Terminal Commands, Applets, and Desklets on Linux Mint Cinnamon
Written on Mar 10, 2026
No matter which application you use for it, you access the command line through the terminal emulator. You can style it with a larger font and multiple colors, unlike opening a virtual text console or TTY. There are hundreds of command-line commands, but I want to focus on the ones used with applets and desklets for the Cinnamon Edition of Linux Mint.
Free Disk Space
I am not the only person confused by how much disk space I have free on my internal solid-state drive. According to the gnome-disk-utility ("Disk"), I have a 512 GB disk with 369 GB free. According to the Nemo file manager, I have 363.4 GB free. Finally, using the "df" command on the command line, I have 339 GB free.
Some of this has to do with how reserved space is calculated. The default for the ext4 file system is five percent. Five percent of 512 GB is more than 25 GB. That is a substantial amount of reserved space when even one percent is more than sufficient. I use the "tune2fs" utility at the command line to tame reserved space usage.
To reduce the reserved space on my data partition to one percent, which is identified as "/dev/sda2":
sudo tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sda2To reduce the reserved space on my storage drive to zero (because it is not necessary), which is identified as "/dev/sdb1":
sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdb1
If I want to track how much space I have free, I would probably use the "Disk Space" desklet because it is the most conservative, showing 338.5 GB free. I do not think I will do that, other than temporarily, because I doubt I will ever get as low as 100 GB. I store most of my data on portable drives. Most of what is on the internal drive is temporary, outside of the operating system itself.
The Terminal Free Command
Use the "free -h" command at the terminal to check how much memory and swap space is being used. Specific results can be used with applets and desklets. The command within the "CommandRunner" applet has to be invoked with the shell. For free memory:
sh -c "free -h | awk 'NR == 2 { print $3 }'"
For swap usage:
sh -c "free -h | awk 'NR == 3 { print $3 }'"
The command within the "Command result desklet" desklet does not have to be invoked with the shell, and multiple commands can be used. The "CommandRunner" applet requires multiple instances to display them all.
The "Disk Space" desklet, in multiple instances, can show these things as well, but I prefer seeing things on the panel because I rarely look at the desktop. I am using the "CommandRunner" applet to display swap usage on the panel.
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay