The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Trans Fat 41g]

Is it just me or does i3 use kind of a lot of memory?

It could be a memory leak or some outside factor causing odd behavior in i3. I know Picom is janky shit that, if decked out fully, causes a lot of programs to exhibit odd memory usage spikes. I don't really use it with a config file anymore, because A) window borders are enough and B) some elements look like trash with shadows, and some rule settings don't compensate very well.

 

[Considered HARMful]

You forgot Step 2b: Rice your CFLAGS and USE.

Oh no no no, ricing is mandatory in step 1. Don't forget the -O99 -funroll-loops -fomg-optimized!

I really need to learn more of these KDE shortcuts, they're really useful.

I think that virtual desktops are criminally underused by users, especially those introduced to newer (KDE 5) versions of Plasma. I've seen a few default installations of "n00b" distros like Kubuntu and there's only one desktop enabled by default, so many people don't even know of the feature.

In comparison and as far as I remember, in KDE 3 days, you basically started with a 2x2 grid of virtual desktops, so you practically couldn't be ignorant of the feature. [*]

A few more notes after watching the linked video:

• I don't know why he uses the Super key, it was always Alt on my machine. Though maybe the defaults changed in Plasma a number of releases ago and it's just me sticking to my good ol' config, so bear that in mind whenever I mention using Alt key below.
• I tend to use the no-border feature for some applications extensively to the point of remembering the proper key sequence, provided you're using en_* locale: Alt+F3, then 'm' for "More Actions", then 'n' for "No Border".
• If you're doing this a lot or tend to position specific applications in specific ways, sizes and/or parts of your desktop, you can predefine a set of rules for the window manager to handle and enforce them for you. Look at: System Settings -> Window Management -> Window Rules.
• I strongly suggest enabling virtual desktops, at least in a 2x2 layout and setting up the following shortcuts: Ctrl+Alt+arrow for moving left/right/up/down across them; Ctrl+Alt+Shift+arrow for ditto but dragging along the currently focused window. System Settings -> Shortcuts -> KWin, look for "Switch one desktop ${direction}" and "Window One Desktop ${direction}".
• Use yakuake, but change the shortcut from the stupid F10 (or was it F12?) to Ctrl+Shift+` (left apostrophe, the one with ~ above it). That way you can still switch it on and off with one hand and you don't block out the ability to use either left apostrophe nor tilde for typing.

[*] Though I'm still salty that the "modern" KDE removed the feature of having a different wallpaper on each desktop. But at least they've hidden the cashew.

 

[Knight of the Rope]

So Kubuntu 20.04 LTS is coming to a close soon

I was about to go all Redditor on your ass with "Uh, no ackshully faggot, Ubuntu 20.04 is supported until 2030 goddamn it, it's a damn solid investment and fuck you" but you're actually right:


What the fuck? Why are those EOLs so different? I always thought Kubuntu tried to follow the same release milestones as Ubuntu proper.

 

[PFM]

I was about to go all Redditor on your ass with "Uh, no ackshully faggot, Ubuntu 20.04 is supported until 2030 goddamn it, it's a damn solid investment and fuck you" but you're actually right:
View attachment 3044611

What the fuck? Why are those EOLs so different? I always thought Kubuntu tried to follow the same release milestones as Ubuntu proper.

Either way I was wrong, I was thinking EOL was April of this year. Looks like I got a bit more time to put this off.

 

[Ahriman]

Oh no no no, ricing is mandatory in step 1. Don't forget the -O99 -funroll-loops -fomg-optimized!

I think that virtual desktops are criminally underused by users, especially those introduced to newer (KDE 5) versions of Plasma. I've seen a few default installations of "n00b" distros like Kubuntu and there's only one desktop enabled by default, so many people don't even know of the feature.

In comparison and as far as I remember, in KDE 3 days, you basically started with a 2x2 grid of virtual desktops, so you practically couldn't be ignorant of the feature. [*]

A few more notes after watching the linked video:

• I don't know why he uses the Super key, it was always Alt on my machine. Though maybe the defaults changed in Plasma a number of releases ago and it's just me sticking to my good ol' config, so bear that in mind whenever I mention using Alt key below.
• I tend to use the no-border feature for some applications extensively to the point of remembering the proper key sequence, provided you're using en_* locale: Alt+F3, then 'm' for "More Actions", then 'n' for "No Border".
• If you're doing this a lot or tend to position specific applications in specific ways, sizes and/or parts of your desktop, you can predefine a set of rules for the window manager to handle and enforce them for you. Look at: System Settings -> Window Management -> Window Rules.
• I strongly suggest enabling virtual desktops, at least in a 2x2 layout and setting up the following shortcuts: Ctrl+Alt+arrow for moving left/right/up/down across them; Ctrl+Alt+Shift+arrow for ditto but dragging along the currently focused window. System Settings -> Shortcuts -> KWin, look for "Switch one desktop ${direction}" and "Window One Desktop ${direction}".
• Use yakuake, but change the shortcut from the stupid F10 (or was it F12?) to Ctrl+Shift+` (left apostrophe, the one with ~ above it). That way you can still switch it on and off with one hand and you don't block out the ability to use either left apostrophe nor tilde for typing.

[*] Though I'm still salty that the "modern" KDE removed the feature of having a different wallpaper on each desktop. But at least they've hidden the cashew.

Honestly, it's a damn shame that the KDE devs make a lame job in showcasing the many, many features KDE has. Exploiting the "power user" side of it would be fantastic, and yea - I remember how KDE 3.x came with 2x2 virtual desktops, although I could never get the hang of those back then.

 

[James Edwin]

KDE is amazing with power user features but I love gnome for the "install os ok its done" nature. No customization or anything needed, everything is where it 'should' be and looks good. it seems like its the worse DE for ram idle I've seen yet however.

All that extra shit with KDE is nice but its a real distraction because most of it isn't actually even needed. I love linux and customization but its actually really fucking annoying to rice your DE out and then distro hop anyways and lose everything. At least with gnome its all 1:1.

 

[Ahriman]

So what is the general consensus on KISS Linux? is it a meme distro or is it actually useful? what are the advantages of it over say, Linux From Scratch?

A meta-distribution for the x86_64 architecture with a focus on simplicity, sustainability and user freedom.

These days I am just reading and messing around with Alpine Linux, probably seeing if it's possible to run an old school window manager like CDE or Openbox for maximum Linux aesthetics (it is). But these days, I find them hard to take seriously, like Gentoo.

https://imgur.com/a/nRrLdQo

Looks comfy, tho. Also, I do agree with the creator's rant on web design.

 

[byuu]

So what is the general consensus on KISS Linux? is it a meme distro or is it actually useful? what are the advantages of it over say, Linux From Scratch?

Why would you use it over something like Crux?
And why does everyone have to invent their own package manager?

 

[Ahriman]

Why would you use it over something like Crux?
And why does everyone have to invent their own package manager?

No idea really, just throwing it out there. I prefer Alpine because it's what I'm most comfortable with, I even use it for work. There's also Venom, another light-weight distro I haven't heard about.

Source

Insightful comment.

 

[DavidS877]

As someone who has built their own kernels and assembled an OS from scratch for various things, the last thing I want these days is to do that shit again.

Sure, it's cool to make a router fit on a 1.44MB floppy when that's all the hardware you have to spare. Now I just want the damn thing to work and be easy to add packages to.

1.2.13 was the last good kernel, now get off my lawn.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

I thought of seriously using Alpine at some point, I even set it up on my raspberry pi once, but messed up somewhere and couldn't get anything to work. The idea of a super tiny distribution used as a basic desktop is just satisfying, but yeah, I'm going to need zero sleep to try and figure KISS out.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

KDE is amazing with power user features but I love gnome for the "install os ok its done" nature. No customization or anything needed, everything is where it 'should' be and looks good. it seems like its the worse DE for ram idle I've seen yet however.

All that extra shit with KDE is nice but its a real distraction because most of it isn't actually even needed. I love linux and customization but its actually really fucking annoying to rice your DE out and then distro hop anyways and lose everything. At least with gnome its all 1:1.

Yeah man if every DE could just do what icewm does that'd be great. By that I mean copy a folder to your home folder with all settings & configs. In the case of icewm the folder is called .icewm. You get the rest.

 

[Pushing Up Tiddies]

It could be a memory leak or some outside factor causing odd behavior in i3.

It's not leaking, it's using a stable amount, it's just that 10MB+ seems like a lot for what it's doing (tracking a handful of window outlines).

window borders are enough

My man.

virtual desktops are criminally underused by users

I can't live without virtual desktops. I hate it when the OS (e.g. Mac) makes switching between them slow and/or animated, gives me motion sickness.

KDE is amazing with power user features but I love gnome for the "install os ok its done" nature

Gnome 2 was a great DE. Gnome 3 removed too much useful stuff and just has this shitty "made for a tablet not a real computer" feel to it. Ubuntu's Unity was trash.

 

[Ahriman]

This is so cool.

RETURN TO TRADITION.

 

[AmpleApricots]

So what is the general consensus on KISS Linux? is it a meme distro or is it actually useful? what are the advantages of it over say, Linux From Scratch?

I really like KISS. I've been using gentoo as a daily driver for I think 14 (16?!!) years now? So that as reference. Nothing I ever encountered is as powerful as portage but portage has a ton of cruft and ebuilds even when you're experienced with them can be incomprehensible at times and sometimes depend a bit on what I like to call "magic words" where you're not entirely sure what something does that's in there but add it anyways because nothing works otherwise. Usually not a good sign.

The problem with KISS and other such simple distributions is that they're cool as long as you have a very simple setup with a few software tools but exponentially grow in complexity as soon as you pull in complicated packages that have tons of different run-time and build dependencies. That's not really a problem with their build managers themselves, mind you, it's more of a general modern software kind of problem. A linux system that is equipped to actually build all of the software it uses needs a ton of software just for that building process, especially since every software these days seems to come with it's very own build system and often depends on entire programming language packages (with, you guessed it, their own build- and runtime dependencies - it really never ends and is dependencies all the way down - dependency hell is a real thing) you're only going to need once for that particular package and then never again. That's not lightweight and quite the amount of clutter and wasted CPU cycles building things you'll never really use much. At least the KISS package manager (contrary to portage) makes a difference between build- and runtime dependency and caches what it has built by default so you can easily write something to remove the build-time dependency clutter and just have it installed for building the package (or set something up in a mount namespace that only unpacks the build-time dependencies at build time, or even builds the software statically so you don't need the runtime dependencies installed either - I think void does offer something similar to this) but if it's worth the bother? I don't know. KISS packages are also very easy to write and easily comprehensible (really - kudos to the creator - you don't really need gentoo's useflags either as you can individually write a simple sh script for every build process, even e.g. make "pseudo-packages" that really just alter a config file or something) but that won't help you that much when you have about 200 packages to maintain to build libreoffice. Then you have to think of ways to make sure things stay updated so a exploit in libgayops doesn't compromise your entire system. It's all not that easy.

KISS is a good framework to build something for yourself I think. I've been experimenting with that on my notebook, in combination with bubblewrap for it's namespace functionalities (especially mounts) and alpine/void linux for complicated software packages I don't want to build myself, optionally to run them in a container of the particular distro (akin to a flatpak, but less complicated - I don't need things like Docker either, again way too complicated for my usage scenario) or to run the binary I want to run directly on my filesystem with creative mounting and binding of files. Works pretty well and I remain in full control over the base and some core software I actually care about patching and maintaining. It's also a lot easier and faster to run the update command on the container/root filesystem than to e.g. compile the new firefox version and it'd dependencies from scratch like in gentoo. If it is worth the effort I don't know, the feeling of having full control is nice though and the original reason I came to linux. For a day to day driver where you want both somebody upstream to care about updates and the maximum in reasonable, fine-grained control over every single package (if you don't care about the clutter and time spent compiling) gentoo and portage is still unbeatable though.

 

[Considered HARMful]

Yeah man if every DE could just do what icewm does that'd be great. By that I mean copy a folder to your home folder with all settings & configs. In the case of icewm the folder is called .icewm. You get the rest.

I believe that most if not all of the popular DE's "just work" like that. It's just that they mostly migrated from residing in their own dot-diretories (like .kde4) into ~/.config which - I suppose - is for XDG compatibility.

So, either way, copying or remounting home directory should be sufficient for DE config migration.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

~50mb VS ~500mb is a huge difference up until you have 16gb+ ram like any modern machine has

Even aside from gaming, the RAM use of your DE doesn't really matter because your web browser is going to eat it all anyway. Also Atom apps.

RAM use can make a difference on low-spec PCs though.

 

[byuu]

~50mb VS ~500mb is a huge difference up until you have 16gb+ ram like any modern machine has

8GB is still very common. Low-end laptops still come with just 4GB.

 

[Aidan]

8GB is still very common. Low-end laptops still come with just 4GB.

Based low-end hardware respecter.

 

[AnOminous]

8GB is still very common. Low-end laptops still come with just 4GB.

That just fucking astounds me. My fucking phone has 64GB. I shit 64GB. Yes that's storage but even my video card has 16 GB of straight RAM, and it isn't even a high end one.

I really like KISS.

I really like low-end distros in general, the sort of thing that lets you keep an old and beloved computer alive for a few more years, even if it's just doing some specific task. Older machines as routers/firewalls are really good for more lightweight distros.