The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Never Scored]

Here's an example of where this bit me in the ass: I was trying to install a Doom sourceport called Chocolate Doom. Now, all Doom source ports require you to already have Doom's data, which is contained in what are called WAD files. But here's the problem.... I have absolutely no idea where to put the WAD files, and the program itself doesn't have an option for telling it where the WAD files are!

It literally just lets you set up controls and graphic resolutions and shit, not configure directories. I got FRUSTRATED looking for exactly that option and not finding it.

I haven't used Chocolate Doom in a while, but I went through a phase where I played a shitload of doom and Hexen a few years back. What you want to do is create a desktop launcher that launches chocolate doom followed by the path to the WAD you want to use. I'm on my Windows machine at work, so I can't give you exact instructions, but here's a useful Youtube video. Skip to around 4:40 0r 4:45 where he uses the GUI. You don't need to dick around with making textfiles like he does at the beginning.

Works for creating simple click and go desktop shortcuts for dosbox games and a lot of emulators where you just want to launch one particular rom and play too.

 

[skykiii]

Have you considered the ageless advice of RTFM? You'll have all the information you need in the manual (man <command>) and for most utilities the --help|-h flag. You can even read the man pages in your browser by searching "man <command>" or going to a site like https://linux.die.net directly. Learn how to use your tools.

Problem for awhile was I didn't have constant internet access. Less of a problem now, but for a long time a huge issue was "Oh, you need to look that up on a webpage" when doing that was literally not an option except maybe like, one day out of every five.

Again, that problem's gotten better since I do have internet at home now... but the memories linger.

And seriously some of the shit I was running into was stuff that felt like really should have been just basic. Spiral was way worse about this than Linux Mint admittedly (Mint has been smooth so far), but what got me to stop using Spiral Linux was one day it told me I was out of hard drive space (on a 1tb hard drive)... it turned out it was making routine backups of the HD, a process I had neither asked it to do nor ever saw an option for. Inside the GUI itself there was no option to turn this shit off, and going in with a live system of a different install wouldn't allow me to delete the backups due to "ownership" or some shit... and actually loading the backups took me to a terminal, not a GUI (so what was even the point?)..... And yes literally the HD somehow got so full the OS wouldn't even boot. Because of its own retarded backups.

And again, had to deal with all of this without the benefit of having any sort of internet access. When I installed Mint I made a note to look this shit up and turn it off immediately,

But its still annoying that its even something I have to specifically look up how to deactivate, as opposed to something that's off by default--shouldn't the user get to decide whether a process like this is running? Seems to me it would make more sense if the install asked the user to opt in to it, rather than just assuming we want it and then putting the onus on you to make sure the system isn't doing something you don't want it to.

 

[Aidan]

Problem for awhile was I didn't have constant internet access. Less of a problem now, but for a long time a huge issue was "Oh, you need to look that up on a webpage" when doing that was literally not an option except maybe like, one day out of every five.

Again, that problem's gotten better since I do have internet at home now... but the memories linger.

And seriously some of the shit I was running into was stuff that felt like really should have been just basic. Spiral was way worse about this than Linux Mint admittedly (Mint has been smooth so far), but what got me to stop using Spiral Linux was one day it told me I was out of hard drive space (on a 1tb hard drive)... it turned out it was making routine backups of the HD, a process I had neither asked it to do nor ever saw an option for. Inside the GUI itself there was no option to turn this shit off, and going in with a live system of a different install wouldn't allow me to delete the backups due to "ownership" or some shit... and actually loading the backups took me to a terminal, not a GUI (so what was even the point?)..... And yes literally the HD somehow got so full the OS wouldn't even boot. Because of its own retarded backups.

And again, had to deal with all of this without the benefit of having any sort of internet access. When I installed Mint I made a note to look this shit up and turn it off immediately,

But its still annoying that its even something I have to specifically look up how to deactivate, as opposed to something that's off by default--shouldn't the user get to decide whether a process like this is running? Seems to me it would make more sense if the install asked the user to opt in to it, rather than just assuming we want it and then putting the onus on you to make sure the system isn't doing something you don't want it to.

I thought timeshift required manual activation on Mint. Timeshift being the backup utility.
I just did a fresh install in a VM and when I ran Timeshift it does all of the first-time-setup prompts.

 

[skykiii]

I thought timeshift required manual activation on Mint. Timeshift being the backup utility.
I just did a fresh install in a VM and when I ran Timeshift it does all of the first-time-setup prompts.

for Mint you may be right (though I recall double and triple-checking just to be absolutely sure). It was SpiralLinux where it was on without asking, and it just made me paranoid about the subject afterward.

 

[Aidan]

for Mint you may be right (though I recall double and triple-checking just to be absolutely sure). It was SpiralLinux where it was on without asking, and it just made me paranoid about the subject afterward.

Having never used Spiral I decided to check it out and it does have a system snapshot made by default using Snapper and doesn't seem to make this apparent for some reason.

One thing I like about Mint that most people ignore is it has sane post-install steps, in there is where you would have to enable backups. Until you do that step there are none enabled. If you skipped this early on and want to revisit it, just type "Welcome" in the search menu. If you do want backups, use the settings wizard (top right in Timeshift) to set it up, then click the "create" button. Personally, I just rsync to other disks periodically, I used to automate that but I've gotten lazy.

 

[Heliantheae]

Problem for awhile was I didn't have constant internet access

Good thing the man command for reading manual pages doesn't require internet access, provided you're not stupid enough to somehow opt out of having the manuals installed with your packages. Should that be the case then the --help flag still provides basic information for any tools meant to be used by humans and not written by complete morons.

 

[AnOminous]

Good thing the man command for reading manual pages doesn't require internet access, provided you're not stupid enough to somehow opt out of having the manuals installed with your packages. Should that be the case then the --help flag still provides basic information for any tools meant to be used by humans and not written by complete morons.

I've always found man pages too obtuse to learn much from. They're great if what you want to know is "what's that flag I forgot" (but --help usually does that adequately), but for anything much more than that I want something like an O'Reilly book. I doubt I could ever have figured out how to do anything with awk or sed from their man pages.

Maybe someone out there can read those things but my eyes glaze over from the excess autism. That said, they're often really complete and great for refreshing your memory on something you know but have forgotten.

 

[seri0us]

I've always found man pages too obtuse to learn much from. They're great if what you want to know is "what's that flag I forgot" (but --help usually does that adequately), but for anything much more than that I want something like an O'Reilly book. I doubt I could ever have figured out how to do anything with awk or sed from their man pages.

Maybe someone out there can read those things but my eyes glaze over from the excess autism. That said, they're often really complete and great for refreshing your memory on something you know but have forgotten.

The only reason I remember to do anything with awk or sed at this point is looking back at scripts I wrote earlier to see what I was doing.

 

[AmpleApricots]

also let's never forget the magical .sh script that just does a thing magically and you don't really know how it works anymore and the only comment in the file is "#08/10/11 ugly hack; will fix later."

 

[Fcret]

I've always found man pages too obtuse to learn much from. They're great if what you want to know is "what's that flag I forgot" (but --help usually does that adequately), but for anything much more than that I want something like an O'Reilly book. I doubt I could ever have figured out how to do anything with awk or sed from their man pages.

Maybe someone out there can read those things but my eyes glaze over from the excess autism. That said, they're often really complete and great for refreshing your memory on something you know but have forgotten.

sed and awk are full-blown programming languages. You should be using their info documentation instead of the man pages.

 

[AnOminous]

sed and awk are full-blown programming languages. You should be using their info documentation instead of the man pages.

The O'Reilly book on both of them and regexes in general was pretty good if you're dumb.

 

[std::string]

But its still annoying that its even something I have to specifically look up how to deactivate, as opposed to something that's off by default--shouldn't the user get to decide whether a process like this is running? Seems to me it would make more sense if the install asked the user to opt in to it, rather than just assuming we want it and then putting the onus on you to make sure the system isn't doing something you don't want it to.

I think the real problem is that it somehow managed to fill up a 1TB drive with backups. I don't know how it even managed to do that unless you spent a lot of time editing videos and re-encoding them or it was backing up a SQL database (both will fuck with btrfs snapshots.)

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

Does anyone have any thoughts on musl on linux? Was thinking if I needed to shift from gentoo to openbsd since I got tired of crossdev compiling on pre-2008 laptop hardware. Was trying to pack in as many optimizations as I could.

 

[seri0us]

Does anyone have any thoughts on musl on linux? Was thinking if I needed to shift from gentoo to openbsd since I got tired of crossdev compiling on pre-2008 laptop hardware. Was trying to pack in as many optimizations as I could.

are you a libreboot thinkpad enjoyer

 

[Another Char Clone]

sed and awk are full-blown programming languages. You should be using their info documentation instead of the man pages.

I just use perl

 

[skykiii]

I think the real problem is that it somehow managed to fill up a 1TB drive with backups. I don't know how it even managed to do that unless you spent a lot of time editing videos and re-encoding them or it was backing up a SQL database (both will fuck with btrfs snapshots.)

The answer there is quite simple. First, there's a rare DVD set I used to have that I backed up before selling, but I keep a copy of those backups on this hard drive since I really don't want to lose them. Second, it was also including random stuff I had torrented in its backups. So I had whole gigabytes that were just "I was marathoning anime X this week,,,,"

 

[ZMOT]

And here's one thing that drives me up the wall: the amount of times I ask Linux users for any sort of help, or I look up guides online, and a lot of them ask me to use the command line--I'm sorry, the "terminal." Seriously? In 2023 I'm being told to use this DOS Prompt looking thing? And its often for stuff I'm thinking should be a basic fucking feature. Like seriously 99% of every piece of advice I get is go to the terminal and type dah-dee-dah.

look up any issue on windows, then check what the absolute first (and often only) help is you'll get: "press win+R or open a command prompt, then type 'sfc.exe /scannow'"

The funny thing is that I actually did grow up with an MS-DOS machine and in fact still use DOS on a regular basis.

The thing about Linux that puts me off is just it works differently, or at least it seems to. People are telling me there's a direct Linux equivalent of DOS functions like batch files, but I don't know them. Most times when I see commands written out, I can understand some of the syntax but it just feels kinda weird ("sudo apt install thingamabob".... seriously you just type that and this "sudo" thing knows exactly what thingamabob is? Actually every time I've followed an instruction like that, its never done anything at all).

At least when I go cd\dosgames\civ and run civ.exe I understand exactly what's happening.

TL;DR the issue is less "newfag getting scared of terminals" and more "oldfag having difficulty adapting to something new." Which I mean, I spend half my time here talking about how great the eighties and nineties were so I think "having trouble adapting to something new" is basically my entire personality at this point.

the logic is the same, command + target + options. only difference it's usually --help instead of /?. even half the commands work the same (or you can set an alias if you want to).

I get being a boomer and not wanting to learn new things, but it's not like you have to suddenly develop amnesia and start from scratch, you only need to adjust some (bad) habits. in my experience it takes about the same time or less getting used to linux than trying to figure out why windows fucked up again and how to fix it.

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

are you a libreboot thinkpad enjoyer

Haha no, it's a 1997 Sony VAIO 505. I just like to keep old stuff running in case it is ever needed.
Doubles as a space heater on cold nights too.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

I'm probably going to soon install Artix as Debian just doesn't play nice with my printer, and passing my printer through into a VM running Artix seems to work fine.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

Still dealing that /oldroot issue I talked about a few pages ago and it's driving me batty.