The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[jeff7989]

Changing my taskbar to a floated one is gay as fuck, just use my config files ffs. Yay, you wasted vertical space on a 16:9 screen, good job Ranjeet.
I'll revert my root dataset to KDE 5 and consider my options, they introduced some visual glitches and broke a couple icon themes and widgets.
On troonland my Nvidia can finally render at screen refresh rate in glxgears, so that's nice, but tooltip popups render corrupted textures.

I'm considering something simple without the flat cancer and on X11. I want something proven and stable, so no more rug pulls in the future.
Maybe CDE with kwin or something similar.

 

[Slav Power]

Some games which originally targeted Win16 and later ported to Win32 don't work right on newer NT. SimCity 2000 comes to mind.

But the 32-bit port of SkiFree works no problem on Win10, last I tried.

In case of some of those very old Win16 games, you could try and run them through WineVDM which implements Wine's VDM into 64-bit Windows. It's not perfect, some games will shit themselves and you're really better off setting up Windows 3.1 under DOSBox-X/PCem/86Box for those, but it's doable. Microsoft tried to port VDM to 64-bit Windows, but failed, didn't bother to try and it was only available on 32-bit Windows 10, but let's be fair, no one used 32-bit Windows 10.

This is just the reality of old software and newer OS versions, which is why in a lot of industrial applications they run Windows 98/XP/7 machines, because the software to control the machines was designed for that OS and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. You'll need to fiddle both under Windows and Linux to get shit like this running, with Linux having the small benefit of Wine being so behind modern Windows distributions that it's outdatedness helps with legacy software.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

I'm considering something simple without the flat cancer and on X11. I want something proven and stable, so no more rug pulls in the future.
Maybe CDE with kwin or something similar.

JWM sits cozily between Fluxbox and IceWM. No need to scrounge for themes, either, you can just have it match whatever you are using for your gui software with the standard configs. You can swap out the "flat" elements for motif.

 

[Aljam]

I tried to fuck around with the plasma 6 beta and the settings menu would constantly crash so I gave up. Guess there's always hyprland

 

[BootlegPopeye]

Installed KDE Neon with plasma 6 and right out of the gate it still has issues with HiDPI - half the applications have a tiny cursor regardless of the setting. Back to Linux Mint I go.

 

[Rekeita's Kidneys]

I just wish XFCE would become WFCE, Wayland genuinely has it's advantages.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Installed KDE Neon with plasma 6 and right out of the gate it still has issues with HiDPI - half the applications have a tiny cursor regardless of the setting. Back to Linux Mint I go.

Time to drop all support for normal display resolutions, knock-off Retina displays only. Anything less than 2K is out of date, like non-Linux kernels, normal init systems, and X11.

 

[innocent jogger]

In case of some of those very old Win16 games, you could try and run them through WineVDM which implements Wine's VDM into 64-bit Windows. It's not perfect, some games will shit themselves and you're really better off setting up Windows 3.1 under DOSBox-X/PCem/86Box for those, but it's doable.

I installed Win 3.1 in DOSBox and I seem to remember having video/sound issues with some of the games I tried to add (a MS collection of arcade game ports comes to mind). It was a while ago and I may not have been patient enough to work it out but I do know even the DOSBox Team point out that DOSBox is NOT a Windows emulator and has been mainly optimized for MS-DOS gaming.

On the other hand, I have a DOS 6/Win 3.1 VirtualBox VM that I set up just for the fuck of it and I can say that DOSBox handles Windows way better.

JWM sits cozily between Fluxbox and IceWM. No need to scrounge for themes, either, you can just have it match whatever you are using for your gui software with the standard configs. You can swap out the "flat" elements for motif.

That looks pretty nice, I've never tried out any of those before.

I've always felt that using major DE distros was just a waste of time and resources myself. FWIW I still prefer Openbox+LXDE+whatever software I want from the other distros. I definitely prefer QT over GTK3 but I don't need the whole KDE/GNOME/etc. bloat. I reformat my devices periodically so I wrote my own scripts and guides for setting shit up the way I like it. As I have said before, I love Linux because you don't need a desktop and there are a lot of choices if you want one.

And, since this is the Linux thread:
I have a question for Debian users. I've been test driving Bookworm on my extra laptop for a while now and I was wondering is there any way to change the gay ass flat tool bar icons on qBittorrent 4.5 or are they baked in?

QBT 4.2


QBT 4.5


It's not a deal breaker for me or anything since it's still a great program (and free) but goddamn, what is this obsession with making everything flat and ugly? It makes me sigh a bit everytime I see shit like this--technology is here and things should either improve or stay the same until they need to improve. Even a basic bitch laptop or phone has better video than I could imagine 20 years ago and yet I keep seeing shit like this. (Don't get me started on Windows. lol)

 

[Slav Power]

I installed Win 3.1 in DOSBox and I seem to remember having video/sound issues with some of the games I tried to add (a MS collection of arcade game ports comes to mind). It was a while ago and I may not have been patient enough to work it out but I do know even the DOSBox Team point out that DOSBox is NOT a Windows emulator and has been mainly optimized for MS-DOS gaming.

On the other hand, I have a DOS 6/Win 3.1 VirtualBox VM that I set up just for the fuck of it and I can say that DOSBox handles Windows way better.

It's because DOSBox de facto didn't have a real update since 2010, only three tiny patches, it's badly outdated. What I'm referring to is DOSBox-X, which is an active fork of DOSBox that added a shitton of new features and bugfixes, and is capable of running Windows 98 with Voodoo graphics.

Though, again, 86Box is a better bet if you have a fairly modern PC and you want to emulate Windows 3.1 with good compatibility. It's excessive attention to emulation accuracy starts becoming badly detrimental when you're aiming for Pentium II emulation. PCem does better in that regard, but it has less features than 86Box.

 

[XiaoMeiMei]

Was wondering if anyone here has any experience with Hyprland. Asking here cause discord and reddit is gay.
It's my first time using a tiling WM, so risk of me being retarded exists.

I've got more or less everything working under Arch, except for one thing. One thing I'm working on which is an app written in Rust using winit and wgpu. For whatever reason it outright refuses to receive any input. I can move the window, but I can't do anything with it. It's as if its outright refusing any input at all (logging inputs show that cursor and keyboard events just don't happen).

Anyone experienced anything similar? I'd prefer not to go back to Plasma, but this is driving me insane.

 

[Susanna]

And, since this is the Linux thread:
I have a question for Debian users. I've been test driving Bookworm on my extra laptop for a while now and I was wondering is there any way to change the gay ass flat tool bar icons on qBittorrent 4.5 or are they baked in?

QBT 4.2


QBT 4.5

That’s a known Wayland issue, something about xwayland doesn’t play nice with it. You may be able to use a launch option to make QBT launch directly with Wayland instead.

 

[Gargamel]

I just wish XFCE would become WFCE, Wayland genuinely has it's advantages.

Wayland support has been Xfce's development roadmap for a while now. They're working towards an experimental Wayland session option for upcoming version 4.20.

PCem

Isn't the developer of PCem a troon who ragequit over some drama bullshit? Is it even still developed? I know 86Box is a fork of PCem.

 

[Slav Power]

Isn't the developer of PCem a troon who ragequit over some drama bullshit?

Yeah.

Is it even still developed?

That's the thing, it isn't. Two years since the last release, four months since the last commit. 86Box is still actively developed, but it's developed by retro autists that aim for the best accuracy at the cost of performance, so it's harder to emulate better CPU's with it. On the other hand it has a better feature set because it's in constant development.

My i5-12400 can emulate a Pentium MMX at 266MHz tops, and it'll start shitting itself trying to emulate anything better. For less demanding machine emulations, like a 486 with VGA graphics for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 it's probably fine on weaker hardware, but if you want a Pentium II you're likely to struggle even on the top single core performance CPU's on the market.

Was wondering if anyone here has any experience with Hyprland. Asking here cause discord and reddit is gay.
It's my first time using a tiling WM, so risk of me being retarded exists.

I've got more or less everything working under Arch, except for one thing. One thing I'm working on which is an app written in Rust using winit and wgpu. For whatever reason it outright refuses to receive any input. I can move the window, but I can't do anything with it. It's as if its outright refusing any input at all (logging inputs show that cursor and keyboard events just don't happen).

Anyone experienced anything similar? I'd prefer not to go back to Plasma, but this is driving me insane.

If you want to play around with tiling WM's, stay with X11 for the time being and use something like i3. They're meant to be barebones by design, so that they use the least amount of resources just to display your windows. They're very utilitarian and Hyprland wants to be super pretty and fancy because Wayland and Arch and troons and shit.

I like the idea of tiling WM's, I know that they can't really exist on Windows because janky NT code from the 90's, and I'd use them if I wanted to make a minimalist Linux install for specific tasks. As long as 99.9% of control panel shit from DE's can at least have a good CLI equivalent that is.

 

[Gargamel]

That's the thing, it isn't. Two years since the last release, four months since the last commit. 86Box is still actively developed, but it's developed by retro autists that aim for the best accuracy at the cost of performance, so it's harder to emulate better CPU's with it. On the other hand it has a better feature set because it's in constant development.

My i5-12400 can emulate a Pentium MMX at 266MHz tops, and it'll start shitting itself trying to emulate anything better. For less demanding machine emulations, like a 486 with VGA graphics for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 it's probably fine on weaker hardware, but if you want a Pentium II you're likely to struggle even on the top single core performance CPU's on the market.

I get the accuracy thing. I mean, if you don't want or need an accurate simulation of an old computer with a particular set of components, there's always virtualization. I've found 86Box to be all over the place in terms of performance though, even when emulating something simple like a 386 with VGA graphics and an IDE hard drive. It chugs in ways a real 386 does not, and that's on a real computer, not my old shitty laptop. So to me it seems they're not meeting their goal of being accurate.

Though I think it would be cool to accurately emulate a complete system with a Pentium II or better, I've actually got a pile of real Pentium II/III machines, any one of which will do the job just fine.

 

[AmpleApricots]

aim for the best accuracy

this seems to be the fate of every emulator eventually. Hyperautists coming along, trying to simulate every single transistor and electron. Wholly unnecessary, IMHO.

 

[Slav Power]

this seems to be the fate of every emulator eventually. Hyperautists coming along, trying to simulate every single transistor and electron. Wholly unnecessary, IMHO.

It's the right thing to do from preservation standpoint. Some software might act finnicky under an emulator that's just "good enough" so you'll want accuracy. Of course that's not ideal if you just want to play games and that's all you care about, but then again, you hack around for better performance, you'll run into issues where the games might be unplayable.

The ideal way to go would be having good accuracy without it being excessively detrimental to performance, but obviously that's not always the case. This level of accuracy is a good thing, but the issue is when you aim for nothing but that at the cost of performance.

 

[innocent jogger]

Isn't the developer of PCem a troon who ragequit over some drama bullshit?

Replace "troon" with "furfag" and we may have found where Byuu/Davey Grindr is hiding. lol

 

[AmpleApricots]

from preservation standpoint

I guess that depends on what they actually do, which I do not know. Doing "excessive emulation" of datasheets doesn't really preserve anything. Emulating e.g. hardware quirks or buggy implementations of non-buggy hardware would, but it'd also be good to actually document that shit. I don't want to exclusively state this is bad or completely pointless because I know too little about what the process actually looks like but I've seeen some of these "accurate" emulators in the past and honestly they kinda added layers nobody really needed.

 

[Slav Power]

I guess that depends on what they actually do, which I do not know. Doing "excessive emulation" of datasheets doesn't really preserve anything. Emulating e.g. hardware quirks or buggy implementations of non-buggy hardware would, but it'd also be good to actually document that shit. I don't want to exclusively state this is bad or completely pointless because I know too little about what the process actually looks like but I've seeen some of these "accurate" emulators in the past and honestly they kinda added layers nobody really needed.

Let's put it this way: you're writing a piece of software that's meant to replicate the way given hardware works so that software designed from that hardware runs as expected. You're essentially rewriting a computer in code that runs on another computer. You can either either use a half measure and do a narrow scope replication of that, or a full measure and just try and rewrite as much of that computer in code as possible.

For all the shit byuu got for blackmailing the forum, his emulator was one of many examples of why accuracy matters. Other SNES emulators like ZSNES might've worked well for the mainstream games, but as soon as you tried playing something more niche that the emulator wasn't tested for you'd run into issues. And you could also execute malicious code with a malicious ROM file because of that.

bsnes aimed to replicate the actual hardware, which was the result of the "unnecessary" hardware requirements to run it, but in return you can throw almost anything that was made for the SNES on it and it will behave just like it would on the SNES. This is the golden standard emulators should aim for, but at some point you will run into the wall of the hardware not being able to replicate the other hardware in code so well.

The /emugen/ wiki has a good writeup on this debacle and has many other good resources when it comes to the accuracy question. Most of what I know about emulation comes from there.

In short, best accuracy should be the goal, but it's not always possible and at a certain point you should knock your ambitions down a notch. Shit's not easy and emulator devs are autistic, because no normal person would make those.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Byuu making a 100% accurate SNES emulator made sense because there's only one SNES (or at least a very small number), so it's possible that people were coding to its quirks.

I can't imagine why you'd possibly want to use anything other Qemu, VirtualBox etc. for a PC. PCem implies that there were programs that only ran on certain x86 CPUs or motherboards, which meant they must have been buggy as hell even at the time. This seems like autism for the sake of autism.