The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[AnOminous]

Most of the complaints I see people making about Linux are solved by using FreeBSD. It has none of these RedHat things everyone is mad about. Are you that much of a GPL fundamentalist? Please don't tell me that it's too tinkery.

You sound like a faggot but tbh I actually have used FreeBSD because it just does what it does.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Most of the complaints I see people making about Linux are solved by using FreeBSD. It has none of these RedHat things everyone is mad about. Are you that much of a GPL fundamentalist? Please don't tell me that it's too tinkery.

I would be interested to hear what problem FreeBSD actually fixes. For people on the desktop. I definitely couldn't think of any.

 

[俺たちファームズでノッテる]

I don't want to upgrade to Windows 11 so I decided to bite the bullet and learn Linux, is Mint really the best option for beginners? I'm completely tech-illiterate so anything more than copy-pasting commands is too much for me.

I'd recommend Linux Mint. Ultimately, it is very simple to use and install, plus its GUI practically covers most things you would need. I would also tell you that using the terminal in Linux is not scary. For me, I have to dive into the terminal a bit more often than most since my distro I use (arch-based) has a lot more updates.

But Mint is really solid.

 

[Slav Power]

Speaking of the "wake to boot" issue, here's how my ThinkPad with Windows 11 fares when it wakes from hibernation.
From lifting the lid to seeing the Win11 loading throbber, it takes ~18 seconds.
Then to see the Win11 login screen it takes ~4 seconds. Then a few more for the IR cam to read my ugly mug and I'm on the desktop.

The bloated mess that is Win11 takes only 4 seconds to load up from hibernation and most of the time spent waiting is on the hardware to get it's shit together. No matter what you put on your machine, Windows or Linux, you gotta take the POST wait time into consideration, and with NVMe drives being commonplace nowadays, those now take more than loading the OS itself.

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

I would be interested to hear what problem FreeBSD actually fixes. For people on the desktop. I definitely couldn't think of any.

I guess if your problem is not having enough pain and suffering in your life, using a BSD as a desktop daily driver is a great way to fix that problem.

 

[Nothing Is Written]

Any Gnome developer worth his programming socks looks forward to completely rewriting his unoptimized Python hobby application from scratch every couple of years to support GTK5/6/7 with less features than ever before.

"...his..."

Where's Solus on the Linux rankings?

Looks to be pretty healthy.

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=solus

You have to be a pretty big faggot to run not only a Youtube channel but a tech/Linux focused one too.

That one YouTuber obsessed with bash is a decent bloke. He doesn't suck cock as far as I'm aware.

https://youtube.com/@yousuckatprogramming

OS sitrep:

• Despite having an nVidia GPU, haven't encountered any issues in Arch using Wayland/Hyprland
  • It idles at 20-30% load though, with Firefox, QBittorrent, and Hyprland most likely to blame
• I fucking hate btrfs so much it's unreal - thinking of reformatting to exfat4
  • Dynamic drive discovery and management is needlessly complex, but I understand why... I just don't need any of the features btrfs offers, and those I do can be done on an exfat4 system with extra packages
• nftables.conf syntax is the most retarded shit I've ever seen and the CLI tool is convoluted for what little it does
• I never realised how little I actually need a desktop, but file managers and discovery are headache inducing
  • ranger and fzf are great, and Dolphin is fine, but Hyprland does not like theming
• Why the fuck is oh-my-posh so popular, it's a screen economy hog and all the themes I've seen are gay
• I'm sad to see p10k is no longer under active development, but works fine
• With a strict killswitch on my VPN, I don't really touch nftables anyway (probably a bad idea, but I like set and forget shit, especially with port forwarding managed by the VPN client)
• AUR is excellent though diluted, but I like the yay wraps pacman
• Rolling distros are... frenetic
• DNS resolution is a cunt
• No system failure after two months, but my dotfiles and general OS maintenance hygiene is very rusty (first time daily driving Arch)
• KDE wallet keychain issues are retarded in Hyprland
• VSCode works happily with pull and push requests, but again, Hyprland insists on instancing pop up windows in the most obscure screen locations (often off-screen, displaying about 15% of the instance)
• My second monitor is apparently my primary monitor now for reasons I don't care to configure, but hope one day will just wake up and fix itself

Pic unrelated.

 

[Snackbarism]

Ah the eternal agony of a Linux techie. You know it's somehow useful but you don't know how, you can't give it away because nobody you know is proficient enough in Linux or can use it and you don't want to throw it away because that's wasteful for something that can be useful if only you can find that specific use case.

Just think of all those PCs that are going to get thrown out because they can't be upgraded to Windows 11 due to their strict hardware requirements and mandatory TPM chip. Whilst some will have served their time and are at that point good enough for the bin, a lot of them could easily get a fresh lease of life as a Linux PC.

To be fair, Linux is not much of a barrier compared to how it used to be. The general web browser user could easily cope. If you are a gamer then as long as it's not fucked by anti cheat you can do it for the most part, compatibility is a lot better these days. Not everything is Linux friendly but it's better than how it used to be back in the day.

Looked into the craptop myself and seeing how there's been a few horror stories regarding the internal 64GB storage I have bought a 128GB SSD to go into it from eBay.

 

[Betonhaus]

I would probably give them to a niece or nephew who's old enough to understand computers but young enough that they'll probably destroy it, and set up a nextcloud backup with deletion protection (with their and their parents consent and knowledge and possibly under their parents control) so that when it does they don't lose anything important. But browser sync would probably be enough and a nextcloud backup would be redundant

 

[Jang Joo]

A while back I was given a Windows 7 era machine and was still figuring out what I wanted to do with it beyond Windows offline stuff. Then the sudden autistic desire of dualbooting it with the latest FreeBSD hit me.

Spoilered because this isn't the BSD thread.

Spoiler

>Minitool partition wizard on Windows to make the partition (had to format it to NTFS for the BSD installer to see it)
>boot the iso to install FreeBSD
>the partition/slice confusion comes back to me
>the entire partition I made is a BSD partition, then under that is the slice that's going to be UFS
>install done, boot up the iso again to run a shell because I need to make the slice bootable
>gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot ada0s4
>go back to Windows and add a Windows bootloader entry for FreeBSD with EasyBCD

Done. FreeBSD 14 and Windows 7 coexisting in the same disk. I expected more trouble and even forgot swap. But I am curious to see how it will do without it. In due time I'll be installing a desktop and whatnot.

 

[Nothing Is Written]

I fucking hate btrfs so much it's unreal - thinking of reformatting to exfat4

• Dynamic drive discovery and management is needlessly complex, but I understand why... I just don't need any of the features btrfs offers, and those I do can be done on an exfat4 system with extra packages

I mean ext4. Fuck the FAT.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

Fuck the FAT.

Ew.... why would you?

 

[neal_rice]

Trim off the FAT if you are going to do that

 

[Betonhaus]

FAT32 is still used for EFI partitions so your computer knows how to find the bootloader. I'm not sure if any new computers can now handle a ext4 EFI partition yet.

 

[WielkiWapiesz2137]

EFI is pure slop BIOS all the way

 

[GNU Abyss]

Just think of all those PCs that are going to get thrown out because they can't be upgraded to Windows 11 due to their strict hardware requirements and mandatory TPM chip. Whilst some will have served their time and are at that point good enough for the bin, a lot of them could easily get a fresh lease of life as a Linux PC.

To be fair, Linux is not much of a barrier compared to how it used to be. The general web browser user could easily cope. If you are a gamer then as long as it's not fucked by anti cheat you can do it for the most part, compatibility is a lot better these days. Not everything is Linux friendly but it's better than how it used to be back in the day.

Looked into the craptop myself and seeing how there's been a few horror stories regarding the internal 64GB storage I have bought a 128GB SSD to go into it from eBay.

Depending on what you want to do with this laptop, it might not be necessary. A barebones Linux install on a binary distro is about 2 GBs, give or take. With a weak CPU like that, I'd forget about fancy DEs and compositors. JWM, IceWM or Openbox (what I use) are your friends, unless you want to use tiling WMs.

 

[Dirty Harry]

Agree with the assessment on Mint, it's darn good and probably the most flawless of all the Linux distros out there. I think Linux tards who move on to Arch or Fedora do so out of boredom, you can modify the hell out of Mint just like any other distro. You can always put Gnome or JWM or whatever on Mint and run it using those Windows Manager/environments. Change the kernel if you wish.

JWM is fun and I use it on my 21 year old laptop which still works. So many ways to tweak it if you get bored.

 

[Slav Power]

I'm not sure if any new computers can now handle a ext4 EFI partition yet.

Why would they though? ext4 is supported basically only by Linux, FAT32 is supported by absolutely everything including your smart blender and you don't need files over 4GB in your EFI partition, nor do you need any of the shit that file systems like ext4 or NTFS offer. If anything, ext4 EFI partitions is the type of purposefully incompatible bullshit I'd expect people accuse Microsoft of. Imagine if Microsoft forced it for ReFS to be the standard for EFI partitions to cut Linux out of the market.

 

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Agree with the assessment on Mint, it's darn good and probably the most flawless of all the Linux distros out there. I think Linux tards who move on to Arch or Fedora do so out of boredom, you can modify the hell out of Mint just like any other distro. You can always put Gnome or JWM or whatever on Mint and run it using those Windows Manager/environments. Change the kernel if you wish.

The primary difference is that in the end Linux Mint isn't really its own distribution, it's built off stable releases of other distributions. If you're using a full distribution like Devuan, there should be testing and unstable branches that let you use the latest software, like Arch, but more coherently.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

This is the kind of thing I'm worried about with the project from the beginning bringing in non-technical politics at all. I feel like it's going to add unnecessary hurdles. And I'm sure lunduke loves it. Because that means he can grift attention off of it. But for the project it's probably going to be a net negative.

I fucking hate btrfs so much it's unreal - thinking of reformatting to exfat4

Yeah. Btrfs isn't worth using in my opinion. Nothing it offers, makes dealing with it worth it. And the snapshot thing. Isn't completely worthless, but using it to revert changes to the system to fix problems, at least when I tried using it. Was just a waste of my time, disk space, and CPU cycles. While getting worse performance.

The file system I've really grown to love, and in my opinion is really underrated is xfs. It's not new or fancy and it seems like not that many people know about it even though it's by no means new. The reasons I recommend it are:

it has even better performance than ext4. While still being just about as light. Some people say it's not as fast on smaller files, but that information is outdated, as far as I know even small files should be just as fast now.

It also takes advantage of copy-on-write, and it should automatically work with cp And it allows you to make copies within your file system super fast, without taking up extra disk space until the files actually start to change. (Just the normal CoW behavior).

And one of the most important things to me. Is it just works like a normal filesystem, not needing all the extra subvolume stuff.

 

[Betonhaus]

The primary difference is that in the end Linux Mint isn't really its own distribution, it's built off stable releases of other distributions. If you're using a full distribution like Devuan, there should be testing and unstable branches that let you use the latest software, like Arch, but more coherently.

They may be stable, but they aren't necessarily user friendly and sometimes even makes user hostile design choices like Gnome or snaps. Linux Mint takes that stable base and strips out the garbage like snaps, then maintains their own desktop environment Cinnamon which was forked from Gnome but then actually made user friendly.