The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[419]

In light of the Windows 11 reveal being a boring pile of fuck, I've gotten back to work in preparation for switching away from Microshit for good. Picked up a laptop I had lying around from almost a decade ago, nuked the drive on it since it already only had a fresh Windows installation and started using that as a test machine for Linux stuff.

I would go against the grain and advise people to get into as technical as a distribution they can stomach if they want to understand their computer and OS more than as consumer items that are just meant to work. You'll learn things, you'll learn to fix things, you won't get surprised by things that break and you'll even understand why some distributions are bad and distro maintainers often are the forums jannys of the linux universe. There's kind of a deception going on to sell distros as proper custom OSes the distro-maintainers brewed up when they're really just a software collection with custom skin most of the time. You can do anything linux in any distro and the differences are often purely academic at best.

Considering what I've done so far, I'll also second this. In the past I've had experience with more simple Debian-based distros like Mint just for most gaming and occasional Proton tweaks in the terminal, plus Raspbian for occasional RPi projects both in and out of school, though this time I figured I'd try jumping into the deep end and getting to grips with Arch.

There are surprisingly many ways to make the experience a lot easier on yourself the first time around even on a distro that everyone memes as being one of the hardest to learn. Not only does Arch now have the dedicated archinstall script for guided installs, but projects like Luke Smith's LARBS make it really easy for newcomers like myself to get to grips with ricing and functionality even for things like Suckless programs. Even as someone not used to using tiling managers I've found it really satisfying to learn the basics of dwm and vim along with some configuration little by little just by referring to the help PDF included. If you don't mind putting in the time to readjust and accustom yourself to not doing things the Windows way, I'd highly recommend that approach as well either on old test hardware or just a VM.

 

[Ahriman]

DT installing Gentoo, 1 hour long, super useful and informative.

Haven't watched it yet, but I was always more or less curious about Gentoo. I might even consider it.

gentoo

In all seriousness, If youve never been exposed to linux, start with linux mint, its known as babys first linux its very userfriendly and based off ubuntu? which there is a tonne of documentation for. if you need games look up Proton (steam games that run on linux and how well they run) and for everything else theres lutris and winedb also playonlinux.

If you have been exposed to linux before and are not afraid to troubleshoot or debug go for Manjaro or better yet arch, youll learn a lot about yourself (how close to suicide you actually are) and your computer. IF you do go for any of these, Do not constantly update because atleast for arch since its a rolling release sometimes stuff breaks, just recently pacman (where you install programs) broke for a few hours, and the nerds were reeeeing

Counterpoint: I'm on the IT industry so I cut my teeth with CentOS and Ubuntu Server. I get paid to troubleshoot and fix shit on Linux.

When I close my work laptop, I want something that works straight up, that lets me download+play vidya in the most straightforward and hassle-free way posible, for instance. I don't have the autistic desire to tinker with my own personal laptop on my free time. It's one of the reasons I lean towards Mint or maybe even Pop_OS, I want something that just works and doesn't give me any shit. Not because I don't know how to fix it, but because I can't be fucking bothered to do it for free, on my spare time.

Having said that, like I said earlier, I might consider dual-booting into Gentoo if the mood strikes.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Anyone have any recommendations for a file manager that sucks less than Thunar? I tried doublecommander and while I like what they were going for in spirit it seems to lack some of the things that I liked in the old win/dos doublepane managers. Doublepane isn't a requirement though; I'm good with literally anything that has sane unified views, pinnable shortcuts and will allow me to view files in 10pt rows and keyboard shortcut to select/batch move to a particular target.

E: Really digging nnn. No muss, no fuss, good keyboard shortcuts.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Anyone have any recommendations for a file manager that sucks less than Thunar? I tried doublecommander and while I like what they were going for in spirit it seems to lack some of the things that I liked in the old win/dos doublepane managers. Doublepane isn't a requirement though; I'm good with literally anything that has sane unified views, pinnable shortcuts and will allow me to view files in 10pt rows and keyboard shortcut to select/batch move to a particular target.

worker is basically a remake of the classic amiga directory opus, it has a lot of functionality and it's only dependency is X. I kinda stopped using file managers much but I remember it being quite decent if a bit cluttered, and the programmable buttons, shortcuts, search and lua support etc. might be useful. It's not pretty and has quite the jungle of configuration menus but it's good with tiny bitmap fonts to get a lot of stuff in very little screen real estate. It also lifted an interesting feature from the amiga version by recognizing file types optionally not by file extension but by actual content. Don't let the looks fool you, it's still very actively developed. For the command line in linux there's midnight commander. There's also nnn if you need something tiny to just navigate folders and group select files quickly.

 

[一个日志]

Anyone have any recommendations for a file manager that sucks less than Thunar?

I really like dolphin, or lf if you are le 1337 h4x0r man

 

[Kosher Dill]

Here's a question that gets asked a billion times online but never answered properly: where are the settings for Wine typically kept?
I screwed something up and want to go back to "factory config", but no matter what I delete it seems to still have some leftover config somewhere. I've already tried deleting (and/or re-creating) everything in ~/.wine and the Wine-related stuff under ~/.local but there's apparently more to it than that alone.
I'm using Q4Wine as my front-end, if it matters. It worked great... once.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

It looks to provide a Windows 10-style constant stream of updates, so it seems completely worthless to me. Any downsides to excising it?

If you're not using any snaps (snap list, make sure there's nothing except the defaults there that Ubuntu automatically comes with) there's no reason to keep it around.

If you are, you can try to migrate to Flatpak, since it's quite a bit easier on RAM and CPU.

 

[Never Scored]

Here's a question that gets asked a billion times online but never answered properly: where are the settings for Wine typically kept?
I screwed something up and want to go back to "factory config", but no matter what I delete it seems to still have some leftover config somewhere. I've already tried deleting (and/or re-creating) everything in ~/.wine and the Wine-related stuff under ~/.local but there's apparently more to it than that alone.
I'm using Q4Wine as my front-end, if it matters. It worked great... once.

They are kept on your hard drive. Replace your hard drive and they will be reset. You're welcome.

 

[tehpope]

Here's a question that gets asked a billion times online but never answered properly: where are the settings for Wine typically kept?
I screwed something up and want to go back to "factory config", but no matter what I delete it seems to still have some leftover config somewhere. I've already tried deleting (and/or re-creating) everything in ~/.wine and the Wine-related stuff under ~/.local but there's apparently more to it than that alone.
I'm using Q4Wine as my front-end, if it matters. It worked great... once.

some are stored under winecfg (run that in terminal).

I usually just google my linux question and can usually find the answer within a few minutes.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Here's a question that gets asked a billion times online but never answered properly: where are the settings for Wine typically kept?
I screwed something up and want to go back to "factory config", but no matter what I delete it seems to still have some leftover config somewhere. I've already tried deleting (and/or re-creating) everything in ~/.wine and the Wine-related stuff under ~/.local but there's apparently more to it than that alone.
I'm using Q4Wine as my front-end, if it matters. It worked great... once.

some of it might also be under ~/.config

 

[Dick Justice]

Isn't all that kept in the wine bottle under $WINEPREFIX ? I've never heard of any global settings.

 

[Considered HARMful]

Here's a question that gets asked a billion times online but never answered properly: where are the settings for Wine typically kept?
I screwed something up and want to go back to "factory config", but no matter what I delete it seems to still have some leftover config somewhere. I've already tried deleting (and/or re-creating) everything in ~/.wine and the Wine-related stuff under ~/.local but there's apparently more to it than that alone.
I'm using Q4Wine as my front-end, if it matters. It worked great... once.

Everything is in $WINEPREFIX, which by default is ~/.wine. Maybe that frontend of yours (lolwut, why do you need something like that anyway?) stores some data in another location.

 

[Kosher Dill]

some of it might also be under ~/.config

Yeah, this is what I was missing - thanks. Deleting the rest of that junk gets me all the way back to square one.

Maybe that frontend of yours (lolwut, why do you need something like that anyway?)

And also this. Seems like there's a lot of logging that still only goes to stderr, and once you read that it's easy to find the root cause. Lesson learned.

In the end it seems like it wasn't any of my settings causing the problem, but a bug that got pulled in in a recent system update.

glx: Assign unique serial number to GLXBadFBConfig error (960c86d6) · Commits · Mesa / mesa

Since commit f39fd3dce72 a new GLX error is issued in case context creation fails. This broke wine on certain hardware: While wine installs an error handler to ignore this kind...

gitlab.freedesktop.org

Thanks everyone.

 

[Shoggoth]

I would go against the grain and advise people to get into as technical as a distribution they can stomach if they want to understand their computer and OS more than as consumer items that are just meant to work. You'll learn things, you'll learn to fix things, you won't get surprised by things that break and you'll even understand why some distributions are bad and distro maintainers often are the forums jannys of the linux universe. There's kind of a deception going on to sell distros as proper custom OSes the distro-maintainers brewed up when they're really just a software collection with custom skin most of the time. You can do anything linux in any distro and the differences are often purely academic at best.

Considering what I've done so far, I'll also second this. In the past I've had experience with more simple Debian-based distros like Mint just for most gaming and occasional Proton tweaks in the terminal, plus Raspbian for occasional RPi projects both in and out of school, though this time I figured I'd try jumping into the deep end and getting to grips with Arch.

Gotta give some pushback here. It's easy to look back with our experience and think getting into any distro is easy. It's hard to forget unix sucks. Windows sucks ass and Mac sucks wang but unix still sucks.
I am not a sysadmin. Newbies are definitely not sysadmins. They don't have to deal with the insanity of linux and keeping a machine up and running.
Haven't tried it yet, but maybe Nix is the only one that makes sense.
My advice to those considering dipping their toes in - get an easy start. Computers are not worth pulling your hair out over. You can always learn and experiment afterwards, even with Ubuntu. If you just want to ditch windows/osx and use linux, not admin it, go for the user friendly options

 

[Had]

Linux bros, can windows be turned around for the better, what would you in your infinite autism to fix it.

 

[Dick Justice]

Linux bros, can windows be turned around for the better, what would you in your infinite autism to fix it.
View attachment 2322408

Liberate the source code and licenses so it can be forked and fixed by anyone who wants to. It's not about forcing what I want on everyone else, it's about having the freedom to decide for myself.

E: If that can't be done, the least worst thing would be trying to pivot back toward providing windows as a product, not spyware that commoditizes the user.

 

[stupidpieceofshit]

Liberate the source code and licenses so it can be forked and fixed by anyone who wants to. It's not about forcing what I want on everyone else, it's about having the freedom to decide for myself.

fuck, I would take the Windows7-10 search, with Windows 9x/XP with the windows 7 search in the start menu (and classic style control panel back in full).
No forced updates (even more so now that MS has no QA department, no breaking things because "I wanna be Apple too!"

 

[eternal dog mongler]

My advice to those considering dipping their toes in - get an easy start. Computers are not worth pulling your hair out over. You can always learn and experiment afterwards, even with Ubuntu. If you just want to ditch windows/osx and use linux, not admin it, go for the user friendly options

I'd second this advice, although I don't really consider Ubuntu a "just works" option anymore. Development quality seems to have declined precipitously within the last four years. Fedora is probably the best all-around choice. You'll run into weird SELinux stuff every once in a while (DOSbox, for example, pisses SELinux off because some games make stuff on the heap executable) but you can just google what to do.

If you want to become a professional sysadmin or something, best thing to do is to throw RHEL (or whatever you want to learn) on VirtualBox and intentionally start breaking stuff to see what happens and ask yourself what you could do to fix it. Obviously can't do this on a computer you're actually using.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

I think for ease of use, you really have to go with Debian-based distros. It occurred to me a long time ago that the 'elite' Arch type distros were too much of a hassle to get working, and I have been with Linux Mint for awhile now. But there are a ton of options, and most normie toe dippers will find the most .deb, repos, and quasi-mainstream support out there as long as they stick to one Debian based distro or another.

 

[419]

Arch type distros were too much of a hassle to get working

What, even Manjaro? I would have thought that's arguably better than Mint for some people as a starting distro since it's just as ready-to-use as Mint while also allowing for AUR integration which everyone usually loves Arch for.