The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Dr. Geronimo]

Use KDE for a day or two. Then use gnome, and weep the tears of sorrow.

I barely got Mint to work I'm not going to risk fate any further for the time being

Is there a KDE distro you would recommend for a retard? Garuda looks tempting

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Can I get the rundown on why GNOME is shit and why other desktops are better?

The development environment is pozzed for Gnome, they're not at all interested in linux autism but political autism.

Too much resource overhead with very little features to make up for it, runs like trash on ARM.

In order to even customize, requires stuff to be added later to make that practical, going against the Linux philosophy of control.

 

[Considered HARMful]

I barely got Mint to work I'm not going to risk fate any further for the time being

OK, I'll bite.

GNOME was started as on idealistic grounds, because the already successful KDE was using Qt, which then had a license non-conforming to FSF's purity tests. And we can't have unpure software in the GNU world, so off went some people (among them retard incarnate - Miguel de Icaza, who was a Poettering-like figure before Poettering came to be known for shitting up your sound with pulseaudio, but I digress) to make a Truly Free®™© Desktop Environment.

I'll skip some irrelevant technical parts on how the GTK is shit, because shoving OOP in C when you have more suitable languages is retarded and go straight to the meat.

So GNOME devs, being the zealots they are, know better than you, the user, what you actually want and their favorite pastime is first hiding features, then removing them a few releases down the line, because nobody uses them (because they're hidden, duh).

They really jumped the shark in GNOME3, when the Everything Is A Mobile Device brainworm infection took over the project and caused a severe outbreak of sloppy blowjobs towards apple devices. This resulted in such breakthrough technological and UX advances like removing maximize button from the window manager. Because simplicity, yo!

Is there a KDE distro you would recommend for a retard? Garuda looks tempting

Maybe Kubuntu?

 

[stupidpieceofshit]

Powershell

Powershell is powerful sure. But what the fuck where the people who made the commands on.
Why the hell is the pwd/cd equivalent Get-Location
Why the hell is dir/cd equivalent Get-ChildItem
DOS/Unix commands were/are short and memorable Powershell's is just a clusterfuck.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

OK, I'll bite.

GNOME was started as on idealistic grounds, because the already successful KDE was using Qt, which then had a license non-conforming to FSF's purity tests. And we can't have unpure software in the GNU world, so off went some people (among them retard incarnate - Miguel de Icaza, who was a Poettering-like figure before Poettering came to be known for shitting up your sound with pulseaudio, but I digress) to make a Truly Free®™© Desktop Environment.

I'll skip some irrelevant technical parts on how the GTK is shit, because shoving OOP in C when you have more suitable languages is retarded and go straight to the meat.

So GNOME devs, being the zealots they are, know better than you, the user, what you actually want and their favorite pastime is first hiding features, then removing them a few releases down the line, because nobody uses them (because they're hidden, duh).

They really jumped the shark in GNOME3, when the Everything Is A Mobile Device brainworm infection took over the project and caused a severe outbreak of sloppy blowjobs towards apple devices. This resulted in such breakthrough technological and UX advances like removing maximize button from the window manager. Because simplicity, yo!

Maybe Kubuntu?

I remember using early Gnome pre 2.0 with Red Hat 6 and contempory Mandrake. It was alright, not as good as the then BeOS'y KDE environments but alright. Gnome 3 is just evil.

Of course, back then you could just use WindowMaker and some random apps written in completely different toolkits and it wouldn't look any more inconsistent than Gnome apps did. Now they just all look like shit.

 

[419]

Gnome 3 is hideous (somehow Cinnamon is alrightish, though).

I believe that's because Cinnamon, while derived from GNOME 3, is still largely based off of GNOME 2 in its design. The whole reason Cinnamon exists is GNOME 3 being made by dickheads and doing away with the conventional desktop metaphor that 2 once had.

 

[Overly Serious]

Powershell is powerful sure. But what the fuck where the people who made the commands on.
Why the hell is the pwd/cd equivalent Get-Location
Why the hell is dir/cd equivalent Get-ChildItem
DOS/Unix commands were/are short and memorable Powershell's is just a clusterfuck.

Ah, now. I'd say Powershell commands are more memorable and consistent. I mean, you and I know that pwd is "print working directory" but Get-Location is more self-explanatory and it's consistent with Set-Location and Push-Location. It's just a pain in the arse when you have to type DIR -Recurse | Select-String -Pattern "foo" instead of grep -r foo.

Anyway, remind me again how you manage variables in a Bash script?

I'm done on this though as it's derailing things. If anyone is interested in a Windows v. GNU/Linux thread that is a bit deeper than the usual "UAC lol / awk rocks", I can start a thread.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Powershell is powerful sure. But what the fuck where the people who made the commands on.
Why the hell is the pwd/cd equivalent Get-Location
Why the hell is dir/cd equivalent Get-ChildItem
DOS/Unix commands were/are short and memorable Powershell's is just a clusterfuck.

I mean, in powershell you can literally just use:

• pwd as shorthand for Get-Location
• cd as shorthand for Set-Location
• dir or ls as shorthand for Get-ChildItem
• cat or type as shorthand for Get-Content

I tend to use the shorthand in an interactive shell, but the longform is more readable in scripts.

Honestly, if I had much need for scripting on Linux, I'd probably just use pwsh on there. Dotnet core works fine for Linux-hosted web services too

 

[teriyakiburns]

I just found out that fucking pulseaudio allows random apps to alter its sample rate and then forces that setting on everything. I was trying to work out why all my youtube videos sounded like they were on helium, then I realised that my music was playing slightly faster and higher pitched than it should as well. Fuck poettering and his bullshit decisions again.

 

[byuu]

I just found out that fucking pulseaudio allows random apps to alter its sample rate and then forces that setting on everything. I was trying to work out why all my youtube videos sounded like they were on helium, then I realised that my music was playing slightly faster and higher pitched than it should as well. Fuck poettering and his bullshit decisions again.

Even though Poettering stopped working on it years ago it still suffers heavily from his retardation.

Another stupid decision was to make it a self-starting/stopping service for no real benefit which causes annoying things like your bluetooth headset (BlueZ should be honorary Poettering software because it's also fucking garbage) disconnecting because PulseAudio decides it needs to kill itself after you close your media player for a second (and have no other sound using applications running).

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Another stupid decision was to make it a self-starting/stopping service for no real benefit which causes annoying things like your bluetooth headset (BlueZ should be honorary Poettering software because it's also fucking garbage) disconnecting because PulseAudio decides it needs to kill itself after you close your media player for a second (and have no other sound using applications running).

yOu pEoPlE CoMpLaIn wHeN I TrY To tAkE OvEr yOuR EnTiRe sYsTeM BuT EvEn wHeN I TrY To sAvE ReSoUrCeS In a rEaLlY SeNsIbLe wAy (WhO UsEs sOuNd oN A ReGuLaR BaSiS On tHeIr lApToP Or hOmE DeSkToP?) YoU CoMpLaIn. ThErE'S No sAtIsFyInG YoU GnUsErS. -LeNnArT PoEtTrInG

 

[Dick Justice]

I believe that's because Cinnamon, while derived from GNOME 3, is still largely based off of GNOME 2 in its design. The whole reason Cinnamon exists is GNOME 3 being made by dickheads and doing away with the conventional desktop metaphor that 2 once had.

That's a funny way to spell MATE.

 

[ArnoldPalmer]

Yeah, but Cinnamon is nicer.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

So far I still largely prefer XFCE as far as basic desktop environments are concerned, so far Manjaro had performed on XFCE better for ARM than MATE, which is still something I'd recommend over some cheap ass walmart tablet UI that is Gnome 3. For instance, I've experienced a longer delay in logging out and logging in with MATE than with XFCE.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

A few pages ago I said that most of the remaining problems I had with Linux related to Nvidia, if I was writing this 10 years ago I'd have to add in 25 percent for Pulse audio. Anyone remember the days when sounds coming from browsers either didnt work or were scratchy? And you had to install flash and some other garbage to get it to work, and even then it still had problems. It's come a long way considering how much more awful Pulse Audio used to be; it is light years better than it was in say 2009.

The other problem I have gotten with some regularity is with grub. I can't tell you how many times a corrupted grub install fucked up my entire system.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Flame: Copying the wrong drivers into /lib/firmware on Linux can torpedo your entire system, so you can't even boot into a tty to fix things without using a rescue disk. Just the existence of those driver files is enough to ruin things.
And yeah, maybe the solution is "Don't install the wrong drivers, dumbass", but the whole situation strikes me as ridiculous. Is there a way to configure something analogous to Windows' "Safe Mode" as a recovery option in grub? Even the regular "recovery" preset doesn't work in this case.

 

[Considered HARMful]

Flame: Copying the wrong drivers into /lib/firmware on Linux can torpedo your entire system, so you can't even boot into a tty to fix things without using a rescue disk. Just the existence of those driver files is enough to ruin things.
And yeah, maybe the solution is "Don't install the wrong drivers, dumbass", but the whole situation strikes me as ridiculous.

We're talking about firmware, how is that ridiculous? My sympathies and all, but dude, seriously, firmware!

Is there a way to configure something analogous to Windows' "Safe Mode" as a recovery option in grub? Even the regular "recovery" preset doesn't work in this case.

First of all - firmware to what kind of device (NIC? GPU?) and what happens on boot? Kernel panic?

Second - it depends. GRUB is a mini operating system in itself. Depending on what happens when, you might pass some particular options to kernel cmdline to boot into single user mode, disable some modules from loading and so on. Provie more info please.

 

[teriyakiburns]

A few pages ago I said that most of the remaining problems I had with Linux related to Nvidia, if I was writing this 10 years ago I'd have to add in 25 percent for Pulse audio. Anyone remember the days when sounds coming from browsers either didnt work or were scratchy? And you had to install flash and some other garbage to get it to work, and even then it still had problems. It's come a long way considering how much more awful Pulse Audio used to be; it is light years better than it was in say 2009.

The worst part about Pulse is that it's essentially a userland wrapper around alsa that poettering created because he couldn't figure out how to configure dmix. In fairness, the documentation was terrible, but rather than writer better docs he wrote a whole new daemon that is still fundamentally broken even if it mostly works most of the time. That's poettering in a nutshell: he can't figure out how to make something work on his crappy laptop, so he writes a spaghetti-code replacement and then uses his redhat connections to force everyone else to use it.

If only someone had properly forked OSS for linux, we wouldn't have systemd...

 

[Kosher Dill]

We're talking about firmware, how is that ridiculous? My sympathies and all, but dude, seriously, firmware!

The offending package in question was firmware-iwlwifi, which contains drivers for dozens of wifi cards and copies them all into /lib/firmware. So obviously there are millions of people out there with extraneous drivers (presumably most people only have 1 wifi adapter at most) and it works fine. Except when it doesn't, apparently.
I would consider "Any extra driver file wrecks you" to be reasonable behavior, or "Extra drivers are always fine", but not this.

What happens is that on startup it gets partway through the text-mode init process (whatever exactly you call that), and then the screen goes black. No chance to get into a console by hitting Ctrl-Alt-F3 or anything like that.
You fix this by just deleting the offending files, but you can only do this if you have some sort of working OS dual-booted or you have a boot disk. That seems unnecessarily limiting. Ideally I think the solution would be to have a boot mode that loads up only enough drivers to have a keyboard and monitor, mount the storage device where your system is, and get you logged into a console session. It sounds like something that should be possible.

 

[Shoggoth]

Regarding dual booting:
Said previously on the thread, installed on separate disks, had no issue. Also had no need to boot back into windows. If I did, a windows update might fuck things up eventually, but I don't know and don't care anymore, suck my dick, Bill.
On noob friendly distros and DEs:
Man just install Pop. It doesn't matter one bit in the long run, but you'll have the easiest time getting started. Everything can be changed later, including the desktop environment. There are instructions on Pop's website on how to change it. I tried plenty of distros and DEs, I prefer KDE, but Pop + patched up GNOME is fine. If you dislike it, use KDE, which is also fine.