Amateur Linux Hour

[Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus]

I would throw opensuse into the mix of JUSTWERKS, but the people in charge decided to smear shit all over themselves by calling conservatives "rotten flesh to cut out", so take that recommendation with a big grain of salt.

That's disappointing, I liked Tumbleweed (although they do weird things with packages deb and other rpm ones don't) and their support of KDE over the shitbox that is Gnome. They also bought Rancher (the company) and Rancher(the product)/K3s/etc. are all pretty good. Leave it to Germans to be completely insufferable faggots, they also had a tranny at one of their recent conferences though so it's not surprising:

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If you want a distro that "just works" and has easy to find answers, just use Ubuntu or Mint. Debian would be similar but if you think things are old in Ubuntu, lmao when you try Debian. You could change it to one of the other branches (testing or unstable vs stable) for more up to date software but things may break. Debian 12 just released so it might have semi-recent packages.

If you wanted to mirror enterprise you could pick up Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux, they're both based on RedHat after IBM bought them and they shit up CentOS. Things will be old(er) but generally not as bad as Debian (might vary with the release of 12). You could probably also try CentOS (now CentOS Stream) but considering the changes you're probably just as well off using Fedora.

If for some reason you're inclined to use Arch I'd just install it with the installer or following along with the wiki ,which is top notch. It is complex in the "I've never used Linux before" way but it's not as bad as people make it out to be, although installing anything that isn't in the official repos will probably be a bit much. The derivative of it people usually run, Manjaro, is run by retards who let their certs expire repeatedly (amongst other things) and their suggested workaround was "change your system time". EndeavourOS appears to be the successor to Antergos and that was alright, so if you must maybe try that. Getting support for anything Arch will usually vary from unhelpful to screeching to read the wiki and made worse if you make it known your install wasn't done by hand (or is an Arch derivative).

 

[analrapist]

the distribution doesn't matter that much

Distro doesn't matter until it does. RetroPie's manual build-install works on Debian-based OSes. End of. It's not the only software distribution that depends on specific distro. Next time I'm in the mood to migrate distro, I'm going back to Debian Bookworm from Arch.

Right now is a very good time to start with the newly-released Debian Bookworm, which has some policy changes under the hood that make it one of the most newbie-friendly Debian releases ever.

 

[Betonhaus]

dude, you don't understand, I NEED photoshop to crop my images. gimp can't even draw a circle...

That's certainly one way to interpret my statement.

 

[jalopy]

Ubuntu is mostly niggerware at this point. It's hard to describe, but it's the Windows of the Linux world: all corporate shit. Either Linux Mint or Manjaro (arch-based) are good alternatives for beginners.

I kind of agree/disagree. From what I can tell Mint dropped native support for RDP and I cannot find a reason why, so logging into it as a VM on a server requires VNC or loading a different desktop environment, which seems redundant and dumb. It's more that the feature was dropped for reasons I can't find. By contrast Ubuntu supports RDP out of the box with user settings and all.

However, Ubuntu as an appliance has been terrible. Both VMs I run have hard locked multiple times requiring either a pile of patience for ProxMox to shut them down or for me to restart the whole server. By comparison, Windows 10 LTSC has stayed bullet proof with uptimes in excess of 30 days before I feel like updating.

Honestly, I want a Linux distro I can SSH into to learn and practice all the wonders of the Command Line Interface but also run services that I can low stress check in on via a Graphical User Interface if something is funky and I have other shit to deal with.

 

[Betonhaus]

Honestly, I want a Linux distro I can SSH into to learn and practice all the wonders of the Command Line Interface but also run services that I can low stress check in on via a Graphical User Interface if something is funky and I have other shit to deal with.

So like rendering the graphical apps locally using a gui over ssh?

 

[DavidS877]

dude, you don't understand, I NEED photoshop to crop my images. gimp can't even draw a circle...

You're using Linux now.

magick infile.png -crop 40x30+10+10 +repage  outfile.png

it draws circles too

magick -size 100x60 xc:  -stroke Firebrick  -fill tomato -strokewidth 2 \
        -draw 'circle 50,30 50,55'    circle_circle.png

So like rendering the graphical apps locally using a gui over ssh?

If only there were some way to do that... Hopefully your app isn't Wayland only(ssh -X)

 

[Feline Supremacist]

I still use Linux despite Linspire being my first, currently using Mint after trying out a bajillion distros. It just werks.

My autism is limited to finding a similar distro for PPC Macs (fuck you Ubuntu MATE for dropping support for PPC) other than Gentoo/Debian. I can't waste hours on it anymore.

 

[seri0us]

I still use Linux despite Linspire being my first, currently using Mint after trying out a bajillion distros. It just werks.

My autism is limited to finding a similar distro for PPC Macs (fuck you Ubuntu MATE for dropping support for PPC) other than Gentoo/Debian. I can't waste hours on it anymore.

Would you ever main a PPC machine?

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

I kind of agree/disagree. From what I can tell Mint dropped native support for RDP and I cannot find a reason why, so logging into it as a VM on a server requires VNC or loading a different desktop environment, which seems redundant and dumb. It's more that the feature was dropped for reasons I can't find. By contrast Ubuntu supports RDP out of the box with user settings and all.

? Did they remove XRDP from the package manager? It's just worked whenever I have used it (most recently with Devuan).

If so, presumably some kind of stupid Wayland/snap related nonsense.

 

[jONALD]

For those that want a medium difficulty, Endeavor OS has been a dream to use for something arch based. I don't know the in and out of the damn system but a lot of it feels like it just werks along with 'yay' coming preinstalled to make using the Arch User Repository not a dependency nightmare. The most trouble I ever had was navigating steam files to install certain mods for games or doing the dumbest shit to make a few RPG Maker games to run. Actually, 'yay' makes the shit arch feel like it is any old Loonix distro so use whatever and hope whatever guide you find has as much hand holding like the Gentoo install handbook

Edit: like, for real, read that fucking Gentoo handbook just for a few pages. It felt like a 3rd grade teacher was guiding me and I wish all guides covered crap like that

 

[Friendly Primarina]

Honestly, I want a Linux distro I can SSH into to learn and practice all the wonders of the Command Line Interface but also run services that I can low stress check in on via a Graphical User Interface if something is funky and I have other shit to deal with.

You can do this in most distros. Desktop Environments (the GUI) have a "terminal emulator." Despite its name, it is actually fully functional and gives you the best of both worlds between a CLI and a GUI.

 

[Libertarian Wario]

Linux is good because the distro kind of doesn’t matter. I’ve started rolling two more into my tools just this week.

I can see why programmer-FOSS nerds with ADHD end up supporting a ton of different distros. It’s a nice change of pace from feature parity oriented development to just clunk around with your existing code and do some nice, cathartic automation.

Would you ever main a PPC machine?

I wish I had the money to do that, but alas, more computers are expensive, and the ones that tend to be cheap and useful are almost never anything but x86-64!

 

[419]

I'll just chip in with more or less what others have already said by now and suggest Mint as a beginner distro. It was my personal choice of first-time distro when I started out in getting accustomed to a Linux system, and since that and the occasional attempt back then at Bash scripting — mainly for a couple aliases — I've been more than comfortable enough to switch to an Arch-based distribution and follow along with the Arch wiki for specific bits of software and configuration.

If you do ever want to try anything Arch-based, don't bother with Manjaro. Endeavour would probably be a much better call for something "beginner-oriented" although I myself haven't gotten around to using it before. Once you've gotten comfortable enough with that, then I would say doing the manual installation for Arch proper once or twice on some other machine/VM would give you some decent experience with setting up a system relatively closer "from scratch", and get you more comfortable with doing shit in the command line.

 

[Feline Supremacist]

Would you ever main a PPC machine?

I have, and I would, if I could get Linux running to my liking on my dual G5 but only for certain tasks, If someone were to drop a POWER9 into my lap? Absolutely.

Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii all used PowerPC btw

 

[teriyakiburns]

From what I can tell Mint dropped native support for RDP and I cannot find a reason why

The reason would be that RDP is a proprietary protocol, owned by Microsoft, who keep tweaking the protocol to lock out non-approved clients and servers. Chances are the mint maintainers decided it wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with constant complaints about it being "broken". That aside, MS also asserts some patent licenses over the protocol, so mint might also have dropped the native implementation to avoid getting sued.

 

[Betonhaus]

I have, and I would, if I could get Linux running to my liking on my dual G5 but only for certain tasks, If someone were to drop a POWER9 into my lap? Absolutely.

Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii all used PowerPC btw

I would be neat to get Linux running on a bondi blue iMac, but it wouldn't be useful for a lot of things.

 

[IamnottheNSA]

dude, you don't understand, I NEED photoshop to crop my images. gimp can't even draw a circle...

Sure. Are you OK with Photoshop CS6? Because there's this thing called WINE that can let you run it...

Ok, but for real, when I was making the jump from Windows 7 to Linux (first Gentoo, then Debian on my laptop and Xubuntu on my main machine), getting the old Windows programs that I'm so used to to work there (either through WINE or by tracking down a Linux version of the program) was one of my main goals. I had to downgrade in a few cases, like Adobe Audition. Fortunately, I have no problem running older software, so it was a mostly-painless experience.

 

[Feline Supremacist]

I would be neat to get Linux running on a bondi blue iMac, but it wouldn't be useful for a lot of things.

I have Debian and Lubuntu on a first gen G4 PPC Power Mac, barely a step up from the last gen G3. Debian ran better but like I said I don't have hours to devote to compiling something like Gentoo anymore, which I suspect would run best.

The only reason I had a G5 was for fiddling around with apps for POWER, which have to be x64, and at this point I could probably get an old POWER machine donation if I really tried. But life is short, and unpredictable, so I choose to do other things right now.

 

[Absolutego]

I really like Fedora as a daily driver and would recommend it to most newbies. It does what it's supposed to without throwing you into the absolute swamp that is Ubuntu/Debian troubleshooting.

 

[Betonhaus]

I have Debian and Lubuntu on a first gen G4 PPC Power Mac, barely a step up from the last gen G3. Debian ran better but like I said I don't have hours to devote to comping something like Gentoo anymore, which I suspect would run best.

The only reason I had a G5 was for fiddling around with apps for POWER, which have to be x64, and at this point I could probably get an old POWER machine donation if I really tried. But life is short, and unpredictable, so I choose to do other things right now.

I think I'd like to put linux on an iMac so I can put it on a podium, and hook it to a computer with one of those leaked Chat AI's, with a fancy audio effect when it's "talking"