The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Aidan]

I am gonna be the other guy, and suggest Fedora instead. Linux Mint is actually pretty good these days, but Fedora is more robust, and it also "just werks".

Fedora is pretty alien to pure Windows users in my opinion.

and Guh-Nome sucks

 

[Splinters RCVD ✞]

Fedora is pretty alien to pure Windows users in my opinion.

and Guh-Nome sucks

Depends. The GNOME version is indeed weird, not to mention that it is an absolute resource hog. If you download the Cinnamon or XFCE spin of it the weirdness goes away.
And the package manager, dnfdragora, is not hard to learn, as long as you stick to the basic stuff. It's not harder than Debian's Synaptic.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

Depends. The GNOME version is indeed weird, not to mention that it is an absolute resource hog. If you download the Cinnamon or XFCE spin of it the weirdness goes away.
And the package manager, dnfdragora, is not hard to learn, as long as you stick to the basic stuff. It's not harder than Debian's Synaptic.

I gotta be honest. I don't know what the fuck was going on with dnfdragora cause whenever I tried fedora something on that install was just fucking up any ability for me to do any kind of updates & shit. It was a fresh install too so I fucking swerved outta there. But yes GNOME is gay & GNOME software is gay "except gnome disks"

 

[Spasticus Autisticus]

I'm going to stick my neck out and defend GNOME. If you go into it expecting the traditional desktop metaphor, you're going to hate it. The workflow when mouse-jockeying it is pretty shitty. But if you embrace the keyboard shortcuts and the Activities-based workflow it's actually quite efficient. It takes some getting used to but not that much more than the switch from a traditional desktop to a tiling window manager. I'll grant that it's not amenable to customization, and the resource usage could be lighter. But in my experience GNOME strikes a nice balance between modern conveniences and the "get out of my way and let me do shit" efficiency of tiling WMs.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

whats a good filemanager that is not shit and can be used with any desktop environment? nautilus is too basic for my taste

if your use case involves sorting a giant folder of jumbled files into categories look into nnn. It looks a bit intimidating at first but you only really need like five commands out of the hundred it supports to get most jobs done and those can be memorized in under 10 minutes.

For basic desktop drag drop on a whim I still have no idea and everything I've tried seems to have issues with either multiple selection or copying to smb-mounted volumes.

Does anyone know how to successfully hide a kvm from getting detected. Already tried things like patching kernel/RDTS/...

If you've got a Spice video device it'll blow your cover for whatever reason. If this is a gpu pass setup just set the spice video device to 'none' and see if it's still detected as a kvm running solely off the gpu.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I tried out Ubuntu (and several of it's derivatives, I don't feel like doing the research finding out what they actually changed in those - my guess is not much) recently and can understand why people don't flock to a linux userland experience if that's the distro they get told to install. There's nothing fundamentally wrong but so many small things a normie would just expect to work out-of-the-box are weird, like wrong DPI setting for the used display, or screen tearing because a simple X server flag isn't set you could've put there with a tiny sh script detecting the hardware first that it really makes me wonder if the package maintainers know anything about the packages they maintain. Such things (screeen tearing, unreadable fonts, monitors defaulting to odd-ass refresh rates like 39 Hz for some reason, S3 standby basically never working out of the box while there's nothing wrong with the kernel and a simple 'echo mem > /sys/power/state' works) make a terrible first impression. They're like wanting to be Windows really hard while sucking at the select few things Windows is good at. Really - these distros felt really half-assed. There'd be a million little ways where you could make sure that was not the first impression, even if the software you have no direct influence on has it's temperament.

But distro maintainers are the tranny jannies of the Linux world so my guess is they're probably all busy with backstabbing, CoCs and treehouse politics.

nnn

It really is the console equivalent of "just opening a few folders and dragging/dropping/double-clicking files instead of using the full blown file manager" In X there is rox filer for that, although it's kinda abandoned and there's a bit of bitrot. I also remember pcmanfm although I don't remember what I didn't like about it.

There's also Worker which is a homage/ripoff of the old Amiga Directory Opus and in pretty active development last time I checked and I advertise every chance I get. Very configurable and customizable while being low on resources, also a tiny dependency footprint with basically only default X libraries. The only downside is it doesn't look fancy and the menus are a bit labyrinthine.

The fun thing about Linux is I could build a system for a 486 (Although Pentium MMX would be a better target) and it wouldn't be much different from the enviroment I currently run, although slower and I'd obviously wouldn't be able to run a modern browser. This kind of freedom of choice in software parts and customization is something corporations like Red Hat/IBM/Microsoft hate and want to take away from you.

 

[Ahriman]

Fedora is pretty alien to pure Windows users in my opinion.

and Guh-Nome sucks

I am a KDE fanboy so that's what I run on my Fedora 35 install. Everything runs fine on my end, and for people coming from Win10, I would say that it might look more attractive to them.

At least that's what drove me to Linux 20 years ago, KDE 3.5.x looked a lot slicker than Win98.

Also, I miss Amarok like you wouldn't believe, so I went with Strawberry Player, a fork of Clementine, which in turn was a fork of Amarok.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

I'm going to stick my neck out and defend GNOME. If you go into it expecting the traditional desktop metaphor, you're going to hate it. The workflow when mouse-jockeying it is pretty shitty. But if you embrace the keyboard shortcuts and the Activities-based workflow it's actually quite efficient. It takes some getting used to but not that much more than the switch from a traditional desktop to a tiling window manager. I'll grant that it's not amenable to customization, and the resource usage could be lighter. But in my experience GNOME strikes a nice balance between modern conveniences and the "get out of my way and let me do shit" efficiency of tiling WMs.

Yeah, Gnome 3 has really grown on me. My main problem with it is that, like...they went hard in the opposite way from KDE where you're going to have to pop open the terminal and use dconf to change settings rather than having KDE's cool maze of menus. Once you get used to the workflow it's amazingly good though.

e: also, installing Fedora one version behind is the big brain move. I don't have to deal with kernel regressions that way.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

I tried out Ubuntu (and several of it's derivatives, I don't feel like doing the research finding out what they actually changed in those - my guess is not much) recently and can understand why people don't flock to a linux userland experience if that's the distro they get told to install. There's nothing fundamentally wrong but so many small things a normie would just expect to work out-of-the-box are weird, like wrong DPI setting for the used display, or screen tearing because a simple X server flag isn't set you could've put there with a tiny sh script detecting the hardware first that it really makes me wonder if the package maintainers know anything about the packages they maintain. Such things (screeen tearing, unreadable fonts, monitors defaulting to odd-ass refresh rates like 39 Hz for some reason, S3 standby basically never working out of the box while there's nothing wrong with the kernel and a simple 'echo mem > /sys/power/state' works) make a terrible first impression. They're like wanting to be Windows really hard while sucking at the select few things Windows is good at. Really - these distros felt really half-assed. There'd be a million little ways where you could make sure that was not the first impression, even if the software you have no direct influence on has it's temperament.

But distro maintainers are the tranny jannies of the Linux world so my guess is they're probably all busy with backstabbing, CoCs and treehouse politics.


It really is the console equivalent of "just opening a few folders and dragging/dropping/double-clicking files instead of using the full blown file manager" In X there is rox filer for that, although it's kinda abandoned and there's a bit of bitrot. I also remember pcmanfm although I don't remember what I didn't like about it.

There's also Worker which is a homage/ripoff of the old Amiga Directory Opus and in pretty active development last time I checked and I advertise every chance I get. Very configurable and customizable while being low on resources, also a tiny dependency footprint with basically only default X libraries. The only downside is it doesn't look fancy and the menus are a bit labyrinthine.

The fun thing about Linux is I could build a system for a 486 (Although Pentium MMX would be a better target) and it wouldn't be much different from the enviroment I currently run, although slower and I'd obviously wouldn't be able to run a modern browser. This kind of freedom of choice in software parts and customization is something corporations like Red Hat/IBM/Microsoft hate and want to take away from you.

Ubuntu and ubuntu based distros were always shit from my experience. The entire ppa system alone is fucking cancerous as fuck. Shit broke down faster than a penny hookers asshole. In addition microsoft & ibm can try as they like but they'll never be able to take away that ability to customize linux as people want. Pandora's box was opened & they failed to close it years ago so fuck em. Also fuck bill gates. Thieving asshole only has his millions because he stole from Gary Killdall to make MS-DOS.

 

[Frail Snail]

I'm going to stick my neck out and defend GNOME. If you go into it expecting the traditional desktop metaphor, you're going to hate it. The workflow when mouse-jockeying it is pretty shitty. But if you embrace the keyboard shortcuts and the Activities-based workflow it's actually quite efficient. It takes some getting used to but not that much more than the switch from a traditional desktop to a tiling window manager. I'll grant that it's not amenable to customization, and the resource usage could be lighter. But in my experience GNOME strikes a nice balance between modern conveniences and the "get out of my way and let me do shit" efficiency of tiling WMs.

I don't mind the idea, but resource usage is the deal breaker. Maybe one day I'll switch, when there's a cross between the GNOME workflow and XFCE system load. I also find it really fun to read news about what they are removing from their DE this month, very entertaining.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I also remember pcmanfm although I don't remember what I didn't like about it.

I use it as part of LXQt and the only thing I don't like is that for some reason pcmanfm is the only user interface for a bunch of not-really-related DE settings.

 

[TsundereDev]

And if you don't want to read the actual manual do a search on stackoverflow or wherever. Even accounting for the occasional need to search the web, the command line is really where it's at in Linux, and it's nice to be able to type in a single line and have it immediately do whatever you asked it to do, rather than open up some GUI and spend minutes clicking around in menus trying to make it to something vaguely similar to what you wanted.

I love using the command line. It was something I was hesitant about initially, cause in decades of using Windows it was something I'd never really had to deal with, but holy fuck, it is weirdly fun. Every day I use Linux, I feel like I understand computers a bit better and in a way I never would have with Windows. It is helping a lot in my attempts to learn programming. Kinda considering trying something besides Ubuntu (don't think I'm ready for Gentoo or Arch tho) so any suggestions are welcome.

Reading "In the Beginning Was The Command Line" by Neal Stephenson has also been a big help in filling in knowledge gaps and understanding some things I had only a tenuous grasp on. (Linked here)

 

[The Ugly One]

Depends. The GNOME version is indeed weird, not to mention that it is an absolute resource hog. If you download the Cinnamon or XFCE spin of it the weirdness goes away.
And the package manager, dnfdragora, is not hard to learn, as long as you stick to the basic stuff. It's not harder than Debian's Synaptic.

I used MATE on CentOS. It was fine. But I didn't expect my Linux machine to be anything more than a devbox. IMO if you are looking for Linux to really replace Windows on a PC, it's going to be an exercise in frustration, since there are all these little things in the long tail of development that just don't get done in passion projects. This is especially true in the free alternatives to enterprise software (GIMP and LibreOffice, I'm looking at you). But for Linux, all I care about is, does the web browser work (so I can get to Stack Overflow and the ticket system), and can I open up and easily manage a bizarre number of terminals?

I love using the command line. It was something I was hesitant about initially, cause in decades of using Windows it was something I'd never really had to deal with, but holy fuck, it is weirdly fun. Every day I use Linux, I feel like I understand computers a bit better and in a way I never would have with Windows. It is helping a lot in my attempts to learn programming. Kinda considering trying something besides Ubuntu (don't think I'm ready for Gentoo or Arch tho) so any suggestions are welcome.

Reading "In the Beginning Was The Command Line" by Neal Stephenson has also been a big help in filling in knowledge gaps and understanding some things I had only a tenuous grasp on. (Linked here)

I felt like something got lost over the years from DOS to the NT-based operating systems. The first PC I ever had came with a programming manual, and I had a lot of fun screwing around with that as a boy. It's funny because to this day, I feel slightly bewildered by the Visual Studio environment. I don't really know where the fuck things are. Not really. Much prefer a command-line CMake-based toolchain.

 

[Splinters RCVD ✞]

I love using the command line. It was something I was hesitant about initially, cause in decades of using Windows it was something I'd never really had to deal with, but holy fuck, it is weirdly fun. Every day I use Linux, I feel like I understand computers a bit better and in a way I never would have with Windows. It is helping a lot in my attempts to learn programming. Kinda considering trying something besides Ubuntu (don't think I'm ready for Gentoo or Arch tho) so any suggestions are welcome.

Reading "In the Beginning Was The Command Line" by Neal Stephenson has also been a big help in filling in knowledge gaps and understanding some things I had only a tenuous grasp on. (Linked here)

From Ubuntu, the closest intermediate OS would be Debian with a GUI included in the install. XFCE is the one I recommend. It has its own graphical package manager called Synaptic, but the CLI is apt. In Debian, you can easily find yourself needing to adjust apt's internal configuration, like adding or removing a repo. This can be done in the terminal. The two best tools are nano and vim. The former is more easygoing, the latter is part of Linux mastery. Learning to use and configure apt and tinker around with either nano or vim are very good vantage points for some intermediate linux smarts. Use of the dd command is also important, you can use it to make install images on disks and USB sticks, among others. Some other commands and CLI applications to think about: free (queries the status of your RAM) upower -d (queries your battery status) tmux (allows you to split the terminal windows up into multiple terminals, use preferably on big screens) htop (CLI task manager). This should be a good pack for now.

EDIT: I forgot a huge one. The man command. It brings up the manual of whatever entry you give it, eg. man vim would bring up the manual for vim. Very handy.

 

[AnOminous]

Also, I miss Amarok like you wouldn't believe, so I went with Strawberry Player, a fork of Clementine, which in turn was a fork of Amarok.

Amarok was fucking awesome. Thanks for the recommendation.

 

[Kosher Dill]

This is especially true in the free alternatives to enterprise software (GIMP and LibreOffice, I'm looking at you).

What do you find is still lacking in LibreOffice? It seems fine to me, but I'm not doing anything more sophisticated than spreadsheets with VLOOKUPs.

 

[AnOminous]

What do you find is still lacking in LibreOffice? It seems fine to me, but I'm not doing anything more sophisticated than spreadsheets with VLOOKUPs.

When you need compatibility with other software, like your product is interfacing with some archaic entity (like a court), and they want some specific version of Word for any submitted document, and LibreOffice insists on outputting absolute shit that crashes other people's computers, I would call that lacking.

It does not work well with others. Incidentally, the whole Office suite works fine with wine. At least in my experience.

 

[The Ugly One]

What do you find is still lacking in LibreOffice? It seems fine to me, but I'm not doing anything more sophisticated than spreadsheets with VLOOKUPs.

It's adequate for basic use and not much more than that. For cross-company collaboration on generating professional quality marketing materials, it is woefully inadequate. There are about ten million little things that make the difference between professional grade and "jank as hell," and that's why Office keeps raking in the big bucks. A lot of those are things you probably wouldn't even use. The thing to remember here, and which I did not appreciate at all before I started working on the non-engineering side of the business, is that Microsoft is at heart an enterprise software company. It is very, very good to companies in terms of taking care of your toolchain/productivity needs. Nobody else is in their league. Google has made a half-hearted attempt, but they're an advertising platform company, not an enterprise software company, and all the things businesses need that don't ultimately support ad clicks are things they don't care about.

 

[Ahriman]

Throwing in another super useful link for anyone wanting to learn how to master the command line:

Why do you need to learn the command line anyway? Well, let me tell you a story. Many years ago we had a problem where I worked. There was a shared drive on one of our file servers that kept getting full. I won't mention that this legacy operating system did not support user quotas; that's another story. But the server kept getting full and it stopped people from working. One of our software engineers spent a couple of hours writing a C++ program that would look through all the user's directories and add up the space they were using and make a listing of the results. Since I was forced to use the legacy OS while I was on the job, I installed a Linux-like command line environment for it. When I heard about the problem, I realized I could perform this task with this single line:

du -s * | sort -nr > $HOME/user_space_report.txt

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are helpful for many tasks, but they are not good for all tasks. I have long felt that most computers today are not powered by electricity. They instead seem to be powered by the "pumping" motion of the mouse. Computers were supposed to free us from manual labor, but how many times have you performed some task you felt sure the computer should be able to do but you ended up doing the work yourself by tediously working the mouse? Pointing and clicking, pointing and clicking.

I once heard an author say that when you are a child you use a computer by looking at the pictures. When you grow up, you learn to read and write. Welcome to Computer Literacy 101.

LinuxCommand.org: Learning the shell.

Introduction to Learning the Shell

www.linuxcommand.org

This is the one guide that, with that example, made me realize that there's just so much untapped potential with the command line, that I practically gave up wanting to learn any other programming language. Just git gud at Bash and you could easily run circles around devs. Just imagine some old, hardened Sysadmin curb-stomping snobby Python and C++ code monkeys with just a one-liner, it's amazing.

I am far from being a CLI wizard, so it's always useful to revisit guides.

Conventions for Command Line Options

Practical Shell Patterns I Actually Use

Over the decades I’ve been using the shell, there are thousands of reusable patterns I’ve picked up from looking over others’ shoulders and googling. Unfortunately, I’ve for…

zwischenzugs.com

GitHub - adrianscheff/useful-sed: Useful sed scripts & patterns.

Useful sed scripts & patterns. . Contribute to adrianscheff/useful-sed development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

An intro to finding things in Linux

locate, whereis, which and find commands

www.madebygps.com

And a pretty good guide on how to use top. htop (and glances) is nice and all, but it's important to learn how to fully understand its forefather.

How To Use The Linux Top Command (and Understand Its Output) | CodePre.com

The Linux top command is one of the stalwarts of Unix-like operating systems. Its utilitarian display is packed with useful information about your system’s

codepre.com

Also, big shoutout to commandlinefu.com, a fantastic resource for commands, check it out and see how many cool things you can do with the command line.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

Does anyone know a good file manager that doesn't change the default application for a filetype because I opened a file with it once?