The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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GoysGoneWild said:
Got gentoo running on my main machine. Learned a lot about shit I've been avoiding - namely grub and EFI. Did a barebones minimal install, the most functional things I have are tmux, vim and bashtop right now.
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Configure the kernel with EFISTUB, stick it on a 32mb (or bigger, depends on what you need) FAT (maybe ext, you can try but it is not guaranteed to work) partition (with directories like this: EFI/boot/bootx64.efi to make sure it gets found by your firmware) and you don't need a bootmanager, as the kernel can boot directly. I'm not sure how it is with fancier firmware if you have any but there's a lot of configuration options these days. Especially when I'm only booting one configuration I'd forego the boot-manager altogether, grub is a POS. You will have to tell the kernel were / is in it's command line, though. This is best done by UUID. You can also configure an initramfs to do things for you before loading your main init, like mounting an encrypted drive. It's not necessary for the partition to be mounted. I don't know how dynamic managers like the (e)udevs do it as they were a mess years ago and I stopped using them, but you might have more luck by adding the partition by UUID also, not by direct path. "blkid" to get the UUIDs is in util-linux or busybox.

now get rid of dbus, policy- and consolekit, udev (you can use mdev or a static /dev instead, another thing that's advertised for "embedded only" but works just fine and has no arcane configuration, nobody needs automounting anyways and if you really need it, there are ways - for programs that needs udev "find /sys/" you can google for udev zero, there are ebuilds) and pam and you got rid of the worst brain damage of recent years. gtk3 (if you want to use a lot of the more common GUI programs like browsers) will demand dbus for one of it's components but you can patch that build-time dependency out. Or just don't start the dbus service if that's too complicated. I also advise to use runit, but not gentoos default configuration that somehow depends on openrc and is configured in an utterly retarded way that makes runit itself somehow use openrc and is pretty much the dumbest thing I've ever seen in an ebuild. (which I can only explain by the fact that the maintainer is a confirmed systemd shill) Just kick that entire dependency out and do a local ebuild with your own scripts as soon as you're up to it.

Now watch your system actually idling when it is, you know, idle. I was absolutely shocked how a default install of Ubuntu amounted to a 1.xx load average just sitting there on a dualcore machine.
 
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Bassomatic said:
Awesome awesome, and I'm gonna dox you and mail you a bottle of scotch! :P Can't wait to set this up tonight.
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Assuming that Rocky Linux or LMDE is too heavy for your system to handle, MX Linux is a perfectly acceptable choice. MX uses the XFCE desktop environment which is considerably lighter than GNOME 3 (which Rocky ships with out of the box) or Cinnamon (which LMDE ships with out of the box). I didn't realise that you were bottlenecked by 2.5GB of RAM, so I do apologise for my ignorance about your hardware.
 
Dread First said:
Assuming that Rocky Linux or LMDE is too heavy for your system to handle, MX Linux is a perfectly acceptable choice. MX uses the XFCE desktop environment which is considerably lighter than GNOME 3 (which Rocky ships with out of the box) or Cinnamon (which LMDE ships with out of the box). I didn't realise that you were bottlenecked by 2.5GB of RAM, so I do apologise for my ignorance about your hardware.
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Remind me of something. Is MX Linux more lightweight than AntiX? I know the latter uses icewm which is more lightweight than xfce but as a whole idk which system comes out on top of that department. I never bothered to check & I been to focused on assignments to worry about it.
 
Seasoned News Reporter said:
Remind me of something. Is MX Linux more lightweight than AntiX? I know the latter uses icewm which is more lightweight than xfce but as a whole idk which system comes out on top of that department. I never bothered to check & I been to focused on assignments to worry about it.
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Don't quote me on this, but I believe that MX Linux is basically the brainchild of the developers of both the MEPIS Linux and antiX Linux distros coming together to combine their efforts. I know that MEPIS has been defunct for damn near a decade straight, but I believe antiX still remains in active development because its design goals are significantly different compared to MX's.
 
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You know, I almost forgot how nice Xfce is when it's configured to not look like absolute dogshit. Just went through the trouble of installing MX on my Linux Mint hard drive specifically to see how it stacks up. So far, so good!

***

A few observations:

1. The default panel configuration is fucking awful. Who the fuck decided that it should be oriented vertically and on the left? It's easily fixed, but it's still an oddity nonetheless

2. My Xbox controller's analogue sticks also move the mouse. This will definitely be annoying until I can figure out how to change that. (e: never mind)

3. Installing Flatpaks tripped me up until I realised that the MX "app store" (if you will) basically has a repository of Flatpak apps. Looks like I downloaded the Citra flatpak off the website for nothing 😅

4. It's definitely a bit rough around the edges, but overall? I actually like MX for what it is. Though with that in mind, I kinda wish that I had the KDE version instead of the Xfce version to maintain continuity between this and my FreeBSD install.

5. It's so jarring to me to see neofetch return such little usage of RAM when I'm fully loaded into X11 with a proper desktop environment. Even Linux Mint on my old setup with MATE used up anywhere between 4-6GB of memory when idle.

6. Transferring ROMs and ISOs from my NTFS hard drive over to the MX install was painless! Again, this is completely unlike Linux Mint where I had to use a flash drive like some kind of barbarian.
 
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Frail Snail said:
According to its man page, it may not be very accurate for multicore CPUs - which is most of them at this point.
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Isn't something like htop or the zenith system monitor good enough for this at a basic level? I feel like zenith alone would be better than average since it shows network usage among other things. (Yes it's a rust app, I'm well aware)
 
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No idea if this has been asked before, but anyone know if Linux could be used practically without a desktop environment?

Been sharpening my assembly programming skills on an old computer and was reminded how much I liked the simplicity of DOS. Would be psyched to have a modern equivalent.
 
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RolandD-10 said:
No idea if this has been asked before, but anyone know if Linux could be used practically without a desktop environment?

Been sharpening my assembly programming skills on an old computer and was reminded how much I liked the simplicity of DOS. Would be psyched to have a modern equivalent.
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I don't see why it couldn't. There's a handful of people out there who use shit like i3 which is just a tiling window manager that just layers terminals next to each other. There's others out there as well. I would recommend you don't completely nuke your desktop environment but instead keep it installed as a backup just in case you need to go into you can. But give it a go comrade, report back how it works out for you.
 
Seasoned News Reporter said:
I don't see why it couldn't. There's a handful of people out there who use shit like i3 which is just a tiling window manager that just layers terminals next to each other. There's others out there as well. I would recommend you don't completely nuke your desktop environment but instead keep it installed as a backup just in case you need to go into you can. But give it a go comrade, report back how it works out for you.
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Alright! I’ll give it a shot after work.
Going to try it in 80x25 text mode for maximum feelz.
 
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RolandD-10 said:
No idea if this has been asked before, but anyone know if Linux could be used practically without a desktop environment?

Been sharpening my assembly programming skills on an old computer and was reminded how much I liked the simplicity of DOS. Would be psyched to have a modern equivalent.
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Practically speaking, there are countless standalone window managers you can use as a substitute for a desktop environment: IceWM, Fluxbox, Openbox, i3, and so on. If you’re talking about using a text console only, well… you’d basically be using a computer just like RMS.

3119967d0c said:
? Installing ntfs-3g/FUSE shouldn't be that hard.
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I tried but it didn’t work on my specific setup for some bizarre reason.
 
RolandD-10 said:
No idea if this has been asked before, but anyone know if Linux could be used practically without a desktop environment?
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If you mean "Can I use Linux as some sort of terminal command line or something and do pretty much everything just by typing commands" then yes. Yes you can.
 
RolandD-10 said:
Alright! I’ll give it a shot after work.
Going to try it in 80x25 text mode for maximum feelz.
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screen or tmux will save you.

Unless you really really want to feel the pain.

And I'll get hate for this, but probably Emacs as well.
 
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Dread First said:
Practically speaking, there are countless standalone window managers you can use as a substitute for a desktop environment: IceWM, Fluxbox, Openbox, i3, and so on. If you’re talking about using a text console only, well… you’d basically be using a computer just like RMS.



I tried but it didn’t work on my specific setup for some bizarre reason.
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I put my vote in there for icewm. I use daily despite having built a new rig because it's just that damn good. Also copying config is super easy since it's just .icewm & goes in your home folder.
 
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davids877 said:
screen or tmux will save you.

Unless you really really want to feel the pain.

And I'll get hate for this, but probably Emacs as well.
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Oh wow never heard of Tmux before, didn’t know such a thing existed or was possible. Thanks fam.

Edit:
Noob question, what’s the deal with emacs?
 
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I've found something that rather worries me.

I was visiting the Bunsenlab forums today to check whether or not the devs are making any progress towards a Bullseye release and I came accross a mail from the debian development team admitting firmware is starting to become an issue:


archive:


I saw this one coming a mile away when the Kernel team decided to subscribe to the contributor covenant and the old guard started threatening with pulling pieces of the code, as it turns out all they had to do to hurt open source was piss off or wait until they were laid off.

There are little to no devs writing firmware and assembly anymore, open source has been co-opted by ruby script kiddies and gui designers with CalArts degrees. Expect to start paying money for the licensing of closed source firmware in the following years.

All in all, Stallman was right again and Torvalds is still a faggot, news at 11.
 
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