The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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ellroy said:
During my days of running Scientific Linux and CentOS 6 has my desktop OS, I have had to revert kernel upgrades before. 6.3 was the roughest phase and pushed me out of Scientific Linux and into Fedora. I have had to use an older kernel once with Centos in the 6.5-6.7 days. It was nice to select an older kernel to boot and figure out how fucked the system was.
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This used to be a more common problem in linux, ie the need to use an old kernel because of something being borked in a newer one. But in the last 10 years, I think I have had to use an older one exactly once - and this was maybe 2012 or so. Kernel stability really improved after 2010 or so, and holding onto to every prior kernel is probably not really needed and a throwback to an earlier era.

One thing that has gotten worse, not in terms of actual compatibility which has always improved, but in terms of basic usability is fucking WINE. What a fucking awful hunk of shit this program has become. Just to get it to install properly is a nightmare. Most user unfriendly piece of shit major program in linux that I can think of right now.
 
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BootlegPopeye said:
This used to be a more common problem in linux, ie the need to use an old kernel because of something being borked in a newer one. But in the last 10 years, I think I have had to use an older one exactly once - and this was maybe 2012 or so. Kernel stability really improved after 2010 or so, and holding onto to every prior kernel is probably not really needed and a throwback to an earlier era.

One thing that has gotten worse, not in terms of actual compatibility which has always improved, but in terms of basic usability is fucking WINE. What a fucking awful hunk of shit this program has become. Just to get it to install properly is a nightmare. Most user unfriendly piece of shit major program in linux that I can think of right now.
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Read my mind. I was going to install WINE this weekend to get Microsoft Office installed because libre office spell check and dictionary/grammar libraries are a trash fire.

Thanks for the heads up lol
 
ellroy said:
Read my mind. I was going to install WINE this weekend to get Microsoft Office installed because libre office spell check and dictionary/grammar libraries are a trash fire.

Thanks for the heads up lol
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Which dictionaries are giving you trouble ? I've been meaning to setup aspell + langtool for emacs. I haven't tried it myself, but I know you can swap them around in libreoffice.

I don't use it myself, but I know that Microsoft Edge has enhanced Office365 built in. But I think 365 is the shitty version that requires an account.
 
BootlegPopeye said:
One thing that has gotten worse, not in terms of actual compatibility which has always improved, but in terms of basic usability is fucking WINE. What a fucking awful hunk of shit this program has become. Just to get it to install properly is a nightmare. Most user unfriendly piece of shit major program in linux that I can think of right now.
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Fucking THIS, Wine used to work mostly out of the box around a decade ago, i could easily play stuff that was installed on my Windows partition without dealing too much with configuration and terminal crap, nowadays you have to deal with crap like Lutris or a billion dependencies to get a simple program to work.
 
BootlegPopeye said:
This used to be a more common problem in linux, ie the need to use an old kernel because of something being borked in a newer one. But in the last 10 years, I think I have had to use an older one exactly once - and this was maybe 2012 or so. Kernel stability really improved after 2010 or so, and holding onto to every prior kernel is probably not really needed and a throwback to an earlier era.
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There was a pretty nasty btrfs regression recently. If you were affected by it and didn't catch it then it would have slowly eaten your SSD. Just constant writing defragging in an infinite loop.

So these things still do happen.
 
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Mr. Duck said:
Fucking THIS, Wine used to work mostly out of the box around a decade ago, i could easily play stuff that was installed on my Windows partition without dealing too much with configuration and terminal crap, nowadays you have to deal with crap like Lutris or a billion dependencies to get a simple program to work.
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Yeah, its awful, and it isn't just a few noobs with this problem, but quite alot of people. Just search "wine linux install" and youll find hundreds and hundreds of people on various distros with the same problem. Thank god Valve has their own fork and I barely have to use them now, but in the last few days there are a couple programs I need to run that aren't game related so I had to attempt to get it working. It's an endless rabbit hole of broken dependencies, "solutions" on various websites that don't work, etc.

It's so bad I am tempted to attack them on their own bug tracker with a bug report "your program is becoming an unusable hunk of shit" w/ the terrible backsliding the app has taken (first slowly) over the last 10 years.

eternal dog mongler said:
There was a pretty nasty btrfs regression recently. If you were affected by it and didn't catch it then it would have slowly eaten your SSD. Just constant writing defragging in an infinite loop.

So these things still do happen.
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Ah see wasn't aware of that one. Well, this is maybe only the 2nd time in the last 10-12 years I knew about a regression that bad. When I first was playing with Linux, it seemed like every other Kernel release broke. My recollection of the one that happened to me was a kernel release that fucked something with the bootloader (the source of about 75% of all linux problems now).
 
eternal dog mongler said:
There was a pretty nasty btrfs regression recently.
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Btrfs once saved a ton of my data from silent corruption that would've eventually found it's way into my backups no other file system would've made me aware of until it was too late, so I'm grateful for that. But yes, it has a turbulent past. I don't care much for this everything and the kitchen sink and "please install always the newest version to avoid bugs" mentality either. That's fine for some constant-in-development videogame but filesystems should be a bit more stable and focused than that. That's also why one layer of my physical backup volumes is still ext4. Btrfs is a good file system but I feel this might taint it in public perception eventually.
 
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Mr. Duck said:
Fucking THIS, Wine used to work mostly out of the box around a decade ago, i could easily play stuff that was installed on my Windows partition without dealing too much with configuration and terminal crap, nowadays you have to deal with crap like Lutris or a billion dependencies to get a simple program to work.
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Wine has become annoying because Windows programs stopped shipping as monoliths with bundled libraries and actually started deferring some of their dependencies to the operating system level. I remember back in the day when pretty much every game shipped with almost all of its required DLLs and would very regularly fuck up system directories by overwriting them with its own versions of a library.

Now though, you have like C++ redists, .NET, all these fucking game engine redists, etc. And they're all handled at the OS level instead of coming from the installation itself.

tl;dr Windows and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
 
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AmpleApricots said:
Btrfs once saved a ton of my data from silent corruption that would've eventually found it's way into my backups no other file system would've made me aware of until it was too late, so I'm grateful for that.
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no-exit said:
Which dictionaries are giving you trouble ? I've been meaning to setup aspell + langtool for emacs. I haven't tried it myself, but I know you can swap them around in libreoffice.

I don't use it myself, but I know that Microsoft Edge has enhanced Office365 built in. But I think 365 is the shitty version that requires an account.
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hunspell-en_us 2020.12.07-4

I also noticed Libre was defaulting to Russian in the spell check tool. I've reached my limit of patience for Libre given how old the project is. I think Microsoft Office may be the only serious choice for school work now.
 
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Am I the only one that doesn't make it a fatal deal to have some screen tearing? I use a basic monitor with unremarkable specifications, and even some jank. I see some xorg utilities outside of compositing being developed to perhaps deal with the issue, but again, it's not like anything is broken at all by it on my end.

It feels like everyone switching to Wayland is stuck on the tearing subject, but never comments on the inputs and color control problems with Wayland.
 
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AlephOne2Many said:
Am I the only one that doesn't make it a fatal deal to have some screen tearing? I use a basic monitor with unremarkable specifications, and even some jank. I see some xorg utilities outside of compositing being developed to perhaps deal with the issue, but again, it's not like anything is broken at all by it on my end.

It feels like everyone switching to Wayland is stuck on the tearing subject, but never comments on the inputs and color control problems with Wayland.
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Screen tearing isn't a deal breaker for me. I dislike Xorg because it's old, the protocol has to be hacked around to make it fast, and most of the specification exists to support graphics paradigms that haven't been relevant since before most KF users were born.

Wayland's problem is getting buy-in. Distros don't ship with it by default and support for it by widget toolkits is anemic to say the least. If Red Hat is serious about pushing it, they need to drop some cash on getting every major and minor graphical library in the Linux world to support it.
 
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Fcret said:
I hope you're actually using tcsh and not vanilla csh, my brother in Christ...
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I use bash for most normal purposes but I also have csh because I have some genuinely ancient scripts I never got the energy to update and they're broken in even tcsh. I kept telling myself I'll rewrite the maybe 50 lines of shit I still use but considering it's been since the early '90s I don't think that is ever going to happen.

Anyway, shells in order of how often I use them: bash, tcsh, zsh, csh (for a few janitorial things), and of course, the trusty old sh. There's a lot of stuff that is still just basic shell scripts. I also usually have a few different terminal apps and some old settings that simulate specific ancient amber mono and green mono terminals I miss. There's just something about an amber terminal window in full screen emulating DEC VTxxx of some flavor.
 
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