The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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I have local $HOME on every system, but they also mount my main file server and a symlink in $HOME goes there so I also have access to shared files. I have wildly different OSes across my systems so sharing home itself would be a pain.
 
davids877 said:
I have local $HOME on every system, but they also mount my main file server and a symlink in $HOME goes there so I also have access to shared files. I have wildly different OSes across my systems so sharing home itself would be a pain.
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What do you use for shared drives? I sometimes resort to ExFAT or even FAT32 because pretty much any OS you'd care to use supports one or both of them.
 
AnOminous said:
What do you use for shared drives? I sometimes resort to ExFAT or even FAT32 because pretty much any OS you'd care to use supports one or both of them.
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NFS.
What, do you take me for one of those people who runs Windows?

And now a slightly less flippant answer. For Network Files: The file server is Linux with EXT4 and exports to my Linux systems with NFS and the Windows systems with Samba/SMB. The Windows systems sometimes whine about running stuff directly from SMB so I just drag the file to a local filesystem. But all the content/media works fine.

Physically shared disks. Small USB sticks are ExFAT or FAT32. Bigger stuff that may need to be shared cross platform is usually NTFS with VeraCrypt if needed. Linux only drives tend to be EXT4 with VeraCrypt if needed. Linux NTFS sucks, but it works well enough for file exchange/shared files as I usually keep a USB filesystem with my entire home directory from my file server when I travel.
 
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Yes, you can basically have your entire Linux OS on an NFS share, to make things simple for modern systems you could make a kernel with EFI stub and initramfs that mounts the NFS share(s) and then jumps into whatever init is in that share. Don't even need GRUB in that case (which I think actually can't do it). Could probably boot such a system off a floppy disk if you can get a modern kernel+busybox small enough. From that extreme you can take it down to every variation. Unixoids were made with multi-user networking in mind. That's like, their bread and butter.

(By default NFS is UDP and not encrypted. For a local network with no outside interference that's actually fine and makes sure shit stays fast, but you could also combine this with NFS kerberos scheme or setting up a VPN tunnel, then the rest of your OS files can be in another country for all your kernel cares)

teriyakiburns said:

It's exactly as bad as it sounds.
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..and shit like this just tries to obfuscate that fact and create a svchost.exe so that people don't have to read scary manpages to understand how anything about their computer works. Did they also leave it rough around the edges and half-assed it just to basically abandon development midway and be dismissive at every bug report made about it? That's the systemd way!
 
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AmpleApricots said:
Yes, you can basically have your entire Linux OS on an NFS share, to make things simple for modern systems you could make a kernel with EFI stub and initramfs that mounts the NFS share(s) and then jumps into whatever init is in that share. Don't even need GRUB in that case (which I think actually can't do it). Could probably boot such a system off a floppy disk if you can get a modern kernel+busybox small enough. From that extreme you can take it down to every variation. Unixoids were made with multi-user networking in mind. That's like, their bread and butter.
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PXE is still a thing. It's mostly thought of as an install mechanism but you can run without any local storage without any problems. Either NFS or iSCSI is common. It's one of the blackest of the black arts though. These days about the only people screwing with it for home use are Raspberry Pi users. If your Network Interface Card/MB doesn't support PXE natively you can use a stub loader off a USB stick to handle it.
 
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davids877 said:
PXE is still a thing.
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I have some ancient MediaGX (Cyrix/National Semiconductor and finally AMD who then based their Geode SoCs on it) thinclients who have very reduced firmware and basically only can boot via network like this. I've not have gotten the nerve to try it out and from my research it's actually easier to just give them a fully-fledged BIOS and hack an IDE header in. That black. They're cool DOS machines because of their compatibility, low power consumption and decent speed for DOS applications/games. (they're basically Cyrix 5x86 cores on steroids with Soundblaster+OPL3+Gameport and VGA adapter built-in)

My guess is the Pis could be mainly interesting to use in that way if you want to set up computing clusters, one as a server and then n-clients. Also probably in work enviroments where you want to give people computers but want to also have full control over them and easily roll software out. I wouldn't know about any of that though. My usage case for NFS shares back in the day was mainly saving on internet bandwidth and storage space. I find the thought of a shared $HOME interesting now that I might get a third computer but it's all a slippery slope with me and I'm worried I end up with a data center accidentally.
 
davids877 said:
Linux NTFS sucks, but it works well enough for file exchange/shared files as I usually keep a USB filesystem with my entire home directory from my file server when I travel.
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I have one of those modem/router things that can share from a USB stick but that's rarely practical for more than critical shared files. It seems to handle most everything. I usually prefer to have something mounted directly and if every possible OS that needs it can, great.
 
One thing I’d like to do is get VR working, but OpenHMD is giving me a reach around. I have it installed but I have no clue how exactly to use it, and I might be retarded but I can’t understand the instructions either.
 
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The absolute state of Gnome


Also,

 
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Splitting up kernel versions like that seems like a bit of a support nightmare.

What were they doing with GNOME? Backporting stuff from 42 into 41? Seems like another fun one.
 
I started trying out Garuda Linux. It’s very pretty to look at but it feels unstable. I do really like how there’s a very good post installation script
 
Lately I've been using SoX to generate noise for tuning out background chatter and keep focus. Works pretty well I'd say. play command is supplied by the sox package of your distro:

Code: 
play -n synth noise

Supported types are noise/whitenoise, tpdfnoise, pinknoise and brownnoise (what I use, the others are too harsh). You can modify the signal further through various filters, but I've been content with the raw noise so far.
 
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I've been playing around with my notebook and desktop, especially with program forwarding. (meaning - run the program on the desktop, see&use it on the laptop) Even though X definitively supports this (in fact, was built with it in mind) it doesn't really work well with modern programs like browsers, since they basically get transferred pixel by pixel, uncompressed and without being capable of hardware acceleration like this. Everything that needs 3D acceleration then needs VirtualGL which is a considerable clusterfuck to set up last time I tried.

I attempted years ago to encode the entire desktop via ffmpeg and stream it via netcat to the target computer, all in hardware. Hardware encoding was utterly broken years ago and all that did then was make my AMD GPU lock up. Now it works fine, HEVC encoding/decoding is supported by both machines in hardware and at the resolution of the laptop screen with 30 FPS the streaming is completely fluent and with little to no noticeable (for me) latency and doesn't even task the weak celeron laptop much. (playback is with mpv via "low latency" profile in fullscreen) Keyboard/mouse input I do via a homebrew uinput solution, which basically works like a KVM which switches the output hard to the target machine. (and listens to a specific key combination to switch back) I know there are more high level solutions for X but I found them to be buggy sometimes, uinput works at kernel level, X isn't even required.

I also know there are different proprietary solutions that tackle this in linux and are probably more elegant but I am pleasantly surprised that it is perfectly feasible now with onboard stuff almost any linux installation has these days. I haven't even looked at tweaking the encoding yet and it probably can be made more efficient.
 
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AmpleApricots said:
I attempted years ago to encode the entire desktop via ffmpeg and stream it via netcat to the target computer, all in hardware. Hardware encoding was utterly broken years ago and all that did then was make my AMD GPU lock up. Now it works fine, HEVC encoding/decoding is supported by both machines in hardware and at the resolution of the laptop screen with 30 FPS the streaming is completely fluent and with little to no noticeable (for me) latency and doesn't even task the weak celeron laptop much. (playback is with mpv via "low latency" profile in fullscreen) Keyboard/mouse input I do via a homebrew uinput solution, which basically works like a KVM which switches the output hard to the target machine. (and listens to a specific key combination to switch back) I know there are more high level solutions for X but I found them to be buggy sometimes, uinput works at kernel level, X isn't even required.
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For people who want slightly more out-of-the-box solutions can check out "Sunshine" and "Moonlight" (no, I haven't tried either of them)
 
Ok, so, Nvidia drivers have bricked my main system and since there's jackshit I can do about it other than crying I've decided to answer @Seasoned News Reporter regarding my opinions on IceWM as I needed to re-install my test server and I didn't feel like installing Fluxbox or Openbox:

For starters out of the box this has got to be one of the ugliest out-of-the-box WM's I've ever seen, it even includes a really tacky looking wallpaper pre-installed (I swear I didn't change it)

before.png

However you can make it look pretty nice without changing a whole lot of the default configs as there are a lot of themes for it and setting them is pretty easy.

after.png

Now, there are some things that actually bother me about this specific WM, there may be some workarounds for these issues but I honestly don't have the patience for it:
  • There's no right-click menu while using a terminal and this honestly is a deal breaker for me in future installs as I like to copy and paste shit into and out of terminals instead of using commands. Bizarrely enough the mouse works perfectly fine everywhere else and while you can paste things into terminals without issue I had trouble copying info out of terminals, I could copy info but I could only paste it into the terminal again, which is very annoying.
  • On the subject of terminal woes, it seems like it also doesn't like terminals with extra menu functionality. For instance I couldn't open extra tabs in kitty or Alacritty and Cool-retro-term has its' right-click GUI customization functionality disabled. This is due to IceWM superimposing its' own menu over other terminal emulators menus, which I find to be very lame
  • I had trouble with window composition, particularly with transparency, although I could get some programs like conky to work Compton just refused to cooperate.
  • It doesn't seem to handle killing and starting some programs very well; Conky in particular has given me issues on boot and shutdown sequences but oddly enough it does handle other programs without issues, for instance I always have problems with awesome killing brave and other programs instead of closing them on shutdown, which doesn't happen here.

This is somewhat offset by the ridiculously small amount of resources that it consumes (As you can see on the second picture after a full bare-metal systemd install it doesn't even break into 400 MB of RAM at idle). I don't have fluxbox stats at hand but I believe it even beats that these days and may be on par or a little above dwm on binary systems, which is really impressive for a stacking window manager.

Overall though if you're looking to save resources and don't mind some minor annoyances I think it's a good window manager


Ahriman said:
Also,

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I take issue with this, I don't have an IBM laptop, my "free" system is a Dell Wyse Cx0 C90LEW; a 32 bit monocore computer with an IDE interface for hard drives and 1 GB of ram. IBM Laptops are overrated.
 
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