The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Citation Checking Project]

>Asks for a recommendation that will run on 2012 hardware.
>Asks for something that can run right out of the box with no real setup.
>Just goes to linux mint after recommended a lightweight linux operating system that checks all those requirements.
What?

What component do you think will bottleneck? The 9.2 according to this table has 4GB of RAM and an i7, which is exactly what I'm running GNOME 3.34 on right now.

 

[Never Scored]

What component do you think will bottleneck? The 9.2 according to this table has 4GB of RAM and an i7, which is exactly what I'm running GNOME 3.34 on right now.

Plus I have mine upgraded to 16 gigs of ram.

 

[George Orson Welles]

What component do you think will bottleneck? The 9.2 according to this table has 4GB of RAM and an i7, which is exactly what I'm running GNOME 3.34 on right now.

I'm not really saying anything will bottleneck, I'm saying that I recommended a distro that fit his requirements and he copped out to Mint.

 

[Never Scored]

I'm not really saying anything will bottleneck, I'm saying that I recommended a distro that fit his requirements and he copped out to Mint.

I have a Macbook Pro still actively supported by Apple for the moment that supports a max of 16 gig of ram. I have an SSD in it, though you had no way of knowing that. I asked if there was any particular distro people would recommend, because I didn't know if there was any proprietary hardware in there that’s not widely supported. I didn’t want a situation where I installed Ubuntu or something and found there were not drivers available for some proprietary component.

You recommended a distro designed for keeping obsolete hardware alive, that loads the entire OS inside of, I think, something like a gig of ram, loading a bunch of lightweight programs into memory so you don't have to wait for them to load from a hard drive after boot. I have 15 more gigs of ram than the amount Puppy was designed for and I have a ssd so loading programs from the hard drive into ram does not create a bottleneck. With all due respect, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were genuinely trying to help, your recommendation is not really suitable for my setup and there's no need to get butthurt about it.

After this someone told me it was just a standard x86 box, so I'm just going to use my preferred distro that I've installed on many standard x86 boxes in the past. Then you seemingly got salty about it. Where is the disconnect here? You're telling me to install a distro that's essentially designed for netbooks on a computer with 16 gigs of ram, an i7 processor and an SSD and when I say no, you're getting mad.

 

[Aru-chu]

I have an arch install. i3wm for maximum productivity. Won't say it's the absolute best distro but the bare bones start has given me a pretty good look inside how many linux distros work. Anyone else like using overly complicated shit for no good reason?

Arch Linux
I3WM
Qutebrowser
Midnight Commander

I can do just about anything I need without touching the mouse.

 

[George Orson Welles]

I have a Macbook Pro still actively supported by Apple for the moment that supports a max of 16 gig of ram. I have an SSD in it, though you had no way of knowing that. I asked if there was any particular distro people would recommend, because I didn't know if there was any proprietary hardware in there that’s not widely supported. I didn’t want a situation where I installed Ubuntu or something and found there were not drivers available for some proprietary component.

You recommended a distro designed for keeping obsolete hardware alive, that loads the entire OS inside of, I think, something like a gig of ram, loading a bunch of lightweight programs into memory so you don't have to wait for them to load from a hard drive after boot. I have 15 more gigs of ram than the amount Puppy was designed for and I have a ssd so loading programs from the hard drive into ram does not create a bottleneck. With all due respect, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were genuinely trying to help, your recommendation is not really suitable for my setup and there's no need to get butthurt about it.

After this someone told me it was just a standard x86 box, so I'm just going to use my preferred distro that I've installed on many standard x86 boxes in the past. Then you seemingly got salty about it. Where is the disconnect here? You're telling me to install a distro that's essentially designed for netbooks on a computer with 16 gigs of ram, an i7 processor and an SSD and when I say no, you're getting mad.

I thought your Macbook Pro was under-performing/garbage and that Puppy would be good for you, my apologies. I was "getting mad" about how it was kind of dismissed, plus how it seemed about your setup as mentioned before, I thought you were going to put a workload onto your hardware intentionally and break something in the process.

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

Can anyone reccomend a good distro for a Macbook Pro 9,2? This is the last unibody model from 2012. Something where pretty well everything works out of the box without too much fucking around?

Try a Manjaro iso. If you have at least 4gb of ram you can comfortably even use the KDE version of the iso. The nice thing about the Manjaro iso is that it boots into a live environment so you can verify that things are working as they should be before installing. Be sure to activate the wifi before beginning the install procedure.

 

[Stasi]

Why is there no love for xfce? Had a junker laptop years ago and xfce was all it could run well. Have much better hardware but stuck with xfce over the years. Its snappy, works and I'm used to it.

What am I missing by not switching other than bells and whistles?

 

[Coffee Anon]

So with the recent crashes I've been having and now this

The Fedora Project's One Sentence Vision - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

I'm thinking of dropping Fedora and trying something else. I used Arch in 2010-2011 but a system update trashed it, I used gentoo from 2015-2018 but went back to Windows for muh games during one Christmas time and then regretted it.
Then installed Fedora (I used it on a laptop in like 20011-2012 or therabouts) around new years and I just don't like it anymore. It's like Windows where you get weekly updates that require system restarts, installation, and then restarting again.

This thread can help me decide what I should switch to.
In order of the Like categories, please vote:
Arch (like)
Gentoo (dislike)
Alpine (agree)
FreeBSD (disagree)
Void (Achievement)
Suicide (Winner)
Keep Fedora (Mad at the Internet)

 

[010101]

On a work laptop, I used to have basic bitch Ubuntu but I couldn't stand Unity or Gnome. Or those fucking package repairs with every single distro upgrade, which gives me shit that's promptly outdated anyway. I still keep the Ubuntu, but it's gutted so much you wouldn't know it.
Apart from that, I have an old laptop running Arch. That system survived so fucking long, I even ran it from a USB drive for about a year until it completely fried. Fun fact: most computers you can get to don't have BIOS locked, so you can boot your own OS and fuck around with them.

Why is there no love for xfce? Had a junker laptop years ago and xfce was all it could run well. Have much better hardware but stuck with xfce over the years. Its snappy, works and I'm used to it.

What am I missing by not switching other than bells and whistles?

I use it. Fits my almost non-existent graphics needs perfectly.

This thread can help me decide what I should switch to.
In order of the Like categories, please vote:

You're missing one option: keep Fedora (Mad at the Internet).

 

[Coffee Anon]

You're missing one option: keep Fedora (Mad at the Internet).

You're right, I added it.

 

[Never Scored]

I thought your Macbook Pro was under-performing/garbage and that Puppy would be good for you, my apologies. I was "getting mad" about how it was kind of dismissed, plus how it seemed about your setup as mentioned before, I thought you were going to put a workload onto your hardware intentionally and break something in the process.

I hit my wife because of you.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

So with the recent crashes I've been having and now this

The Fedora Project's One Sentence Vision - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

I'm thinking of dropping Fedora and trying something else. I used Arch in 2010-2011 but a system update trashed it, I used gentoo from 2015-2018 but went back to Windows for muh games during one Christmas time and then regretted it.
Then installed Fedora (I used it on a laptop in like 20011-2012 or therabouts) around new years and I just don't like it anymore. It's like Windows where you get weekly updates that require system restarts, installation, and then restarting again.

This thread can help me decide what I should switch to.
In order of the Like categories, please vote:
Arch (like)
Gentoo (dislike)
Alpine (agree)
FreeBSD (disagree)
Void (Achievement)
Suicide (Winner)
Keep Fedora (Mad at the Internet)

If you are going to go full Arch Linux, here's something to help out. Gonna go update my server right now and then come back.

 

[George Orson Welles]

I hit my wife because of you.

Shit dude, can't you unhit her?

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

I recommended Arch, as it is easier than Gentoo. If you understand Gentoo, than I would suggest Gentoo. But for most laptops I recommend Arch above Gentoo.

If you have already know how to configure your own kernels and have wrapped your mind around portage and know how to solve minor problems like dependency errors, there really is nothing better than Gentoo. The only reason why I pick Arch above Gentoo for laptops is because of the compiling. The more robust the system is, the easier it will live with Gentoo.

In the end, for desktops, Gentoo is my choice.

 

[Win98SE]

Did an interesting install today on an Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station, which is just a Linux box running some old kernel that you plug USB drives into to share on your network. Got serial access via the UART port on the main board, then found instructions for getting it set up to boot something off a flash drive, so now it's running the ARM variant of Arch Linux. It's ultimately bottlenecked by the flash drive of course, but once stuff gets loaded into memory it's good to go. I offloaded some non-mission-critical stuff from my main server to give it something to do for now, but I'll find a better fit for it this weekend.

On the negative side of things, I pulled out an old laptop that was struggling to run Win7 (I assume due to thermals), and did a bare Arch install to see if it could work as a home theater box. Everything went fine until I hooked it up to the TV, which began blanking out and artifacting. Down the rabbit hole of Intel Integrated Graphics I went before finding success with the Linux-LTS kernel. This was last night, and when I sat down to watch something today, I immediately ran into the same problem again. There's always hardware failure, but there's also ground loops, potential software issues, bad battery/power supply, etc, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like troubleshooting, but stuff like this is boring as shit. Won't say I didn't think about just hooking up the Chromecast again and giving the laptop a 9mm send-off.

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

Did an interesting install today on an Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station, which is just a Linux box running some old kernel that you plug USB drives into to share on your network. Got serial access via the UART port on the main board, then found instructions for getting it set up to boot something off a flash drive, so now it's running the ARM variant of Arch Linux. It's ultimately bottlenecked by the flash drive of course, but once stuff gets loaded into memory it's good to go. I offloaded some non-mission-critical stuff from my main server to give it something to do for now, but I'll find a better fit for it this weekend.

On the negative side of things, I pulled out an old laptop that was struggling to run Win7 (I assume due to thermals), and did a bare Arch install to see if it could work as a home theater box. Everything went fine until I hooked it up to the TV, which began blanking out and artifacting. Down the rabbit hole of Intel Integrated Graphics I went before finding success with the Linux-LTS kernel. This was last night, and when I sat down to watch something today, I immediately ran into the same problem again. There's always hardware failure, but there's also ground loops, potential software issues, bad battery/power supply, etc, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like troubleshooting, but stuff like this is boring as shit. Won't say I didn't think about just hooking up the Chromecast again and giving the laptop a 9mm send-off.

pacman -S inxi

Then run inxi -Fxxxz

Show the results, you might as well tap into the autistic hivemind of the farms for help.

 

[Coffee Anon]

I recommended Arch, as it is easier than Gentoo. If you understand Gentoo, than I would suggest Gentoo. But for most laptops I recommend Arch above Gentoo.

If you have already know how to configure your own kernels and have wrapped your mind around portage and know how to solve minor problems like dependency errors, there really is nothing better than Gentoo. The only reason why I pick Arch above Gentoo for laptops is because of the compiling. The more robust the system is, the easier it will live with Gentoo.

In the end, for desktops, Gentoo is my choice.

This is for a desktop. Also, while Arch seems to have good support for hardening the system and kernel, I can't figure out if it has a repository of programs compiled with gcc hardening features. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Security
And I don't trust AUR.
If I have to compile it all myself then I'm thinking I might as well go gentoo, but I have to admit that I borked portage in my last gentoo install (after 2 years with no problems) after installing several release versions of python3 and couldn't figure out how to fix it.

Also, I went with gentoo because it had hardened gentoo with grsec stuff and now that's gone

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

If you aren't going to do any debugging, just keep your global CFLAGS as :


CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
COMMON_FLAGS="-march=native -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

If you plan to debug, just remove the -fomit-frame-pointer flag. GCC will know your CPU's flags so "native" is fine. Also, the "~arch" flag is fine, I always use it. So, again in /etc/portage/make.conf add the following line :

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64"

This will enable newer packages, Not totally bleeding edge, that would be using the .9999 ebuilds, but newer than "amd64". The thing with the bleeding edge is that you can bleed. So the .9999 ebuilds are generally things to avoid.

For hardening, tune your kernel and build your desktop accordingly. Pick a sane profile. If using KDE pick the KDE profile, if using Gnome pick the Gnome profile, but if using something nicer, like i3-gaps, just pick the desktop profile. As explained in the link you can combine profiles.

CCACHE is fine to use as it speeds up compiling time for minor version changes. Something that might take 30 minutes to compile will only take a few minutes with a minor version bump. Major version bumps will take the full 30 minutes though. Initial builds with ccache as slightly longer than without, but the time saved with minor version upgrades more than makes up for it. Not using it is obviously fine, so up to you.

WRT python, just let portage handle it for the most part and don't assign a version in your make.conf. People who were picking versions had a lot of grief as Python2 was retired this year from upstream. While there are some lingering Python2 packages still around (numpy being a prime example), portage has been decent at keeping things sanitized well.

Be sure to add a /swap partition. Even with 32GB of ram I added a 1GB /swap just to be safe.

Updating my desktop right now :

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

I recommended Arch, as it is easier than Gentoo. If you understand Gentoo, than I would suggest Gentoo. But for most laptops I recommend Arch above Gentoo.

If you have already know how to configure your own kernels and have wrapped your mind around portage and know how to solve minor problems like dependency errors, there really is nothing better than Gentoo. The only reason why I pick Arch above Gentoo for laptops is because of the compiling. The more robust the system is, the easier it will live with Gentoo.

In the end, for desktops, Gentoo is my choice.

pacman -S inxi

Then run inxi -Fxxxz

Show the results, you might as well tap into the autistic hivemind of the farms for help.

If you aren't going to do any debugging, just keep your global CFLAGS as :


CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
COMMON_FLAGS="-march=native -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

If you plan to debug, just remove the -fomit-frame-pointer flag. GCC will know your CPU's flags so "native" is fine. Also, the "~arch" flag is fine, I always use it. So, again in /etc/portage/make.conf add the following line :

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64"

This will enable newer packages, Not totally bleeding edge, that would be using the .9999 ebuilds, but newer than "amd64". The thing with the bleeding edge is that you can bleed. So the .9999 ebuilds are generally things to avoid.

For hardening, tune your kernel and build your desktop accordingly. Pick a sane profile. If using KDE pick the KDE profile, if using Gnome pick the Gnome profile, but if using something nicer, like i3-gaps, just pick the desktop profile. As explained in the link you can combine profiles.

CCACHE is fine to use as it speeds up compiling time for minor version changes. Something that might take 30 minutes to compile will only take a few minutes with a minor version bump. Major version bumps will take the full 30 minutes though. Initial builds with ccache as slightly longer than without, but the time saved with minor version upgrades more than makes up for it. Not using it is obviously fine, so up to you.

WRT python, just let portage handle it for the most part and don't assign a version in your make.conf. People who were picking versions had a lot of grief as Python2 was retired this year from upstream. While there are some lingering Python2 packages still around (numpy being a prime example), portage has been decent at keeping things sanitized well.

Be sure to add a /swap partition. Even with 32GB of ram I added a 1GB /swap just to be safe.

Updating my desktop right now :

View attachment 1165249

It is painfully clear that there is A LOT of things to learn from you. All of my Linux knowledge boils down to trial by fire.