The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

Ahriman said:
As a KDE fanboy, the "meh" rating kinda triggers me. KDE can be pretty powerful, if you take enough time to learn its ins and outs.
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I spent my teen years using Linux during the worst times to be either a KDE fan or a GNOME fan: that weird interval between 2009-2015ish when KDE 4 and GNOME 3 just launched and every new release of KDE4/GNOME3 broke something (hyperbole). Truthfully? That entire experience was more than enough for me to shun both of them. The KDE team thankfully realised how autistic they were being and gave us KDE5 (which I do actually like), but I'm far too invested in GTK tooling to ever fuck with that manually.

I know Ubuntu Unity is now a thing, but I'm still heartbroken that Canonical decided to discontinue Unity because it really did mature into a much more useful desktop than GNOME 3 ever was (or tries to be today). I remember using Ubuntu 12.04 and that "fuzzy search" feature where you could just search menu bar options by hitting the alt button was so fucking cool because it made formatting my papers for school that much quicker. MATE and Cinnamon are my next preferred, but I only really enjoy MATE on Linux Mint and Cinnamon's lack of a mintMenu like on Linux Mint's MATE version burns my ass 10 years later.
 
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If I had to choose another DE that isn't KDE, then I'd use XFCE. I've installed Linux Mint XFCE on my mom's PC (for pure normie web browsing, etc) and she can handle it just fine. Additionally, on my previous job I used Mint XFCE on a Dell workstation, and it "just worked". Felt super comfy and never got in my way.
 
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Ahriman said:
If I had to choose another DE that isn't KDE, then I'd use XFCE. I've installed Linux Mint XFCE on my mom's PC (for pure normie web browsing, etc) and she can handle it just fine. Additionally, on my previous job I used Mint XFCE on a Dell workstation, and it "just worked". Felt super comfy and never got in my way.
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I've often found myself enjoying minimal window managers like Openbox or IceWM that I can configure to launch via startx on machines that I sparingly use a graphical interface on. I've tried getting into i3, but I just can't adapt to it.
 
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Ahriman said:

As a KDE fanboy, the "meh" rating kinda triggers me. KDE can be pretty powerful, if you take enough time to learn its ins and outs.
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I find KDE to be the best option for a "modern looking" DE, followed by XFCE if you don't care about the bells and whistles that KDE offers with the problem being that XFCE uses GTK which sucks ass or just use a WM like a real Linux autist does :smug:
 
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Ahriman said:

As a KDE fanboy, the "meh" rating kinda triggers me. KDE can be pretty powerful, if you take enough time to learn its ins and outs.
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Personally I take whatever he says about Linux with a bit of a grain considering he's been wrong before, although on what exactly I don't remember. GNOME is only bad because its bloated and does more than what it needs to in the background, but otherwise its workflow is solid and I like the UI design. Same with KDE, but I've never really messed with it. My machine doesn't like it for whatever reason. XFCE's weakness for me is that it doesn't update very often, but it really doesn't need to except for my niche case, but they recently pushed a pre-release for a major update so that may change. Cinnamon is pretty solid, but I am not the biggest fan of the start menu. Just a nitpick.
 
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Mister Uno said:
Personally I take whatever he says about Linux with a bit of a grain considering he's been wrong before, although on what exactly I don't remember.
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He embarrassed himself making a bigger stink about Fedora's installer like the bulk of "reviewers" do. Sure, it isn't the most comfortable, it's slow as hell and has an inconsistent layout but it isn't as bad as he made it out to be. He missed clearly laid out, verbatim instructions given to him.
 
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I just use xfce. I was using icewm at a point but eventually went back to just using xfce after brief stint where fedora pushed a an update that resulted in people with amd cards having no fucking sound at all. At that point I said "Naw, fuck this" and just went back to endeavour os with xfce. Got tired of ricing my desktops but I keep a backup of all my ice configs on the off chance I feel like going back. Gnome in general just pisses me off, I find it to be un-intuitive and lacking features I get in other desktop environments like the ability to drag my damn taskbar window buttons around. In the case of KDE I want to like the desktop, I really do, but the amount of problems I've had with that shit just breaking hard out of nowhere is just enough for me to not bother. Maybe it's changed in recent years but I never cared to check which is a shame cause some of the KDE theme's are fucking yummy.

Now with that being said I have yet to find a desktop environment worse than enlightenment. My god I hate that piece of shit. On the surface it looks sleek and smooth but god damn it is it a fucking problem. That shit crashes worse than kde ever did. Kicked backed to the login screen and it basically starts a whole new session when you log back in yet all programs you had open before were still open in the old session before the crash. Then it only gives you the error warning after you log back in from the fucking crash. It's a recurring problem too since bodhi linux forked the old version and updates that since the new enlightenment is a rewrite which explains why nobody fucking uses it and their push on the efl libraries has procured less fruit than rubbing sandpaper on my nuts or blowing my own brains out. Fuck enlightenment.
 
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I actually ended up building a small alpine system (picking the most minimal image which was basically just busybox, a few common /etc/ files and the excellent package manager) for my convertible/notebook thing. My self-built system/kiss fork didn't work well for it as compiling on an old skylake Core M that's battery run is just not really all that practical and I didn't want the headache of setting my faster system up to distribute binary packages. Also quite frankly, I want to try something more stable and less rolling, and I'm getting somewhat tired of situations where I have to build twenty build time dependency libraries just to compile the final program. It's like wanting to build a house but first having to make all the nails you're going to use yourself. Also, nowadays every software package seems to use three different build systems and it's never the three same ones.

It also gave me an excuse to start making the final cut and leaving behind the last of the leftover cruft, various GNUisms and bashisms that still were somewhat around in my scripts and that just seemed to follow me around for the last decade+. I stick to busybox for just about everything including init, and will use daemontools as process supervisor. (Although I'm not even sure I really need a process supervisor, I'm just running very few daemons and tbh I've never seen them crash and it'd either not really matter all that much if they they do or would be instantly noticeable. The few times I wanna restart them I'm doing it manually anyways)

Let's see how it goes.
 
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I tried alpine on my mini pc and sadly it was one of those situations where audio, video, and suspend was beyond my level to try and stabilize. This box doesn't like kernels below 5.18 that much, just merely tolerates them but will have a bitch fit if I try to adjust power management settings.

I did love how dead basic it was, though, not to shit on it.
 
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I'll still roll my own kernel (and some select programs), I kinda have to because I've got a initramfs setup with very skeletal init and static /dev. My kernel with initramfs lies on a small, (~32-64 mb) unencrypted partition so the firmware has something to boot with. The inits only job is then to unlock the rest of the system with cryptsetup and boot into the "proper" init with switch_root.(busybox version) It was the simplest solution with the least dependencies/chances for things to go wrong. I always also wanted to implement stuff to make sure the kernel hasn't been tampered as an exercise but meh. It's more of a "crackhead stole my notebook" protection, not an evil maid one.

I'm only using alsa and not the linux sound system of the moment so if you ever learned how to set up an asound.conf, you basically never have to touch it again. The braindamage in linux usually comes when you go to automated, one-size-fits-all solutions. I have to admit, windows usually does those better, even if still bloated. If you're not afraid to customize and rewrite a config file/sh script if things change then you can cut down on a lot of bloat. I really like how alpine doesn't really have defaults, mostly because I'm only interested in their package manager and them doing the compilation job for me.
 
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Ahriman said:
Fedora for me, it's really damn comfy.
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Are you on Fedora 37? How are you finding it? I was playing around with a Fedora install on a spare laptop I had and PipeWire seems to have an issue where it doesn't change the music channel when I plug headphones in, and trying to revert to PulseAudio broke my sound system completely.

I'm wondering if it's just my bad luck or if others are having similar issues. (Hopefully the former: I'm all for de-Poettering wherever possible, so I hope it's not a gamestopping issue with PipeWire.)
 
My Gentoo tried to install PipeWire once, which then led to Wine and Clementine fighting over who had access to the audio. So I suspect it's just shit.

I 'ate systemd, but I've not had any problems with Pulse. Apart from that time I was messing around with Bluetooth, which it didn't like at all.
 
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Mister Uno said:
GNOME is only bad because its bloated and does more than what it needs to in the background, but otherwise its workflow is solid and I like the UI design.
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Seasoned News Reporter said:
Gnome in general just pisses me off, I find it to be un-intuitive and lacking features I get in other desktop environments like the ability to drag my damn taskbar window buttons around.
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I actually really liked GNOME 3 for a while, unfortunately the more I used it the harder it was for me to keep using it. At first it was little things like extensions breaking which just meant you had to update them. Later once I realized I use more than 4 workspaces at once during long work/programming sessions and that I could not assign hotkeys at the time for anything higher than 4 workspaces. I looked to find a solution only to be met with forum posts that went something like "lol why are you using more than 4 workspaces? You should downsize, no we are not changing anything". Small and weird missing features and things like window bars being comically big with no real fix and so on and so forth.

It's "popular" and easy to hate on GNOME but these things combined with sudden workflow changes being common in updates it was getting really exhausting to keep using it. Which sucked because I really liked it as a whole package. I know it's a meme to shit on the GTK file picker but I firmly believe that it is the best example of how unwilling the developers are (or codebase is so bloated they can't) to fix things or add new features, because those developer's attitudes absolutely carried over to other features/requests. Switched to XFCE and KDE and while I still kind of prefer GNOME it's so much easier to just get things working the way I want to.

I also like the spins of GNOME like Garuda's GNOME or Pantheon but as with GNOME eventually things started breaking for me in weird ways. I remember I dropped Pantheon after the entire DE started crashing if I opened the start menu and alt+tabbed at the same time. Also XFCE and KDE are the only DEs where IMEs just worked for me.
 
Knight of the Rope said:
Are you on Fedora 37? How are you finding it? I was playing around with a Fedora install on a spare laptop I had and PipeWire seems to have an issue where it doesn't change the music channel when I plug headphones in, and trying to revert to PulseAudio broke my sound system completely.

I'm wondering if it's just my bad luck or if others are having similar issues. (Hopefully the former: I'm all for de-Poettering wherever possible, so I hope it's not a gamestopping issue with PipeWire.)
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Not at the moment, but will be upgrading from 35 to 37 soon.

Honestly I've had zero issues with Pipewire or Wayland, even when playing vidya at borderless fullscreen. I could be an outlier but my experience with both has been fantastic really.
 
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demicolon said:
Why is PulseAudio bad?
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It has a habit of breaking all the goddamn time, even to this day. If you happen to have a configuration of hardware that it's not designed to play nicely with, you're often just fucked. On that Fedora install I was talking about, I tried to replace PipeWire with PulseAudio and it worked, for all of five seconds, before it just stopped playing sound ever again ever until I killed the daemon and restarted it, in which case it would work for another 5 seconds. (I'm still not even sure what the hell was going on there. PulseAudio on Ubuntu 20.04 works a treat.)

Part of the dislike for PulseAudio also stems from its history as the prototypical example of Poettering shitware, with the patented Poettering software cycle:
>be Lennart Poettering
>get put in charge of Linux software project
>immediately start expanding the scope of what your software is expected to do
>code the interface so that completely unrelated programs end up depending in weird ways on your new shitware
>explicit and implicit dependencies everywhere
>release buggy version of the software that you've forced distro maintainers to use through dependency shenanigans
>deflect criticism to other people's software when people point out that your coding is shit
 
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