The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

Sam Losco said:
Edit - Oh, I think the TightVNC problem I had was encryption settings not working right.
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Yeah, most VNC implementations use weird encryption modes that aren't supported by anything other than that one selfsame piece of code. A lot of the online resources say "Just turn off encryption", but... no.
 
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Not meaning to pander to communism. But in a sense. Was gaming great in the 90s because of the mentality of sharing? I mean free games online. Aswell as Linux a free OS, even if gaming on it is not good. But just saying. The free softwares we enjoy like Firefox etc
 
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Kosher Dill said:
- And as long as I'm dreaming, have some sort of "remote desktop" feature that can actually be remoted into from non-Linux systems
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X2go
I tried half a dozen solutions to get remote apps and desktops from Mint and debian on my Windows 10 desktop and X2go was the only one that worked out of the box without problems and acceptable (and the best) performance.

Kosher Dill said:
Can I get a recommendation on a Linux distro?
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Pop!_OS
The first "everything works as expected" experience I have had with desktop Linux in a long while.
 
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I'm off the fucking winduhs again after they updated Edge and took over my computer with this god awful splash screen trying to force me to switch I had to shut down in task manager. Trying out Manjaro on my desktop now. Usually Mint is my go to, but this has been a Windows machince since I built it and the Mint installer had problems writing the bootloader due to UFEI fuckery, so I decided to try a different distro instead of fucking with it.

I have to say, Manjaro is not too shabby.

I installed dropbox from the Arch User Repository using Yay. Are the helpers like Yay and the stuff in the AUR generally secure enough for personal use?

Richard29 said:
Not meaning to pander to communism. But in a sense. Was gaming great in the 90s because of the mentality of sharing? I mean free games online. Aswell as Linux a free OS, even if gaming on it is not good. But just saying. The free softwares we enjoy like Firefox etc
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Open source shit and sharing online and in tech is more like a voluntary co-op as opposed to full on socialists and communists advocating coercing people at the point of a gun. It's the difference between "I made this and I want to share it for free," and "I will give you money because I appreciate this thing you made for free," versus "I will use this gun to take stuff from people who have more than me."
 
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Richard29 said:
Not meaning to pander to communism. But in a sense. Was gaming great in the 90s because of the mentality of sharing? I mean free games online. Aswell as Linux a free OS, even if gaming on it is not good. But just saying. The free softwares we enjoy like Firefox etc
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If you're interested read Hackers: Heros of the Computer Revolution. In short: devs were much more competent because of the monastic devotion that development required which means that most games were also labours of love where 18 hour days were just accepted as a matter of course. Smaller scope also made coherent dev easier. The other part is that devs subscribed much more to the hacker ethic than they do now. The difficulty of pushing bits also made the whole scene more of a tight-knit community. Don't forget in this era sneakernet was still the most efficient way of moving large amounts of data.

If that seems a bit to ethereal it might be easier to look at it and see what we've lost. In short, as games have become more corporatized innovation has fixated around three basic goals: improve monetization, increase polish to broaden appeal, and minimize the Time to Market. Pretty much all of these directly or indirectly oppose quality so we have good design slowly collapsing like the Ottoman Empire while all the money goes into finding the most effective microtransactions and lowest friction menu designs. It's kind of like videogames are building a gilded cage around themselves.
 
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I had hopes in the Indie market to bring some of the old magic back, but indie video game "developers" are now first and foremost PR people that try to sell something via social media. They barely know anything about programming or computer science in general and the bar of entry being lowered endlessly through technological advancement made this possible. If you look at the advice given to indie developers to be "successful", it's 90% about how to do PR, networking (the social kind) and how to draw some youtube people in, making the actual godamn game is way down on that list. That this leads to piles of bad-to-mediocre cookie-cutter games that are indistinguishable and nobody cares about (including often the dev) should not surprise anyone. We also all know what an incestuous swamp the whole "indie" games industry is.

Back in the day you had to be really good at the technical aspect and also had to be creative with the programming to make computers do the things they barely had any resources for and also weren't really made for in some cases. Also most devs had a vision or played around with theoretical simulation systems and technologies they found interesting, quite a few of them coming from an engineering or even scientific background. It was also more of a passion for many (like creating an art piece) since there really weren't the absurd amounts of money in it there are now and the work invested often wasn't in any relation to the money you could theoretically make. The only vision nowadays seems to be to go viral and make a big cash grab and never have to work again. That's how you got SimEarth and SimLife back then, whole planet simulators that ran on ~7 Mhz machines with 512 kb/1 MB of RAM, while "pixel art" "adventures" with bought graphic assets need 6-core machines.
 
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AmpleApricots said:
I had hopes in the Indie market to bring some of the old magic back, but indie video game "developers" are now first and foremost PR people that try to sell something via social media. They barely know anything about programming or computer science in general and the bar of entry being lowered endlessly through technological advancement made this possible. If you look at the advice given to indie developers to be "successful", it's 90% about how to do PR, networking (the social kind) and how to draw some youtube people in, making the actual godamn game is way down on that list. That this leads to piles of bad-to-mediocre cookie-cutter games that are indistinguishable and nobody cares about (including often the dev) should not surprise anyone. We also all know what an incestuous swamp the whole "indie" games industry is.

Back in the day you had to be really good at the technical aspect and also had to be creative with the programming to make computers do the things they barely had any resources for and also weren't really made for in some cases. Also most devs had a vision or played around with theoretical simulation systems and technologies they found interesting, quite a few of them coming from an engineering or even scientific background. It was also more of a passion for many (like creating an art piece) since there really weren't the absurd amounts of money in it there are now and the work invested often wasn't in any relation to the money you could theoretically make. The only vision nowadays seems to be to go viral and make a big cash grab and never have to work again. That's how you got SimEarth and SimLife back then, whole planet simulators that ran on ~7 Mhz machines with 512 kb/1 MB of RAM, while "pixel art" "adventures" with bought graphic assets need 6-core machines.
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I think the closest thing now is shit like 8-Bit Guy making RTS games for the Commodore 64.
 
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Richard29 said:
Not meaning to pander to communism. But in a sense. Was gaming great in the 90s because of the mentality of sharing? I mean free games online. Aswell as Linux a free OS, even if gaming on it is not good. But just saying. The free softwares we enjoy like Firefox etc
Click to expand...
Dick Justice said:
If you're interested read Hackers: Heros of the Computer Revolution. In short: devs were much more competent because of the monastic devotion that development required which means that most games were also labours of love where 18 hour days were just accepted as a matter of course. Smaller scope also made coherent dev easier. The other part is that devs subscribed much more to the hacker ethic than they do now. The difficulty of pushing bits also made the whole scene more of a tight-knit community. Don't forget in this era sneakernet was still the most efficient way of moving large amounts of data.

If that seems a bit to ethereal it might be easier to look at it and see what we've lost. In short, as games have become more corporatized innovation has fixated around three basic goals: improve monetization, increase polish to broaden appeal, and minimize the Time to Market. Pretty much all of these directly or indirectly oppose quality so we have good design slowly collapsing like the Ottoman Empire while all the money goes into finding the most effective microtransactions and lowest friction menu designs. It's kind of like videogames are building a gilded cage around themselves.
Click to expand...
AmpleApricots said:
They barely know anything about programming or computer science in general and the bar of entry being lowered endlessly through technological advancement made this possible.
Click to expand...
I think the 90's you had reached a sweet spot with computer technology, which became powerful enough to allow creators to realize their visions fully, while still being small enough that a small team can wrap their hands around the tech and understand it all. Today, while computers are orders of magnitudes more powerful, they are also orders of magnitudes more complex, meaning that either you need a large term to develop games, which requires corperate backing and all the compromises that comes with that, or you use devkits, libraries and tools many times removed from the hardware or even any low-level systems around it.
 
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Cannot recall if it was here, but someone once recommended Manjaro with i3 and it is the best OS and DE I've ever experienced. The only issue I've experienced is with the lock screen; it's just a bad blurred screen and sometimes it doesn't even take effect until six seconds after the laptop has been opened. It can be a bit confusing at first, but once you learn dmenu, kill, and window switch, it's much more intuitive than any other DE. I tried switching to XFCE with i3 but I ended up hating how clunky XFCE was and the i3 merge was terrible.
 
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Never Scored said:
I'm off the fucking winduhs again after they updated Edge and took over my computer with this god awful splash screen trying to force me to switch I had to shut down in task manager. Trying out Manjaro on my desktop now. Usually Mint is my go to, but this has been a Windows machince since I built it and the Mint installer had problems writing the bootloader due to UFEI fuckery, so I decided to try a different distro instead of fucking with it.

I have to say, Manjaro is not too shabby.

I installed dropbox from the Arch User Repository using Yay. Are the helpers like Yay and the stuff in the AUR generally secure enough for personal use?



Open source shit and sharing online and in tech is more like a voluntary co-op as opposed to full on socialists and communists advocating coercing people at the point of a gun. It's the difference between "I made this and I want to share it for free," and "I will give you money because I appreciate this thing you made for free," versus "I will use this gun to take stuff from people who have more than me."
Click to expand...

The most popular AUR packages are usually fine. Always check the PKGBUILD before installing though, just to make sure nothing shady is going on, ie it's cloning the right git repository, no random patch files ect.
 
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AmpleApricots said:
I had hopes in the Indie market to bring some of the old magic back, but indie video game "developers" are now first and foremost PR people that try to sell something via social media. They barely know anything about programming or computer science in general and the bar of entry being lowered endlessly through technological advancement made this possible. If you look at the advice given to indie developers to be "successful", it's 90% about how to do PR, networking (the social kind) and how to draw some youtube people in, making the actual godamn game is way down on that list. That this leads to piles of bad-to-mediocre cookie-cutter games that are indistinguishable and nobody cares about (including often the dev) should not surprise anyone. We also all know what an incestuous swamp the whole "indie" games industry is.

Back in the day you had to be really good at the technical aspect and also had to be creative with the programming to make computers do the things they barely had any resources for and also weren't really made for in some cases. Also most devs had a vision or played around with theoretical simulation systems and technologies they found interesting, quite a few of them coming from an engineering or even scientific background. It was also more of a passion for many (like creating an art piece) since there really weren't the absurd amounts of money in it there are now and the work invested often wasn't in any relation to the money you could theoretically make. The only vision nowadays seems to be to go viral and make a big cash grab and never have to work again. That's how you got SimEarth and SimLife back then, whole planet simulators that ran on ~7 Mhz machines with 512 kb/1 MB of RAM, while "pixel art" "adventures" with bought graphic assets need 6-core machines.
Click to expand...

There's stacks of games worth playing in the indie space, but the trouble is that the better games are inherently more difficult to find because the devs are spending all their time actually working instead of shilling on twitter. It's an unfortunate dynamic.

E: It also hurts that a lot of the typical "indie scene" are the kind of soyboys we saw in Indie Game the Movie all signal boosting each other while pretending to be the alpha and omega of indie dev.
>you must be at least this pozzed to collect your IGF award and Polygon puff piece
 
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I need to switch from Windows 10 to Linux, I have a large steam library. Suggestions on specific OS to use? I'm very tech savvy but I've been pozzed by Microsoft for life.
 
I recently used the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 20 for a gaming setup with steam and Lutris and everything worked out of the box. If you don't mind trying a radically different user interface from what you are used to, I'd suggest Pop!_OS instead. Although my reasons for that suggestion are mostly emotional and only rellevant to Linux enthusiasts.
 
What's the appeal of pop os? The name with the neckbeardy underscore and GNOME turn me off but people always suggest it. What makes it stand out from Ubuntu and Mint?
 
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