The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Miller]

Best distro:

 

[skykiii]

I use Linux Mint now, used to use Spiral Linux, but....

...... You know what? Let me know what you think of my little script here:

[clears throat]

You know what's BULLLLLLLSHIT?

Linux.

These days, switching to Linux makes sense, since Windows has gone downhill. I miss the days of Windows 98 or even XP where if your system got too fucked, you could just reinstall. Nowadays, you have to buy it all over again if you wanna do that.

With Linux, you can do a fresh install whenever you want. So that's great.

But why can't Linux be more user-friendly?

Here's an example: anything you want to install on Linux is done through a software manager, where you never get any direct control over where it goes, and the program won't ever tell you what its doing.

Here's an example of where this bit me in the ass: I was trying to install a Doom sourceport called Chocolate Doom. Now, all Doom source ports require you to already have Doom's data, which is contained in what are called WAD files. But here's the problem.... I have absolutely no idea where to put the WAD files, and the program itself doesn't have an option for telling it where the WAD files are!

Also, if you have WADs for both Doom 1 and Doom 2, Chocolate Doom and all other source ports will always default to Doom 2. So what if I want to play Doom 1? On Windows, you could just create a shortcut or a batch file. On Linux, you have to delete Doom 2's wad file. And what if I want to play user-made levels?

And this just makes me wonder how shit like Dosbox is gonna work. Again on Windows, I tend to have different Dosbox configurations with different shortcuts depending on what each game requires, but on Linux you can't do that--there's just the one shortcut, you can't make more, you can't make different .conf files, and again I'm not even sure where it installs Dosbox anyway.

Another reason I hate this whole package manager shit, is for awhile I didn't have internet access at home. Now, on Windows, if I found a new freeware game or a program I wanted to try, I could usually download the installer, put it on a thumb drive, bring it home and try it out. With Linux, that's not possible. Its basically always like installing a game on a modern console--if you don't have an internet connection and if its not available on one of Linux's recognized repositories, you ain't gettin' it.

Now, that's basic shit, but here's something that happened that really pissed me the fuck off. This was back when I was using Spiral Linux, and I haven't tried it under Mint.

See, one thing I like to do--a habit from way back--is partition my drive into an "Operating System" drive and a "Storage" drive, the latter being just a blank drive where I'm eventually gonna put stuff like videos, games, random downloads.... so I use GParted to make such a drive.

But now I'm told I can't mount it because its somehow assigned to "root," and I need root permissions.

It's a blank fucking drive. Why the hell do I need root permissions? Oh, I can go into Disks or GParted and FORMAT this drive any fucking time, but got forbid I actually use it without entering a password!

By the way, at no point during installation did it ever ask me to set a root password, and yet it asks for one. The one user password I DID set does not work. Entering nothing at all doesn't work either. So I'm not even sure what the hell it wants.

So I had to give up on having a "Storage" drive.

And here's one thing that drives me up the wall: the amount of times I ask Linux users for any sort of help, or I look up guides online, and a lot of them ask me to use the command line--I'm sorry, the "terminal." Seriously? In 2023 I'm being told to use this DOS Prompt looking thing? And its often for stuff I'm thinking should be a basic fucking feature. Like seriously 99% of every piece of advice I get is go to the terminal and type dah-dee-dah.

I appreciate that this is kinda coming off as "I wish Linux was more like Windows 98 or XP" but.... what's wrong with that? Those were back in the day when Windows was actually worth using. Really, all I want my Linux laptop right now to do is A) play movies and B) run a selection of old games. I'd like it to run old DOS and Windows 98 games so that I could take it to my sister's house and show Myst and Riven to her kids, but Linux sometimes makes this such a pain in the ass that it's seriously more convenient to just lug around an older Windows XP. Vista, or 7 laptop instead.

And that is bullshit.

 

[byuu]

Here's an example of where this bit me in the ass: I was trying to install a Doom sourceport called Chocolate Doom. Now, all Doom source ports require you to already have Doom's data, which is contained in what are called WAD files. But here's the problem.... I have absolutely no idea where to put the WAD files, and the program itself doesn't have an option for telling it where the WAD files are!

That's more of a problem of Chocolate Doom not telling you where to put the required files.
A lot of source ports never want to tell you for some reason. I remember actually having to do a source dive just to find out what directories a port looks for. It's ridiculous.

Also, if you have WADs for both Doom 1 and Doom 2, Chocolate Doom and all other source ports will always default to Doom 2. So what if I want to play Doom 1? On Windows, you could just create a shortcut or a batch file.

You have shortcuts (links which won't help here or .desktop files that work similar to Windows' .lnk files) and batch files (shell scripts) on Linux.

Another reason I hate this whole package manager shit, is for awhile I didn't have internet access at home. Now, on Windows, if I found a new freeware game or a program I wanted to try, I could usually download the installer, put it on a thumb drive, bring it home and try it out. With Linux, that's not possible. Its basically always like installing a game on a modern console--if you don't have an internet connection and if its not available on one of Linux's recognized repositories, you ain't gettin' it.

You could just download an AppImage, it's like a portable EXE on Windows.

And here's one thing that drives me up the wall: the amount of times I ask Linux users for any sort of help, or I look up guides online, and a lot of them ask me to use the command line--I'm sorry, the "terminal." Seriously? In 2023 I'm being told to use this DOS Prompt looking thing?

Because it's the quickest and easiest way to help you.
It is so much faster for both you and the one giving you help to give you a quick command you can copy-paste than telling you to open this menu, click on this item, enter this on that field - Oh, you're using KDE instead of Gnome? Then you have to click THAT menu, and ....

 

[Generic Retard]

Another reason I hate this whole package manager shit, is for awhile I didn't have internet access at home. Now, on Windows, if I found a new freeware game or a program I wanted to try, I could usually download the installer, put it on a thumb drive, bring it home and try it out. With Linux, that's not possible. Its basically always like installing a game on a modern console--if you don't have an internet connection and if its not available on one of Linux's recognized repositories, you ain't gettin' it.

You can download any programs you find on the project sites, usually even in .deb or .rpm formats nowadays probably even the dreaded flatpack and snap-whatsitsname.
Worst case: You have to compile yourself and hope your installed libraries match the minimum requirements.

See, one thing I like to do--a habit from way back--is partition my drive into an "Operating System" drive and a "Storage" drive, the latter being just a blank drive where I'm eventually gonna put stuff like videos, games, random downloads.... so I use GParted to make such a drive.

But now I'm told I can't mount it because its somehow assigned to "root," and I need root permissions.

It's a blank fucking drive. Why the hell do I need root permissions? Oh, I can go into Disks or GParted and FORMAT this drive any fucking time, but got forbid I actually use it without entering a password!

By the way, at no point during installation did it ever ask me to set a root password, and yet it asks for one. The one user password I DID set does not work. Entering nothing at all doesn't work either. So I'm not even sure what the hell it wants.

So I had to give up on having a "Storage" drive.

Just mount the drive via /etc/fstab under ~yourUser/storage or some shit and make the owner of that directory your user.
As for the root password: Ubuntu (iirc) started the trend where you don't use the root user anymore and you can just type "sudo <rootCommand>" to execute as root using your user password. Not really a security gain IMHO, maybe if you take into account people leaving root shells open...

And here's one thing that drives me up the wall: the amount of times I ask Linux users for any sort of help, or I look up guides online, and a lot of them ask me to use the command line--I'm sorry, the "terminal." Seriously? In 2023 I'm being told to use this DOS Prompt looking thing? And its often for stuff I'm thinking should be a basic fucking feature. Like seriously 99% of every piece of advice I get is go to the terminal and type dah-dee-dah.

It's easier to tell someone to type xyz asdf into a shell prompt, than to explain to them how to click somewhere no not there the leftmost... yes and one row under that... and.. oh no you don't have that GUI program installed, okay then first...
See?

 

[teriyakiburns]

It's easier to tell someone to type xyz asdf into a shell prompt, than to explain to them how to click somewhere no not there the leftmost... yes and one row under that... and.. oh no you don't have that GUI program installed, okay then first...
See?

This bizarre aversion people have to terminals never ceases to confuse me. My boomer mother had literally no idea how computers worked until her dying day, but she figured out how to run DOS commands and knew her way around the terminal enough to do most of what she needed. If she could do it, why can't these zoomers, who are supposed to be so computer savvy compared to her? Terminal is easy; it does exactly what you tell it to do.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

More often than not drive issues, network issues, etc. will HAVE to be addressed in the command line because the surface level GUI tools simply lack the visual widgets and feedback necessary to avert a crisis. You can't even put faith in the GUI file managers to address total storage available, don't even solely rely on graphical tools to guarantee that basic sum of information.

 

[YE24]

This bizarre aversion people have to terminals never ceases to confuse me. My boomer mother had literally no idea how computers worked until her dying day, but she figured out how to run DOS commands and knew her way around the terminal enough to do most of what she needed. If she could do it, why can't these zoomers, who are supposed to be so computer savvy compared to her? Terminal is easy; it does exactly what you tell it to do.

Oldfags were taught that a computer was a command-line. Or a text terminal.

Newfags were taught that you tapped on pictures to make a computer do things. Writing words at a computer feels weird and unnatural. This is why Zoomers (and a sad amount of Millennials) mostly can't code, versus Gen X and early Millennials who learned to use computers by typing commands at them.

 

[byuu]

If the terminal is too scary for you then I have a solution:

GitHub - sudofox/shell-mommy: Mommy is here for you on the command line ~ ❤️

Mommy is here for you on the command line ~ ❤️. Contribute to sudofox/shell-mommy development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Also does anyone have that Terry Davis clip where he says something like GUI is for niggers, command line is for white men?
I can't find it.

 

[Peenix]

If the terminal is too scary for you then I have a solution:

GitHub - sudofox/shell-mommy: Mommy is here for you on the command line ~ ❤️

Mommy is here for you on the command line ~ ❤️. Contribute to sudofox/shell-mommy development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Also does anyone have that Terry Davis clip where he says something like GUI is for niggers, command line is for white men?
I can't find it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikod2fONH0Q

 

[notafederalagent]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikod2fONH0Q

Archive to get around the age gate:

 

[Car Won't Crank]

I appreciate that this is kinda coming off as "I wish Linux was more like Windows 98 or XP" but.... what's wrong with that? Those were back in the day when Windows was actually worth using. Really, all I want my Linux laptop right now to do is A) play movies and B) run a selection of old games. I'd like it to run old DOS and Windows 98 games so that I could take it to my sister's house and show Myst and Riven to her kids, but Linux sometimes makes this such a pain in the ass that it's seriously more convenient to just lug around an older Windows XP. Vista, or 7 laptop instead.

I have Riven running on Mint using Lutris fshacks flawlessly. It only takes a little bit of setup but if you create your wineprefix directories correctly, migrating through distro updates or even complete OS changes becomes super easy. As for mounting drives use the Disks utility GUI to format and setup automount. It basically adds the line in fstab for you. For new disks, all are formatted using root so you need to chown the partition to your user if you want it to stop asking you for superuser permissions when writing files running as rootless.

 

[skykiii]

This bizarre aversion people have to terminals never ceases to confuse me. My boomer mother had literally no idea how computers worked until her dying day, but she figured out how to run DOS commands and knew her way around the terminal enough to do most of what she needed. If she could do it, why can't these zoomers, who are supposed to be so computer savvy compared to her? Terminal is easy; it does exactly what you tell it to do.

The funny thing is that I actually did grow up with an MS-DOS machine and in fact still use DOS on a regular basis.

The thing about Linux that puts me off is just it works differently, or at least it seems to. People are telling me there's a direct Linux equivalent of DOS functions like batch files, but I don't know them. Most times when I see commands written out, I can understand some of the syntax but it just feels kinda weird ("sudo apt install thingamabob".... seriously you just type that and this "sudo" thing knows exactly what thingamabob is? Actually every time I've followed an instruction like that, its never done anything at all).

At least when I go cd\dosgames\civ and run civ.exe I understand exactly what's happening.

TL;DR the issue is less "newfag getting scared of terminals" and more "oldfag having difficulty adapting to something new." Which I mean, I spend half my time here talking about how great the eighties and nineties were so I think "having trouble adapting to something new" is basically my entire personality at this point.

 

[Jeff Q. Anime]

sudo (superuser do) is literally just the equivalent of getting an admin elevation prompt in modern windows or opening cmd in admin mode. It's not a magical command that does everything.

The direct equivalent of batch files are bash files, typically ending in .sh. Bash scripting. Perhaps you are slightly confused by the fact that commands in Linux are not all "exe", but they aren't strictly in Windows either.

 

[SphinxItOver]

*snip*

Mint is based on Ubuntu and that is based on Debian so you have 3 different sources for documentation and Q&A forums. If you're a visual learner and need videos to explain things like file systems and how to search for info the first video is a good place to start. This will help you figure out where to put your installed files and what parts of the files structure you can place into different partitions/drives without too much issue. Second video helps you find and use that GUI for the disk part and mount. It's not a one for one. So you'll need to figure out how it's different from your needs, the key words associated and learn to embrace the docs/wiki's.

The gui is all the pretty video game graphics and the term/cli is the game play mechanics and story line. You don't have to learn or use the term but after you start playing with it you will wonder why you avoided it. Good luck. I honestly didn't learn jack or shit until switching away from Mint to Arch/Gentoo but you'll figure out when, or if, you want to do that.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Nano is a good way to get comfortable in command line text editing, no this isn't a "this versus that" program circle jerk, it legitimately was my gateway into the command line and I do not regret it one bit.

 

[DavidS877]

Chocolate Doom seems to have like 50 options, some of which are "Where to find the configuration file" and "Where to find the WAD files"

Dosbox:

dosbox [name] [-exit] [-c command] [-fullscreen] [-userconf] [-conf congfigfilelocation] ..........

followed by a ton more options.

So, I'm not seeing a problem here unless you expect a GUI to let you choose options. In that case I recommend getting a Mac.

 

[Fcret]

Doesn't chocolate doom have the chocolate-doom-setup command that drops you into a semi-graphical user interface to configure all this shit?

 

[Heliantheae]

Most times when I see commands written out, I can understand some of the syntax but it just feels kinda weird ("sudo apt install thingamabob".... seriously you just type that and this "sudo" thing knows exactly what thingamabob is? Actually every time I've followed an instruction like that, its never done anything at all).

Have you considered the ageless advice of RTFM? You'll have all the information you need in the manual (man <command>) and for most utilities the --help|-h flag. You can even read the man pages in your browser by searching "man <command>" or going to a site like https://linux.die.net directly. Learn how to use your tools.

 

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Best distro:

I would be less horrified to see a Rapelay icon on a standard desktop, than this anime shit.

 

[skykiii]

Doesn't chocolate doom have the chocolate-doom-setup command that drops you into a semi-graphical user interface to configure all this shit?

It literally just lets you set up controls and graphic resolutions and shit, not configure directories. I got FRUSTRATED looking for exactly that option and not finding it.