The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[2023 poster]

I use Arch as my daily. Run headless Rasparian and CentOS for a few servers. Despite the horror stories of Arch, I've never really had that much trouble with it breaking things. I think once an update screwed up my desktop environment but it was a pretty quick fix that required a minimal amount of work to get going again. Other than that, most issues wind up being my own fault by way of something I did.

CentOS is the one that gives me the most headaches though. Especially on ARM-based architecture. Lot of compatibility issues and it just being constantly behind by years on fixes and updates other distros have long moved passed. It's supposed to be the most 'stable', and yet I struggle to find instances where I'd prefer to run it over some other kind of distro, even for server and special-purpose machines that are just supposed to do a handful of things and nothing else.

 

[Miller]

One thing I like about Manjaro is the default theme of their DE. It's like Linux Mint, once you have installed it, you don't feel the need to change the colors or the folders icons.

 

[std::string]

I'd still prefer if Canonical stopped using the corpse of desktop Ubuntu to try to force their Snaps on everyone. What's wrong with letting people easily opt out of using Snaps or Flatpaks?

They could just make it a post-install option to use Snaps or Flatpaks or both or neither and then everyone would stop complaining.

Wrinkle in that is that apparently Mozilla asked Canonical to package Firefox as a Snap, which I find extremely odd.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Wrinkle in that is that apparently Mozilla asked Canonical to package Firefox as a Snap, which I find extremely odd.

It's easier for them. Lets them ship a single image with its own libs, rather than having to account for different library versions.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

 

[Balldo's Gate]

They could just make it a post-install option to use Snaps or Flatpaks or both or neither and then everyone would stop complaining.

Wrinkle in that is that apparently Mozilla asked Canonical to package Firefox as a Snap, which I find extremely odd.

The auto-installed Firefox Snap totally broke Firefox on a fresh install of Ubuntu for me.

It would perform updates while I was using the browser and then refuse to load any new pages on a daily basis, which is tantamount to a crash. Replacing the Firefox Snap with the PPA should have fixed it, but it was displaying the same behavior. I eventually settled on a different way to solve the problem, which was to change distros.

 

[verymuchawful]

I updated my EndeavourOS install after half a year of avoiding it. All I can say the installation did not survive the operation. Grub refused to even come up, straight to the bios screen. Salvaged important files and reinstalled a fresh up to date ISO and was back up and running in like an hour tops though.

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

I use Arch as my daily. Run headless Rasparian and CentOS for a few servers. Despite the horror stories of Arch, I've never really had that much trouble with it breaking things.

I think that was mainly during the systemd "transition" days (I used arch until 2013 ish?). I still run gentoo on my older box and crossdev into my shitty laptop as of now though.
From my personal experience the difference in the errors was that:
1) Reading the news list in Gentoo/Arch really helps prevent you from being retarded.
2) Both have great encyclopedic wikis for knowledge.
3) I always found Arch discouraging partial upgrades to odd (But what seems to be a design choice)

I don't know what you thought was so great about this list. Do you think I want to compile my own distro myself? Only 1 of the 5 you showed had any promise. If you think these are what good, modern distros should be then you're delusional.

Then write your own or contribute to change the direction of a distro.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

Then write your own or contribute to change the direction of a distro.

I literally called you delusional for thinking that I should just 'build my own distro' and you verify that. I'm not a tranny, and you're still delusional that you think a wall of terminal text is a good operating system.

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

I literally called you delusional for thinking that I should just 'build my own distro' and you verify that. I'm not a tranny, and you're still delusional that you think a wall of terminal text is a good operating system.

It's not my fault that you aren't yet trying to exploit what appears to you a gap in the market by doing that yourself and then selling it as a product.
Here's a hint. There's something called Chrome OS that corners the majority of that market.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Any suggestions at all for USB portable distros? Maybe one of the man Puppy ones works better than FossaPup?

 

[Aidan]

Any suggestions at all for USB portable distros? Maybe one of the man Puppy ones works better than FossaPup?

I'm not well versed in persistent live USBs but took a look at NomadBSD and thought it was pretty cool, though it's FreeBSD and not Linux.
I've checked out the main PuppyLinuxes and Fossapup was the one I had the best experience with so can't contribute on that front, but you should be able to make a persistent live USB using any Ubuntu based distro pretty easily.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

I will look into Nomad. I am in particular looking for a OS that will offload most of itself onto the host's RAM so I don't have to be stuck waiting for it to load from the USB at every turn. My attempt with ParrotOS ended up heavy as all hell and even had graphic issues that were like the RAM was glitching out because of that. Though that may be because I tried to load too much software on the install. Maybe making a cleaner one would work better.

My attempts with FossaPup led to a GRUB screen that I couldn't figure out, likely me fucking up the install or not reading something properly.

 

[Aidan]

>xfce is average
Opinion discarded
>shits on deepin
Opinion reconsidered

I stick with XFCE because I'm simple, but I think he's right in that most people would prefer something like Cinnamon or KDE. Guh-nome is something I have never enjoyed.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

I personally am a big fan of KDE plasma and a lot of their stuff. Dolphin is really nice as are a lot of the KDE applications. I find however that XFCE is my go-to when I need to make a install lighter while also looking good, like when putting Mint on a older laptop of a relative or running a VM for other needs.

Gnome looks too much like a Apple meme, not a fan.

 

[Miller]

Didn't this guy sign the petition against RMS?

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

I use Arch as my daily. Run headless Rasparian and CentOS for a few servers. Despite the horror stories of Arch, I've never really had that much trouble with it breaking things. I think once an update screwed up my desktop environment but it was a pretty quick fix that required a minimal amount of work to get going again. Other than that, most issues wind up being my own fault by way of something I did.

I gave Manjaro a go in a VM, it seemed fine most of the time.

After using it for a while, I was a little confused at myself. Nothing was objectively more up to date than Debian 'unstable'. Dependancy checking was suss. There wasn't really anything in 'AUR's that wasn't just baked into the Debian system. It still had the systemed rootkit installed.

I installed Devuan stable on a pre-Lenovo Thinkpad yesterday. Good experience, boots fast (with a HDD and sysvinit), suspend and hibernate work great, just like running it on a much newer Toshiba 2in1, everything just works. Chicago95 looks great on a nice 1024x768 panel, even if it is TFT.

 

[std::string]

I personally am a big fan of KDE plasma and a lot of their stuff. Dolphin is really nice as are a lot of the KDE applications. I find however that XFCE is my go-to when I need to make a install lighter while also looking good, like when putting Mint on a older laptop of a relative or running a VM for other needs.

I usually go with KDE simply because Okular can handle every ebook file format I've tried and I have a few obscure ones in my collection (CHM, DJVU.)

The differences in memory usage between KDE and things like XFCE or LXDE/LXQt also don't matter as much these days when you consider the second you open a browser it's already taking more memory than the whole damn DE. I don't know how the fuck modern browsers manage to eat so much memory.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

It really feels like people nowadays just don't value resources like they used too. Shit like Windows 11 and Chrome just splurges on ram like a motherfucker, no attempt at self control at all.

 

[Aidan]

It really feels like people nowadays just don't value resources like they used too. Shit like Windows 11 and Chrome just splurges on ram like a motherfucker, no attempt at self control at all.

Developers no longer need to care, or at least that's the mindset.