The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Car Won't Crank]

Hello.

Apple are currently making the best laptops by a considerable margin, but even before the switch to Apple Silicon they were very high quality compared to the garbage you have to tolerate buying windows laptops. Good displays, good keyboards, superb trackpads, decent battery life, and slim. For software development I prefer having the project folder on my NAS, connected over Wireguard from my laptop, where I use VSCode and ssh under macOS to do all the actual work while the (Linux) workstation I’m controlling with ssh builds etc on the NAS project folder.

That's really a matter of opinion though. Apple quality comes 90% from marketing. The great thing about regular laptops is that there are so many designs with all manner of displays, keyboards, trackpads, and other hardware to choose from you can't really pigeonhole them and make a general comparison against Apple laptops. I've tried to use Macbooks and the ergonomics just aren't there for me. It's also overpriced for what it is. For all you extol about them, I find it odd you've reduced your fancy Apple laptop to a telnet machine. That's something my shitty $100 netbook can do too.

 

[Susanna]

That's really a matter of opinion though. Apple quality comes 90% from marketing. The great thing about regular laptops is that there are so many designs with all manner of displays, keyboards, trackpads, and other hardware to choose from you can't really pigeonhole them and make a general comparison against Apple laptops. I've tried to use Macbooks and the ergonomics just aren't there for me. It's also overpriced for what it is. For all you extol about them, I find it odd you've reduced your fancy Apple laptop to a telnet machine. That's something my shitty $100 netbook can do too.

For me what matters is battery life, build quality, and monitor quality, in that order. If I go to an electronics store that has laptops on display (fewer and fewer of those each year), any MacBook there will satisfy my requirements perfectly, but with windows laptops I’ve never found one I liked (and believe me I have tried). If the keyboard and monitor are alright, the battery life is non existent, or the laptop itself seems good but it has a dGPU that absolutely nukes battery life even once you disable it, and literally none of them have had good trackpads in my experience. Some are reasonably sized and not awful to use, but they’re still mediocre compared to the perfection you get with a Mac.

Go ahead and laugh but I literally can’t use trackpads on windows. Tap to click drives me insane, and if it didn’t the fact that any tap in the bottom right registers as a right click does, or that it scrolls at random (and in the wrong direction when you try to scroll on purpose!!), or that it randomly minimises everything. These are operating system issues because they do fix themselves if I run Linux on the machine, but it’s an absolutely awful first impression.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

For me what matters is battery life, build quality, and monitor quality, in that order. If I go to an electronics store that has laptops on display (fewer and fewer of those each year), any MacBook there will satisfy my requirements perfectly, but with windows laptops I’ve never found one I liked (and believe me I have tried). If the keyboard and monitor are alright, the battery life is non existent, or the laptop itself seems good but it has a dGPU that absolutely nukes battery life even once you disable it, and literally none of them have had good trackpads in my experience. Some are reasonably sized and not awful to use, but they’re still mediocre compared to the perfection you get with a Mac.

Go ahead and laugh but I literally can’t use trackpads on windows. Tap to click drives me insane, and if it didn’t the fact that any tap in the bottom right registers as a right click does, or that it scrolls at random (and in the wrong direction when you try to scroll on purpose!!), or that it randomly minimises everything. These are operating system issues because they do fix themselves if I run Linux on the machine, but it’s an absolutely awful first impression.

Sounds like it comes down to preference in the end. I've had no issues with trackpads, however I don't run Windows on anything.

 

[TerribleUser09]

For me what matters is battery life, build quality, and monitor quality, in that order. If I go to an electronics store that has laptops on display (fewer and fewer of those each year), any MacBook there will satisfy my requirements perfectly, but with windows laptops I’ve never found one I liked (and believe me I have tried). If the keyboard and monitor are alright, the battery life is non existent, or the laptop itself seems good but it has a dGPU that absolutely nukes battery life even once you disable it, and literally none of them have had good trackpads in my experience. Some are reasonably sized and not awful to use, but they’re still mediocre compared to the perfection you get with a Mac.

What kind of gibberish is this?
If you compare Macbook Pro to any top-tier gaming laptop out there made by some reasonable company (Lenovo, MSI, ASUS) the latter winds. Not only that. I can't grasp how to can use Macbook for any other purpose than one-window internet scrolling/typing. Doing some multitasking on an Apple machine is horrendous. I used Macbook 12'' with Retina and yatta-yatta and my old Lenovo T450p and in my subjective opinion for Apple, the only advantage was weight. Let me also tell you, that specifically I choose Lenovo T450p because it is one of the last laptops in line with Lenovo in which you can literally change everything. I changed the screen, keyboard, trackpad, hard drive to M2, extended RAM, and replaced CPU with a better one from Acer, and still, the price was lower than the new Apple laptop. Not only that. I didn't have to solder a thing during this process.

Although it was a good laptop I passed it to my relatives and bough uber-gaming-laptop from Lenovo. Price reaching Apple Pro and still with better components. Bigger screen, more detailed, higher RAM, disk storage, great keyboard and trackpad and it is still cheaper than what Apple offers. But, in Apple's defense, I have to say I prefer iPhone over Android (it verks and has sustaining support) and iWatch (for medical reasons). But their computer line is a joke and anyone buying their computers is doing that for snob reasons.

 

[Susanna]

What kind of gibberish is this?
If you compare Macbook Pro to any top-tier gaming laptop out there made by some reasonable company (Lenovo, MSI, ASUS) the latter winds. Not only that. I can't grasp how to can use Macbook for any other purpose than one-window internet scrolling/typing. Doing some multitasking on an Apple machine is horrendous. I used Macbook 12'' with Retina and yatta-yatta and my old Lenovo T450p and in my subjective opinion for Apple, the only advantage was weight. Let me also tell you, that specifically I choose Lenovo T450p because it is one of the last laptops in line with Lenovo in which you can literally change everything. I changed the screen, keyboard, trackpad, hard drive to M2, extended RAM, and replaced CPU with a better one from Acer, and still, the price was lower than the new Apple laptop. Not only that. I didn't have to solder a thing during this process.

Although it was a good laptop I passed it to my relatives and bough uber-gaming-laptop from Lenovo. Price reaching Apple Pro and still with better components. Bigger screen, more detailed, higher RAM, disk storage, great keyboard and trackpad and it is still cheaper than what Apple offers. But, in Apple's defense, I have to say I prefer iPhone over Android (it verks and has sustaining support) and iWatch (for medical reasons). But their computer line is a joke and anyone buying their computers is doing that for snob reasons.

Gaming laptops are the silliest computers ever produced. Not only can't you game on them (short of shooters on ultra low quality, but I don't like shooters and can't stand ultra low quality), they're worthless as laptops because they get all of three seconds of battery life. Useless.

I'll take my old 2013 Macbook Air over a gaming laptop any time. That thing still gets a whole work day worth of battery life, and if I feel like it I can even load up Civ V on it and wait tens of minutes for turns to compute.

Oh right I should address your points, too.
Actually multitasking on a mac is lovely. The operating system is perfectly adapted to trackpad gestures. I can swipe between maximised programs and there are third party applications to let me snap them into a grid (like Powertoys on Windows or KDE's zones). I've used Windows, and like I said it's an absolute mess trying to do anything on it. Half the time it'll act as if I did the "minimize everything" swipe (Why does such a thing even exist!? Nobody ever wants that!!!) when I'm just trying to move the cursor around with one finger. Apple's multitouch gestures are absolutely delightful. I hate macOS for being so limited in other respects, because I would love to use it full time again. But for pure productivity, you can't beat a mac. Windows is nowhere near it, and while I'm sure Linux can be configured to come close, that's so much work.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Windows is nowhere near it, and while I'm sure Linux can be configured to come close, that's so much work.

Workspaces work out of the box in the mainstream distros. In Mint Cinnamon and other gnome derived DEs it's just ctrl+alt+arrow keys. It's hardly that much more work unless you're one of those Arch people runing i3 or something more autistic. Apple has for sure got the trackpad gestures and bling bling ui animations down well, but for those who don't want to touch the Apple ecosystem, keyboard shortcuts in Linux are a perfectly reasonable alternative. My Asus netbook is very comparable to the Air in battery life too. I've had it out in the garage running OBD diagnostic tools in a Windows 7 VM through kvm and it lasted ~8 hours with screen on.

 

[JoseRaulChupacabra]

The great thing about regular laptops is that there are so many designs with all manner of displays, keyboards, trackpads, and other hardware to choose from you can't really pigeonhole them and make a general comparison against Apple laptops.

I hate Apple with a burning passion and I literally partied the day Steve Jobs died, but I think this abundance of choice can be a double edge sword when it comes to actually getting one, because unlike desktops where you can control everything, it's a package deal with laptops.

Sometimes, the predictability brought on by a limited product line can be worth the premium if it's your work machine. At least you know the display is pretty good on most of them. Not super demanding colorist good, but good enough for most creative work.

That said, all iSheep deserve to be gassed. The ones that are smug about it deserve to be made into lampshades.

 

[AmpleApricots]

For a mobile device in 2023 you (I) really want/need at least 6-7h battery life with a few % to spare, to not run the battery down after three months (in a realistic scenario, not 6 hours of straight blender rendering but also not 5% brightness and idle) a screen around/over 220 PPI (the more the better here really) and passive cooling. You'd be surprised how much this narrows it down in the PC mobile market. It's one of these things where you can pick two, usually, and these devices also usually are expensive. Not rarely quite unreasonably so.

Would I go with mac? Probably not, mostly because I doubt you'll ever be able to use Linux on them as first class citizen OS - but they do cover these points. Yes Macs are also not repairable but so aren't really any other modern offerings (ten year old Thinkpads don't count, a loud space heater who can barely browse the internet is just not worth it in current year)

 

[grump]

I've posted about my thoughts on linux a couple years before so I'll update now. Generally I think its getting better.
With windows going the direction of anointing microsoft as the owner of your computer I don't think I'll be back anytime soon. Once you get used to it you start to wonder why everybody doesn't use it. Its usually what windows should have been. The ease and stability of newer windows without all the extra cruft and spyware. Its come a long way from the days of being the OS for pimply nerds who like to masochistically pore over man pages and debug their own compilers to fix trivial issues.

Things about it I still don't like...

As I said its generally as easy to use if not easier than windows for most things. But occasionally if you wander off the beaten path, you'll be back to the bad old days of looking through arcane man pages and typing voodoo into the command line. Its not as bad as it used to be and its getting better but its still there.

Windows has moved away from being a graphical layer on top of a command line. Linux is still more stuck in that paradigm. There are good and bad things about this. Good is that the command line is a powerful tool. Bad is that Linux is much more dependent on arcane command line based solutions.

Standard software apps are still generally inferior to Microsoft's. In fact I don't think they've advanced in any meaningful way either relative to their microsoft competitors or in absolute terms since I last posted. Writer and calc and impress are shittier versions of word and excel and powerpoint but they get the job done. The main issue is compatibility between the two which can be a big problem when you have to give a presentation and you find that its been corrupted moving between the two.

Office apps are shitty but usable, Unfortunately GIMP the general graphics app is still almost unusable. Its like it actively tries to thwart you at every turn. Inkscape is pretty bad too. These two programs along with games are almost the entire reason why I have to keep Windows on dual boot. The Linux fanboys want to promote their OS. What have they been doing all these years with this trash stinking up the joint with no one bothering to fix it?

Game compatibility of course...I've been hearing of new tools that are supposed to fix this but it remains an issue. OTOH linux is the native environment for many technical and niche types of software. So it becomes more of an even or superior tradeoff if you move into an academic or technical role.

Linus and much of the powerbrokers around him are throbbing wieners. But so is MS I guess so this is wash. Wish there was a third option without a douchebag in charge but what are you going to do?

 

[Betonhaus]

I've posted about my thoughts on linux a couple years before so I'll update now. Generally I think its getting better.
With windows going the direction of anointing microsoft as the owner of your computer I don't think I'll be back anytime soon. Once you get used to it you start to wonder why everybody doesn't use it. Its usually what windows should have been. The ease and stability of newer windows without all the extra cruft and spyware. Its come a long way from the days of being the OS for pimply nerds who like to masochistically pore over man pages and debug their own compilers to fix trivial issues.

I was using Zorin OS as my main OS for a month or so and ultimately it worked fine. Things were a little slower but still useable, but I was pretty deep in the microsoft ecosystem and there were many workarounds or changes i needed to do.
Ultimately, I ended up switching back to Windows. The experience was 90% the same and I'd be fine using it if Microsoft fell off the earth, but aside from proving i could there was no real reason for me to use linux.
In fact, switching back to Windows would sole some long-running issues I've been having. For example my HTPC has three problems where each one is only solved by installing a specific distro. I need a Ubuntu 20.04 version to run the touchscreen driver, a newer kernel to support the bluetooth, and I am pulling my hair out figuring out how to perform a function that KDE did super easily - but KDE breaks the touchscreen drivers.

 

[Ahriman]

While on the topic of Macs:

Action Retro has been on a roll lately, installing Ubuntu on old Macs, with great success.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

Office apps are shitty but usable, Unfortunately GIMP the general graphics app is still almost unusable. Its like it actively tries to thwart you at every turn. Inkscape is pretty bad too. These two programs along with games are almost the entire reason why I have to keep Windows on dual boot. The Linux fanboys want to promote their OS. What have they been doing all these years with this trash stinking up the joint with no one bothering to fix it?

Krita is pretty much recommended over GIMP for actually drawing shit.

Game compatibility of course...I've been hearing of new tools that are supposed to fix this but it remains an issue.

I feel like personally it's no longer really an issue unless you just have to play Valorant (which means installing a literal rootkit on your pc)

 

[std::string]

Office apps are shitty but usable

I wish. That's the only reason I still keep Windows around.

Excel's online version is castrated and MS seems to have no interest in parity with the offline version.

e: jesus fuck why can't I type today

 

[grump]

Krita is pretty much recommended over GIMP for actually drawing shit.

I like Krita. It disproves the canard people who defend GIMP (having never used it) that GIMP just seems bad because people are used to photoshop. Unfortunately its a drawing app and not a general purpose image manipulator or a vector editor. So I still have to use Photoshop and Illustrator.

 

[Miller]

Is there a list of things to do in order to have the best gayming experience on a Linux system?

Krita is pretty much recommended over GIMP for actually drawing shit.

I agree. I only use Krita now for either drawing or montages, even when I'm on Windows. I used to have a cracked version of Photoshop but I got tired of having the error message (I guess Adobe closed down the services for the older versions of PS).
I'm sure GIMP is great but to me it's not user-friendly.

 

[Susanna]

Is there a list of things to do in order to have the best gayming experience on a Linux system?

Not really, other than getting an AMD or Intel GPU if you have a choice, as these two both have really good Linux drivers, and Nvidia’s is complete garbage. For the most part one distro is as good as another, pick whichever appeals most to you. Your number one tool is going to be Steam Proton. It’s wine but better, and works just fine for pirated games you’ve added into steam library manually also, and even from the console without steam at all if you don’t like Gaben for whatever reason. If you prefer pure wine, lutris is a wrapper that makes it more newbie accessible, to the point of having automatic install scripts for certain games.

 

[TOTAL NIGGER DEATH]

Is there a list of things to do in order to have the best gayming experience on a Linux system?

You should launch all your games through steam if they are steam games using proton. You should also look up a game on protondb to see if you should use a specific version of proton or protonGE, whether you should set some launch options or not and other related pc gaming troubles. Sometimes Proton wont work well with some games when that happens protonGE will be recommended use protonup-qt which is a gui for a custom fork of proton called protonGE that uses some workarounds valve won't use due to legal bullshit. For non steam games you can add them to steam and launch them that way using proton or protonGE or use Bottles. Bottles is a container that does all the wine and dxvk setup needed to run windows applications you need in a container so you don't have to install and configure wine on your own. All you need to do is set some parameters like what kind of container you want eg: gaming, general software and bottles sets up all the stuff for you in a neat container you can add your exe's in and run.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Is there a list of things to do in order to have the best gayming experience on a Linux system?

Steam, Lutris, and emulators trifecta. Lutris is for the non steam games. You can still use the latest proton version through Lutris when setting up your games. Fshacks works well too, up to you to pick and choose. Fastest turnkey solution is Steam.

 

[Marvin]

Not really, other than getting an AMD or Intel GPU if you have a choice, as these two both have really good Linux drivers, and Nvidia’s is complete garbage.

For what reason?

For years I've always deliberately gone with nvidia on linux, at least as early as 2005 up until... idk when the last time I built a computer, a few years ago, I think.

I care about open source in the general sense, but I've never gotten the obsession some people have with extremely low level components like the bios absolutely needing to be open source. I understand that it furthers knowledge and porting of this software to new situations and platforms, and I support that, but unless you're like rms tier passionate, everyone compromises once in awhile. I generally try to support open source, but once in awhile if the motivations are aligned right, I'll go for a closed source component occasionally.

In my experience, closed source nvidia drivers for linux always had much higher performance and always were dead simple to just drop in. The open source intel drivers never had complete support for all the features of the card and were fiddly and a pain in the ass to get working sometimes.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

For what reason?

For years I've always deliberately gone with nvidia on linux, at least as early as 2005.

I care about open source in the general sense, but I've never gotten the obsession some people have with extremely low level components like the bios absolutely needing to be open source. I understand that it furthers knowledge and porting of this software to new situations and platforms, and I support that, but unless you're like rms tier passionate, everyone compromises once in awhile. I generally try to support open source, but once in awhile if the motivations are aligned right, I'll go for a closed source component occasionally.

In my experience, closed source nvidia drivers for linux always had much higher performance and always were dead simple to just drop in. The open source intel drivers never had complete support for all the features of the card and were fiddly and a pain in the ass to get working sometimes.

Same here. KDE on X.org with Nvidia drivers, absolutely rock-solid.

Nvidia's also supposed to be a lot better if you want to fiddle around with AI shit.