The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[macrodegenerate]

While your description of it is good, sometimes using the command line is an inevitability when troubleshooting. You might avoid it for a long time, but it will happen. Don't be afraid of it. The perception that typing commands into the terminal is for all-knowing techno wizards is the stupidest shit and needs to die.

I remember windows 95 and how that you still needed to use the DOS prompt for some things. I'm sure that at some point in the near future there will be a distribution that prides itself in never using the terminal.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

All right, lads. With the way things are going in Bongistan I think it's time to switch OS. What's good for a newfag like me? I see Linux Mint is for people who're spooked by actually running commands and terminal windows but I really want a good scope of what my options are. Don't particularly care for gaming unless it's pre Steam Dwarf Fortress. I'm more into writing and stuff.

If you are not already using a VPN you need one now. Mullvad is pretty good, they even allow you to pay them by post letter so you have no real paper trail.

 

[Gatdam Animal Person]

Don't be afraid of it. The perception that typing commands into the terminal is for all-knowing techno wizards is the stupidest shit and needs to die.

People are afraid of the terminal because they never had the basic theory to begin with.
Once you start to learn and practice, it'll become nature in no short time.
Don't feel ashamed if you use a cheat-sheet, it's always useful for even the best of us.

 

[SleeplessEcho]

All right, lads. With the way things are going in Bongistan I think it's time to switch OS. What's good for a newfag like me? I see Linux Mint is for people who're spooked by actually running commands and terminal windows but I really want a good scope of what my options are. Don't particularly care for gaming unless it's pre Steam Dwarf Fortress. I'm more into writing and stuff.

Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment. Or Debian (with the same DE) if you're daring. Or Ubuntu (if they support Cinnamon, which I think they do).

Cinnamon is a no-frills DE with tradtional (think windows XP / classic theme-windows 7) desktop methapors.

It doesn't fuck around, it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it doesn't try to be fancy for appearance's sake. It has your desktop icons, your taskbar, your "start menu", traybar icons, quicklaunch icons. It has more stuff if you want it to, but you shouldn't. The default hotkey bindings are delightfully tasteful.

Despite its "traditional" look-and-feel, it's modern, no mistake about that - *actively* developed and pushing the occasional new feature, but mostly just keeps things running smoothly.

I've used it for the past 6 years in Debian installs (Linux Mint is a Debian downstream derivative) and I wouldn't change it for anything else. Suits me perfectly both as an end-user and as a professional IT-stuff engineer.

As for distro, well, Linux Mint is aimed at non-technical folks; some family members of mine use it and are plenty happy with it.

Ubuntu also holds your hand along and is plenty suitable for general audiences, plus the plethora of online resources if you run into some problem - everyone uses it, so your solution is more likely than not a Google's search away.

 

[Betonhaus]

Yeah generally Linux Mint is the best introduction os to Linux and is among the most stable and flexible. KDE Plasma is a highly customizable desktop environment which makes Kubuntu (or KDE Neon) a good draw, but that's if you're going down the rabbit hole a bit. Zorin OS has a lot of hand holding but suffers from being based on Gnome.

I had a question about LMDE, does it have issues accessing non-free sources like for video codecs? The main difference I found between Debian and Ubuntu is that Debian doesn't by default support proprietary codecs and such easily.

 

[AnOminous]

All right, lads. With the way things are going in Bongistan I think it's time to switch OS. What's good for a newfag like me? I see Linux Mint is for people who're spooked by actually running commands and terminal windows but I really want a good scope of what my options are. Don't particularly care for gaming unless it's pre Steam Dwarf Fortress. I'm more into writing and stuff.

Depends. Are you running on older hardware? Mint is a little resource hungry, but anything from the last five years or so should be able to handle it.

I don't know if anyone here uses Peppermint OS (apparently not many as only one other person has ever mentioned it on this thread) but I think it's a really noob friendly distro, fairly easily customizable, and on top of that looks nice. It's also really minimal. It's what I usually use on old laptops and similar near-obsolete hardware, for instance, my original MacBook from 2008 that just recently finally stopped working.

Because it comes with the bare minimum of packages just to run it, you have a lot of room to expand into.

The desktop environment is Xfce, which might be an issue if you're into using more modern DEs, but personally I like it. It's simple, lightweight, no frills, and somewhat reminiscent of classic Windows.

The perception that typing commands into the terminal is for all-knowing techno wizards is the stupidest shit and needs to die.

How to use shell:
1) Google what you want to do
2) Click stackexchange link in search results where some pajeet explains it in broken English
3) Cut and paste

 

[WhiteNight]

How to use shell:
1) Google what you want to do
2) Click stackexchange link in search results where some pajeet explains it in broken English
3) Cut and paste

To add to this, ChatGPT is quite good at this stuff and can accurately answer questions about even obscure points of shell. In fact GPT may put the Exchanges out of business.

 

[DavidS877]

To add to this, ChatGPT is quite good at this stuff and can accurately answer questions about even obscure points of shell. In fact GPT may put the Exchanges out of business.

And it's probably more accurate than the usual pajeet response.

 

[AnOminous]

And it's probably more accurate than the usual pajeet response.

Karma whoring pajeets are actually pretty okay most of the time. Not that I haven't seen absurdly wrong and useless responses.

 

[Perfectly Innocent]

The main difference I found between Debian and Ubuntu is that Debian doesn't by default support proprietary codecs and such easily.

Just enable their contrib and non-free repos; everything you’re likely to want (that Ubuntu offers) is available as part of Debian itself these days,

Debian’s stance on patents amounts to “see no evil, hear no evil” as they’re a volunteer project with no individual entity to sue. If anyone does threaten the project, the volunteer who knows of the threats is meant to speak to a specific person confidentially under client-attorney privilege, where the person doing the threatening basically gets the Null treatment.

Just make sure not to use debian-multimedia or any other weird third party repos, as they haven’t been needed for patented codecs to work in a long time, but still exist for bleeding edge replacement packages (which are for a very specific audience). At most, you’d maybe want to swipe their w64codecs package but who needs WMV support?

 

[Lichen Bark]

Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment.

This is going to sound dumb, but what does that mean? I have used Ubuntu. What is a desktop environment really?

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Just enable their contrib and non-free repos; everything you’re likely to want (that Ubuntu offers) is available as part of Debian itself these days,

Debian’s stance on patents amounts to “see no evil, hear no evil” as they’re a volunteer project with no individual entity to sue. If anyone does threaten the project, the volunteer who knows of the threats is meant to speak to a specific person confidentially under client-attorney privilege, where the person doing the threatening basically gets the Null treatment.

Just make sure not to use debian-multimedia or any other weird third party repos, as they haven’t been needed for patented codecs to work in a long time, but still exist for bleeding edge replacement packages (which are for a very specific audience). At most, you’d maybe want to swipe their w64codecs package but who needs WMV support?

Besides, since Linux Mint provides flatpaks, media players installed through them should have codecs bundled in most cases anyways, right?

This is going to sound dumb, but what does that mean? I have used Ubuntu. What is a desktop environment really?

Desktop environments are just collaborative components building up to a graphical interface, with various opinionated means to managing usage of icons, menus, integrated software, etc.

EDIT: What Betonhaus said, but I will also add that a desktop environment is a full suite of widgets built around the window manager that renders the various bits and pieces in the first place.

 

[Betonhaus]

This is going to sound dumb, but what does that mean? I have used Ubuntu. What is a desktop environment really?

Short version: in the old days Microsoft DOS was a command line OS, and Windows was a software package that ran on top of it to give it a graphical interface.

Linux is like that. Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, etc is the OS itself, but they are only useable as a text based operating system. To make it function like what you are used to it needs a desktop environment, such as GNOME, KDE's Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, etc. Linux Mint is considered a complete package as Cinnamon is the desktop environment it ships with.

Most OSs use one of the standardized interfaces. so you can have Ubuntu and Fedora that work pretty much the same as they both run the GNOME DE, but then you have Kubuntu which runs KDE and looks completely different from Ubuntu despite being pretty much trhe same OS

In unrelated questions, i have an old computer with a Nvidia Ion GPU that is only supported by Debian 10 or Ubuntu 18. is there a way to force the driver to run on a newer version, or is there a better alternative?

 

[jONALD]

I've come back to Endeavor OS after distro hopping back to Winblows for a few games. Each time I spend less time on windows and more with Linux. I'm starting to feel the horrible itch to learn more and Gentoo calls my name but my beard isn't long enough just yet. It will happen soon and I have a feeling I'll never hop back and end up sticking to windows permanently as I play less vidya gaymes.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

Can anyone recommend a Debian package that shows keyboard and mouse inputs on screen? I'm am playing an emulated game that requires me to click fast, but it registers maybe one out of every two clicks. I want to see if the problem is the emulator, the system or my shitty cheap mouse.

 

[daffodils]

Can anyone recommend a Debian package that shows keyboard and mouse inputs on screen?

The standard tool for this is called 'xev' and is part of x11-utils. Start it from a terminal, move your mouse over the window that gets created, click. The terminal will show information about the events getting registered.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

I've come back to Endeavor OS after distro hopping back to Winblows for a few games. Each time I spend less time on windows and more with Linux. I'm starting to feel the horrible itch to learn more and Gentoo calls my name but my beard isn't long enough just yet. It will happen soon and I have a feeling I'll never hop back and end up sticking to windows permanently as I play less vidya gaymes.

I have had pretty good experiences using Endevour and running windows games by using Bottles. For Windows only games you can rely on Valve's proton sure but that isn't a iron clad solution. Bottles solves that pretty damn well, just use it to install the Windows version of Steam, which you run from the Bottles launcher and you are set (though you can also run non-Steam stuff by using Bottles the same way you would use Wine.)

For refference: Atomic Heart on Endevour using Proton was getting about 40fps on low settings on my machine, with hard dips to as little as 12fps. Running it on Bottles allowed me to go to medium-high settings at a solid 60fps with only occasional drops to 40fps.

 

[GNU Abyss]

How to use shell:
1) Google what you want to do
2) Click stackexchange link in search results where some pajeet explains it in broken English
3) Cut and paste

While stackexchange won't fuck with what you are copying, newbie command line users should keep in mind that what you paste into the shell from a browser can potentially be malicious because of invisible characters and Javascript. What's worse is that the clipboard's contents can also be automatically executed as soon as you paste them. Type in the answer manually. It's both safer and useful for rote memorization.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

The standard tool for this is called 'xev' and is part of x11-utils. Start it from a terminal, move your mouse over the window that gets created, click. The terminal will show information about the events getting registered.

Turns out I had it installed the whole time Either way this is just what I was looking for, thank you.

 

[jONALD]

-snip-

How the hell did you manage to get so few frames? I remember playing the second day after release of Atomic heart and getting a stable 60fps with proton experimental. I do run with 1080 Ti hybrid (air cooled and water cooled) with 32 gigs of ram and a i7 7700k CPU.