The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

Slav Power said:
My only real issue is that I don't know any good CLI alternatives for the usual GUI elements like sound mixer, network management and things like that.
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I can give some suggestions if you don't mind:
  • nvtop (GPU monitor, lets you see how much your gpu is used, which programs use it, decode/encode rate, etc.)
  • htop (task manager - top on steroids)
  • pulsemixer (pulseaudio mixer but it also works if you are using pipewire)
  • nmtui (lets you manage your connections if you use NetworkManager)
  • fff (fucking fast filemanager - simple file manager written in bash)
  • midnight commander (this does not need any introductions)
Betonhaus said:
Is there a way to do snapshots of before/after installing a de and uninstall only the packages installed between those two snapshots, with waringings about packages installed later that have dependencies?
Click to expand...
TimeShift is your friend, it allows you to perform snapshots of your OS ala Windows' System Restore
 
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Slav Power said:
My only real issue is that I don't know any good CLI alternatives for the usual GUI elements like sound mixer, network management and things like that. I'd be fine with it being a CLI interface, as long as it's more like nano in usability and not vi if that makes sense, and it'll replace the need of learning a bajillion commands to do basic shit.
Click to expand...
alsamixer is what I use for audio control
nmtui/nmtui-edit allows connecting to wireless networks (may Allah forgive me)
 
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snov said:
Most likely what broke it was not installing KDE, but uninstalling GNOME. A DE is a huge and complicated piece of software, and it vomits dotfiles all over your ~ the first time its run, making a huge mess.
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desktop environments are the devil. Linus(the tec tips one, not Torvalds) uninstalled steam or something with the package manager via terminal and it also uninstalled his DE. Granted he should have read, but I also almost fell for this mistake with some software, only that I read before typing y and pressing enter

What's up with desktop environments doing this shit? What sort of package manager relationship do packages have that can remove the entire DE with them lol
 
0gh said:
desktop environments are the devil. Linus(the tec tips one, not Torvalds) uninstalled steam or something with the package manager via terminal and it also uninstalled his DE. Granted he should have read, but I also almost fell for this mistake with some software, only that I read before typing y and pressing enter

What's up with desktop environments doing this shit? What sort of package manager relationship do packages have that can remove the entire DE with them lol
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I don't see any real downsides to TWM's compared to DE's. The worst you lose is a control panel and other GUI configuration options. Besides that, what else do you really need? Everything else you do on your PC is in all kinds of software that doesn't need a DE. Web browser? That's just an X11 window. Steam? X11 window. Terminal emulator? X11 window. File manager? X11 window.

All you really need to use your PC is a window manager, and when you're a power user, a TWM is perfect. Again, if I could I would replace the taskbar with a TWM, but GlazeWM is a bit fucky. A DE is good for your grandma or a newbie, but if you're a seasoned nerd, you realize it's for the most part useless, and you'd be happier with i3. Eats less resources, and does just what you need it to do.
 
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0gh said:
What's up with desktop environments doing this shit? What sort of package manager relationship do packages have that can remove the entire DE with them lol
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Desktop environments are a massive collection of packages that touch different points in your system and interlocks deeply. Determining what is and isn't important is tricky.

I wonder if there's a way of making a Linux distro that categorizes packages then puts their files on specific folders so you can delete some without it breaking they system (like Nvidia software would be in /drivers/, Wayland and KDE would be in /environment/ and Gui apps would be in /applications/ with core files being in their own. It's a bit more complicated then I can explain though and would require a rewrite with its own package manager.
 
Betonhaus said:
From my experience, by the time you've settled on a DE you're going to want to do a clean install anyway as there's several bad decisions that were grandfathered in on that install.
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No time for that. Just make some new hacky workaround. I will admit I did have the same Manjaro install for 6+ years that had some weird issues before I did re-install fresh with Endevor. Sometimes I get the hankering for some Chicago95 on XFCE, or KDE, or what I'm currently using Cinnamon. I even have Budge and Gnome installed, but I don't think I've used them much. All of this just works TM.
 
TheDataHorder said:
truly the autistic way of swaping DE's, just install another and ignore the previous one.
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Isn't that the opposite of the autistic way? A true autist would extirpate every remnant of the degenerate, evil DE they hated.
 
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0gh said:
What's up with desktop environments doing this shit? What sort of package manager relationship do packages have that can remove the entire DE with them lol
Click to expand...
The steam thing was just a packaging and repo oopsie (which should now be fixed, I hope. some people were having their fucking linux kernel removed.) It was caused by a new version of libc being pushed to repos and then withdrawn, and steam has a x64 and i386 libc dependency and that caused apt to flip the fuck out since it couldn't reconcile a single x64 and i386 libc version so it just removed everything that depended on it.

Obviously if you see steam removing a bunch of packages it shouldn't be touching you should maybe hold off and figure out what's going on.

As far as removing DEs bricking your system goes, it's a complicated problem with cross dependencies and how apt figures out which packages are supposed to be autoremoved because they're now orphaned. DE packages are metapackages that just require a bunch of dependencies but provide no functionality on their own.

You install package A which requires C. You install package B which also requires C. You remove A, C does not get autoremoved because B still requires it. Yay! That's the easy case.

Now consider this across hundreds of packages in DEs, which are marked required, recommended, essential or suggested as dependencies, and both KDE and Gnome have different ideas about each one, and then apt decides it's going to helpfully orphan and autoremove X11 for you because you removed Gnome and ACTUALLY it was just recommended and not a require and now you can't boot into your desktop.
 
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std::string said:
Now consider this across hundreds of packages in DEs, which are marked required, recommended, essential or suggested as dependencies, and both KDE and Gnome have different ideas about each one, and then apt decides it's going to helpfully orphan and autoremove X11 for you because you removed Gnome and ACTUALLY it was just recommended and not a require and now you can't boot into your desktop.
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People need to embrace the Slackware way of doing things: install everything so that you don't need to care about dependencies at all since they are all always satisfied.
 
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If I have an IOWait of 72 and my server's web apps and Jellyfin UI is sluggish while downloading torrents with a several hundred gigabyte backlog of files to move to the hard drives, does that mean I should replace my cheapo SATA SSD with a PCIe one?

Or maybe I should find that 100gb SSD I have kicking around and install that, moving the os to that drive and leaving the 1tb drive as the download disk
 
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Betonhaus said:
If I have an IOWait of 72
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72 WHAT? Weeks? Percent? Milliseconds? Using which tool?

Because I don't believe in GUIs I use "iostat" to watch devices.

In Debian/Ubuntu it's in the sysstat package.

"iostat -xkz 10" and you can see how each device is performing. If %util or any of the *wait items is high on the device that seems slow then moving traffic off that to another device or moving the OS off would likely improve things.
Also, it's color coded for when it feels a metric is high and could be impacting things.
 
davids877 said:
72 WHAT? Weeks? Percent? Milliseconds? Using which tool?

Because I don't believe in GUIs I use "iostat" to watch devices.

In Debian/Ubuntu it's in the sysstat package.

"iostat -xkz 10" and you can see how each device is performing. If %util or any of the *wait items is high on the device that seems slow then moving traffic off that to another device or moving the OS off would likely improve things.
Also, it's color coded for when it feels a metric is high and could be impacting things.
Click to expand...
1713385477503.png

they system gets really slow and laggy when qbittorrent is downloading a lot of files and goes back to normal after i pause downloads. sda is the os ssd, sdb-f are the mergerfs drives
Bash: 
$ iostat -xkz 10
Linux 5.10.0-28-amd64 (gunther)  2024-04-17      _x86_64_        (4 CPU)

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           6.33    0.00    9.80   42.33    0.00   41.55

Device            r/s     rkB/s   rrqm/s  %rrqm r_await rareq-sz     w/s     wkB/s   wrqm/s  %wrqm w_await wareq-sz     d/s     dkB/s   drqm/s  %drqm d_await dareq-sz     f/s f_await  aqu-sz  %util
sda             90.77  13921.26    13.90  13.28    4.93   153.36   44.15  13916.37    24.63  35.81   13.18   315.21    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    5.52    6.13    1.06  60.51
sdb              2.26    249.49     0.04   1.75   13.04   110.25   29.13  21345.22     1.70   5.52  214.49   732.83    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00    6.28  12.84
sdc             53.52   9043.08     0.13   0.24    1.98   168.97    0.17      2.50     0.46  73.23   89.41    14.94    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00    0.12   7.19
sdd             53.57   9092.57     0.05   0.09    1.89   169.73    0.14      1.96     0.36  72.39   80.81    14.49    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00    0.11   6.92
sde              1.09    102.29     0.07   5.93    6.81    93.67   34.77  25965.17     2.06   5.60  212.68   746.86    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00    7.40  12.94
sdf             81.23  13784.91     0.07   0.09    1.49   169.70    0.19      2.89     0.53  73.06    9.06    14.85    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    0.04   18.37    0.12   8.57
sr0              0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    1.44     0.17    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   0.00


avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           3.28    0.00    3.92   78.66    0.00   14.13

Device            r/s     rkB/s   rrqm/s  %rrqm r_await rareq-sz     w/s     wkB/s   wrqm/s  %wrqm w_await wareq-sz     d/s     dkB/s   drqm/s  %drqm d_await dareq-sz     f/s f_await  aqu-sz  %util
sda              4.40     76.00     0.00   0.00   53.14    17.27   48.00  17928.40    29.10  37.74   26.66   373.51    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    1.70   21.88    1.55  93.56


avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           1.23    0.00    0.96   81.12    0.00   16.69

Device            r/s     rkB/s   rrqm/s  %rrqm r_await rareq-sz     w/s     wkB/s   wrqm/s  %wrqm w_await wareq-sz     d/s     dkB/s   drqm/s  %drqm d_await dareq-sz     f/s f_await  aqu-sz  %util
sda              1.00     14.80     0.00   0.00   58.60    14.80   38.40  10386.40    19.80  34.02   36.57   270.48    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    2.40   27.92    1.53  95.24


avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           3.84    0.00    5.04   78.08    0.00   13.05

Device            r/s     rkB/s   rrqm/s  %rrqm r_await rareq-sz     w/s     wkB/s   wrqm/s  %wrqm w_await wareq-sz     d/s     dkB/s   drqm/s  %drqm d_await dareq-sz     f/s f_await  aqu-sz  %util
sda              3.60     18.00     0.00   0.00  104.19     5.00   32.40  16733.20    19.70  37.81   40.60   516.46    0.00      0.00     0.00   0.00    0.00     0.00    0.40    2.75    1.69  93.36
 
Betonhaus said:
they system gets really slow and laggy when qbittorrent is downloading a lot of files and goes back to normal after i pause downloads. sda is the os ssd, sdb-f are the mergerfs drives
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If you didn't tell me this was an SSD I'd assume this was a slow SMR hard drive.
Those performance numbers are horrible.

1. Does the drive run near full often?
2. What filesystem?
3. Did you leave an empty partition for the drive to have some breathing room. SSDs, especially older ones really don't like being full.

You might clean up the drive and then run "fstrim -a" Filesystem should handle it automatically but it may not be doing it. Check to make sure all the SSD mounts in /etc/fstab have the "discard" option set.
 
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davids877 said:
If you didn't tell me this was an SSD I'd assume this was a slow SMR hard drive.
Those performance numbers are horrible.

1. Does the drive run near full often?
2. What filesystem?
3. Did you leave an empty partition for the drive to have some breathing room. SSDs, especially older ones really don't like being full.

You might clean up the drive and then run "fstrim -a" Filesystem should handle it automatically but it may not be doing it. Check to make sure all the SSD mounts in /etc/fstab have the "discard" option set.
Click to expand...
1. usually the 1tb ssd drive is only about 10% used unless I'm doing a major download. According to my web panel yesterday I downloaded 1.6tb of files, which get moved to the hard drives after downloading.
2. ext4
3. I don't think so...

I'm wondering if trim hasn't been able to keep up with the downloading... maybe I should pause downloads and run fstrim

...oh that's so much better. I added "/usr/sbin/fstrim /" as a custom command in webmin so I have a one button click if it happens again.
 
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davids877 said:
If you didn't tell me this was an SSD I'd assume this was a slow SMR hard drive.
Those performance numbers are horrible.

1. Does the drive run near full often?
2. What filesystem?
3. Did you leave an empty partition for the drive to have some breathing room. SSDs, especially older ones really don't like being full.

You might clean up the drive and then run "fstrim -a" Filesystem should handle it automatically but it may not be doing it. Check to make sure all the SSD mounts in /etc/fstab have the "discard" option set.
Click to expand...
All this is good info. Are there any errors in the console log (dmesg) about the drive?
 
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