The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

Dread First said:
I was trying to go for Rocky Linux KDE, but my hardware doesn't like to play nice with anything forcing Wayland.
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There's almost definitely a way to get X11 installed and working on it. Or probably like 5 other popular distros that serve a similar criteria you need. Explore your options a bit before hopping, glad you found something usable though
 
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Dread First said:
I was trying to go for Rocky Linux KDE, but my hardware doesn't like to play nice with anything forcing Wayland
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Pretty certain that KDE Plasma on Rocky Linux isn't forced to Wayland. In fact, a dig through the package repository of RL9 shows that Wayland support is separate. You most likely just needed to switch the session through your Display Manager.
 
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Leaded Gasoline said:
Do you even know what you want to run on the thing? Mobile C2Ds aren't actually that weak, it only takes like 12 hours to set up a minimal Gentoo install with 2GB of RAM
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I can get 8gb of ram for it for about $10. looks like I could install 16gb, but that requires the firmware to be up to date and is a bit overkill. Overall 8gb of ram and a 240gb ssd would cost $30. also the battery does work for an hour or so and doesn't need to be replaced. it looks like it will be perfectly serviceable with little expense. Linux Mint runs somewhat decent on it and will run perfectly fine with those upgrades
 
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Dread First said:
I purged Windows 11 off my PC for Linux Mint MATE yesterday. I was trying to go for Rocky Linux KDE, but my hardware doesn't like to play nice with anything forcing Wayland. If only there was a LInux Mint-esque project but for RHEL clones, but it is what it is. I decided against FreeBSD because I have no clue how nicely the Linux compatibility module would play with Steam and Proton.

My dismay at running an Ubuntu variant aside, I still staunchly maintain that Linux Mint MATE is the standard bearer for consistency and usability out of the box.
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Fedora maybe?

@The Anarki Main
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I could never get Void to work. I really liked it for a bit, but then every time I'd install a package it would corrupt the initramfs and brick the system. And since there is so little documentation, I couldn't fix it like I would be able to in minutes with Arch. Some weird issue specific to my hardware. I've changed out my whole motherboard twice since then so maybe I'll give it another try but I can't recommend it over Arch.
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(Sorry trying to not make a bunch of posts and editing in multiquotes from a phone is a pita, if it wasn't the the origional reply).

When trying void not long ago my experience was kind of similar. I ran into some issues. I did get a working system, but some things I wasn't sure how to do the 100% correct way, and I had them break, and had to go back and fix it.

Freebsd was like void, but such an order of magnitude worse its hard to describe without sounding like I'm exagerating. The documentation was better. But the usability was much worse. Almost nothing functioned properly even after configuring it following the handbook, or if it did. It didn't seem to last. Things like my aux port, didn't switch audio from the speakers out of the box. Wifi was dropping for seemingly no reason. Theres more, but this is enough.

But after doing freebsd, then trying void (since I was coming from freebsd void seemed nice). Then going back to my arch installs. It really stuck out how well arch works. And how stable the system itself is (not like stable as in uses old packages like debian obviously.)

I'm still trying out other distros since I have multiple ssds, and Right now one is the ssd I am using for throwing new stuff on it. I've mentioned above I'm doing gentoo right now. It has actually been a nice experience so far. It has its difficulties in some areas. Which caused me to have to reinstall it on the first attempt. But that was my fault completely. And it was because I messed with a bunch of stuff on my system, without fully grasping how gentoo manages packages (I still don't fully grasp everything, since portage and all its options are pretty vast)
 
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prollyanotherlurker said:
Freebsd was like void, but such an order of magnitude worse its hard to describe without sounding like I'm exagerating. The documentation was better. But the usability was much worse. Almost nothing functioned properly even after configuring it following the handbook, or if it did. It didn't seem to last. Things like my aux port, didn't switch audio from the speakers out of the box. Wifi was dropping for seemingly no reason. Theres more, but this is enough.
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Expecting it to act like a normal OS that humans use as a desktop computer is expecting something it isn't.

I've used it, but as things like a router or a headless server of some kind where I never need to interact with it directly but just use services on it or share files or do some very specific thing.
 
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AnOminous said:
Expecting it to act like a normal OS that humans use as a desktop computer is expecting something it isn't.

I've used it, but as things like a router or a headless server of some kind where I never need to interact with it directly but just use services on it or share files or do some very specific thing.
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I've got a FreeBSD TrueNAS installation for exactly this purpose and it's great.

Years ago I was distro hopping and briefly tried FreeBSD. I don't remember much, but what I do remember is that it was a hinkier, clunkier Linux distro from a usability perspective.

It forms a great base for a fairly static server or appliance, but terrible for anything requiring much day-to-day user interaction or frequent updates, and it certainly won't support any particularly exotic hardware.

Linux really shines on the desktop for hardware support, just because it was popular enough that there was always at least one stray nerd with the hardware willing to help out, whether with coding or even just basic testing and user feedback.

Like I've got a TV tuner in my Linux desktop to grab OTA TV broadcasts. It'll be a snowball's chance in hell before that device is supported in any of the BSDs.
 
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AnOminous said:
-snip-
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tried out the net variant a few weeks ago and it's really not desktop friendly. you can install a desktop environment like xfce, but forget most common session managers. you either use this one obscure manager or you manually start the X11 server while logged in to the console locally.
very much designed for server/embedded device use, no wonder sony uses the damn thing for the PlayStation.
 
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Wirlaburla said:
Pretty certain that KDE Plasma on Rocky Linux isn't forced to Wayland. In fact, a dig through the package repository of RL9 shows that Wayland support is separate. You most likely just needed to switch the session through your Display Manager.
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The Anarki Main said:
There's almost definitely a way to get X11 installed and working on it. Or probably like 5 other popular distros that serve a similar criteria you need. Explore your options a bit before hopping, glad you found something usable though
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I'm one of those idiots who bashes his head against a wall for five hours and then finds a LInuxQuestions post from 2001 that says "tick the box" or "check the menus" and then I'm like "oh... right." I only feel dismayed at using an Ubuntu variant because I haven't had fun tinkering with a RHEL clone since CentOS got shitcanned for CentOS Stream.

The live USB image I made for Rocky Linux 9.4 kept forcibly rebooting my PC the moment that the desktop loaded in. Didn't care enough to figure out why, I just assumed the session uses Wayland. Opted for Linux Mint MATE instead, since that's never once let me down. It just gets boring after a while.

Booted into X11 on MATE without issue, it recognised my monitors at the correct resolution and refresh rates, and did the usual post-install updates+reboot. Already have Lime3DS, MelonDS, PPSSPP, Steam, and my Firefox profile set up. Xbox One controller's working perfectly, I copied all my ROMs/ISOs over along with my save data, imported my steam games on the hard disk I have, mapped controllers, tested a few games with no problems insofar as frame rate, performance, input lag, or whatever else. Hulu and HBO Max work too if you remember to toggle Widevine on.

Maybe I'm not doing enough right now, but for a first 24 hours with a freshly installed Linux distro? It's eerily stable and functional. Nothing's gone horribly awry yet, and everything's comfortable enough so far. When does it go sour?

Doxed my hardware in the past via neofetch a few times, but Ryzen 5 with an RX Vega 64 does combo well with FOSS nowadays. I'm glad as hell I'm not running any NVIDIA hardware with hindsight.
 
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So far, my linux experience has made me appreciate the commandline more. And performance is sweet overall. For recording games, what's the best option, OBS, Steam Recording Beta or GPU screen recorder? Running on an AMD RX 6750XT in 1440p.
 
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WULULULULU said:
So far, my linux experience has made me appreciate the commandline more. And performance is sweet overall. For recording games, what's the best option, OBS, Steam Recording Beta or GPU screen recorder? Running on an AMD RX 6750XT in 1440p.
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Dread First said:
Can't go wrong with OBS.
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OBS crashes on half the RTMP servers I send it to, and capture performance has gotten worse for me over the past couple of years. Its over-reliance on FFMPEG for screen-grabbing being a large part of the problem. Same issues on Windows.

GPU screen recorder seems to be by far the most efficient option. But it lacks a lot of the professional encoding settings OBS has.

Steam Recording Beta is only optimized for Radeon at the moment and in my experience the hardware encoder straight up doesn't work with NVIDIA. If you have a Geforce card, it hogs resources from the game and the recording ends up being like 10 FPS.
 
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Betonhaus said:
Or Linux Mint, which removes most of the bullshit. LMDE doesn't have any of the bullshit.
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It still has that Ubuntu base, I just don't see the purpose of Ubuntu while the existence of Debian remains a fact. Mint is superior to Ubuntu, but Raygun was superior to all other female break dancers in Australia.
 
He Who Points And Laughs said:
It still has that Ubuntu base, I just don't see the purpose of Ubuntu while the existence of Debian remains a fact. Mint is superior to Ubuntu, but Raygun was superior to all other female break dancers in Australia.
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Linux Mint disables the Ubuntu snaps. To be honest I never get a clear answer to what's the important differences between Linux Mint (Ubuntu based) and LMDE aside from minor little things that are equally split on which one does it better.
 
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Betonhaus said:
Linux Mint disables the Ubuntu snaps. To be honest I never get a clear answer to what's the important differences between Linux Mint (Ubuntu based) and LMDE aside from minor little things that are equally split on which one does it better.
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It's more focused on security updates with very few back-ported changes from the mainline Ubuntu LTS base.

Driver management is as basic as vanilla Debian, so you don't get the graphical utility to manage drivers.

The live installer for LMDE is unique as it isn't based on Calamares, Ubiquity, nor some derivative GTK dialog (YAD/Zenity). The live installer includes an expert mode if you require more specialized drive configurations. I used the expert mode to set up BTRFS with sane mounting options.

Please note that expert mode requires you to write your own fstab configuration, which can be done quicker if you install the arch-install-scripts package and run the following:

Code: 
genfstab -U /target >> /target/etc/fstab

You mount the volumes you're installing on to /target and not /mnt. You have to make the /target directory yourself.

At the end of the day it's just a specialty, like the newer EDGE edition that provides more recent kernels. If you read around the Linux Mint forums or wherever Linux Mint is frequently discussed, you won't find many contributors or maintainers recommending the specialty editions over the mainline editions. Which is perfectly reasonable. I personally use LMDE on the basis of having more history with Debian than Ubuntu LTS, and that I can set up BTRFS a lot easier.
 
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Bro is coping and seething about some arguement he had with a guy who is critical of how wayland is being implemented.

To me the whole time I was watching this. I could only think of this.
crying-wojak-mask-meme-3.png


Edit: oh yeah. And in response to the freebsd thing.

Yeah. I knew it was going to have limitations compared to linux, but I didn't think it would be as bad as it was for the job, especially since some people do actually use it for desktop and it has a lot of window managers, and desktops.

But as I used it more. It just got more frustrating.

Its a shame, because there are some cool things about freebsd. Like, I like their implementation of package management. With the ports thing. And also having everything in binaries you can install with pkg. Jails. Even though i didnt get a chance to mess with them. Seems cool. Etc.

But the usability just isnt there for it as a distro. I imagine its the same or worse for openbsd. Being that you cant even do a wifi install without loading wifi drivers with a seperate usb first.

A linux distro that had something closer to how freebsd does packages would be pretty cool imo. Arch has the aur. But really isn't the same. And gentoo has some binpkgs. But that isn't nearly what freebsd covers with its binaries. And I also like how building from source works more in freebsd also. With the ncurses prompts asking what to build in.
 
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Posting this since I have an issue with suspend not working on my PC, the fix was to unbind/bind the xhci_hcd driver whenever we go in and out of sleep.

Make a file inside the following directory: /lib/systemd/system-sleep/

I hope you find this useful!
Bash: 
#!/bin/bash

# Original script was using /bin/sh but shellcheck reporting warnings.

# NAME: custom-xhci_hcd
# PATH: /lib/systemd/system-sleep
# CALL: Called from SystemD automatically
# DESC: Suspend broken for USB3.0 as of Oct 25/2018 various kernels all at once

# DATE: Oct 28 2018.

# NOTE: From comment #61 at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/522998

TMPLIST=/tmp/xhci-dev-list

# Original script was: case "${1}" in hibernate|suspend)

case $1/$2 in
  pre/*)
    echo "$0: Going to $2..."
    echo -n '' > $TMPLIST
          for i in `ls /sys/bus/pci/drivers/xhci_hcd/ | egrep '[0-9a-z]+\:[0-9a-z]+\:.*$'`; do
              # Unbind xhci_hcd for first device XXXX:XX:XX.X:
               echo -n "$i" | tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/xhci_hcd/unbind
           echo "$i" >> $TMPLIST
          done
        ;;
  post/*)
    echo "$0: Waking up from $2..."
    for i in `cat $TMPLIST`; do
              # Bind xhci_hcd for first device XXXX:XX:XX.X:
              echo -n "$i" | tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/xhci_hcd/bind
    done
    rm $TMPLIST
        ;;
esac
 
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