The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Car Won't Crank]

Any opinions on snappy / snapd? (a) I had my first encounter with it recently when my QA team was complaining all our servers were slow, and I found snapd holding CPU time hostage on a regular basis. It came pre-installed with Ubuntu because I was looking for something that Just Werks, but I'm regretting that now.

It looks to provide a Windows 10-style constant stream of updates, so it seems completely worthless to me. Any downsides to excising it?

I'm not a fan of snaps or flatpaks. They're containerized which is cool but the windowing theme is often borked with the native theme and won't necessarily follow light or dark mode automatically. They also take up a lot of space and if you like to save configs you have to dig through the snap or flatpak specific directory instead of just putting it in /etc/application or .program.config file in your home directory.

 

[Meriasek]

Pretty sure I have one or two Linux distros somewhere hidden on my computer... On the latest I used i3 as a desktop manager, which I liked quite a bit. However, due to some quirks of me being shitty with installs and harddrives and whatnot, that install is on another HDD and needs hitting a key during startup to get into the bootloader... One of these days I'll have to do a fresh install of everything on that computer.

 

[Job the Long-Suffering]

Quick question. As someone who has only used Linux for about 6 months, and doesn't have any real programming knowledge yet, is it a bad idea for me to delve into Xmonad as a tiling window manager?

I know there will be a learning curve and I'm fine with that, but I keep seeing references to Haskel and scripts that make me wonder if I'll be in over my head.

I've already followed installation walkthroughs and that all looks easy enough. It's more the implementation of it, and being able to do everything I'm already doing, more or less that I'm slightly concerned with.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Quick question. As someone who has only used Linux for about 6 months, and doesn't have any real programming knowledge yet, is it a bad idea for me to delve into Xmonad as a tiling window manager?

I know there will be a learning curve and I'm fine with that, but I keep seeing references to Haskel and scripts that make me wonder if I'll be in over my head.

I've already followed installation walkthroughs and that all looks easy enough. It's more the implementation of it, and being able to do everything I'm already doing, more or less that I'm slightly concerned with.

Thanks for any help.

Just dive into it and learn as you go. That's the best way to do it

 

[Job the Long-Suffering]

Just dive into it and learn as you go. That's the best way to do it

Yeah, that's the plan.
Just taking some precaution I guess.

 

[Bongocat]

Another potentially noob question. I'm noticing the command line is indeed faster for specific tasks (like roughly clipping and converting videos, ironically enough). I've noticed that certain parameters and paths will complete on tab, so it has to be pulling that information from somewhere.

Is there anything that can provide not just autocompletion, but autosuggestion to command line parameters? Like this:

 

[byuu]

Another potentially noob question. I'm noticing the command line is indeed faster for specific tasks (like roughly clipping and converting videos, ironically enough). I've noticed that certain parameters and paths will complete on tab, so it has to be pulling that information from somewhere.

Is there anything that can provide not just autocompletion, but autosuggestion to command line parameters? Like this:

View attachment 2270037

Not sure if bash can do it but fish has something like that.

 

[Jimjamflimflam]

Yeah, that's the plan.
Just taking some precaution I guess.

I'm not a expert so I could be wrong but couldn't you install a virtual machine so if it does go bad, its only virtually?

 

[Bongocat]

I'm not a expert so I could be wrong but couldn't you install a virtual machine so if it does go bad, its only virtually?

in almost all cases except highly sophisticated malware, yes, that's a safe sandbox to work in

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

Fuck Snap.

They're like Game Freak storing all the character models per map even if the map only uses 2 of 100.

If you are okay with such redundancy in the name of "security" fine then, but fucking Canonical making them mandatory.

 

[Aidan]

Another potentially noob question. I'm noticing the command line is indeed faster for specific tasks (like roughly clipping and converting videos, ironically enough). I've noticed that certain parameters and paths will complete on tab, so it has to be pulling that information from somewhere.

Is there anything that can provide not just autocompletion, but autosuggestion to command line parameters? Like this:

View attachment 2270037

I don't know if bash or zsh can do it but zsh has a plugin that provides suggestions based on your history. You can enable the "suggestions" via completion by hitting tab in both zsh and bash with the code snippet below added your your bashrc or zshrc. It's probably pretty universal but idk for sure

bind TAB:menu-complete

How to customize Oh My Zsh with Auto-Suggestions and Syntax Highlighting?

As a developer, we spend a lot of time working on the terminal and having personalized shell makes the working environment perfect, decreases frustration and also, increases productivity.

soniasingla.com

Alternatively, for peak autism you can use emacs which I know has a package specifically for that that's highly regarded. I'm not much of an emacs nerd but have toyed with it and I'm confident Doom Emacs and Space Emacs each have it installed and enabled by default. That's its own rabbit hole though. If you want to go down it, I think System Crafters should be good for it. I intend to do a emacs-from-scratch build at some point just for learning as I think emacs is worth learning depending on what you do and like.

 

[Had]

I didn't choose linux
I just grow to hate windows more everyday

 

[Gay_Frog]

Alternatively, for peak autism you can use emacs which I know has a package specifically for that that's highly regarded. I'm not much of an emacs nerd but have toyed with it and I'm confident Doom Emacs and Space Emacs each have it installed and enabled by default. That's its own rabbit hole though. If you want to go down it, I think System Crafters should be good for it. I intend to do a emacs-from-scratch build at some point just for learning as I think emacs is worth learning depending on what you do and like.

Just a rant how the fuck is emacs is in linux "philosophy" that "only do one thing and do it right"? If I see people using more like OS than a text editor.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Just a rant how the fuck is emacs is in linux "philosophy" that "only do one thing and do it right"? If I see people using more like OS than a text editor.

To get technical, that rule applies more to the underlying OS and userspace tools rather than to applications. Besides, EMACS does do one thing very well. It just happens that the one thing it does well is everything.

Once you realise that it's actually a monolithic OS with a bad text editor built into it, it all makes a lot more sense.

 

[Dick Justice]

Just a rant how the fuck is emacs is in linux "philosophy" that "only do one thing and do it right"? If I see people using more like OS than a text editor.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your post, but if not you might find this useful.

I can't speak to systemd, but what you're referring to is the "Unix philosophy". Exact definitions naturally vary, but I think it can mostly be boiled down to the bullet points:

• Write tools that do one thing and do it well. Expect the output of your tool to be the input to some as of yet unknown tool.
• Output to text because it's the universal interface.
• Worse is better, perfect is the enemy of good. Design tools that can be deployed, tested, and iterated quickly. Be willing to sacrifice functionality for simplicity. Don't be afraid to throw out and rewrite code that's not working well. Avoid feature creep.

The overarching goal, imo is to be able to quickly and easily create functional software and rapidly improve it through iteration.

 

[Madre Muerte]

Ok I'm converting to popOS right now (My computer is making the boot drive off a dvd) Anything I should know?

 

[Aidan]

Ok I'm converting to popOS right now (My computer is making the boot drive off a dvd) Anything I should know?

No just read documentation and ask questions and things will probably go well. As far as I know that's one of the popular new-user friendly ones.

 

[Monkey_Fellow]

I have been using Manjaro on my school laptop for a year now and I love it.
Is game support good now? I really want to use it on my gaming desktop, but I don't want to dualboot and shit.

 

[ZMOT]

I have been using Manjaro on my school laptop for a year now and I love it.
Is game support good now? I really want to use it on my gaming desktop, but I don't want to dualboot and shit.

depends on the game, DRM and cheat protection are still an issue, if you play games without those you should be fine (with a minimal to noticeable performance hit, depending on game and hardware).

dunno how extensive protondb is these days, but "game" + "linux" should have a guide or post somewhere on the internet from someone who looked into it already.

 

[Enig]

depends on the game, DRM and cheat protection are still an issue, if you play games without those you should be fine (with a minimal to noticeable performance hit, depending on game and hardware).

dunno how extensive protondb is these days, but "game" + "linux" should have a guide or post somewhere on the internet from someone who looked into it already.

The only two games I have problems with via proton these days that aren't related to DRM issues are Doom 64 (since the Kex engine has some autistic ass issues with mouse probing that goes above 125hz) and Rise of the Triad 2013's DX10 exec because DX10 support is still janky. Either way it's still a monkey's paw, sure we get a lot more games to play now but it also keeps companies from considering native ports since they can use proton as a crutch.