The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Slav Power]

Is there a stigma?

Yeah, the stigma of that it's not "real Linux" just because it comes preloaded with all the essentials 99% of people would need, and that for the real Linux experience you need Debian/Arch/Gentoo etc. Mint is still real Linux, you can rm -rf the living shit out of your system on it as well as on any other.

The stigma/misconception assumes that if Mint aims to be as accessible and "just werks" as Windows, it does so by being as locked down as Windows. It's not, it's still as powerful as any other Linux distro, it's just that unlike something like Arch, you start off with a working system that you'll be breaking as you fuck around in the terminal and learn Linux.

Mint is the distro to recommend for beginners, as they'll get an unfucked Ubuntu for a solid starting base, and if they're willing to go deeper they can break that, or get comfortable in a distro that just works, doesn't get in their way and does what they need it to do. If a beginner gets comfortable with Linux from that, then I'd say a good exercise to learn Linux further would be installing Debian without a DE and then setting something up from the headless mode. The entry point is lower than Arch, the environment is more familiar, and you do more intermediate things to get comfortable with Linux.

edit oh. reading it again. i think I understand what you meant by the second thing.

Yeah basically the bloat that's the issue is the shit that runs in the background, not what sits on the hard drive. How much of this apparent "bloat" of Windows/Mint ultimately runs in the background, and how much of it just sits dormant in the install to be invoked when a piece of software needs it to run? A ton of this "bloat" is actually a good thing as it allows your OS to do it's job: run the software you need to run to do your work. And people want their OS to do just that, not for Microsoft to tell them what they want to do, or to fuck around for hours to try and make the tiniest, most riced out setup.

 

[Susanna]

fuck around for hours to try and make the tiniest, most riced out setup.

Fixing the scroll direction or moving the taskbar to the top of the screen because that’s where you prefer to have the clock are not unreasonable expectations.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

them what they want to do, or to fuck around for hours to try and make the tiniest, most riced out setup.

It comes down to what's easier to me a one time setup where I just put the things there myself to do what I know I want to do. Is easier. Than back tracking through the work someone else did. Things like arch especially. Are pretty easy to get set up really quickly if you know what you're doing.

There is a reason people use arch. And it's not because they want to rice their desktop. Like you said. You can do that from mint, or any other distro.

Just because someone thinks mint is the easiest to use for them. Doesn't mean it's the same for everyone. And I don't think, at least anyone in this thread has told people not to use mint. At least not that I remember seeing.

 

[The Saltening]

As a general rule, the newer a hardware feature is, the less likely you are to have it supported in Linux. HDR and FSR4 sound like relatively recent developments. I don't have any of this on my machine, my only advice is consulting Wikis and forum posts.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope - probably something to look for, Valve's microcompositor for games

Another thing worth mentioning is that stable distros often lag behind in feature support. I know the "btw" stereotype, but it wouldn't hurt to try and install Arch or its easier flavor - EndeavourOS. I'm pretty sure even Valve's SteamOS is based on Manjaro (an Arch derivative).

Better because AMD supports Linux directly. I'm not one to talk to about HDR though because I don't care about it so it's never factored into anything for me. Apparently it's supported experimentally on KDE Plasma 6 with Wayland.

If you're new it may seem daunting but try EndeavourOS which is Arch with KDE Plasma 6. Endeavour has an installer so isn't the meme Arch experience and its package manner is very straightforward.
To install Steam, for example, you'd open the terminal and type yay steam and then type the corresponding number for the Steam package.

There's also Garuda which I know has an autistic looking gaming version, uses KDE, and is also Arch based and has an installer, though I don't know if it uses yay, you can install that after the fact if you like.

Whether Endeavour or Garuda meet your needs, I don't know, but they use KDE Plasma and Wayland so might support the features you're after. There's a post from last year where a guy got HDR working to an acceptable level for him with Garuda but at that point whatever works on Garuda will work on other Arch-based distros. https://forum.garudalinux.org/t/enabling-hdr-crashes-desktop-after-wakeup/36906/4

I am taking a look at endeavourOS.

So I googled how to install mesa drivers and some dude on reddit posted a solution.

sudo pacman -S mesa lib32-mesa vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon libva-mesa-driver libva-utils

my question is... how on earth do you figure this out? like im looking at this knowing I would never ever be able to guess this.

 

[Rust Troony]

my question is... how on earth do you figure this out?

The answer, as always, is the arch wiki (In case your talking about pacman: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman)

 

[Aidan]

my question is... how on earth do you figure this out? like im looking at this knowing I would never ever be able to guess this.

There's no guessing involved. That's saying to use pacman to install the mesa stuff which you can also search for using pacman or just look it up on the Arch wiki. It seems cryptic at first until you start using it. It's normal not to know this at first.

Mint is still real Linux, you can rm -rf the living shit out of your system on it as well as on any other.

Just ran this on Mint.

sudo rm -rf /
[sudo] password for aidan:       
rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe

 

[The Saltening]

There's no guessing involved. That's saying to use pacman to install the mesa stuff which you can also search for using pacman or just look it up on the Arch wiki. It seems cryptic at first until you start using it. It's normal not to know this at first.

How does one search with pacman? I was reading the wiki and I found some of the stuff the command mentions but not all of it. So I kind of started to get it in a sense.

Idk. I'm installing endeavourOS rn so we will find out. My main things are steam, mesa, and gamescope. Gamescope being the least important.

 

[GNU Abyss]

I am taking a look at endeavourOS.

So I googled how to install mesa drivers and some dude on reddit posted a solution.

sudo pacman -S mesa lib32-mesa vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon libva-mesa-driver libva-utils

my question is... how on earth do you figure this out? like im looking at this knowing I would never ever be able to guess this.

You can always use a graphical package installer starting out. As for the packages, that dude is making things redundant.
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/mesa/

Provides: libva-driver, libva-mesa-driver=1:25.0.5-1, mesa-libgl=1:25.0.5-1, mesa-vdpau=1:25.0.5-1, opengl-driver, vdpau-driver

As you can see, the mesa package already provides libva-mesa-driver. As for the rest, it installs mesa & mesa's 32-bit version (OpenGL drivers), vulkan-radeon & 32-bit vulkan-radeon (Vulkan driver for your GPU) and libva-utils (utility programs).

The figuring out process is just a chain of trying something, shit breaking, looking things up on the Internet, writing down what you installed, encountering a new error and realizing you didn't install this one small thing, back to lurking the net. Rinse and repeat.

How does one search with pacman? I was reading the wiki and I found some of the stuff the command mentions but not all of it. So I kind of started to get it in a sense.

Per pacman's manual page, there are two hits for searching.

QUERY OPTIONS (APPLY TO -Q)
-s, --search <regexp>
Search each locally-installed package for names or descriptions that match regexp. When including multiple search terms, only packages with descriptions matching ALL of those terms are returned.

SYNC OPTIONS (APPLY TO -S)
-s, --search <regexp>
This will search each package in the sync databases for names or descriptions that match regexp. When you include multiple search terms, only packages with descriptions matching ALL of those terms will be returned.

Since you don't have what you need installed, you need the sync variant. That's the -Ss combination. If it was something you already have on your system, that's -Qs.

 

[Aidan]

How does one search with pacman? I was reading the wiki and I found some of the stuff the command mentions but not all of it. So I kind of started to get it in a sense.

Idk. I'm installing endeavourOS rn so we will find out. My main things are steam, mesa, and gamescope. Gamescope being the least important.

pacman -Ss searchterm
EndeavourOS has yay and so you can also do yay searchterm for the same results. Yay is a pacman wrapper.

 

[Vesperus]

my question is... how on earth do you figure this out? like im looking at this knowing I would never ever be able to guess this.

You Google it. The Windows powershell command
Get-ChildItem "C: \Driver File Location" -Recurse -Filter "*inf" | ForEach-Object { PNPUtil.exe /add-driver $_.FullName /install }
Is hardly intuitive, either.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

No fucking way this is real. (I mean it might but this is crazy lol)

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

my question is... how on earth do you figure this out? like im looking at this knowing I would never ever be able to guess this.

That's what I'm saying about just using whatever distro for a bit. Look around for a little see how things work.

Pick one a just use it a bit. Distros do things differently. The most popular overall are either Debian based (Ubuntu, mint, a ton of others) or arch based (Manjaro, endeavor, Garuda) they use their own package manager. Debian ones use apt, arch ones use pacman.

If you go with one distro and use it a bit you will be able to figure out how things are done. After you do know. It is actually easy to move to others. Since you are basically just changing the package manager, maybe the init system, and maybe the packages that come by default. But after you get a hang of how things are done in Linux it's easy to know what to expect on new distros in the future.

And usually now days. You do actually get the option for using a GUI to install software. Ubuntu and mint have their front ends to install things, and arch has its own. But like I said. Pick something. And mess around first. Diving into it all is a lot especially if you haven't used the terminal before. And you are wanting to do things that involve using it.

 

[Max Weber]

Also, since you're already on OpenSUSE, might be worth it to just upgrade it to Tumbleweed. I don't think it's as bleeding edge as Arch, but it's close, and the additional delay is probably a good thing for you, less likely that an update will fuck shit up.

 

[Aidan]

You're sending him mixed signals, as he's already checking out EndeavourOS. OpenSUSE seems like an odd distro for someone focused on gaming but I'm not able to comment much beyond that.

 

[The Saltening]

I have endeavourOS up and running. I am able to play games. HDR seems to work as well. At least on the desktop.

Unfortunately stuff like FSR4 just is not a thing. Which severely limits my ability to play certain games. Expedition 33 for example requires optiscaler FSR4 to run properly and clean up the horrible TAA stuff. That game also is super resource intensive so playing at 4k high settings without FSR4 is not really possible. I am going to install and find out anyway.

Thanks for all the input. endeavourOS has been much better and so far nothing is broken. It just kind of works. Wine and Proton also seem to just work. I havent used gamescope yet so idk how that works. LACT is cool but doesnt do much in terms of what I thought it would do.

I don't think I could swap permanently. yet. Not having adrenaline really sucks.

The only real reason I am even here is because with windows 10 ending and windows 11 being a stupid nigger I suspect I will be moving over here eventually. I absolutely refuse to accept the windows 11 AI screen recording shit. recall or whatever the fuck those jews named it.

I still do not have a solution for controlling my mouse mapping and DPI and such. Havent really looked into it yet.

I'll be honest at this point I could totally use this daily. I am not a power user. I like gaming and youtube after work. Not having FSR4 really is a hard pill to swallow. Not only because it makes a lot of modern games look better than native (Lazy TAA implementation from devs) but it also lets me play games at higher FPS (usually because poor optimization but not always). This is mainly an issue for Hunt: showdown (which I am not playing rn) and Expedition 33.

I guess its good I am diving in now so that none of this eats my ass when windows 11 rapes later. I know what I am getting into and the tradeoffs and such.

 

[Vesperus]

I don't think I could swap permanently. yet. Not having adrenaline really sucks.

The nice thing about it being your system is, you can do what the hell you like: there's no purity test unless you want one.
I'm still dual-booting with W10 because trying to tard wrangle Elite Dangerous with a VR headset into Linux sounded hard, and dual booting is easy.

 

[The Saltening]

The nice thing about it being your system is, you can do what the hell you like: there's no purity test unless you want one.
I'm still dual-booting with W10 because trying to tard wrangle Elite Dangerous with a VR headset into Linux sounded hard, and dual booting is easy.

This is why I have a special nvme drive just for linux. I want to eventually move to it.

While I am here. Does anyone know why both firefox and brave can not open the element app to login? I am trying to get element desktop working and after signing in on the browser I click continue and it errors out.

 

[Aidan]

While I am here. Does anyone know why both firefox and brave can not open the element app to login? I am trying to get element desktop working and after signing in on the browser I click continue and it errors out.

No clue and can't test it right now but can't you get around it for now by installing the desktop client and log in directly?

 

[GNU Abyss]

Unfortunately stuff like FSR4 just is not a thing. Which severely limits my ability to play certain games. Expedition 33 for example requires optiscaler FSR4 to run properly and clean up the horrible TAA stuff. That game also is super resource intensive so playing at 4k high settings without FSR4 is not really possible. I am going to install and find out anyway.

Out of my ass advice, but I've seen flags in gamescope's manual referencing FSR capabilities.

I don't think I could swap permanently. yet. Not having adrenaline really sucks.

Corectrl can undervolt your GPU, in theory.

 

[The Saltening]

No clue and can't test it right now but can't you get around it for now by installing the desktop client and log in directly?

The desktop client logs in through the browser. Not a great design imo. For some reason The browser is unable to redirect to the app.

This might be a dumb question but is it possible to boot my linux drive into a windows vm so I can mess with both at the same time?