The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[volatile puar]

Is there any mainstream distro that does not come preloaded with Firefox? No matter what you're going to need a browser and the only other browsers are closed source, based on Chromium with has a hostile license, or so far behind supporting HTML7 or whatever number were on that they are effectively broken for users.

Zorin and some other distros have switched to shipping a modified version of Brave, because Firefox is committed spyware now, but it's not a huge deal since anyone who is choosing their operating system will also choose their web browser.

 

[Slav Power]

Mental Outlaw:
>reads baitposts on /g/ with a Xitter/article screencaps
>compiles them into a video that repeats them in a more civilized way so that he doesn't sound like a drooling mongoloid
>gets plenty of dosh from AdSense and a bunch of Dunning-Kruger retards glazing him
>those said retards then repeat BS about Linux being 10000% better than Windows and that no one needs Windows anymore
This guy:
>runs 80 benchmarks just to get data on which Windows/Linux version has the best performance
>Windows 11 inches slightly more over 10
>both Linux distros are ~15% behind Windows
>every "win"/"loss" is within the GPU clock fluctuation margin of error
Though, "I wish I had better news". Here's your good news: going from "can't run shit" to "~15% behind newest Windows" is a massive fucking accomplishment, so chin the fuck up. It's not like you're going to get 10000% more performance with better software, it's the same type of copium as pulling every optimization tweak under the sun to make your ancient PC suddenly perform like a brand new one. Windows already tries it's best to utilize the hardware, and it's all about using it as well as you can, not pulling performance out of your ass. Well, unless you're Nvidia, then you shill MFG or w/e.

I would honestly rather shoulder the political slant rather than use systemd. Of the "easy"/"new user" distros, the only ones with that going for them are probably Devuan or MX Linux. Of course, for users with more technical inclinations I'd always suggest Gentoo above all, or if they're on a shitbox or otherwise don't like compiling, Void, CoC be damned. If not that, Artix. Point still stands: systemd creep is far and away worse than some random political bloviating.

>hey I'd like to try Linux what should I install
>oh install this thing that people rarely hear about because Poettering is the devil and systemd is evil and you should use dickinit+shitbox becuase yadda yadda and also Gentoo is way better
Dude, just tell newbies to fuck off and use Windows at this point, because by pulling this shit you're actively maintaining the zeitgeist that all Linux users are egotistical, narcissistic dickheads.

Mint should be recommended as the only option for newbies for a reason:
-a single suggestion instead of forcing a newbie to choose between Mint/Manjaro/Bazzite/MX/dickshitnux, the moment you do this you've lost them because they're not going to delve into technical pros and cons of each distro when they have zero experience with Linux
-Mint has a massive community and bases itself on a well established distro. systemd is ubiquitous, so if you want the least issues and the most chances someone will help you, Mint is the way to go
If you disagree then, again, drop the pretense you want people to actually switch to Linux, and double down on wanting to keep it your special "2smart4u" club, because you can't have it both ways. Telling newbies to use Devuan/MX is like throwing a toddler into the deep sea. Lest we forget that the average newbie usually doesn't even know you can just reinstall Windows, yet you assume they hold the same Linux knowledge as you do.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Mint should be recommended as the only option for newbies

MX is actually more noob friendly than Mint. Your average newbie shouldn't be tinkering with inits to begin with, so the fact that it defaults to sysvinit (with the option to switch to systemd if you're that way inclined) should be invisible to them. MX has a better overall user experience in the UI, with a comprehensive GUI toolset (in the form of MX Tools) for dealing with basic issues than Mint or anything Ubuntu offers, and in my experience is more stable and less prone to "oh shit something broke for no reason" episodes (whereas Ubuntu-based systems - including Mint - occasionally shit out their guts for reasons that would not be obvious to a a seasoned greybeard, let alone a neophyte). It also manages to strike a good balance between newbie friendly and actually capable.

 

[Aidan]

I've never had Mint suddenly break on me and I used Mint XFCE edition for a couple of years without any significant changes to it. The first time I tried MX in a vm it broke when I opened one of the settings menus. I blamed virtualization but later when I tried it on a laptop I moved after a week because it had issues properly recovering after going into sleep mode for some reason.

I don't think MX is as smooth as is being touted here. Regardless, anyone wanting to check out Linux should spin up different distros in a virtual machine or on a spare computer before making a decision.

 

[Nobody Important]

I've been using Fedora 40-42 for a bit, and it does what I need it to do. Debating whether to go back to CentOS with the release of Stream 10, but I probably won't.

 

[Disdainer of the Plebs]

So has anyone in here given Bazzite/steamOS a shot for gaming? How much work do you have to put into making it work? I currently run dual boot win10/mint because I want to spend my time playing games, not trying to make them work. Win11 is a certified bloated sack of shit, so I was thinking of moving over to one of the proton centric distros when win10 goes EOL.

 

[Miller]

Of course Linux Mint is officially partnered with the "Global Crew of Activists" Mozilla, so if these sorts of associations bother you then Mint is not the choice for you.

The guy who made Linux Mint is not a big fan of Isreal.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

>oh install this thing that people rarely hear about because Poettering is the devil and systemd is evil and you should use dickinit+shitbox becuase yadda yadda and also Gentoo is way better

Yeah. Gotta say I agree here.

Telling a new person to install some alt init distro is probably a bad idea. Just adding more likelihood, they will run into problems. And it will be harder than normal to find solutions. Especially if they don't even know what an init system is.

Everything is made around systemd on Linux now. That's just the reality, and for people to have the most seamless move to Linux possible. They will almost always want to just go with something systemd. And if it's mx getting recommended.

I do think there are cases for some other distros to be recommended to new people. But most of the time mint is fine.

The guy who made Linux Mint is not a big fan of Isreal.

Oh. Then never mind. I think everyone knows Israel is our greatest ally. We can't stand for someone speaking ill of our best menches.

 

[The Saltening]

I am trying to update all my shit and I keep getting the "failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) error. It lists a shit load of files owned by gpgme. What do I do? I run the update command like every couple days and this is the first time its had issues.

I found this but it doesnt really help me. "just update more often" is not the problem.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=272350

NEVER MIND I GOT IT

uhm.... brave logged me out of everything now and dolphin is not showing all my drives.....

apparently i no longer have permission to view or open my other drives.

this is so fucking gay. I just updated my system and now my drives arent available and google is a worthless sob with no answers. All my accounts in my browser are signed out. Etc. etc.

I also lost access to my root folder in dolphin. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS HAPPENING

 

[Fcret]

I will point out that this isn't entirely accurate as some programs are not listed on this website, such as the GPL2 Apple Chess https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Chess. Something very weird is that I can't seem to find license files in any of these repos, so I'm not sure if Apple is actually following the terms of the GPL and other licenses that they're using, also the "Download source code" button for Apple chess leads you to the Apple OS webpage which doesn't seem to host the Chess code at all, so that might be a problem.

It's in the README

This is the source code for Apple's Chess.app Version 3.0, as shipped
in MacOS X 10.8. This project consists of two components:
The Chess engine, "sjeng", and the graphical frontend.

"sjeng", contained in the "sjeng" subdirectory, is distributed under the
terms of the GNU General Public License. See sjeng/COPYING for
details.

The graphical frontend, i.e., all files not in the "sjeng"
subdirectory (including files derived from glChess which Apple has
permission to relicense under the following terms), are distributed
under the terms of the Apple Sample Code License:

sjeng doesn't appear to be directly linked (Chess.app seems to communicate with it entirely using standard i/o) so there's no requirement under the GPLv2 to provide source code for Chess.app as it's technically not a derived work.

 

[The Saltening]

I am losing my fucking mind right now

I had to rename a bunch of files to get the updates to go through and now everything is fucked. I did everything according to the wiki. Check what owns file. If nothing then rename file. Run update. Delete file.

Now i have no access to my hard disks. No root folder for my main OS disk. The drives exist in the KDE partition manager. But I have no access to them in dolphin. I also can not enable "view hidden places" in dolphin

 

[Dante Alighieri]

sounds like it's time to burn it all and start over

 

[Betonhaus]

this boys and girls is why we don't recommend Arch to people new to Linux. Hell, it's not recommended for people who are somewhat familiar with Linux

 

[The Saltening]

sounds like it's time to burn it all and start over

bro i have it setup just how i want it. I have so much shit configured. I checked in fstab and it only lists my main drive partitions.

Something wiped over the update (it was a big one with kernal updates).

None of my drives have mount points. Partitions no longer show in dolphin at all. I do not understand.

I can't even mount a USB drive and access it. Guess I'm booting into windows.

Holy fuck I forgot how much I hated windows. I do not miss all these fucking popups telling me to enable features i do not give a single fuck about.

 

[Fcret]

bro i have it setup just how i want it. I have so much shit configured. I checked in fstab and it only lists my main drive partitions.

Something wiped over the update (it was a big one with kernal updates).

None of my drives have mount points. Partitions no longer show in dolphin at all. I do not understand.

I can't even mount a USB drive and access it. Guess I'm booting into windows.

Holy fuck I forgot how much I hated windows. I do not miss all these fucking popups telling me to enable features i do not give a single fuck about.

Can you boot into the arch livecd and mount them? If the installations aren't entirely borked, you should be able to mount the disks and then chroot into them to try and fix them.

 

[The Saltening]

Can you boot into the arch livecd and mount them? If the installations aren't entirely borked, you should be able to mount the disks and then chroot into them to try and fix them.

the main disk is mounted fine. Nothing is installed on the other drives. They are my windows drive and my storage drives.

I need a way to like rebuild my partition list or whatever. The same thing it does when first installing. I can see my drives in a partition manager but I have no way of mounting. fstab is completely blank aside from the partitions on my main disk. I tried manually adding a drive and it didnt work.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

I am losing my fucking mind right now

I had to rename a bunch of files to get the updates to go through and now everything is fucked. I did everything according to the wiki. Check what owns file. If nothing then rename file. Run update. Delete file.

Now i have no access to my hard disks. No root folder for my main OS disk. The drives exist in the KDE partition manager. But I have no access to them in dolphin. I also can not enable "view hidden places" in dolphin

for brave. it sounds like your cookies got cleared.

for dolphin. idk I don't use kde stuff. it's always been buggy when i've tried running their stuff in the past.

I had to rename a bunch of files to get the updates to go through and now everything is fucked. I did everything according to the wiki. Check what owns file. If nothing then rename file. Run update. Delete file.

wait. what?! what article did you read, that it told you to do that? I've ran arch on and off for a good while. That is something I've never done, or needed to do. Would definitely explain how you ruined your system. to get it fixed, I mean, idk it depends what you actually were deleting and changing.

 

[DavidS877]

I tried manually adding a drive and it didnt work.

Then you probably did it wrong.
test mounts by hand, As root, or put "sudo" in front of all of these "mount /dev/whatever /mnt" and assuming that works you can work to rebuild fstab after unmounting (umount /mnt). It's very picky about syntax, if you add a line, do systemctl daemon-reload and then "mount -a" and see if it works, it should give a useful error if not
It's always recommended to use the "UUID" in fstab which you can get by running "blkid"

Also, check for /etc/fstab.bak or similar.

Also, it could be the filemanager which was auto-mounting stuff, in which case I have no idea as I consider filemanagers an abomination.

 

[Aidan]

I need a way to like rebuild my partition list or whatever. The same thing it does when first installing. I can see my drives in a partition manager but I have no way of mounting. fstab is completely blank aside from the partitions on my main disk. I tried manually adding a drive and it didnt work.

It isn't that much of a pain to manually set up /etc/fstab unless you have a convoluted setup. Manually type it out and reboot, see if the other disks mount. Not sure why an update would touch your fstab or anything with Brave but it's more important to fix it than dig around trying to find out why right now.

 

[The Saltening]

wait. what?! what article did you read, that it told you to do that? I've ran arch on and off for a good while. That is something I've never done, or needed to do. Would definitely explain how you ruined your system. to get it fixed, I mean, idk it depends what you actually were deleting and changing.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman#%22Failed_to_commit_transaction_(conflicting_files)%22_error

this one.

The problem is usually trivial to solve (although to be sure, you should try to find out how these files got there in the first place). A safe way is to first check if another package owns the file (pacman -Qo <em>/path/to/file</em>). If the file is owned by another package, file a bug report. If the file is not owned by another package, rename the file which "exists in filesystem" and re-issue the update command. If all goes well, the file may then be removed.

It was a shit load of gpgme related files. After the install all but 1 got replaced so I deleted them.