The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Private Tag Reporter]

I've got Artix running and installed xlibre.

Apparently runit has these things called daemons and services? Besides starting my dhcp stack and window manager, what else would be good to set up in there? It's like a wide open sky, I don't even know what I'm missing (if anything at all), it just kinda works.

 

[Betonhaus]

Hope I don't get roasted over the coals for this, but I kinda wish people were more interested in ChromiumOS to be honest. I actually use it on my secondary device (well, ChromeOS flex) and it's quite nice.

It runs on even the shittiest computers (think 4GB Celeron laptops with eMMC) pretty well, the desktop environment is surprisingly polished and fairly lightweight, and Crostini is fantastic for running basically anything that'll work on a Debian-based system. In fact, I actually tried running the Java edition of Minecraft for fun and I didn't notice a significant drop in performance relative to just running it natively. I believe Firefox works as well. Apparently Steam support is also a thing now, though I'm sure it still has some issues to be ironed out.
Another thing about Crostini - it's treated as a sandboxed environment and you can easily reset it in case you mess something up. Much easier than reinstalling.

To be clear I'm not saying the average Gentoo autist (yes I know it's technically based on Gentoo) or people like that should switch, I simply think it's a viable option for newbies and people who genuinely want a "just werks" distro. I'm well aware that Google is... not exactly a group of angels.

Main reason I'm saying all of this is because it reminds me a lot of Apple's attempts to appeal to open-source folks, with Darwin back in the 00s. There were a few projects that never got anywhere and that kinda makes me sad. In fact, I don't think Apple even releases the source code for it at all anymore (they stopped putting out ISOs even earlier, now it's just nothing at all).

My parents computers are dropping support for Windoes 10. Between teaching them Linux and teaching them Chrome OS I'd say it would be easier to reach them Chrome OS.

 

[daffodils]

Apparently runit has these things called daemons and services? Besides starting my dhcp stack and window manager, what else would be good to set up in there?

Runit-specific things: Turnstile can be used for per-user services. Snooze in combination with runit can serve as a simple cron replacement. Socklog is a logging daemon intended for use with runit.

The vsv script is a nice wrapper around runit's sv command.

Otherwise you probably want chrony to keep the clock synced, dunst for notifications, something like mbsync to pull your mail, poweralertd if you're on a laptop, acpid, maybe udiskie for automounting, maybe restic or syncthing for automated backups, ufw if you want a firewall,...

 

[analrapist]

People were ribbing Debian for the 20 page upgrade document, but the reality most users face is this: Today, I realized an old server of mine was still on bullseye. Upgraded to bookworm by just changing bullseye to bookworm in sources.list and adding non-free-firmware to the sources. Completed. Rebooted. Did likewise to bring it up to trixie. Found out that the Transmission 4.1.0 on Trixie isn't whitelisted for torrents I run on that box. Added a line with bookworm to use the older stable version. Selected it from aptitude. Was asked to downgrade the old co-dependencies. Done. Just Werkzzzzz=-

Mock Debian for its dumb leftism, not for its technical merits, which work quite well.

 

[Angie Wormwood]

People were ribbing Debian for the 20 page upgrade document, but the reality most users face is this: Today, I realized an old server of mine was still on bullseye. Upgraded to bookworm by just changing bullseye to bookworm in sources.list and adding non-free-firmware to the sources. Completed. Rebooted. Did likewise to bring it up to trixie. Found out that the Transmission 4.1.0 on Trixie isn't whitelisted for torrents I run on that box. Added a line with bookworm to use the older stable version. Selected it from aptitude. Was asked to downgrade the old co-dependencies. Done. Just Werkzzzzz=-

Mock Debian for its dumb leftism, not for its technical merits, which work quite well.

It's not terribly dissimilar to what Ubuntu does with do-release-upgrade. A lot of that is a wrapper for consistency checking and working on stuff in the background, since they change a lot of things between releases.

Red Hat's, though, is quite unique. LEAPP will create a mini initramfs, create a cache of the required packages, then boot into that minimalist environment that has enough tools to do the upgrade (so LVM, etc.), mount the sysimage, then upgrades each package and runs a full selinux autorelabel. For as complicated as it sounds, it works amazingly well, and it does avoid some potential pitfalls by doing that.

 

[Taser Confetti]

Mock Debian for its dumb leftism, not for its technical merits, which work quite well.

Life's too short for that shit. I'm not gonna switch to some esoteric distro nobody's ever heard of because all three devs who work on it are "based and redpilled". I want my distros to work and leave me the fuck alone.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Runit-specific things: Turnstile can be used for per-user services. Snooze in combination with runit can serve as a simple cron replacement. Socklog is a logging daemon intended for use with runit.

The vsv script is a nice wrapper around runit's sv command.

Otherwise you probably want chrony to keep the clock synced, dunst for notifications, something like mbsync to pull your mail, poweralertd if you're on a laptop, acpid, maybe udiskie for automounting, maybe restic or syncthing for automated backups, ufw if you want a firewall,...

yeah. With turnstile they will probably want seatd also. Unless they are using it with elogind also. In general getting this set up.

https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/session-management.html

If they are using it with elogind, that can handle suspend and resume instead of acpid. Just depends how they want to do things.

Something I do find nice, is having something for doing dns caching, that's a little more advanced than what you get with just a dhcp daemon. If they are trying to keep things light weight, dnsmasq can do dns caching, and handle dhcp. And some other more advanced stuff. Of course there are more complete dns servers that can do even more.

Also something I think is worth doing is setting up some kind of timed service to disk maintenance. Like trim, or whatever is relevant to the file-system used.

 

[Akerman]

Life's too short for that shit. I'm not gonna switch to some esoteric distro nobody's ever heard of because all three devs who work on it are "based and redpilled". I want my distros to work and leave me the fuck alone.

Debian is very solid, and I don't really care about the people behind it either. I do not see much of Debian's community unlike Arch, it seems more insular. All I know about them is that Debian has this super weird emphasis on it's "philosophy", peculiar norms, a special electoral system and that the creator of it crashed out with an extremely odd death. Some people believe he was tortured, others say he hanged himself. He seemed unstable to me, so I lean towards the latter.

But none of that matters IMO because the distro is very good. My secondary laptop runs Debian and it does everything I need it to do. It has trash spec and it currently runs Openbox and performs very well with modest specifications. Openbox is ridiculously minimal but also very capable and stable. This is not some autistic feat like it was back in the bad old days, new users can easily daily drive Debian now IMO. It's not really difficult to both install & use, but there is a learning curve however you will learn to actually use a Linux system so it's worth it. I mean the so-called Linux Grandma did it and she is not a power user at all. She can't even figure out how to use OBS, and she's able to daily drive Debian Sid.

 

[Baguette Child]

Debian is rock solid. Their devs and contributors woke or not, once you get that shit running it never breaks.

Even a 5 year old can maintain it.

This is exactly why I've used it for my main machines for close on 23 years now. I could care less about the politics as long as it runs consistently and competently.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Something I wanted to expand more on a few days back when I was talking about trying linux in live iso's vs vm's. That got brought up was that you are using a usb to boot from, and those can be slower than a normal drive (though if you have a modern computer with faster usb it's not too bad). The thing about live iso's is while you boot from a usb, and booting can take longer than normal. The way most of them actually work. Is by essentially copying the read-only root filesystem into ram after the initrd starts. Then you are running off of that ram based root filesystem, as you use it, and make changes. I wanted to look around for a decent explanation of what is actually happening with a livecd.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LiveOS_image

This is one of the better ones I was able to find. Though there is a reddit thread I found that give's a good summary.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/opalyy/how_does_a_live_os_work/

So anyway. If you have a decent computer, generally speaking. Livecd's don't really give me any extra latency. It does help if you have 8 or more gigs of memory. If you are running one on a crappy celeron with 4gb of memory. Things will be a bit tight, and might give you issues if you run it for a while.

Debian is very solid, and I don't really care about the people behind it either. I do not see much of Debian's community unlike Arch, it seems more insular. All I know about them is that Debian has this super weird emphasis on it's "philosophy", peculiar norms, a special electoral system and that the creator of it crashed out with an extremely odd death. Some people believe he was tortured, others say he hanged himself. He seemed unstable to me, so I lean towards the latter.

That's funny. Because I see debian users all the time. It's wierd to me arch has the reputation of being the vegans of the linux world. Because of the "I use arch btw" meme. The thing about that. Is it's a meme. People say it because it's a meme. But I see people saying they use debian and pushing it, just as much as I see people saying they use arch or nix users.

 

[Angie Wormwood]

I have moved over to Debian for my home machines lately. I used to use Ubuntu (and later Xubuntu because fuck the bloated mess that KDE has become) but their increasing insistence on treating the user as fundamentally retarded finally hit my last nerve when they insisted on everything being a Flatpak. Because fuck you, you're doing it the Canonical Way™, and we know better.

Shame that no business will do it. Because I've been done with RH for quite a while now (despite my earlier praise of LEAPP), and now Canonical being on my shit-list. But no, we have to have a vendor to give us support. After all, why hire professionals to do things?

 

[DavidS877]

But no, we have to have a vendor to give us support. After all, why hire professionals to do things?

The problem is professionals who can do actual support are pretty rare. I mean RedHat can't hire any so how you can you expect a business whose primary focus isn't IT to be able to hire any. I think so far in my career the number of times RH support had fixed an issue before I figured it out is maybe once, out of hundreds of attempts. It's even worse when you have the fix and you try and explain to them "Please send this to someone in your organization who understands computers so it can get put into the Linux kernel." or whatever package they broke this time.

This has been brought to you by the letters R and H and the word sucks.

 

[Nice Stick]

Debian is very solid, and I don't really care about the people behind it either.

You don't care about them, but they care about you. Do you really want to run software from unstable, untrustworthy people who want to ban you from existence? Troons are famous in some communities for putting backdoors in things.

 

[DavidS877]

Here's the photo from DebConf 25. They do have a pride flag, they do not have the gay nigger trans pride flag.

You can zoom in and see if you see anyone interesting.
Here's a few interesting ones from the rest of the photos I found.

 

[Betonhaus]

What's the best htpc DE for Linux? Something I can install on Linux Mint and have a dedicated user that logs into it at startup and it handles Emby and YouTube? Maybe emulators but the intended computer is a potato

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Debian is very solid, and I don't really care about the people behind it either.

Yes, but you can just use Devuan, which has all the Debian advantages without the main disadvantage and the dangerous freaks.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

What distro would you recommend for running a self-hosted server (for running a Matrix instance, Teamspeak server and cloud-storage). I currently use Artix Linux and have Mint setup on another machine, but I'm not super familiar with the pros/cons of these distros when using them as a server environment. I've seen Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS but I kinda hate Debian/Ubuntu binaries so would any fellas here recommend a good server-oriented distro?

 

[WhiteNight]

I used to use Ubuntu (and later Xubuntu because fuck the bloated mess that KDE has become) but their increasing insistence on treating the user as fundamentally retarded finally hit my last nerve when they insisted on everything being a Flatpak.

As I understand, it is not Flatpaks but Snaps that Canonical via Ubuntu is trying to force on everyone. Snaps are much worse since they're centralized.

As an example of pushback, Mint is based on Ubuntu, but they have opted to remove and block Snap (though this can be overridden). This is explained in their blog post https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906

 

[SCV]

I would recommend checking the package lists for both Void and Artix and seeing if they have what you need. It looks like it's technically possible to use the AUR on Artix, but I would imagine a lot of AUR builds would fail because no systemd.

This isn't really an issue. The only hassle I've run into is some packages that want to run a service will only have a systemd script. It's pretty easy to write an openrc init script or often enough someone will have already done it and put it in the AUR.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

What distro would you recommend for running a self-hosted server (for running a Matrix instance, Teamspeak server and cloud-storage). I currently use Artix Linux and have Mint setup on another machine, but I'm not super familiar with the pros/cons of these distros when using them as a server environment. I've seen Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS but I kinda hate Debian/Ubuntu binaries so would any fellas here recommend a good server-oriented distro?

This is where Debian, or a Debian based distro would be the strongest. A server. Especially if you want long uptime.

If you want something that will be really light, and likely pretty solid, I could see alpine working for a server. I wouldn't recommend using the edge version. Which is basically their rolling release.

What specifically do you mean by hating debian binaries? I'm not sure I've heard of anyone that was bothered about that.