The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

Frederica Bernkastel said:
Apparently there's a bug on btrfs that broke a bunch of peoples' systems
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I tried to follow the link and got this faggot shit:
Screenshot_20250802_155325_Firefox.webp
*sigh*
 
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If anyone else is like me and can never get Ventoy to work right, you can DIY your own Windows boot USB from Linux simply: Set up your usual two-partition EFI setup, one VFAT ("efi-mount"), the other NTFS. You'll need a bit under a gig for your EFI and NTFS needed 6.1G on my 23H2 ISO. Copy everything to the NTFS mount. Copy everything but the sources dir to efi-mount. Make a sources dir on efi-mount. Copy only boot.wim to efi-mount/sources.

This appears to be a novel synthesis of solutions. woeusb and windows2usb both take an "every file in one partition" approach, that uses wimsplit to break install.wim into 2 pieces and then store that on VFAT; alternately, if your EFI supports NTFS, you can just shove everything in one NTFS partition. There's another approach they use that uses some ntfs-uefi bootstrap shim.

My novel synthesis costs the duplication of boot.wim and some small files (544M worth, according to du -sh) but permits the sources to exist in full and unaltered on the NTFS and an EFI-booting shim on the EFI VFAT. 544M is a bit bloaty for an EFI partition but meh. I expect you might be able to get boot.wim right out of the way with proper configuration of BCD, but I've already BCD-maxxed more than I want at this point.

If you'd rather use the other solutions, they're at https://github.com/ValdikSS/windows2usb and https://github.com/WoeUSB/WoeUSB

Edit: The windows2usb author has some fun opinions. https://github.com/ValdikSS/windows2usb/issues/3#issuecomment-771534058 Here he opines that the default Linux behaviour, where Linux writes finish after cached in RAM that makes unmounts wait until completely written, is misconfiguration.

This is a known [1, 2] Linux kernel issue, or, more precisely, a configuration issue: by default writeback buffer is very large, tuned for server workloads. It is not limited to windows2usb, you'll see this behavior on a simple big file copy with a file manager.
This could be fixed by either of:
  1. Reducing writeback buffer. Very simple one time configuration:
echo 'vm.dirty_bytes = 67108864' | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/60-dirty.conf
echo 'vm.dirty_background_bytes = 16777216' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.d/60-dirty.conf
sudo sysctl --system

  1. Enabling Writeback Throttling feature. If you have this issue, most probably your distro compiles kernel without BLK_WBT_SQ flag and you're using default I/O scheduler. If the kernel is compiled with BLK_WBT_MQ (MQ, not SQ), then you can switch the disk to mq-deadline scheduler to make throttling work. Something like this:
    echo mq-deadline | sudo tee /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
    This could be configured on boot with elevator=mq-deadline kernel command line.
Appimage build contains autofsync library, which limits writeback data in userspace. It should help and works for me. If it doesn't, please report. ArchLinux AUR script may include autofsync as well (replace 7z with a shell script which sets LD_PRELOAD to autofsync and executes real 7z binary with it).

I don't want windows2usb to tune writeback values or change I/O scheduler automatically, because that's potentially unwanted feature. I totally understand your frustration with Linux defaults, but it has nothing with this tool.
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Private Tag Reporter said:
but what the hell is a distro for anyways?
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saving time. same reason people use modpacks for games.

prollyanotherlurker said:
That is actually one of the things that gave me a distaste for debian. There were a few other things. But something similar annoyed me quite a lot. To the point I decided it's just easier to use something else that doesn't do all of that stuff for me. Because undoing it is way more work.
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fwiw it should be documented at least, so if you check the directory it's mentioned in the config, otherwise docs.

in the end each distro does it's own shit somewhere, either minor or major. unless people stick to one distro only that's what they inevitably have to deal with.
 
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Private Tag Reporter said:
I hate to follow up a question with a question, but what the hell is a distro for anyways?
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Imagine some train loving autists getting together to make a "real" train set, because mass market coomsumer Lionel sets don't meet their standards.
- The steam engine autist wants to make a steam engine set.
- The freight train autist wants to make a freight set, but only with 1950's engines and wagons.
- The diorama guy wants 15 types of plastic trees, because that's the minimum necessary for a basic set.
- Freight guy doesn't want any trees, just trains.
- Steam engine guy says 3 or 4 trees are okay, but 15 is too many.
- And on and on it goes.
Since they can't agree about anything, they all end up making their own special train set that has the things they care about.

Linux is the same way. They care about autistic issues like licensing, proprietary blobs, programs that are too large or too small, too many shell scripts or too few, developers who are too gay or not gay enough, etc, etc. Then they act like they want people to use their special toy, but they don't really like it when normies show up and just want it to work.
 
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Speaking of USB setup, I remember that once when I wanted to do something from the Linux userspace on a USB drive while in Windows, not wanting to do a live boot, I would just use VMware and do USB passthrough to a Linux VM and do what I had to do there. I remember that I even used to boot from a USB stick within a VMware VM after configuring it for a UEFI delay and entering it's boot menu like that. You could probably do the same for Windows only USB tasks under Linux, whip up a little VM, do a hardware passthrough, run whatever, close or freeze the VM for later use.

Virtualization is neat.
 
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prollyanotherlurker said:
I thought people already assumed there are malicious packages in the aur.
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Arch attracts a lot of idiots. No true and honest unixbeard is going to be running shell scripts from the internet without looking at them first (which is functionally what AUR does)

but hey whatever, time to put my troonsocks on and rice out my Arch install and give all my banking details to Slovenians
 
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The Count of Monte Cristo said:
Arch Linux's website is the only one I've seen that removed the fag drawing and replaced it with a generic green checkmark.
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There are one or two nitter or redlib (I forgot wich one) instances that use their own branding.
I don't get it, why use tranny furry pedo-bait when you can have glorious KiwiFlare DDoS-retardation?
 
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analrapist said:
Edit: The windows2usb author has some fun opinions. https://github.com/ValdikSS/windows2usb/issues/3#issuecomment-771534058 Here he opines that the default Linux behaviour, where Linux writes finish after cached in RAM that makes unmounts wait until completely written, is misconfiguration.
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If only there were some way to tell the mount command not to cache.
Code: 
MOUNT(8)                     System Administration                    MOUNT(8)
NAME
       mount - mount a filesystem
....
FILESYSTEM-INDEPENDENT MOUNT OPTIONS
...
       sync
           All I/O to the filesystem should be done synchronously. In the case
           of media with a limited number of write cycles (e.g. some flash
           drives), sync may cause life-cycle shortening.
If only, sadly he'll just have to rant about it.
 
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Betonhaus said:
If I recall the Jellyfin add on had the exact same problems
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I just got done getting the Jellyfin plugin working with Libreelec. It does work, but it's a bit jank compared to, say, on a Roku or the like. You can't do client key auth, you have to use a user/pass. And if you don't select your main server upon install, you have to enter it manually (no apparent way to autodetect UPNP or DLNA?), or do a total plugin reset and it will autodetect then.
 
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