The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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So I got my server working with some basic firewall and stuff, decided to put it in the closet and finish the setup over ssh. I did not measure the closet before purchasing the case.
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Didn't realize PC cases are so big... I think I will just cut a hole out of the door and call it a design element, it will be better for air flow anyways.

Belisarius Cawl said:
How much better off would I be using a tiling WM instead of Xfce?
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I find that with the software you listed, I work best with dwm and st. St has no real shortcuts, and I have dwm setup such that all shortcuts require the windows key, which I don't use in those other programs, so it makes for a really intitive and unobtrusive experience. I highly recommend larbs.xyz if you want a quick relatively-ok setup to test it out.

Edit: Also I see that if I boot the server without a monitor it doesn't boot into the initramfs but instead goes to the grub commandline (I think, no way to be sure lol), I Wonder how I messed this up...
Edit2: bios was set up to check for non-present graphics card and error if not present. All works perfectly good now. Except the spacing issue of course lol.
 
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Trans Fat 41g said:
It all depends on how much you care about keyboard usage being prioritized over the mouse, the layout of your windows, etc. The i3 window manager is one of the more accessible tiling window managers, though you do have to manually select which direction you want the windows to spawn: aside the currently focused window and below the currently focused window. The default configuration file for i3 should suffice if you really don't care to deal with messing around so much. In my opinion, i3 handles the mouse just as well as the keyboard out of the box while others you have to go out of your way to find a balance.
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So basically I like to keep things pretty simple. In tmux, in the past, I split windows into panes, but that was kinda niche and I don't do it anymore. The only way things get split anymore is if I'm in an editor or using a console file manager. Emacs can use multiple "frames" (i.e. windows) but I never bothered with any of that nor tried to learn the keybindings. At pretty much any given time, only one window will take up almost the entire display (up to the taskbar). I don't see tiling at this level being terribly useful.
 
Belisarius Cawl said:
How much better off would I be using a tiling WM instead of Xfce? (And I say this as a user, at various points, of tmux, ranger, Vim, Neovim and Emacs ... I actually worry that the WM might end up getting in the way of those like Xfce already did)
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Can't really say. I mainly use stacking window managers like cwm and Wayfire. Xfce uses one too, called Openbox. It depends on how you set it up. You can either make everything a keybind, launch everything from a terminal using aliases you set in your .profile or wherever you put environmental variables, or use an application launcher like dmenu or rofi. You have to try it out for yourself. If you are on Xorg, I'd recommend cwm. I also recommend using unbind-key all first in your .cwmrc config first, and setting your own commands. The OpenBSD documentation gives you an example of how to set up the keys. If not, try Wayfire.

One thing to note: for program keybinds (see the xterm example from the documentation), the quotes do matter. You don't have to set it up, however, because cwm mouse binds come with a program launcher by default. Here's another config if you want more ideas on how to customize it. Launching cwm is easy enough. Just put exec cwm in your .xinitrc and run startx from a tty (you should have xorg-xinit installed.) Since you're on xfce, you could probably launch it through your login manager. You should bind restart and quit in .cwmrc before you tinker with it.
 
Frederica Bernkastel said:
Xfce uses one too, called Openbox.
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Ooh, that takes me back a bit. Xfce defaults to xfwm but it seems like openbox is also an option and before there was openbox there was fluxbox and even before that blackbox... (Yeah, my hair is falling out)

I don't know. I really appreciate the detailed rundown. I don't want to think it was just a waste. Having said that, the overall arc of my Linux user experience has been focusing my autism away from the window manager / DE and towards the applications running in those environments. I used to have such a bespoke WindowMaker environment and before that I was even using fvwm2. You can even see a very modern setup here (might even be fvwm3 now). There might be a theory of conservation of autism where the amount of autism is constant but you have to distribute it carefully. I think even Sherlock Holmes talked about this. (He did.)
 
wafflesies said:
my only real gripe with lunduke is if you follow software development at all and learn basic facts about how these companies operate, lunduke's positions sound completely out of left field, like he hasn't worked a day in the industry.
since he claims to have decades of experience in the industry, this makes it come across as he's putting his agenda first before the truth, and i think he purposefully misleads his audience.
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AFAIK he did actually work for MS and SuSE, but he's basically one of those dudes who really loves attention and tried to style himself as the Alex Jones of the open source world. His "agenda" is saying controversial shit so that people talk about him.

He intentionally misrepresents things for effect. There's no way he doesn't know how Linux kernel development works considering his history but we gotta be really scared of woke communist cells infiltrating it after Linus dies I guess.
 
Slav Power said:
Yeah a full ATX case isn't exactly compact. If you have an mATX mobo you're better off getting an mATX case. Also, is that an RB2011? I assume second-hand?
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It's ATX, I wanted to keep upgradability to add new drives or a pcie card. I thought the closet looked like it had plenty of room, alas, I was wrong. The router is a second-hand 3011.
 
Zeftax said:
The router is a second-hand 3011.
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Ah yes, that oddity. My fav Polish YouTuber that reviews MikroTik hardware talked about it. It was MikroTik's first ARM device and they had more plans for this series, including potential WiFi and LTE models with the mini-PCIe slot on the PCB, but ultimately they've made the RB4011 and subsequently ditched the 3011. Now that they've ditched the 2011 for the arguably worse L009 that has the same hardware as the hAP ax lite, they might ditch the 4011 as well now that they have the arguably better RB5009 at the same price point.
Betonhaus said:
Is anyone familiar with Winuxos? Would it be a good way to migrate people away from Windows that are pretty stubborn?
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We've been through this already weren't we? If someone is too stubborn to move from Windows because Linux doesn't run some software they need then they won't move, but if they don't have that lock-in issue then Mint with Cinnamon will be more than sufficient, especially given how Cinnammon apes the Vista-7 era UI layout which people are both familiar with and will always prefer over 10/11's retardation. This distro looks like a heap of crap. It gave me a captcha over me using a VPN that was in, I don't know, fucking Portuguese or some other Espanol habla flavor, and it has a "pro key" option. For a Linux distro. Hard pass.
 
Perfectly Innocent said:
But if kernel developers plan to remove 32-bit backwards compatibility from their x86_64 platform support (it has always been a configurable option in make menuconfig, after all) to complete the phase out of legacy code paths, then there needs to be a decent userland way to handle it (i.e. as performant as the existing way) implemented long before support is ever ripped out,
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whats annoying is they should know 32 bit computers aren't necessarily old
there's a sbc currently being advertised called the zimaboard which is an x86 computer.
of course there's also 32 bit embedded devices which can run a linux kernel.
the patent for x86 expired so china is currently manufacturing 32 bit computers, and they will end up forking the linux kernel to support them.
idk about armv7 being deprecated but those are 32 bit devices from~2015.
it's pretty insane to drop support for x86 when we're seeing development ramp up in this space.
 
wafflesies said:
whats annoying is they should know 32 bit computers aren't necessarily old
there's a sbc currently being advertised called the zimaboard which is an x86 computer.
of course there's also 32 bit embedded devices which can run a linux kernel.
the patent for x86 expired so china is currently manufacturing 32 bit computers, and they will end up forking the linux kernel to support them.
idk about armv7 being deprecated but those are 32 bit devices from~2015.
it's pretty insane to drop support for x86 when we're seeing development ramp up in this space.
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Oh that explains the AOSC/Retro Linux distro I found.

How long until the patents for AMD64 expire?
 
Belisarius Cawl said:
How much better off would I be using a tiling WM instead of Xfce? (And I say this as a user, at various points, of tmux, ranger, Vim, Neovim and Emacs ... I actually worry that the WM might end up getting in the way of those like Xfce already did)
Click to expand...
I went the tiling window manager route a while back. And I don't think I will ever be able to go back. I find it a lot more convenient. I particularly like ones that do what's called dynamic tiling. So they just put the windows on the screen in a set layout automatically. DWM is the first one to do it ( I believe). You can make i3 behave sort of similarly if you use the autotiling program. Usually it will be in whatever distro's repo under the name autotiling. If you wanted an easy way to try it.

I really like that I never need to worry about positioning windows. They take up the whole screen when it's the only window on the workspace automatically. then split the screen in half when there is a second window. And I really like that I can do everything with my keyboard. The only time I need to use the mouse is when I'm using a browser. Or some other GUI program.

Now when I have to use a desktop, when I'm installing a distro, or I have to use someone else's computer that has windows on it. It really sticks out how much more tedious it is having to manually position the windows with a mouse is. It's something that no one think's about because they probably grew up with windows, like I did. So you just do it automatically without thinking about it.

There is another benefit. These are usually fairly small, simple programs, at least compared to running a full desktop environment. So they tend to be a lot more stable than a desktop. And there aren't a ton of programs integrated into them. So if you chose to only install solid programs on it. You will almost never see any real issues, even running arch, any other rolling release distro. I see people complaining about issues with arch updates, and I used to wonder why I never have had any of the same problems. But over time I've come to realize it seems like most of the people that run into problems with arch were running full desktops (a lot of the time kde), and a lot of programs on top of that. And I keep things simple, where I can.
 
Belisarius Cawl said:
At pretty much any given time, only one window will take up almost the entire display (up to the taskbar). I don't see tiling at this level being terribly useful.
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Well that's basically perfect for a tiling WM then. All of them support some sort of tabbed view where they just show whatever window you currently are working with, and can just switch between them as necessary. Without having to fuck arse around with maximizing every window and customizing XFCE panels to be as small as possible. Certainly, that's how I usually use i3wm on laptops when browsing the web.
 
wafflesies said:
whats annoying is they should know 32 bit computers aren't necessarily old
there's a sbc currently being advertised called the zimaboard which is an x86 computer.
of course there's also 32 bit embedded devices which can run a linux kernel.
the patent for x86 expired so china is currently manufacturing 32 bit computers, and they will end up forking the linux kernel to support them.
idk about armv7 being deprecated but those are 32 bit devices from~2015.
it's pretty insane to drop support for x86 when we're seeing development ramp up in this space.
Click to expand...
antiX has great 32 bit support, they've been posting on the forum about how they want to continue offering it for the foreseeable future; it already includes a lot of homespun scripting and customization, so I'm pretty confident they can figure out a way to keep 32-bit going regardless of upstream changes. Don't let the politisperging on their home page dissuade you, the distro is solid. Its been my server distro of choice since I migrated from Alpine a few months back and it works like a charm.
 
What do people consider to be the best distros for a media server with docker images?
 
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