The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

Penne Dreadful said:
Android's 1.0 release was 17 years ago and it's a substantially better fit for what you're saying here
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Not really, since SteamOS is a derivative of Arch and Android is Android. And any Linux cultist that brings up Android as proof that desktop Linux is viable is genuinely deranged. Linux is a kernel, and it can be used to make any operating system, and one of the most disingenuous things you could say is that "if Android uses Linux, and all supercomputers run headless Linux, and most routers run Linux, then desktop Linux distros like Debian or Arch are viable replacements for Windows". SteamOS is the closest to this viability and it shows just how much tard wrangling is needed for it to be even remotely close. It's also why general use SteamOS is never going to happen. Valve already has to tard wrangle Arch on a subset of handheld hardware for it to "just work" for the end consumer, and they sure as hell won't be able to do the same for the millions of different x86 PC configurations to reach the same amount of polish.

I do wonder if the deranged Linux cultists will keep brining up Android to persuade people to ditch Windows for Linux now that Google is locking down the ability to install your own software on Android. You know, something that even Windows doesn't do.
 
Dread First said:
Basically, parallelisation was sorely lacking and orphaned processes were a nightmare to manage.
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Service hierarchy was also a nightmare on any system more complicated than a basic webserver. You had to move around files and figure out start order by hand. systemd does do a fairly good job at this, the main issue is services that trigger their "I'm started" message to systemd when they're not actually started, causing dependents to fail because they're not getting the proper messages/can't see an open socket/etc.
Dread First said:
Why should Linux distributions be beholden to POSIX compliance when there ain't a damn Linux distro that shelled out the money for the certification?
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Because POSIX compliance ensures that you don't have a great deal of fuckery from one distribution to the next. A distribution is supposed to be nothing more than the org's version of predefined software and a way to manage it. The software itself should work similarly from one distro to the next. If you ignore POSIX compliance entirely, it's when you get situations like SuSE's implementation of udev being totally ass-broken despite the same thing working just fine in RHEL and Debian-based systems.
 
Susanna said:
Windows thread to complain about Linux in instead.
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I hate to tell you this but he does this over in the Windows thread as well. A genuinely dedicated autist who never stops complaining about Linux users when we all know already.
Judge Dredd said:
How is Linux and the community doing after the whole Win 10 end of support situation?
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I have had quite a few people switch over so I feel the numbers aren't entirely made up of Deck users. An acquaintance of mine is mixed on all these newbies because he thinks they will cry about Linux not being like Windows and make things worse, but who knows? Pretty sure they already do this anyhow.
 
Slav Power said:
"Could" is an understatement. If you switch the Steam Survey stats to Linux only this is the average that you get.
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The two most popular GPU's are "AMD AMD Custom GPU 0405" which is Deck's APU and "AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV VANGOGH)" which is a different identification for, again, Deck's APU. Together they make up for 26.81% of Linux GPU's, which corelates with the 27.18% share of "SteamOS Holo" 64 bit. Keep in mind that this iteration of SteamOS is exclusive to handhelds like the Steam Deck or the ROG Ally and rarely do people choose to use the modified version of it meant to run on other systems, so these numbers are very close to the reality that 1/4th of Linux users on Steam come from the Steam Deck.

If anyone feels like this is something to be proud of, all it means is that a corporation released a product that's selling in the millions and making them ridiculous amounts of money with them using Linux as means to achieve this product and sales. Any and all code contributions that trickle down to the masses are merely a side effect. Not to mention that if someone brings this up to show that people move away from Windows to Linux, they are lying to you. All that happened is more people are using a Linux based device, but it did not make a dent in the total amount of people using Windows. Because desktop Linux is still a steaming pile of shit, worse than Windows 11, and you need a company like Valve to tailor a distro to dedicated hardware to make Linux viable.
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Tbh computers themselves are products. Hardware is a product, software is by and large a product, even more literally when talking about video games and consoles
PC gamers will try not to admit they're just consooming products but all you're doing when you build a gaming PC is stitching Together a bunch of products and installing software on it
Often it gets brought up that we should buy Linux focused laptops or workstations and these are also products, so I don't see why steam deck isn't a valid Linux device just because it's a glorified tablet computer
I don't have a steam deck but I solely game on a Linux desktop, but I would consider steam deck users closer to what I have than a my own computer if it ran windows
 
wafflesies said:
I don't see why steam deck isn't a valid Linux device just because it's a glorified tablet computer
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The point is that the increase in Linux users on Steam isn't due to people leaving Windows but due to people buying Steam Decks, and the Linux on Steam Deck is incomparable to Linux on a regular PC. There isn't and there never will be a SteamOS equivalent for your average PC due to how much manual work has to go into making it work so well. Since this discussion was started by the question of "how Linux is doing after Win10 EOL" then this is the answer for the Steam Survey data: the Linux stats are inflated by the Steam Deck which don't reflect the reality of people migrating from Windows to Linux.

That, and a daily reminder that if you're waiting for SteamOS to save your ass, it won't. Either move to Win11 or move to Linux now, because you're not getting a savior distro to fix all the inherent issues of desktop Linux. You either deal with those yourself or you deal with Windows issues.
 
Ferryman said:
From what I understand there is very little that changes in practice, now you just have to pick whether you want sysvinit or sysd when downloading the ISO rather than install time.
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cgroups v1 was deprecated and removed from the kernel, making this a destructive or impossible process to choose init systems at boot now.

MX Linux is even closer to Devuan in two out of three scenarios because of this.
 
Ferryman said:
From what I understand there is very little that changes in practice, now you just have to pick whether you want sysvinit or sysd when downloading the ISO rather than install time.
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Yes apparently there were changes that no longer let you swap the init system nilly-willy so you have to pick what you want beforehand (ninja'd there) but still, somewhat funny to see a derivative of such a staunchly anti-systemd distro that is antiX to have the option to use systemd.

In other news, I don't know why but when I tried installing Devuan and Artix on my T420, both failed. Something during Devuan fucked up and it didn't set up the boot partition properly and Artix couldn't even load up the graphics driver with a colored blip in the corner even though bog-standard Arch installed just fine with archinstall, and so did Debian 13. Are there any other non-systemd distros worth looking into? Or just go "fuck it" and stick to mainstream Debian/Arch?
 
Slav Power said:
Are there any other non-systemd distros worth looking into?
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Guix System of course! Slackware is also very cozy.

Trans Fat 41g said:
MX Linux is even closer to Devuan in two out of three scenarios because of this.
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Slav Power said:
Yes apparently there were changes that no longer let you swap the init system nilly-willy so you have to pick what you want beforehand (ninja'd there) but still, somewhat funny to see a derivative of such a staunchly anti-systemd distro that is antiX to have the option to use systemd.
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MX's main selling point was ease of use + their systemd-shim, that let them finagle hard sysd-dependent software into working under sysvnit. With that gone, I don't really see how their sysvinit version is different to Devuan. The main thing that comes to mind is all the little scripts they borrow from antix, which credit where its due, is probably the single most unique Debian-based distro in an endless sea of reskins.
 
Ferryman said:
MX's main selling point was ease of use + their systemd-shim, that let them finagle hard sysd-dependent software into working under sysvnit. With that gone, I don't really see how their sysvinit version is different to Devuan. The main thing that comes to mind is all the little scripts they borrow from antix, which credit where its due, is probably the single most unique Debian-based distro in an endless sea of reskins.
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I personally find the swath of comprehensive gui tools, giving credit to AntiX by extension, the major selling point that other distributions like Ubuntu need to take notes from. You can even use an included gui tool to edit your bash.rc if you're so pleased.
 
Kaiba Cuqk63 said:
1. Totally retarded configs that they overwrite on update. Also managed to ship with a blatant security flaw for a while. you love to see it for all the new users. None of it is even packaged, it updates by cloning a repo and writing over a bunch of files.
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I agree this is bad, I don't know if the configs are retarded, but I can imagine they are bad if your already used to using hyprland a certain way. I also got into Arch at the worst time as it seems more and more blatant security flaws are being discovered.

Kaiba Cuqk63 said:
2. Dozens of unorganized scripts of which a tiny fraction are useful, many are basically what you’d get as the first result searching for “Linux how to ____”. For a handful of these things they have added a script just to write “pkill ___” or something that only gets called in one random spot in the configs.
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I know that most of the scripts i could make myself, but i dont want to. I am busy, I got a mortgage and shit, i dont wana troll stack overflow trying to find out how to do something (and then find out I learned the WRONG way because I didn't ask in the mailing list or IRC).

Kaiba Cuqk63 said:
So that’s brilliant we get more scripts to sift through and a scavenger hunt when you’re trying to debug your configs. There’s one for every single thing you can do with pacman.
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I personally find the script " scavenger hunt" happens more when I set up my own environment,. Omarchy has a nice menu that lists all of them for you which I really like.

Kaiba Cuqk63 said:
3. Grok AND ChatGPT, Google chrome by default!!
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Chromium* but you can always remove that. People like chrome.

As for ChatGPT and Grok. People make it sound like you are pulling massive bloated binaries for these things, the integration of these is literally one line in a script which you can easily remove. All it does is open a website without the header. Yer its dumb and you could do it yourself, but I dont wana.

Kaiba Cuqk63 said:
And what floors me most is they are receiving funding for this! Of all the projects that could use some help, it’s this one with a bunch of little scripts, a corporate maintainer, and other people’s software that’s getting it.
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People are always willing to pay for convenience.


Don't really care about omarchy itself, I am more in love with Hyperland, but I do like the features omarchy has. It got shit I dont care about but every operating system has that. I will take the L and admit that I am a MacFag so I am used to coming from more uniform OS's.
I look at Omarchy as a gateway drug to tiling window managers and using your keyboard more. If this install fucking dies, I will probs just do my own Arch + Hyprland if I am not too busy. But right now I am very busy.
 
Trigger Me Timbers said:
I personally find the script " scavenger hunt" happens more when I set up my own environment,. Omarchy has a nice menu that lists all of them for you which I really like.
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I think having good habits on managing your filesystem mostly get around that. These are some general tips, or little habits I've picked up over time that have helped me.

  1. put your scripts in their own directory. I use 2, one is just ~/.local/bin, I don't solely put scripts in that directory. Other things like applications I install locally go in there. and the scripts I do put in that directory, are things like wrappers for launching other applications, or scripts that act like an application in some way. The other directory I use is one just called scripts. A pretty common place to put it is. ~/.config/scripts. That's where most of my general purpose scripts go.
  2. If you no longer have a use for things move them to a back up directory. I keep a directory I use for backups, then make subdirectories within that for the different things I back up. One for configs, one for scripts I no longer use, or that I rewrote. One for etc files. You get the idea. Generally speaking every once in a while. Maybe every month or two (better to do it before things get out of hand). Just take a look through at least your home directory for files that have accumulated. Move old things you aren't using to the backup directory if they are things you spent time on writing. Or delete things you don't need (my general advice, is if you think you might need something, or don't know what it is, move it somewhere, see if anything breaks, if not you are good to delete it).
  3. The same general idea as 2. But with installed programs. I've heard of people just reinstalling because they installed hundreds of programs over time, and never bothered to remove any of the things they never ended up using. I've found over time. On a similar frequency to cleaning up files. It's a good idea to get the output of the explicitly installed programs for your given package manager (probably redirect it to a file for convenience). take a once over glance and see what you don't want. You could even do something like delete the lines you want to keep. then run pacman -Rns $(cat package-file), then it will remove all the ones you left.Obviously swap it out for the package manager you are using.

Also it was mentioned in the post you are replying too. But the scripts that just have pkill. I really don't see what the huge deal about it is. I have a couple scripts that have that. It's a pretty convenient way to send a signal to another script that's running a loop. Telling it to start over. If that script is set up to listen for a signal. There are all kinds of places where that kind of thing can be useful.
 
Susanna said:
You might not be ready or want to switch, but if I, a relative novice coming from MacOS, was able to switch over a decade ago, others surely can also. Linux isn't perfect, but it's by no means unusable or even particularly difficult nowadays. Just because you couldn't figure out how to install Arch doesn't mean some random gamer can't figure out a normie distro like Fedora or Mint. I've used Windows computers, and my experience is they break all the time. Linux, once set up, will keep running, as long as you don't go poking around in config files just because some idiot on Quora said that a custom kernel will improve your framerate or something. The issues come when you do dumb things like not update a rolling release distro for half a year, and then try to install basically an entirely new distro all at once, easily solved by just running a stable distro and letting it autoupdate (which, by the way, doesn't forcibly auto-reboot your computer every day like on Windows).
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It's great that it finally is easy to set up, I wouldn't have said that about Linux a decade or so ago. The hardware compatibility, install process and the quality of resources to learn have really come a long way in opening up access to Linux for a more general audience of users. Maybe it is not to the general public just yet, but Linux used to be mostly niche even within the computer nerd demo and it's gradually becoming less so. I am sure it could be better in some ways, but compared to before it's night and day. Also with LLMs w/ search functions you can usually get a lot of help/info very quickly which would have taken days of manipulating Linux nerds with "x sucks on Linux" type posts to give up in the past. I am well aware that LLMs should not be considered reliable or might give the wrong advice, but I would gladly take that over having to do social experiments with fat beards for hours. The failure to success rate is about the same in my experience, and in some cases it's better. For instance, if I ask a LLM how to partition a disk as a noob it will just tell you. If you ask Linux nerds they all have their own special way of doing it and will eventually all start fighting about it amongst themselves, ultimately ignoring the person who asked the question in the first place. Look up any "I am new, what filesystem should I use?" discussion for a good example of this. They will also retreat into malicious noncompliance if you don't ask your question in the "correct" way (ala the Soup Nazi, no fix for you!)
 
Akerman said:
. If you ask Linux nerds they all have their own special way of doing it and will eventually all start fighting about it amongst themselves, ultimately ignoring the person who asked the question in the first place. Look up any "I am new, what filesystem should I use?"
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I think using a wiki or a guide is better than either. It's more consistent than either. If you are lucky with an llm they might just give you word for word what you would find in those anyway, and not some bullshit it hallucinated. And you don't have to wait around for people to answer the question.

As great as man pages are, they definitely aren't the most accessible to new people. But the better linux wikis are definitely able to explain things in a way that new people should be able to follow for general tasks, and most people in 2025 know how a wiki works.

Then the guides make it even easier. Usually people will only bother writing those up for things that might be seen as a bit more complicated, where people feel like they need a guide to get them through it the first time.

I've had better luck with those than anything else, when learning about linux. Then later on I moved to man pages, but even still I'll check the gentoo or arch wiki before looking almost anywhere else. And sometimes tldr is nice if it's some command line flag I forgot. The only time I think any of the other options out there are better,is if it's some wierd niche thing. Then, it's pretty likely, an LLM will have no idea, because they probably got it's information from the places I would find in a search, and I'm stuck having to join an irc for the project, or something else. To ask the developer about it directly, or at least someone that might have a lot of knowledge about it that isn't readily available.
 
prollyanotherlurker said:
I think using a wiki or a guide is better than either. It's more consistent than either. If you are lucky with an llm they might just give you word for word what you would find in those anyway, and not some bullshit it hallucinated. And you don't have to wait around for people to answer the question.
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I am not a fan of a lot of the formatting on the wikis, sometimes I miss stuff because they place info boxes all over the place for every minor use case. When I followed the Arch Wiki installation guide the first time for example I totally missed the bootloader section since it's just a hyperlink to a separate article which breaks consistency with the other steps where there is at least some information and then a link to a dedicated page, and the info boxes sometimes clutter up various steps depending on the article and who wrote it. I knew that I needed to install a bootloader, I wasn't totally new to Linux when I did my first Arch install but I accidently missed it due to this break towards the bottom.

These boxes exist for kind of the same problem I talked about earlier, a bunch of nerd fights in the Talk pages about edge cases. Don't get me wrong, I like the info but for anyone trying to follow the guides it can be a bit overwhelming if you aren't used to it. I think parsing that information with something can be useful, don't have to be LLMs of course but for many newer users they are more used to them and so it will probably help them get into documentation. It did for me. I also have had some problems with depreciated stuff when following guides online, but that is a common issue with LLMs too tbf. - But man pages and docs are of course preferable if you are familiar with those already, LLMs just scrape them. That's why it's an entry point which I have seen be successful for a lot of newer users. I think the best documentation I ever read was the FreeBSD Handbook.

EDIT:
Actually scratch that, the best documentation I have come across recently is this from the GAMBAS docs after listing a bunch of limitations with Wayland and shade at the unmovable nature of the devs it just ends with this:
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:story:
 
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Valve announced the Steam Machine, so I have a fun idea for suicide by alcohol poisoning drinking game for you.
1) go into a comment section, any comment section online relating to this release
2) take a drink whenever SteamOS or "Valve saving us from Windows" is mentioned

Ideally, the people who post these comments would do the same so that the amount of no-good bottom feeders that expect Valve to do something that's impossible (Windows but Linux because Valve) comes down to near zero. Everything including the Linux ecosystem would be better off that way. It genuinely pisses me off how much people believe that Valve will make "Year of the Linux desktop" a thing because they're expecting them to create a literal drop-in replacement for Windows which is just never going to happen. People like this shouldn't have access to any x86 computers period and should buy a fucking console and a smartphone instead.
 
Digital Foundry has a video on it.
It looks good for a home style console that runs SteamOS (Arch); it's more or less a slightly less powerful XSX/PS5.
My only worry is that it has 8gb vram; which some games struggle with now (ie Monster Hunter Wilds at 1080p). Hopefully they have a way that the vram can be shared with the system (something similar to unified memory that macs use), or eventually release a 16gb vram version.
 
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