The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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Since this is basically the general FOSS thread, what's been your experience with GIMP 3? I haven't experienced any issues and I found it to have a lot of QoL improvements like not having to do the whole pasted layer anchoring juggle so it feels like a proper modern editor and I've ditched 2.9 from my system. It's no Photoshop and it's still heavier than Paint.NET but I've been finding myself using it more and more recently.

Shame there are no good "opens instantly and can do a decent amount of editing" options to have something to replace MS Paint with. Just about every other alternative takes a while to load up and I need something that loads instantly to fill that niche.

GIMP is tolerable. The biggest shortcoming is how the lasso tool, to this day, PALES in comparison to Photoshop’s pen tool. I used to make forum signatures in GIMP many years ago and it got the job done. Just make sure you already have PNGs on hand because you CANNOT reliably make PNGs in GIMP.
 
Apparently you can run it out of cache and make use of most features offline
Useless. Cache is temporary. Not a single piece of software I have on my drive will cease to work whenever some other software component decides to clean up it's temporary files.

Case in point:
1764116308849.png
PhotoPea expects you to pay $500-$2000 per month to have the privilege of not being tethered to his fickle online service. He shuts it down, you're SOL. You go offline, you're SOL.

Again, Microsoft Paint, Paint.NET, GIMP, even my pirated copy of Photoshop, all of those will happily work as long as I have a working x86 machine and a steady supply of 230V/50Hz AC. That is the baseline for software that I could use. I don't know why this is such a hard concept to grasp that I deeply despise this type of software and there is no use trying to sell me on half-measures (if you can call them that) like relying on my browser's cache.
 
Again, Microsoft Paint, Paint.NET, GIMP, even my pirated copy of Photoshop, all of those will happily work as long as I have a working x86 machine and a steady supply of 230V/50Hz AC. That is the baseline for software that I could use. I don't know why this is such a hard concept to grasp that I deeply despise this type of software and there is no use trying to sell me on half-measures (if you can call them that) like relying on my browser's cache.
Run ProPaint in FS-UAE
andy-warhol-uses-propaint-on-commodore-amiga.webp
 
Shame there are no good "opens instantly and can do a decent amount of editing" options to have something to replace MS Paint with. Just about every other alternative takes a while to load up and I need something that loads instantly to fill that niche.
Take a look at Pinta. It's similar in UI to paint.net (it depends on .NET and even borrows some code), but GTK3. It doesn't have quite as many features, but it has more functionality than MS Paint and loads for me in about the same amount of time. It's more intuitive than Krita and definitely GIMP, and available on all major desktop operating systems.
 
It's more intuitive than Krita and definitely GIMP, and available on all major desktop operating systems.
I'm under the impression Krita is more capable though? I've seen a lot of good 40K art made with Krita.

You wanna know the best part? It actually comes with Compiz! Holy shit, I have not laid eyes on CompizConfig since I was like... 15 years old fiddling with the Compiz options on Ubuntu 10.04. The Fedora 43 MATE spin feels almost identical to the GNOME 2 session that Fedora used to ship with before F15 and the onset of GNOME 3. I'm so hideously out of practice, odds are I might bork something along the way, but I just love the fact that I have a desktop cube and wobbly windows again.

View attachment 8215249
I'm too old to care about rice and just use Xfce now but your post reminded me of a vintage ricer WM developed to this very day—with Samsung as a corporate partner no less!—Enlightenment. I was surprised to find out that Enlightenment is actually only a little less memory-efficient than LXDE.
 
@Ahriman @prollyanotherlurker

It's somehow even easier to get up and running with a graphical session in FreeBSD than I remember. Behold, a minimal Cinnamon desktop on FreeBSD 14.3 as a proof of concept!

Screenshot from 2025-11-25 18-15-08.png

I was shooting for Plasma 5 like last time, but apparently, Plasma 5 ain't in the Ports tree no more. I refuse to touch Plasma 6 after how appalling it was on Fedora, regardless of whether or not it was running Wayland or Xorg.
 
@Ahriman @prollyanotherlurker

It's somehow even easier to get up and running with a graphical session in FreeBSD than I remember. Behold, a minimal Cinnamon desktop on FreeBSD 14.3 as a proof of concept!

View attachment 8217042

I was shooting for Plasma 5 like last time, but apparently, Plasma 5 ain't in the Ports tree no more. I refuse to touch Plasma 6 after how appalling it was on Fedora, regardless of whether or not it was running Wayland or Xorg.
Ah nice, looks pretty comfy!
 
Ah nice, looks pretty comfy!

Steps I followed after exiting bsdinstall and booting in for the first time (roughly). JFYI: wheel, video, operator, and games are the groups I added myself to during the install process.

0. Log into your user account, then go su - to switch to root. Save sudo and doas for later.
1. Edit /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf and change "quarterly" to "latest." ee is FreeBSD's equivalent to nano
2. Execute pkg update then pkg upgrade to update your binary package tools.
3. Execute freebsd-update fetch and freebsd-update install to update the base system, then reboot
4. Execute pkg install xorg. I don't know, nor do I care enough to know how to install a minimal Xorg environment in FreeBSD. Just install the meta package, you'll be fine.
5. Double check the Handbook to see what graphics driver you need, then install it accordingly. For me, it's drm-kmod since I've got an AMD graphics card. Once drm-kmod is installed, I ran sysrc kld_list+=amdgpu to have amdgpu load on next boot.
6. Time to install a desktop environment. I went with pkg install cinnamon lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter, then sysrc dbus_enable="YES" and sysrc lightdm_enable="YES". Don't forget to add proc /proc procfs rw 0 0 to /etc/fstab. Reboot once the install is complete.
7. Fingers crossed when you're rebooting, If you did everything correctly, you'll boot into a hideously minimal LightDM, log in with your user account, and you'll find a black Cinnamon taskbar with hardly any applications. Hey, at least you have xterm to get everything else going

It's ugly as sin, highly utilitarian, lacks the polish that Fedora and Mint give Cinnamon, and I'm nowhere near close to finished (still gotta get the fonts, XDG user directories, my vidya, groups, permissions, and such set up) but y'know what? I fucking love this setup. It manages to hit that same satisfaction as Arch once did, except you're not deciding between doing things manually or just running archinstall. Oh, and you're starting from a text console and booting up to a graphical environment in under 15 minutes. If you skipped archinstall altogether and tried to do this all by hand, it would've taken you at least an hour, probably longer depending on how much you need to refer back to the ArchWiki.

Seriously, I cannot emphasise enough how incomplete yet also oddly satisfying this setup is. It's like when you reach that threshold in Arch or Gentoo where you installed X11 and you need to run startx to see if TWM will actually function correctly, then you just install the rest of your crap through xterm. Except here, my sound is autodetected and I can read the Handbook off Firefox.
 
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Good news:
You can get smug and satisfied and I get to be irrationally angry and seethe.

Even though despite the usual "RIP Windows" circlejerk Steve still made it abundantly clear that gaming on Linux is still buggy and that these results are not directly comparable to Windows.
You might like what this nigger has to say then.

 
Take a look at Pinta. It's similar in UI to paint.net (it depends on .NET and even borrows some code), but GTK3. It doesn't have quite as many features, but it has more functionality than MS Paint and loads for me in about the same amount of time. It's more intuitive than Krita and definitely GIMP, and available on all major desktop operating systems.
I heard about it, though it's basically a fork of Paint.NET before it closed it's source code, which was waaaay back in 2007. It still doesn't launch instantly, maybe it's even slower than Paint.NET, so it's not a good candidate for a "lightweight image editor that launches instantly". Something that's close to my requirement of "launches instantly" is LazPaint, but in my experience it's quite jank to use. It does, however, come with most of the features you'd expect from a robust image editor like layers, effects, wand selection and so on.

Also, I have no idea what footfags did but all of this modern GTK shit looks like this on Windows.
1764151491796.png
It has this gigantic black border extending far beyond the windows' actual border. Same thing happens with Gajim.
You might like what this nigger has to say then.

>play first second
>pause

Holy fucking shit no.

Besides, Steve's problem is that for all his objective research, he likes to be overly sensational and provocative. Wouldn't call it hypocrisy, just being hotheaded. Having "RIP Windows" in the title of a Linux gaming benchmark video where he doesn't shy away from all the glaring issues Linux gaming suffers from will do wonders to video engagement. People who hate Windows and Linux cultists will instantly click the video and then engage in flame wars in the comment section.

The biggest example of how Steve likes to get provocative is his GPU black market documentary. It got hyped to hell and back, and when it finally dropped it was really underwhelming. Maybe a half of it was dedicated to discussing GPU use in AI research in China in that university, and the actual smuggling part was just chinks going "yep, we do this" while casually smoking cigs and drinking tea. Technically yes, that's the black market in question, but it's extremely chill since China doesn't give a shit and find this type of embargo circumvention virtuous. Nothing like what it was hyped up as. It definitely made a mark given how GN was contacted by Secret Service to share their findings though.
 
Wouldn't call it hypocrisy
The video boils down to "He talks about privacy but uses muh youtube, which is worse than bill gates spying on your every mouse movement", then he wanted to see if the gamersnexus website has trackers and went to some chatgpu to find out, instead of just checking on the goddamn website.
 
It's somehow even easier to get up and running with a graphical session in FreeBSD than I remember. Behold, a minimal Cinnamon desktop on FreeBSD 14.3 as a proof of concept!
Freebsd isn't particularly hard to install. It does have the debian style installer after all (obviously with some differences). And if you are installing a desktop environment, it should basically just pull in a bunch of stuff for you immediately to get things up and running.

For me, it was a lot more painful. Because I have no interest in running any of those desktop environments. So I basically had to try cobbling together something working, to try making it like my window manager setup would be on linux, or at least close enough. And I ran into problems basically the entire way through trying to do that. Even then, getting the actual gui running wasn't particularly hard. It was getting it to work in a way that didn't feel like I was loosing a ton of functionality by moving from linux, that was where all of the pain came from in my time running it.And little things I just really don't like (some bigger than others), like you are basically stuck with setting up wpa_supplicant for wifi, and I think the cli for that is about as bad as a cli can be. The support being so shit that you have to run a linux vm and do pci passthrough to make it usable. And having to learn enough about the plaform specific vm stuff they have to make that work.

It felt like freebsd was full of that kind of thing. It didn't have proper support like I would expect, so I would want to use my computer like I normally do, try getting it set up on it, find it's not supported, or if I was lucky someone ran into it themselves, and somehow managed to find their own hacky way of trying to make freebsd work as a desktop os. So I could just use their method. After repeating that over, and over. It was just tiring. I just wanted to use my shit. On linux, I basically never feel like I'm fighting with the (in my opinion bad) decisions of the people that made the operating system, because my use case was slightly outside of the idea they have for how a desktop system will run.

For freebsd, it's in a place where it's good enough, that it pisses me off how much worse it is than it should be. At least for the desktop. It has cool featres (most were made with servers in mind), and has some nice ideas. But the desktop use is very clearly not a priority. Even with them saying they are now trying to focus on it again, I will believe it when I see it.

The crazy thing is the repuation that the operating systems I do like have. Like arch. It's probably the distro that overall gives me the smoothest experience. It's easy for me to make it do what I want. It's also probably the system where I can go from A to Z getting everything I like set up the fastest. So when I see people talking about how much time it takes, or how hard it is to use. Or how if you want to do actual work you won't use it. It's literally the exact opposite of my exerience. At least if you know what you are doing, it's one of the best options, it gives you just enough for a running system, then it gets out of your way, if you know what you are going to run, and especially if you have the foresight to make a script to jnstall everything you want, and copy your configs where they need to go, it's probably about as fast to have a running system on a new machine as nix, without the many drawbacks that nix has for normal use.
 
The crazy thing is the repuation that the operating systems I do like have. Like arch. It's probably the distro that overall gives me the smoothest experience. It's easy for me to make it do what I want. It's also probably the system where I can go from A to Z getting everything I like set up the fastest. So when I see people talking about how much time it takes, or how hard it is to use. Or how if you want to do actual work you won't use it. It's literally the exact opposite of my exerience. At least if you know what you are doing, it's one of the best options, it gives you just enough for a running system, then it gets out of your way, if you know what you are going to run, and especially if you have the foresight to make a script to jnstall everything you want, and copy your configs where they need to go, it's probably about as fast to have a running system on a new machine as nix, without the many drawbacks that nix has for normal use.
This is how I feel about Gentoo. Arch wasn't hard, but I lean on AUR so heavily that I figured just use Gentoo, and Gentoo eased out the rough edges I experience with AUR. Really do gotta give Guix a shot one of these days tho.
 
This is how I feel about Gentoo. Arch wasn't hard, but I lean on AUR so heavily that I figured just use Gentoo, and Gentoo eased out the rough edges I experience with AUR. Really do gotta give Guix a shot one of these days tho.
I like gentoo a lot too. The reason I say that about arch particularly, is you do need to know a little more to use gentoo effectively, than you do with arch. Not saying you can't run gentoo if you don't really know the benefits of what it does. But someone that doesn't is better off just using something else. But for people that get the idea. It's great.

For guix. I really can't comment because I haven't tried it (issues because of proprietary drivers, so I couldn't install it with the normal method). But I do think it's close enough to nix, that I can at least give some thoughts. Since it basically has the same idea as far as how the system works. I think for most people it will be a giant time waste. I know nix is. Almost no one actually needs the things they provide, and the very very few people that do, know exactly why they want/need it.

If you are running a desktop machine especially, I think you are probably way better off on gentoo than nix/guix. At least that was my take away. It was a giant waste of time. Took way more effort than anything else I can think of to do the same thing. The benefits made no difference for me as a desktop user.
 
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Almost no one actually needs the things they provide, and the very very few people that do, know exactly why they want/need it.
Hello. I am one of these people. I am on Gentoo because it enables my dependencies to match the software I want to run. I cannot run specific packages because I cannot make dependencies match. Some packages behave pathologically to avoid this, like Duckstation, which even goes to the length of modifying specific dependencies, and makes the build an absolute nightmare. Having multiple versions of the same package installed concurrently is how you get around this. Gentoo can vaguely do some of this with slots but it's not well-designed. Guix-style distroes resolve this better. I have no problems doing dev leg work to give back to a community that cares. Gnome is too corporate to care. I've tried there. "Your Linux kernel has a different flag than the RedHat config? That's not Linux. Not supported. WONTFIX."

Ultimately, Arch, Gentoo, and Guix all pivot on the capacity of the admin to edit text files to configure his system. They differ in what is automated.
 
The crazy thing is the repuation that the operating systems I do like have. Like arch. It's probably the distro that overall gives me the smoothest experience.
I feel like Arch was a lot harder a few years ago, before they introduced official install scripts. It still wasn’t ever *that* hard, just a bit involved.

I like gentoo a lot
I used to unironically use CloverOS (on a Thinkpad X200 no less), and the one thing I remember most about it was just how nice to use all the package management utilities were. Not just portage, but the additional search scripts as well. I don’t know why most distros seem to put so little effort into package manager search functions, but Gentoo’s were incredibly nice, at least as good as browsing repo websites or using the gui to browse, if not better.

I’m on Void now, and its package search stuff is pretty good. Not quite as good as Gentoo’s, but at this point that may be the rose tinted glasses talking.
 

Well, it was nice using KDE, but I have no choice but jump ship because Wayland is still broken and will probably remain incompatible with my 2016 Nvidia optimus laptop.
It's not quite the end yet... As there's still the fork of Kwin and now the plasma workspace that is X11 only, humorously called KDE-Lite. How long it'll take before the main KDE team gets really mad about it and tries to do anything they can to fuck with it (including attempts to brick software if it detects it's not on Wayland) Is anyone's guess.
 
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