The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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I used Manjaro for a bit, up until their SSL incident about seven-ish years ago. It didn't last long, because I thought, "if I'm going to use Arch, why don't I use Arch?", and then when said incident happened, I switched. I've never had issues of instability, but it's my autism box, so I try to keep the packages to a minimum and use suckless software on it. Unless somebody has a very specific reason, I'm not sure the point of using anything but the upstream distros.
 
I use Xubuntu almost exclusively in VMs via Hyper-V when I need to use MakeHuman, Darktable, or any other *nix goodie that runs like hot ass in Windows. I did use Arch for a time. Shit, is Arch still good or is there a distro that people like (and why)?
 
What's the deal with building Wine from source? How do you do this for distros that don't have a full set of i386 dev packages anymore?
 
I switched to Manjaro and it is infinitely more stable and less frustrating
As others have pointed out, I'm a bit cautious on Manjaro, as they do a lot of their things on their own and don't like to share info on what they're doing. From this there is also concerns about security relating to it. I personally use Endeavour OS like @no-exit stated (fork of Arch with a GUI installer; and some other nice features pre-packaged) and it works out quite well for my needs and as a good basis as an introduction to Arch based systems and the AUR Repository.
 
For some reason, I had gained the impression that Manjaro was Mandrake under yet another new name. Sad. Now I miss that stupid old distro again. First Linux I ever used, Mandrake. I remember nuking the entire thing with rm -rf / one time, because I was a tard and logged in as root.

Ç'est la guerre...
 
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I know this is personal experience and is about as useful as a random dickhead saying "werks for me" but in over a decade of using Linux manjaro is the only distro I've had totally and irreparably kill itself. 100% would not recommend to new users.

I made the mistake of using a Manjaro 'community' build (because I wanted the Cinnamon DE), and I had a similar experience. I've since been told that the quality of these 'community' builds varies greatly, but if that's the case they shouldn't be advertising them at all.

I'm sticking with Mint. Maybe that makes me un-elite or noob but it just WERKS.
 
I made the mistake of using a Manjaro 'community' build (because I wanted the Cinnamon DE), and I had a similar experience. I've since been told that the quality of these 'community' builds varies greatly, but if that's the case they shouldn't be advertising them at all.

I'm sticking with Mint. Maybe that makes me un-elite or noob but it just WERKS.

Good to have you guys around. I'm purging Manjaro from my Pi and gonna try my hand at DWM on Raspbian, it just works, it's there and it's stable.
 
Sorry if I asked this before.

When im playing rimworld on one monitor and a movie on the other there's a chance that my system freezes. I can hear sound playing sometimes but video and controls lock up.

Based on patterns it only happens when playing Rimworld. Is there a way to troubleshoot the why of this happening. What logs could I access that might clue me in? Also what's the best response when a ubuntu machine locks up?
 
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I'd like it if they came out with a Linux phone with a screen resolution higher than 1440x720. Is there something special about screens that specific size that makes them libre-friendly or something?
It's probably an issue with scaling text and guis properly on a small but high res display to actually make it readable. Or maybe it's a driver related thing?
 
Decided to drop Manjaro and go back to Kubuntu but made a pit stop at Mint for bit. Is it just me or does mint feel a bit dated? I got annoyed at the limited scaling options because I connected to my 4K TV and I still felt like the icons and default text were too small.
 
Sorry if I asked this before.

When im playing rimworld on one monitor and a movie on the other there's a chance that my system freezes. I can hear sound playing sometimes but video and controls lock up.

Based on patterns it only happens when playing Rimworld. Is there a way to troubleshoot the why of this happening. What logs could I access that might clue me in? Also what's the best response when a ubuntu machine locks up?
Ctrl + Alt +Backspace will restart X. Needs to be enabled in Ubuntu though. I think it's somewhere in the keyboard settings.

Otherwise, in ascending order of stuff to try: Ctrl + Alt + F1 to get in a virtual terminal, log in and kill the offending process. If keyboard input is locked then Alt + PrintScreen + R will take it away from X and give it back to you. Alt + PrintScreen + K will kill everything you're running.

For figuring out what's going wrong, journalctl.
 
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Sounds like graphics cards drivers locking up for whatever reason. It just happens in Linux sometimes. Maybe try disabling hardware decode acceleration for the video playback and see if it's still happening. Also learn about SysRq keys, or at least memorize REISUB. (e. g. by the sentence "Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken", give it a few seconds of a grace period between E and I)
 
Decided to drop Manjaro and go back to Kubuntu but made a pit stop at Mint for bit. Is it just me or does mint feel a bit dated? I got annoyed at the limited scaling options because I connected to my 4K TV and I still felt like the icons and default text were too small.
I don't like Mint's DE options all that much either. I switched to Pop and it feels and performs to my liking. People give Gnome a lot of flak for good reasons but I think Pop's tweaked Gnome offering is the least offensive.
 
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Sorry if I asked this before.

When im playing rimworld on one monitor and a movie on the other there's a chance that my system freezes. I can hear sound playing sometimes but video and controls lock up.

Based on patterns it only happens when playing Rimworld. Is there a way to troubleshoot the why of this happening. What logs could I access that might clue me in? Also what's the best response when a ubuntu machine locks up?
Oh also just thought about something else and felt like mentioning it in the Linux thread but rimworld and plenty of mods are coded poorly an are surprisingly absolute memory hogs. Rimworld itself is also, quite surprisingly, a VRAM (yes, you read that right) hog in newest incarnations so a double whammy if you don't have a dedicated graphics card. Linux' OOM (out of memory) killer has been incredibly fragile and basically broken for various reasons since forever (there are apparently attempts to solve this in userspace now, and there are out-of-tree kernel patches to make linux handle low-memory situations a lot better, that's neither her nor there though) and the result of that is that your average linux machines usually just grind to a halt if they ever run out of memory and that the OOM killer can take literal hours to resolve this. You might want to attempt to monitor your memory usage and see if that is what happens.
 
I don't like Mint's DE options all that much either. I switched to Pop and it feels and performs to my liking. People give Gnome a lot of flak for good reasons but I think Pop's tweaked Gnome offering is the least offensive.
I actually enjoy the look of Mint but find that Cinnamon is lacking as a DE. Played around with Lubuntu and MX Linux and don't understand the hype. Trying Zorin before I finally stop back at Kubuntu

From the looks of things I'm probably going to be a KDE dicksucker for a while.
 
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