The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Frail Snail]

Within several days, he tried to install Steam using it, and a glitch in the package repository meant that by installing Steam it would actually remove most of his Pop!_OS system. All of this was told to him in a terminal. He read none of this, typed out the long access code, and promptly removed his own OS like a complete fucking dumbass.

I don't even know whose fault that is. Did he try to install a Wayland-based Steam package on purpose, despite his install apparently running on X? Or is this just more shit from know-it-all package maintainers? I wouldn't really expect a Linux newbie to understand dependencies at a glance and the differences between X and Wayland, unless they went full autismo with a clean install.

Relying on cloud services is not a smart move. Startups don't need offices or to be in the Bay Area/Austin, which means they don't need venture capital. A few startups will turn into companies with a Valve-like structure and crush cloud service companies. The monopolies aren't going to stick around forever.

It's not a smart move if you care about privacy or owning your data, but it's a smart business move as you can cut down your expenses and hire less maintenance staff. "Cloud" or, to use a more realistic term, mainframes is where we've been heading for some time. It's also the reason behind Linux receiving so much funding. Such startups may emerge, but remember that all over the world there already exist gigantic warehouses full of computing power that someone else maintains. That will be enough for most businessmen. To provide an alternative to that would mean burning your own money just to have a chance at competition: the Just Build Your Own Youtube problem. Not to mention that Valve, for all its wealth, also uses Akamai and Cloudflare for Steam's CDNs and as protection.

more often than not a company's goal aligns with the user base, they just want a stable piece of software, and are willing to pour money into it - but even then it's not a guarantee, just look at gnome, all that money and support can't stop a large chunk of people shitting on it and rather use something else. there will always be people who think they know and can do better or don't want accept the shit that's out there, sometimes they're successful, sometimes they're not.
outside of that other stuff like BSD's still get support, either private or corporate because people want to or there is a commercial need for it. that won't change for the foreseeable future, so longterm stuff should be fine (more or less).

For all the bitching people do about Gnome, everybody still uses it and the only sort of competition seems to be KDE. Not to mention that GIMP is the only piece of software I know that actually tries to maintain GTK2. If you ever thought about completely ditching it though, every major browser has it embedded so deep you'd go insane trying to replace it. Slow, annoying changes that are very hard to reverse or side-step creeping into codebases of software which many other pieces of software depend on is what worries me. I always keep an eye out for BSDs, in case I have a tech-induced mental breakdown.

 

[69ing Ur Mom]

It's not a smart move if you care about privacy or owning your data, but it's a smart business move as you can cut down your expenses and hire less maintenance staff. "Cloud" or, to use a more realistic term, mainframes is where we've been heading for some time. It's also the reason behind Linux receiving so much funding. Such startups may emerge, but remember that all over the world there already exist gigantic warehouses full of computing power that someone else maintains. That will be enough for most businessmen. To provide an alternative to that would mean burning your own money just to have a chance at competition: the Just Build Your Own Youtube problem. Not to mention that Valve, for all its wealth, also uses Akamai and Cloudflare for Steam's CDNs and as protection.

I wasn't saying people are going to create their own cloud hosting companies. They're going to use cloud hosting and remote employees to have such low costs established companies will not be able to compete.

Valve does the most profitable things and outsources low margin activities. I'm expecting shakeups in any market that relies on a B2B SaaS business model.

 

[Full Race Replay]

I just wanted to tell you guys i spent the last five hours figuring out how to hook up a wireguard tunnel and a squid http proxy so I can use firefox as a VPN-specific browser without turning on the VPN for my whole computer every time i browse for two minutes, so I can browse kiwifarms with you mother fuckers while being as lazy as possible. can I get some hearts please

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

I stopped taking him seriously when his kid killed a cat by shoving it into a dryer. He blamed it on the $15/hour nanny they hired, not that he and his wife worked at LTT 6 days a week and never saw their children.

Now THIS is content, what the fuck?

 

[IamnottheNSA]

"cherry MX browns are the gold standard of key switches" is what made me stop taking him seriously

"Yeah, yeah, that's right. Fuck me."

 

[♦️ King of Diamonds ♦️]

So I've decided I will be setting up a dual-boot of Windows 10 and BlackArch on my "personal use" laptop. However- I need to set Arch up on a secondary SSD (gonna give it about 600GB of space). Installing Arch seems to be a bit more complicated process than other Linux distros- especially on a separate disc, Does anybody have any video tutorials that could walk me through it, step-by-step?

 

[Plunkie]

So I've decided I will be setting up a dual-boot of Windows 10 and BlackArch on my "personal use" laptop. However- I need to set Arch up on a secondary SSD (gonna give it about 600GB of space). Installing Arch seems to be a bit more complicated process than other Linux distros- especially on a separate disc, Does anybody have any video tutorials that could walk me through it, step-by-step?

The Arch wiki's Installation Guide is the most recommended considering how prone things are to changing with each update.

Closest thing I've found video-wise is EF-Linux Made Simple, a youtube channel that does monthly Arch installs.

 

[419]

For all the bitching people do about Gnome, everybody still uses it and the only sort of competition seems to be KDE. Not to mention that GIMP is the only piece of software I know that actually tries to maintain GTK2. If you ever thought about completely ditching it though, every major browser has it embedded so deep you'd go insane trying to replace it. Slow, annoying changes that are very hard to reverse or side-step creeping into codebases of software which many other pieces of software depend on is what worries me. I always keep an eye out for BSDs, in case I have a tech-induced mental breakdown.

I believe @cecograph mentioned in this thread at one point that avoiding GTK outright can be done if you don't mind getting your hands dirty with things like Gentoo USE flags or - in my case to build packages without unnecessary systemd dependencies - custom Arch PKGBUILDs. For what it's worth, those major browsers also support packages like kdialog in order to be used as part of a KDE desktop without still throwing GTK cruft your way like the still-dogshit default file picker. For Chromium or anything based on it (e.g. Brave), you just have to run it with XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=KDE assuming you have kdialog installed or something equivalent.

By something equivalent, I mean the even more next-level step of in fact not even using kdialog, but a custom shell script posing as that executable in order to use whatever file picker of your choice. Have you ever wanted to use a GUI browser but with a CLI file picker? Here you go, you crazy bastard.

All of this, of course, seems extremely arcane, but there's surprisngly more fun to be had hacking together things like this to make everything run in your own style with enough work. Where there's a will to avoid muh bloat, there's always at least one way.

 

[69ing Ur Mom]

Now THIS is content, what the fuck?

Here you go. The video spells out how Linus and his wife neglected their children. They had a surrogate single mom raise them. As a surprise to no one, one of the kids begins to have behavioral problems and kills the cat for attention.

 

[Frail Snail]

I forgot to mention it previously, but there is a systemd alternative with feature parity in development called s6, with the 66 suite to accompany it. Something to look forward to.

So I've decided I will be setting up a dual-boot of Windows 10 and BlackArch on my "personal use" laptop. However- I need to set Arch up on a secondary SSD (gonna give it about 600GB of space). Installing Arch seems to be a bit more complicated process than other Linux distros- especially on a separate disc, Does anybody have any video tutorials that could walk me through it, step-by-step?

Do you need BlackArch for its intended purpose? If a general purpose system is what you're looking for, EndeavorOS is also an option to easily install regular Arch like you would any other distro.

I believe @cecograph mentioned in this thread at one point that avoiding GTK outright can be done if you don't mind getting your hands dirty with things like Gentoo USE flags or - in my case to build packages without unnecessary systemd dependencies - custom Arch PKGBUILDs. For what it's worth, those major browsers also support packages like kdialog in order to be used as part of a KDE desktop without still throwing GTK cruft your way like the still-dogshit default file picker. For Chromium or anything based on it (e.g. Brave), you just have to run it with XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=KDE assuming you have kdialog installed or something equivalent.

By something equivalent, I mean the even more next-level step of in fact not even using kdialog, but a custom shell script posing as that executable in order to use whatever file picker of your choice. Have you ever wanted to use a GUI browser but with a CLI file picker? Here you go, you crazy bastard.

All of this, of course, seems extremely arcane, but there's surprisngly more fun to be had hacking together things like this to make everything run in your own style with enough work. Where there's a will to avoid muh bloat, there's always at least one way.

He did mention it, but not how one could do it. In the case of Firefox, replacing the dialog would work but you still wouldn't be able to compile it with an alternative backend. They used to have a Qt build, but it's long dead because they use GTK even for natively styling checkboxes inside web pages. I don't know about Chromium, maybe it could work there.

It is nice to have that option for a lot of programs, but unfortunately some things can't be decoupled from each other at this point. Using something like surf or qutebrowser isn't really an alternative thanks to all the JS web shitting.

 

[♦️ King of Diamonds ♦️]

I forgot to mention it previously, but there is a systemd alternative with feature parity in development called s6, with the 66 suite to accompany it. Something to look forward to.


Do you need BlackArch for its intended purpose? If a general purpose system is what you're looking for, EndeavorOS is also an option to easily install regular Arch like you would any other distro.


He did mention it, but not how one could do it. In the case of Firefox, replacing the dialog would work but you still wouldn't be able to compile it with an alternative backend. They used to have a Qt build, but it's long dead because they use GTK even for natively styling checkboxes inside web pages. I don't know about Chromium, maybe it could work there.

It is nice to have that option for a lot of programs, but unfortunately some things can't be decoupled from each other at this point. Using something like surf or qutebrowser isn't really an alternative thanks to all the JS web shitting.

I do eventually plan to go into Cybersecurity/"ethical hacking" (I am set to take the 10-day Network+ "boot camp" in a few days, which I need to get before going for Security+, CySA+, and CISSP), so between the "big" three (Kali, Parrot, and BlackArch) I would prefer to use BlackArch since I already use Arch Phosh on my PinePhone and it's the linux distro I'm most familiar with. If you have alternate recommendations for Arch distros that are either built for gaming that might be better suited for my "personal use" laptop- and I can just put BlackArch as the only OS on my "work" laptop.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

Can someone offer up a suggestion as to why Kubuntu is taking a long as time to shut down? It goes to black then the Kubuntu logo stays on screen for roughly 3 minutes usually.

The os is on a Samsung ssd so it shouldn't be the drive

 

[Knight of the Rope]

Can someone offer up a suggestion as to why Kubuntu is taking a long as time to shut down? It goes to black then the Kubuntu logo stays on screen for roughly 3 minutes usually.

The os is on a Samsung ssd so it shouldn't be the drive

Systemd fuckery would be my guess (I've had issues in the past where it's waiting for some network-congested process to finish with a timeout of several minutes, it's absurd).

You can diagnose this stuff if you're feeling in an autistic enough mood. Your GRUB config (/etc/default/grub) probably has a line like:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="... quiet splash ..."

So remove the quiet so that it tells you exactly what's going on, and remove the splash so that it doesn't show the Kubuntu splash screen instead, and it might give you some more information to work with.

ETA: Don't forget to force the updated GRUB config changes through with sudo update-grub, if you decide to do this investigating.

 

[Frail Snail]

I do eventually plan to go into Cybersecurity/"ethical hacking" (I am set to take the 10-day Network+ "boot camp" in a few days, which I need to get before going for Security+, CySA+, and CISSP), so between the "big" three (Kali, Parrot, and BlackArch) I would prefer to use BlackArch since I already use Arch Phosh on my PinePhone and it's the linux distro I'm most familiar with. If you have alternate recommendations for Arch distros that are either built for gaming that might be better suited for my "personal use" laptop- and I can just put BlackArch as the only OS on my "work" laptop.

If it's that soon, I would just install BlackArch and not bother. Whenever doing important things on short notice, they somehow always get fucked up. However, if you feel like wasting some extra time, you can try EndeavorOS like I suggested previously or add the BlackArch overlay to a vanilla Arch install (they detail that on their website). Since you were concerned with Linux being installed only to your specified hard drive, any installer with a manual partitioning option will do. Otherwise the automatic process might detect your Windows EFI partition on the other storage.

Can someone offer up a suggestion as to why Kubuntu is taking a long as time to shut down? It goes to black then the Kubuntu logo stays on screen for roughly 3 minutes usually.

The os is on a Samsung ssd so it shouldn't be the drive

Check the size of journald and other logs systemd writes. If that does nothing, there's the shutdown debug script. I don't think there's a systemd-analyze blame option for shutdowns.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

Systemd fuckery would be my guess (I've had issues in the past where it's waiting for some network-congested process to finish with a timeout of several minutes, it's absurd).

Why is everything on Linux broken?

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Why is everything on Linux broken?

Why are some of us less nerdy about tech in general? It just becomes another learning experience, even if it has its own roadblocks.

I'm just glad both compromises AND workarounds exist equally within the Linux sphere, many of us wish it was the same in the other two courts.

 

[Knight of the Rope]

Why is everything on Linux broken?

Normally I'd agree 100% with this sentiment and remind you that Windows is a thing. But actually this specific scenario is one of the rare cases where Linux does it right, I think: by default the splash screen is enabled and all of the start-up/shut-down messages are suppressed, so that casual users are satisfied without having to see horrifying mid-1990s text crawls every time they boot up. But then when shit breaks, it's easy to turn all of the tedious logging and shit back on so that you can fix the problem.

(By contrast, shutdown takes a full 10 minutes on my personal Windows work machine these days, and who the fuck even knows what it's doing? It's hard enough to even begin to find out. And at the end of the day the solution typically has me on a phone to some tech support faggot as the inevitable endgame of any DIY investigation, and it's tiresome. I administrate systems with both OSes as part of my job, and there's a powerlessness with Windows that I just can't stand.)

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Can someone offer up a suggestion as to why Kubuntu is taking a long as time to shut down? It goes to black then the Kubuntu logo stays on screen for roughly 3 minutes usually.

The os is on a Samsung ssd so it shouldn't be the drive

It's a Plasma thing. It saves the desktop state before each shutdown and does some other stuff so it takes ridiculously long. Another reason why I moved away from it. Other DE don't have this issue. You could try turning off the save desktop state and see if it improves.

 

[Medulseur]

This has probably been asked before but what is the best distro for gaming? I did a bit of research on my own and PopOS, Ubuntu, and Manjaro came up quite a bit however I'd like a second opinion from fellow Kiwis since I don't really trust tech channels on YouTube.

 

[PFM]

This has probably been asked before but what is the best distro for gaming? I did a bit of research on my own and PopOS, Ubuntu, and Manjaro came up quite a bit however I'd like a second opinion from fellow Kiwis since I don't really trust tech channels on YouTube.

All that matters is kernel support of your hardware, and unless your GPU came out last week you don't have much to worry about.