The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice


Pretty interesting, seems like Ubuntu is losing ground to other distros.


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Fedora chillin' in the background. So far I've had a top notch experience with it (Fedora 35, KDE), super comfy and it just werks.
 

Pretty interesting, seems like Ubuntu is losing ground to other distros.

For a personal comment on this:
With Synaptic, dnfdragora and Octo (which can access the AUR), or after learning to use pacman, apt or yum in the terminal on a basic level, you know who is going to waste time with the buggy and slow Ubuntu Software Center, or the unneccessarily complicated launchpad system.
EDIT: I know Ubuntu can do apt in the terminal as well, but in my experience, it was sort of rigged (?), so that you could not avoid the USC or launchpads with it.
EDIT2: Same for Synaptic.
 
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Calm Window Manager is p. cool, it's also portable and has its own various prompts for changing windows, viewing groups, executing commands, etc.

As for the Ubuntu situation, not even System76 wants to put up with GNOME's bullshit anymore. Both them and the Solus Project made a statement at some point about the false perception of them actually supporting the gnome team's decisions, when they were merely fed up over the years, especially with Libadwaita.
 
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Calm Window Manager is p. cool, it's also portable and has its own various prompts for changing windows, viewing groups, executing commands, etc.

As for the Ubuntu situation, not even System76 wants to put up with GNOME's bullshit anymore. Both them and the Solus Project made a statement at some point about the false perception of them actually supporting the gnome team's decisions, when they were merely fed up over the years, especially with Libadwaita.
Ha ha ha. Oh that's so cathartic to read. Shame that while System76 is based for saying gnome is bullshit PopOS is still a dog shit distro "at least from my experience." I wasn't aware solus project even used shit from gnome so this is more surprising to me than it probably should be. The only thing I can think of that I use from the GNOME homos on my system is gnome disks to setup my internal drives & haven't touched it since & polkit.
 
Meanwhile I'm just the faggot using icewm because I wanted something simple without a bunch of bullshit bundled with it.
"i3" is a comfy desktop manager.

who is going to waste time with the buggy and slow Ubuntu Software Center
The removal of Synaptic was the beginning of the end for Ubuntu, and always will be the beginning of the end for any Debian based distro that tries it.
 
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So I'm fairly new to Linux (~2 1/2 years) and I always wondered: why do people use "Debian-based" distros over Debian itself? What do the other distros offer that Debian doesn't?
 
So I'm fairly new to Linux (~2 1/2 years) and I always wondered: why do people use "Debian-based" distros over Debian itself? What do the other distros offer that Debian doesn't?
Mostly because its easier to set up IMO. Debian, due to ideological reasons, tries to restrict itself to free and open source software, keeping away from proprietary stuff. Right off the bat this means you can't use Wi-Fi, because the vanilla installation does not have drivers for Wi-Fi cards. Also, the terminal based package manager apt and its gui Synaptic are set to repositories that stick to this principle, and modifying repositories involves copy-pasting URLs and assorted parameters into the right spot, which can already be scary looking to those used to the very simple installs of Android or Windows. Distros like Mint have simplified package managers, themselves with repositories already configured for repositories which have commonplace software.

If you want to install something in Mint, you go to the package manager, click around the icons, voilá. In Debian, you have Synaptic, which is GUI-based, so far so good. But you might want something not on the list. That requires configuring repositories. You need to find the URLs, copy-paste them into the repo menu, specify what kind of repo it is, which parts of it you are going to use. A single mistyped character can bork it, or maybe Synaptic itself, as long as you don't fix it. The latter is scary to casual users acclimated to the simplicity of Windows and Android, where you just click here and click there. Mint is closer to that.
 
So I'm fairly new to Linux (~2 1/2 years) and I always wondered: why do people use "Debian-based" distros over Debian itself? What do the other distros offer that Debian doesn't?
Ubuntu-fag here: ubiquity (as in the word, not the name of their software installer GUI) and at least the facade of professional corporate support.

Ubiquity: Ubuntu is everywhere in the Linux world. Sure, some of that is due to actual merit: being a user-friendly distro back in the day when installing Linux was a crapshoot and everyone you could ask for help was a "I use Arch btw"-level autist with no social skills was a tremendous boon. Ubuntu, to its credit, managed to capitalize on that crucial period of time to great success.
distrotrends-1.jpg


But some of it is also due to others' unbelievable fuckups. Here's what the state of cloud server computing looked like in 2020, for instance.
Distros2020.png


Of course, Red Hat was hilariously unhappy about this for some reason. Maybe they got tired of public goodwill and wanted to be seen for the supervillains they'd always dreamed of being or something? Dunno. Anyway, they tard-raged and took an axe to CentOS, a much-beloved derivative of their own product:
Screenshot 2022-01-21 at 11-49-40 IBM's Red Hat Just Killed CentOS as we Know it With CentOS S...png

Screenshot 2022-01-21 at 11-49-07 CentOS Linux ending because Red Hat simply refused to invest...png


The results were as predictable as they were fun. (Well, for everyone who didn't spend 2021 migrating critical infrastructure, anyway.)
Screenshot 2022-01-21 at 11-58-47 OpenStack User Survey Analytics and Data.png

Screenshot 2022-01-21 at 11-54-32 Huh, it's as if something happened that made people not like...png


As for my second bit about (the facade of) professional support, that's also a big part of it. When CentOS bit the dust, why did the vast majority of people bounce to either proper paid Red Hat (poor fuckers...) or Ubuntu, and not so much to Debian or Fedora or Arch Linux (lol)? The answer is professional support, or at least the pretense of it. That shit matters in the corporate world: if you can offer your customers even the pretense of being able to call you up and bitch about your problems to them in real-time, all of a sudden employers are much happier to sign off on a subscription.

Sure, Debian is rock solid, but when packages move into oldstable they're effectively dead, and none of the tranny Debian developers are going to bother supporting them anymore, even if a non-negligible portion of their audience still uses the packages. Whereas Ubuntu (and the other Linux flavors with a more professional bent) are happy to keep pushing security updates for a decade or longer, if you're willing to fork out the cash. And businesses are all too happy to pay for stuff, as it turns out. That means they get to claim it as a work expense, and has the upside of having someone 'on the payroll' to call up and blame when things go wrong. Employers love that shit.

Sure, most of the shit you can do in Ubuntu you can do in Debian instead. But to their credit, Canonical has done a good job jumping at opportunities fucking handed to them on a silver plate, for fuck's sake Red Hat, and Ubuntu is everywhere in the cloud/server/dev space these days.
 
Mostly because its easier to set up IMO. Debian, due to ideological reasons, tries to restrict itself to free and open source software, keeping away from proprietary stuff.
You beat me to it.

If you want to install something in Mint, you go to the package manager, click around the icons, voilá. In Debian, you have Synaptic, which is GUI-based, so far so good. But you might want something not on the list. That requires configuring repositories. You need to find the URLs, copy-paste them into the repo menu, specify what kind of repo it is, which parts of it you are going to use. A single mistyped character can bork it, or maybe Synaptic itself, as long as you don't fix it. The latter is scary to casual users acclimated to the simplicity of Windows and Android, where you just click here and click there. Mint is closer to that.
Synaptic is still the best GUI package manager that exists. The ability to export package download scripts from Synaptic makes it easy on those of us who prefer to download and archive packages for later offline installation.
 
Of course, Red Hat was hilariously unhappy about this for some reason. Maybe they got tired of public goodwill and wanted to be seen for the supervillains they'd always dreamed of being or something? Dunno. Anyway, they tard-raged and took an axe to CentOS, a much-beloved derivative of their own product:
CentOS was a problem for Red Hat and it was bound to be killed at some point. Yes, cheapskate users running prod workloads without shelling out for RHEL licenses was one of those problems, but it wasn't the only one. Red Hat decided to rip the bandage off, which was a bad move from a PR perspective, but it was the best choice for the whole RHEL ecosystem. It's now a clear direct line for contributions from CentOS Stream into RHEL, which wasn't the case before. Stream also serves as a preview of future versions of RHEL which provides value in test and dev environments. Alma and Rocky will be all the better than OG CentOS was for it, and even Greg Kurtzer acknowledges this.
 
CentOS was a problem for Red Hat and it was bound to be killed at some point. Yes, cheapskate users running prod workloads without shelling out for RHEL licenses was one of those problems, but it wasn't the only one. Red Hat decided to rip the bandage off, which was a bad move from a PR perspective, but it was the best choice for the whole RHEL ecosystem. It's now a clear direct line for contributions from CentOS Stream into RHEL, which wasn't the case before. Stream also serves as a preview of future versions of RHEL which provides value in test and dev environments. Alma and Rocky will be all the better than OG CentOS was for it, and even Greg Kurtzer acknowledges this.
If it was literally figuratively any company OTHER than IBM I might be inclined to agree with this. Never forget IBM's business model is to latch on to good software like a parasite and gradually kill it to sell support contracts. Everyone who wants to work in or use tech should be required to sign a monastic vow to avoid IBM at any cost.
 
It's now a clear direct line for contributions from CentOS Stream into RHEL, which wasn't the case before. Stream also serves as a preview of future versions of RHEL which provides value in test and dev environments.
What is even the release cadence anyway?

Packages for Fedora -> Packages for RHEL 9 Beta -> Packages for Stream?

Because RHEL 9 beta has packages that aren't on Stream yet.
 
installed linux on an old laptop that ran like shit because the odin project told me I had to.
the caul has fallen from my eyes, my brothers, I see the truth.
i'm sure this is far from an original thought, but this is like carfags and their automatic vs manual transmission dichotomy.
i'm still kinda retarded with it, but damn this rocks.
 
installed linux on an old laptop that ran like shit because the odin project told me I had to.
the caul has fallen from my eyes, my brothers, I see the truth.
i'm sure this is far from an original thought, but this is like carfags and their automatic vs manual transmission dichotomy.
i'm still kinda retarded with it, but damn this rocks.
The true third eye opening is when you realize the quality of your new computing experience despite having years and decades of practice with Windows and merely weeks or months with *nix.
 
The true third eye opening is when you realize the quality of your new computing experience despite having years and decades of practice with Windows and merely weeks or months with *nix.
The downside to that third eye is when you have smarmy faggots trying to throw piss in it like the arch fags who complain about you using manjaro or endeavour os instead of installing arch from scratch every single time.
 
Except at this juncture EndeavourOS is actually wiping the floor with Manjaro. How the hell do you maintain an arch distribution without signing packages correctly.
I use EndeavourOS so at this point I couldn't give two shits about manjaro. Only reason I think manjaro is still useful is as a functional starter distro for people who never used linux before. That & if for some reason you can't boot another distro in your rig. Had that happen with endeavour on my old pc. Manjaro would post, endeavour didn't.
 
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Except at this juncture EndeavourOS is actually wiping the floor with Manjaro. How the hell do you maintain an arch distribution without signing packages correctly.

To my knowledge, EndeavourOS is everything Manjaro is advertised to be, the only differences I think are their respective communities and the default settings. I linked the issues with Manjaro earlier in the thread, and I think LinusTechTips recommended it, which doesn't help at all.
 
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