- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice
- Thread starter tehpope
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NewRetroVagina23
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2021
Why? Any sane person would've jumped ship after Mojave. I jumped ship after El Capitan...Yes, I have OSX on my laptop.
- Joined
- Sep 5, 2019
So I finally got the latest version of Mint but haven't gotten around to testing. I hope it fixes some of my issues I've had.
If it's still shit I guess I'll wait until I can get SteamOS3 on my rig and see if that helps.
If it's still shit I guess I'll wait until I can get SteamOS3 on my rig and see if that helps.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
I might have worded it weirdly, sorry. I didn't mean that the *BSD support never moved past 2004, more like it is as comprehensive as the Linux kernel was around 2004. Back then you carefully had to pick your hardware to have a computer that actually will be able to run Linux, as Linux only supported pretty select and mostly older hardware. (especially everything with blobs like wlan was a bitch if not just downright impossible) Something that isn't really a problem with Linux in recent years, at least for mainstream hardware.
Good to hear that FreeBSD's kernel can keep up more these days though. I actually toyed around with it here and there over the years, but only for very short times. I always felt the ports system was inferior to Gentoo's portage, but that was also before the latter became incredibly bloated in weird places. I did admire the tooling though, especially the basic core stuff. It was all clean, lightweight, adhering to unix philosophy and well documented. GNU's util-linux and coreutils is an absolute mess in comparison, from documentation to unreadable source code to actual toolchain required to build it. (and it just seems to get worse each release) I think what comes close to the same cleanliness and low amount of dependencies these days in that area is busybox and I'm not surprised at all some distros use it exclusively instead, even though it's originally more intended for embedded platforms with very low resources. (although even the lowliest of ARM SoCs often have hundreds of MB RAM and more than one core these days) I also actually used to use tcsh for a while in linux and admired the less nonsensical scripting syntax, but found it didn't integrate well with the environment, so to speak.
I googled around a bit and FreeBSD might actually support my notebook just fine, so I might give it a shot again. I always found you're never going to seriously use something new if you don't just jump into cold water and install it on a system you actually intend to use.
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2018
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of NetBSD. They even have a slogan to that effect. How does it go, again?
- Joined
- May 12, 2017
I used to groan about how slow FreeBSD is when it comes down to supporting new hardware and features, but there is a blessing to be had: when FreeBSD adds support for a network card, a CPU, a GPU, or God knows whatever else, it actually fucking works without much need for hackish solutions to get yourself off the ground. I've often found that Linux tends to muddy up system configurations for new hardware with "quick and dirty" fixes to get certain types of hardware up and running. I've experienced this many times back in 2012-2013 when I was using shit netbooks and old ass computer towers that had Ralink or Broadcom wireless cards (i.e. I'd have to still set up a file in /etc/modprobe.d/ to get Ubuntu to recognise my wireless card). FreeBSD on the other hand actually recognised my wireless cards without issue or any need to create additional configuration files.
Also, maybe this is my ill-informed Linux nerd talking here, but I absolutely adore the fact that FreeBSD's sound system actually y'know... works without any real fuss? I can't tell you how many times on Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Arch, Fedora, or what have you where I had some weird ALSA bug or some issue with PulseAudio affecting my configuration (i.e. having to unmute my speakers via software despite explicitly creating a text file with the appropriate setup to keep that from happening). As far as package management is concerned, FreeBSD's binary packaging used to be awful prior to 9.x, but they immediately fixed that in subsequent releases with pkgng. Having fiddled around with FreeBSD 12.x in VMWare fairly recently, I can safely say that pkgng's just as fast and robust as APT/pacman on Linux.
I can sperg about it forever, but just do yourself a favour and try messing around with it on real hardware to see how you like it. I'm 90% certain you'll enjoy the trip down memory lane while also being pleasantly surprised by what it has to offer you now.
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2021
I started linux 6 months ago and I am very comfortable in Gentoo, don't believe the people saying it's hard. I got a 45% performance boost going from Pop! OS to Gentoo.
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2020
How much will I have to relearn to use gentoo over arch? I'm trying to ease my way away from windows instead of slam my dick into glass. I do not want to learn terminal all at once.
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2021
It's just the same except you have to compile the kernel yourself.
- Joined
- May 12, 2017
Well all this sperging about FreeBSD earlier gave me the impetus to try out FreeBSD 13 on another portable hard drive that I have knocking around. Gotta say, coming back to FreeBSD after 10 years is quite the eye opener. Back in the day, I tried my hand at FreeBSD 9.0 and I did manage to get as far as installing GNOME, Firefox, and LibreOffice. However, my shit hardware at the time combined with a piss-poor internet connection basically killed off any real impetus I had to experiment any further.
Truthfully, I wasn't even expecting FreeBSD to recognise my hardware at first because I built my PC fairly recently, but no: it actually fucking recognises everything in my configuration! I still haven't gotten up to properly setting up KDE5 and SDDM yet, but X11 works perfectly fine and the screen resolution is properly set too! Of course, I did have to load the amdgpu, linux, and linux64 modules to get the screen resolution right. Either way though, I'm genuinely impressed! Hats off to the FreeBSD team for being much more ahead of the curve than people give them credit for!
Truthfully, I wasn't even expecting FreeBSD to recognise my hardware at first because I built my PC fairly recently, but no: it actually fucking recognises everything in my configuration! I still haven't gotten up to properly setting up KDE5 and SDDM yet, but X11 works perfectly fine and the screen resolution is properly set too! Of course, I did have to load the amdgpu, linux, and linux64 modules to get the screen resolution right. Either way though, I'm genuinely impressed! Hats off to the FreeBSD team for being much more ahead of the curve than people give them credit for!
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2015
I keep hearing about GhostBSD. Has anyone here used it? Is it any good? It comes in Mate and Xfce flavors apparently.
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- Joined
- Oct 6, 2016
Sup niggas. I'm going to install Lunix Mint on my mum's pc because she is sick of the buggy shitpile that is windows 10 and I'm sick of constantly fixing it.
It's actually perfect for her because all she does is watch netflix and edit word docs. (Not saying that Linux can't do more but these tasks are piss easy for your average user and don't need mucking about in xterm)
I'm also going to be twiddling about with FreeBSD on a USB stick on my main rig. I've fiddled about in it using VirtualBox but that's buggy and not really representative of a true experience.
Of course, VirtualBox won't boot it
It's actually perfect for her because all she does is watch netflix and edit word docs. (Not saying that Linux can't do more but these tasks are piss easy for your average user and don't need mucking about in xterm)
I'm also going to be twiddling about with FreeBSD on a USB stick on my main rig. I've fiddled about in it using VirtualBox but that's buggy and not really representative of a true experience.
"Of course it runs NetBSD!"
Of course, VirtualBox won't boot it
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
I liked how you immediately got a usable console on boot (usable on resolutions above 640x480 without squinting, also not crippled like linux' vt) on my notebooks odd-ass resolution that won't fit most fonts directly, it was even sensible enough to center the console and not leave an odd looking bar at one of the sides. Even the mouse worked there! Also it had no problems with acpi stuff and top even read out what the remaining battery charge is. Now that's attention to detail. (and yes I know, you can do this all in Linux too, but it's nice to have this out of the box - it could be if distribution maintainers would take care of what they put together instead of hunting the next shiny systemd release) These were the little touches I bemoaned missing in an earlier post in this thread. You boot up something like Ubuntu as normie and it makes a very half-assed impression out of the box.
Sadly, FreeBSD doesn't support the WLAN chip of my notebook and my experiment pretty much ended there, as it doesn't have an ethernet port. I need to do a bit of research if that is a complete impasse (or if I need to add an firmware blob, which I think is probably the problem) but I need an internet connection on the device for that. I'll dig if I have an usb ethernet dongle somewhere.
- Joined
- May 12, 2017
That’s unfortunate to hear; glad to know that wireless networking cards still give people just as much of a headache as they did when I first started toying around with *nix. I’ve personally had my wireless card issues resolved by using “kldload run” but that’s because my old wireless card on my previous rig was a Ralink card.
- Joined
- Mar 4, 2019
Some people (me for instance) have to use it for development purposes.
Other people are just insane.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
I didn't have any problems with either. I think El Capitan was the last update I got...there's only so much point to continuing to try and update a 10-year-old machine.
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2022
I miss just having 80x25 VGA textmode which just works and doesn't burn 100% of the CPU trying to scroll up or repaint.
- Joined
- May 12, 2017
So I finally managed to get KDE5 and SDDM up and running on FreeBSD 13.0! Gotta say, it's nowhere near as painful as I remember it being. Also, this is my first time trying out KDE5 and I gotta say: it's leagues above the utter hell that GNOME has become. Call me slow on the draw for sticking with MATE over KDE5 for all these years. Sound works just fine, though the volume is a bit low for my tastes. This is still very much a work in progress, but compared to Linux Mint? This is infinitely more gratifying both in terms of setup and stability.
I've tinkered around with the various "desktop" spins of FreeBSD like the now-defunct PC-BSD and GhostBSD. GhostBSD is basically MX/Linux Mint/Ubuntu but for FreeBSD, in that it takes a rock-solid and stable "base" like FreeBSD and makes it more "accessible" to newcomers. On a surface level, GhostBSD is just as accessible to newcomers as Linux Mint, MX, et al are but there's a catch: no amount of polish will take away from the fact that you'll have to get your hands dirty in order to get stuff like Linux compatibility up and running. I mean yeah, the same thing can also apply if you're a newcomer to Linux from Windows, but the adjustment from a GNU-based userland to a more "traditional" UNIX-like environment is kinda jarring (especially nowadays when so many things explicitly use systemd as a hard dependency). GhostBSD is definitely worth your time, but I'd suggest trying FreeBSD first and seeing how far you can get by following the official FreeBSD handbook (an excellent, though somewhat outdated in places reference manual).
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I've tinkered around with the various "desktop" spins of FreeBSD like the now-defunct PC-BSD and GhostBSD. GhostBSD is basically MX/Linux Mint/Ubuntu but for FreeBSD, in that it takes a rock-solid and stable "base" like FreeBSD and makes it more "accessible" to newcomers. On a surface level, GhostBSD is just as accessible to newcomers as Linux Mint, MX, et al are but there's a catch: no amount of polish will take away from the fact that you'll have to get your hands dirty in order to get stuff like Linux compatibility up and running. I mean yeah, the same thing can also apply if you're a newcomer to Linux from Windows, but the adjustment from a GNU-based userland to a more "traditional" UNIX-like environment is kinda jarring (especially nowadays when so many things explicitly use systemd as a hard dependency). GhostBSD is definitely worth your time, but I'd suggest trying FreeBSD first and seeing how far you can get by following the official FreeBSD handbook (an excellent, though somewhat outdated in places reference manual).
Jimjamflimflam
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2020
Is there a podcast listener/downloader for Ubuntu that isn't a piece of shit? Clementine crashes constantly, Vocal is garbage, Cpod doesn't feature batch downloads. Just trying to data hoard by downloading all my podcast subs.