The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[James Edwin]

Stick to debian based distros (Debian, Ubuntu and many variants, Mint, PopOS, etc) and ignore anyone who says otherwise. Third party support is best on them and anything more complicated is going to scare off most Linux beginners.

Even though I have used Linux for well over 10 years I still use Mint. Every time I've gone to another distro, I end up going back to Mint.

tbh I find it way easier to break anything arch based, especially once you start using custom kernals.

the idea of "cutting edge" is bullshit and sure, custom kernal's give a little boost, but pop/ubuntu don't have worse performance than Arch or Manjaro. Distros are not where you see some magical performance difference anyways, kernals are, and even that's minimal. People use something like Zen and go "well it feels more snappy for sure" but it's just a placebo. At best it gives you maybe 3 extra fps in a game.

What you REALLY get a version that will be a little harder to fix and easier to break for the sake of features that you probably don't need anyways, and your repo will be a little more up to date but not by a crazy amount. If that's what you're into that's fine too. Arch+KDE+Xanmod is light as hell and you get everything first, but don't cry if your custom kernal breaks your system out of the blue.

 

[teriyakiburns]

The few times I've had to troubleshoot systemd have been a nightmare. The documentation on it is so bad. Meanwile runit ran perfectly fine. Any issues I had or wanted to change was much easier to look up.

The thing that annoys me about systemd is that all the problems it was claiming to solve had already been solved by other inits. The big wedge issue was service supervision, which was already handled by upstart, runit, and OpenRC with varying degrees of success. Process dependency management was the other big thing, but again, OpenRC and runit both handled this just fine, without forcing other things to be dependent on their quirks in order to run.

The problem is poettering (and red hat), wanting control over the ecosystem and being egotistical shits. Anyone with experience of pulseaudio should have responded to systemd with nothing but fire and brimstone just because of poettering's involvement.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Abominations like systemd always started with the excuse of "We have to solve inter-service dependency else pandemonium!11!1" but in my experience I just let them start in an arbitrary order and don't give a fuck and that literally was never a problem. Pretty much all common services you need are smart enough to know to wait when something isn't available yet

The big exception, as always on Linux, seems to be wi-fi. The state of "hardware present, drivers loaded, not connected to network, but will be in a few milliseconds to a few seconds" doesn't play well with dependencies.
Systemd, for all its many sins, actually does solve this problem by having a "network actually up" target that is waitable.

 

[byuu]

he thing that annoys me about systemd is that all the problems it was claiming to solve had already been solved by other inits.

Except for socket activation. Which barely anyone ended up using because it's just a nightmare to work with and very unreliable.

 

[khaine]

The problem is all distros suck in their own unique way. They all don't have packages you need, and then dealing with them outside of the package manager is a nightmare. The version of library x doesn't work with the software you need. It needs version y, which then needs z, a, and c. It can quickly spiral out of easily manageable control.

Also, each version has different locations for things making it harder to transfer knowledge between distros.

I like linux, but fark it would be so much better if people consolidated effort rather than duplicating the same shit.

 

[AnOminous]

Mint is OK but I hate recommending it because it uses Xorg which is its own can of worms and Cinnamon is unstable beyond fuck.

I am used to seeing Xorg everywhere and sometimes need it even on Windows and MacOS, so I guess maybe I've been numbed to its horrors. I haven't really had problems with Cinnamon in particular but I do almost no desktop optimization at all. My average desktop is a bunch of crap thrown right on the desktop.

I like linux, but fark it would be so much better if people consolidated effort rather than duplicating the same shit.

You can do a lot of things in Linux and many of them well. But good luck doing all of them in one distro. People like Windows because you can do more or less anything you can do with a computer on Windows, so long as you don't mind it being done in a mediocre manner.

 

[Frail Snail]

systemd sucks but I'd take it in a heartbeart over writing sysv-style initscripts ever again

They're polar opposites, but now there are other init systems existing inbetween. See, runit and S6.

I like linux, but fark it would be so much better if people consolidated effort rather than duplicating the same shit.

Another finger on the monkey's paw curls. Snap, Flatpak and Appimage appear in the distance.

 

[DavidS877]

tbh I find it way easier to break anything arch based, especially once you start using custom kernals.

the idea of "cutting edge" is bullshit and sure, custom kernal's give a little boost, but pop/ubuntu don't have worse performance than Arch or Manjaro. Distros are not where you see some magical performance difference anyways, kernals are, and even that's minimal. People use something like Zen and go "well it feels more snappy for sure" but it's just a placebo. At best it gives you maybe 3 extra fps in a game.

The main time I see the need for really recent kernels is new hardware support when I buy something that was released in the last 12 months, especially laptop quirks. For Debian I'm typically on Testing on those devices for the first year or so. Ubuntu has similar OEM/HWE support,

 

[Fcret]

They're polar opposites, but now there are other init systems existing inbetween. See, runit and S6.

True, alternatives are often better. But when I'm forced to use a system running systemd (which is quite often in some of my gigs), I much prefer it over the old days when I had to write a old-fashioned initscript for a new service.

My hottest takes are about PulseAudio. I think it's mostly fine these days although I hate how many programs require it just for mixing when ALSA can do that now.

 

[︎︎︎︎︎]

They're polar opposites, but now there are other init systems existing inbetween. See, runit and S6.


Another finger on the monkey's paw curls. Snap, Flatpak and Appimage appear in the distance.

Unpopular opinion: Appimages are actually great and have a reason to exist beyond the whole package-manager discourse. They completely remove the whole dependency tail and the inefficient memory usage is fine in most cases. i try to get everything in Appimages because its just so much simpler to maintain my applications.

 

[Frail Snail]

Unpopular opinion: Appimages are actually great and have a reason to exist beyond the whole package-manager discourse. They completely remove the whole dependency tail and the inefficient memory usage is fine in most cases. i try to get everything in Appimages because its just so much simpler to maintain my applications.

If inefficient memory isn't a concern, I would much rather take statically compiled software from my distro maintainers than an Appimage from the developer. After all, most programs don't even need that many resources to recompile if you kept the previous build's artifacts around. There always needs to be a tard wrangling layer between source code and deployment. Giving code monkeys full reign over everything never works out in the users' favor.

 

[︎︎︎︎︎]

If inefficient memory isn't a concern, I would much rather take statically compiled software from my distro maintainers than an Appimage from the developer. After all, most programs don't even need that many resources to recompile if you kept the previous build's artifacts around. There always needs to be a tard wrangling layer between source code and deployment. Giving code monkeys full reign over everything never works out in the users' favor.

True, but i still think Appimages have a real reason to exist. Everything being contained withing a single file and its universality makes it great for distributing stuff like office software or more normie type applications. In effect theyre a lot more like what normie windows users know. just download a single file from a sketchy website and run it. also makes uninstalling stuff trivial.

there will always be better but i think it has a real niche and is often unfairly criticized. Also i dont see anyone forcing Appimages on the masses like snap, flatpak... etc.

 

[James Edwin]

appimages and stuff like that are cool because portability is cool. They absolutely have an important use. Flatpacks are great too for keeping shit simple.

it IS nice to be able to have something backed up that will just work when you need it without having to install it for the one time you'll need it every odd months, and there are reasons to have portable programs on a handy USB stick.

 

[glicko45]

appimages and stuff like that are cool because portability is cool. They absolutely have an important use. Flatpacks are great too for keeping shit simple.

it IS nice to be able to have something backed up that will just work when you need it without having to install it for the one time you'll need it every odd months, and there are reasons to have portable programs on a handy USB stick.

yeah i totally agree, but i think my favourite appimage has to be BalenaEtcher. because most of the time i just cannot be fucked using the dd command to get shit done. esspecially when i need to burn images in a flash.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

The problem is all distros suck in their own unique way. They all don't have packages you need, and then dealing with them outside of the package manager is a nightmare. The version of library x doesn't work with the software you need. It needs version y, which then needs z, a, and c. It can quickly spiral out of easily manageable control.

What you do is grab the ancient version of the library from an old version of your distro (just unarchive the package) and stick it in the same directory as the executable, then make a shell script to run it that uses LD_LIBRARY_PATH so it looks there first before it looks for the libraries on your system.

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition still has this problem as far as I know. Video games actually were educational for once teaching me how to run software that was linked to libraries compiled before Jesus was born.

 

[seri0us]

Video games actually were educational for once teaching me how to run software that was linked to libraries compiled before Jesus was born.

Video games were pretty educational at teaching me how to computer initially.

"Oh shit, vidya won't run how do I fix this"

I even learned how to type quickly from them because I didn't have a mic back then so I had to type while playing at the same time.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I like my bwrap setup with some random binary rolling distro. Also lets me banish the dotfile insanity into reasonable subfolders and I can also decide which parts of my OS the software is allowed to see. (you'd be surprised what random things some software likes to touch and complains about when it's not there, e.g. firefox is incredibly curious about parts of a linux system a browser shouldn't concern itself with IMO) Or can just drop it all in a tmpfs and make the computer forget about it as soon as the program is closed. Or can overwrite specific files with custom versions for specific programs. Or can do a test run where you let a program clutter it all up and just drop the changes as soon as you're done, never letting them leave the RAM. Incredibly useful for many things, not only security. I'm abusing chromium in appmode as generic non-internet-connected PDF file opener and I couldn't be happier. And if there's something up with that particular chroot setup a rm -r washes all those troubles away.

Yes there's redundancy in these container solutions and that it seems reasonable is kinda insane in itself. But truth be told we're talking here at the very most usually about a few hundred MBs, things that wouldn't even be hard to manage on a 7 year old SD card. It's just too easy a solution to pass up not dealing with loads of shit. Shit's fucked anyways, things will never become sane again here.

 

[Ahriman]

It's pretty damn comfy.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Kudos to the Mint team for not copying Microsoft's retarded panel layout in Windows 11.

 

[ditto]

Kudos to the Mint team for not copying Microsoft's retarded panel layout in Windows 11.

But the GNOME team are taking notes I'm sure...