The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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They like the ease of use and "just works". Then again it seemed most of them just used the web browser.
 
So I tried to lurk a bit in this thread regarding systemd and whether I should use it or not but I've been under the weather so I just wanna know if I should or not.

I'm just an end-user, no dev skills, don't use a cli, but can if needed for diagnosing issues with an install/program, I unironically think GNOME since GNOME 3 is the best Desktop Environment and do intend to use it again once I have access to my computer again.
I'm certainly privacy minded, and with all that said, should I stick to Debian or should I try out Devuan to avoid systemd entirely?
 
So I tried to lurk a bit in this thread regarding systemd and whether I should use it or not but I've been under the weather so I just wanna know if I should or not.

I'm just an end-user, no dev skills, don't use a cli, but can if needed for diagnosing issues with an install/program, I unironically think GNOME since GNOME 3 is the best Desktop Environment and do intend to use it again once I have access to my computer again.
I'm certainly privacy minded, and with all that said, should I stick to Debian or should I try out Devuan to avoid systemd entirely?
Hating on systemd is a fun meme but operationally barely any normal(ish) Linux users care. If you're just an end-user you probably won't even notice that it's there, so there's not even going to be an appreciable difference between Debian and Devuan for you. I say stick with Debian.
 
So I tried to lurk a bit in this thread regarding systemd and whether I should use it or not but I've been under the weather so I just wanna know if I should or not.

I'm just an end-user, no dev skills, don't use a cli, but can if needed for diagnosing issues with an install/program, I unironically think GNOME since GNOME 3 is the best Desktop Environment and do intend to use it again once I have access to my computer again.
I'm certainly privacy minded, and with all that said, should I stick to Debian or should I try out Devuan to avoid systemd entirely?
If you like GNOME and don't care about systemd then I'd suggest Fedora. It's as close to the "official" GNOME distro as you can get. If for whatever reason you don't want to use Fedora, then Debian is fine. Personally I prefer dnf over apt, and Fedora's philosophy of having up-to-date, mostly vanilla packages, but that's just my preference.
 
If you like GNOME and don't care about systemd then I'd suggest Fedora. It's as close to the "official" GNOME distro as you can get. If for whatever reason you don't want to use Fedora, then Debian is fine. Personally I prefer dnf over apt, and Fedora's philosophy of having up-to-date, mostly vanilla packages, but that's just my preference.
Yeah I do prefer Debian/Ubuntu-based distros just for the pure stability of them (not Mint because that one is just bad), I tried using Fedora 17 or 18 iirc and it was a buggy mess. What really shocked me was when I discovered Linus uses Fedora as his daily distro.
 
Anyone have any suggestions for figuring out what might be eating space on the root mount?

Debian 10, ext3 fs, fsck comes back clean, du shows that all the normal things that live on / are using 8gb, yet the partition is 30gb with only ~600mb free. Variations on find aren't turning up anything large or out of the ordinary either since it's a pretty minimal vps install that just runs a couple docker containers (all of which are configured to store their data including docker images on a different drive). I feel like I'm overlooking something but I have no idea what.
 
Anyone have any suggestions for figuring out what might be eating space on the root mount?
As long as a file descriptor is still pointing at a file ( = the file is still addressed by a process) the actual data doesn't get deleted, even if the file system entry was and it doesn't show up in the file system anymore. Tools like du don't register that. Maybe whatever setting the image up is doing something unclean? Maybe some kind of extremely spammy logging going on? You can try looking in proc or check with lsof. If you kill the culprit process, the space should be freed.
 
So I tried to lurk a bit in this thread regarding systemd and whether I should use it or not but I've been under the weather so I just wanna know if I should or not.

I'm just an end-user, no dev skills, don't use a cli, but can if needed for diagnosing issues with an install/program, I unironically think GNOME since GNOME 3 is the best Desktop Environment and do intend to use it again once I have access to my computer again.
I'm certainly privacy minded, and with all that said, should I stick to Debian or should I try out Devuan to avoid systemd entirely?
Linux autism has layers. Systemd hate is layers below what newbies should be exposing themselves to and you should never throw yourself into the deep end right off the bat. On alternative init platforms you will be doing a lot of service configuration manually, in the terminal. Learn how to use the OS on Debian first and, if you ever take the Poettering pill, the other side is also fun and usable. Not sure about privacy though, as this has nothing to do with it.
 
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Why would you be doing lots of service configuration as a noob?
You shouldn't, ideally, which is why I recommended Debian over Devuan for a complete newbie. I'd even say Mint over Debian because the latter has the whole free/non-free driver separation. Some programs refuse to ship non-systemd service files, so it's up to individual distros to make them work and sometimes they don't.
 
Logs were my first suspicion until it persisted between reboots. Tried purging docker's caches too but that wasn't it.

Anyways I figured it out (via mount --bind) : a mounted drive apparently went offline at some point and one of the services wrote a bunch of large files to the mount point where the drive should've been. Odd because I thought the find / -mount -size +20M would've turned them up, but I guess -mount makes it entirely ignore mount point folders even if there's files on them on the local fs.
 
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What's a good alternative to Fedora that isn't as "corporate"?
 
Linux autism has layers. Systemd hate is layers below what newbies should be exposing themselves to and you should never throw yourself into the deep end right off the bat. On alternative init platforms you will be doing a lot of service configuration manually, in the terminal. Learn how to use the OS on Debian first and, if you ever take the Poettering pill, the other side is also fun and usable. Not sure about privacy though, as this has nothing to do with it.
I'd generally prefer initd to systemd but I have no real quality reasons for either, and most of the systemd hate seems to be ideological rather than practical. It's just that the only time I had to do anything remotely related to startups or changes between init levels on servers, it was initd (Solaris specifically).

That was so long ago it's pretty much irrelevant now.

And then suppose you get all ideological about systemd. Are you then going to gimp your NVIDIA card and use the absolutely shitty open drivers that are available because you're that allergic to binary blobs?
 
And then suppose you get all ideological about systemd. Are you then going to gimp your NVIDIA card and use the absolutely shitty open drivers that are available because you're that allergic to binary blobs?
nmtui is fantastic, and NetworkManager is tied to SystemD, so it's not all bad. PulseAudio is pretty much a necessity for professional audio work in Linux. So not all Poettering shovelware is garbage, just most of it. The choice of binary logs with SystemD still seems fucking retarded to me.
 
If I was to buy a new computer this instant, I'd just install a SystemD distribution first and foremost to acid test things.

I just find simpler inits a demonstration of frugality and I can kind of respect that, but it isn't conducive to the times.

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Getting outside of init causes issues no doubt
 
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