The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

awoo said:
that's what was true, but maybe not currently. their G502 was their best selling mouse but apparently their newer stuff suffers quality control problems. it's documented in some amazon reviews which is a real shame. not the first company to have a bestselling product, only to cheap out on manufacturing and tarnish their reputation
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Funny because I had an original g502 and I thought it wore easier than what I have now which is a g502 hero. It's like the rubber pieces of it are resistant to scratching, so it's lasted three or four years for me still looking new as long as I keep it clean. The original was real quick to have scratch damage on the sides I don't know if they change the material or what just over time you'd get little fingernail marks on both sides of the mouse.

The one complaint I do have about mouse tech now is that it would be nice if you didn't have to snap off plastic tabs to take them apart. Would be better if everything was held together with screws so it was a little neater to take apart, would be much easier to clean completely this way and I think the mice would last longer.
 
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BootlegPopeye said:
Funny because I had an original g502 and I thought it wore easier than what I have now which is a g502 hero. It's like the rubber pieces of it are resistant to scratching, so it's lasted three or four years for me still looking new as long as I keep it clean. The original was real quick to have scratch damage on the sides I don't know if they change the material or what just over time you'd get little fingernail marks on both sides of the mouse.

The one complaint I do have about mouse tech now is that it would be nice if you didn't have to snap off plastic tabs to take them apart. Would be better if everything was held together with screws so it was a little neater to take apart, would be much easier to clean completely this way and I think the mice would last longer.
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oh I hate plastic tabs. the cheapo lenovo mouse I use is held together entirely with one big screw in the center which is a great design
 
awoo said:
I digress but I just want to get a reliable mouse that has a little DPI and aim, is that too much to ask
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That DPI shit is a gimmick. The only thing you really need is a mousepad with some good friction, and you don't need to spend money on that either.

I'm using a shitty no-name mouse from China on a block of wood I've sanded down and I have no problem pulling off trickshots.
 
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eternal dog mongler said:
That DPI shit is a gimmick. The only thing you really need is a mousepad with some good friction, and you don't need to spend money on that either.

I'm using a shitty no-name mouse from China on a block of wood I've sanded down and I have no problem pulling off trickshots.
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Maybe. I still would like a mouse that has a good ergonomic shape and proper weighting. I'd probably have to try many mice to decide which I like tho.
 
I fell for the meme and ended up getting a trackball, only to find out it's actually really good. I'm heavily left-handed so "ergonomic" stuff usually just isn't available/useful for me. I got the Kensington Expert. People write it's poorly manufactured (for the price) and the tracking sensor isn't up-to-date. The poorly manufactured part I can't confirm, the tracking sensor maybe but I mostly think it's a skill issue because you get used to it. It's really fun to use and resolved all my long-computer session left-hand wrist issues that were cropping up in the last few months here and there. The pricing might be a turn-off but I really like this device. I also used to think trackballs were obsolete and a joke.

In linux, layout/button programming usually shouldn't matter because at least with X, you can freely program however the computer interprets what comes from input devices with onboard tools. e.g. my capslock key is my ctrl key when I hold it and my ESC key when I just tap it. All with X onboard tools. I recently switched to 60% keyboards I really like but which have no arrow keys. In the terminal and with editors, it is not a problem for me since I usually used either wordstar-esque or emacs keybindings. Sadly, outside of the terminal this is often not really supported (e.g. in the browser in the editing window for writing posts here) and I had to deal with inconsistent input keybindings and programs that often are way too reliant on arrow keys these keyboards don't have and are only to reach via function key combination.

The linux kernel also has the uinput feature, which basically allows you to create virtual HIDs easily that plug directly into the kernel. I wrote a small shim that blocks and redirects all keyboard input from my physical keyboard through such a virtual keyboard. Since the virtual keyboard is purely software, it can query the X server which window is currently focused and interpret keystrokes in different ways through a program-dependant keyboard map I can customize, so I can basically remap my keyboard per application and even have special keyboard modes, e.g. a keyboard combination I can press switches all input to the same shim running on my notebook via SSH tunnel, basically acting as a software KVM switch that only needs the linux kernel and ssh and is completely display-server agnostic. (contrary to things like x2go that need the X server)

tl;dr: if you run linux - as long as your input device is HID compliant - you do not need a driver for anything.
 
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AmpleApricots said:
basically acting as a software KVM switch that only needs the linux kernel and ssh and is completely display-server agnostic.
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I kneel.png
 
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AmpleApricots said:
tl;dr: if you run linux - as long as your input device is HID compliant - you do not need a driver for anything.
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I can confirm that proprietary mouse drivers (especially Logitech) are absolute garbage, from very recent experience. I also miss trackballs. Last time I used them I was in my teens and still had the hand-eye coordination and fast reflexes to be a sniper in Quake deathmatches.

To get my mouse in Windows to work the way I want it to, it took a carpet bombing of the registry and a dozen separate edits, but it only took one in Mint. Thanks xinput!
 
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Ahriman said:
View attachment 3537708

Very insightful.
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I'm sad at how hard the Linux crowd has gone 'back up data and fresh install' for upgrades again on some distros.

This shows off the challenges of doing it right, though. It's just a pity that we have a bunch of programmers telling us 'lol cattle not pets' about servers when you could instead have something as cool as a server with an OS install history going on thirty years. That's mainframe numbers.

I also wonder what this did for performance. x86_64 delivers minor to moderate gains all on its own (many more registers, and bigger ones) but also sort of unlocks access to a lot of fancy system stuff that might make a difference, even for a shell box.
 
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Alright Linux peeps I got some troubleshooting news I ran into. For those who use shared folders on kvm/qemu with both Linux host and guest, you'll find that applications on the guest that use the most recent libtorrent package will refuse to write to the mounted shared folder. It turns out libtorrent uses mmap to cache in memory before writing. When you mount the shared folder using 9p, use the option cache=mmap in fstab or wherever you run the mount command.
 
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Nothing_Much said:
While not technically Linux related, anyone remember Desura?
I do, I had a lot of games on there, but they've been in limbo for years thanks to a bankrupt company that bought it from LindenLab (originally owned).
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It's obvious that when all the freemasons met up and sacrificed children one year, they all decided Gaben is the immortal cloud owning master. Others may come and go, but Steam will be eternal. At least they like Linux.
 
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AnOminous said:
That's seriously windows shit and it's disappointing when my main response to a Linux install eating its own dick is just reinstall.
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I guess it's an old habit from when I was learning about OSs and stuff, but I've gotten so used to doing clean OS installs that if I were to upgrade my Fedora 35 into 36, it'd feel "dirty" somehow.

I need to do a clean OS install.
 
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AnOminous said:
I can confirm that proprietary mouse drivers (especially Logitech) are absolute garbage, from very recent experience.
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If you install proprietary drivers for a HID in the year of our lord 2022, your life has gone out of balance. The best ones are those that want to store settings in some cloud. (and will probably stop making basic device functions work when the manufacturer inevitably pulls the plug/dies) I don't know why people would put up with stuff like this, but they do. This comes from the fact that in many such devices nowadays there's something like an Cortex-M0 ARM SoC which is probably faster than the first few computers I owned. (Not really overengineered, these chips are just that cheap, manufactureres offer "packages" to HID manufacturers and everything) This always gives manufacturers ideas. Half-assed ideas. Their power consumption also really sucks often, either because the firmware is poorly implemented or they're just not as minimal as some or other MCU. That's why you see go battery life actually go down in many wireless devices these days. I was thinking the other day about standard batteries disappearing out of devices and thought it was some planned obsolecence/poor engineering thing. No. It's probably because many of these devices actually need the charge density of a bigger Li-Ion battery. Only exception are manufacturers like Logitech which usually offer insane battery life, mostly because they deal in volume massive enough that they've got their own silicon or can afford better engineers who actually know how to program a minimalist MCU.
AnOminous said:
I also miss trackballs.
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My first trackball experience was in the 90s too and it was somehow even worse than the ball mice back then. I remember literally thinking "how can this be worse". I might've just seen a very poor one. The Kensington is really nice and the sensor is too. I thought it'd probably take me weeks to get used to it, if ever. I got used the day I started using it. It's also really fun to spin the billiard-sized ball and land exactly on the elment you meant to select. Good for your wrist, too. Can only recommend it.
 
AmpleApricots said:
The Kensington is really nice and the sensor is too. I thought it'd probably take me weeks to get used to it, if ever. I got used the day I started using it. It's also really fun to spin the billiard-sized ball and land exactly on the elment you meant to select. Good for your wrist, too. Can only recommend it.
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Also fun to pull out and play with while you're waiting for shit to compile, plus you get the joy of cleaning the crud from the support bearings, which is something I've unironically missed from the mouse ball days. It's so satisfying.
 
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AnOminous said:
That's seriously windows shit and it's disappointing when my main response to a Linux install eating its own dick is just reinstall.
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to be fair, fixing an installation and just replacing it with a working new install are two different skillsets. I'd blame windowsfags switching to linux for that, but otoh they did switch, so maybe it's just a matter of habit before they wise up how shit windows is in that regard (because good luck ever fixing windows once it fucked itself).
 
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