The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Stabmaster Arson II]

To me, Archinstall is like a coin toss, no matter the support (SSD, HDD). I always end up installing Endeavour because I'm too retarded to install Arch manually.

Anyone who uses a rolling release as a daily driver is already plenty retarded in my opinion.

 

[Lord Xenu]

The problem with these "user-friendly" distros, is that something will inevitably break which can only be fixed by interacting with the command line.

Thats not so bad, it can ease the reticent user into trying at least. The support stuff, thats more of a problem. Thankfully documentation is widely applicable across *nix

Anyone who uses a rolling release as a daily driver is already plenty retarded in my opinion.

After a few dist-upgrade hiccups I have been considering trying a rolling release distro. I wouldn't on my server, seems like some people are now days.

 

[Stabmaster Arson II]

I wouldn't on my server, seems like some people are now days.

There's people out there chopping their dick off, people do all kinds of crazy shit nowadays!

 

[nah]

Thats not so bad, it can ease the reticent user into trying at least. The support stuff, thats more of a problem. Thankfully documentation is widely applicable across *nix

I meant to imply that the people who want it easy and "just working" won't bother to RTFM, or if by some miracle they do, they will look for a solution specific to their distro and won't grasp that problems among distros may have a similar root cause but require slightly different ways to resolve the issue. So for Nobara, the hypothetical user would look for ways to fix it for Nobara only, and not try to find a similar issue as it happened in Fedora and then apply Nobara-specific steps (if any) on top of it to fix the problem.

 

[Another Char Clone]

Anyone who uses a rolling release as a daily driver is already plenty retarded in my opinion.

I use gentoo unironically
I'll agree its not for everyone, but I don't think I can go back to Debian or Fedora after using portage, particularly package USE flags, masks and slots. I also configure and install the kernel myself.
It doesn't even come with an installer, just a chroot userspace tarball, "figure out how to boot your system yourself". For me, this means using something like SystemRescueCD (it is Arch based) as a starting point to bootstrap a new gentoo install.

Gentoo lets you do whatever you want, and yes, including sawing your dick off, or you could manage the rolling release properly so you don't have surprises with major upgrade jumps.

 

[Aidan]

I downloaded Ubuntu in a VM and I just started learning terminal a day ago, I have all the commands I've learned down but remembering the options is a bit harder, will I end up having to memorize all of those? Also, anybody got any tips for for a newfag?
I'm currently going through The Odin Project to learn some web dev shit but I've wanted to try Linux for a while just because I think command line is cool.

You will naturally remember stuff you use and end up never remembering other stuff that is infrequently handy.
Being comfortable using --help and man pages is the best thing you can do. 99% of the time with man pages I am lazy and just do the equivalent of "ctrl+f" , /sometext, to jump to something I remember is an option but forgot how to do.

I let linux videos run in the background sometimes to get introduced to commands and options I'm not familiar with and then I know something exists later on that can save me time in a script or something but that is admittedly very nerdy.

 

[AnOminous]

I let linux videos run in the background sometimes to get introduced to commands and options I'm not familiar with and then I know something exists later on that can save me time in a script or something but that is admittedly very nerdy.

Just the thing about numbers in man pages actually meaning something makes me feel slightly less retarded.

 

[Dread First]

Is Rocky Linux any good? I find myself craving Red Hat stability, but I’m still livid over CentOS being nuked.

Wait, what about Fedora Silverblue? Is that even usable for an autistic man’s desktop?

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Wait, what about Fedora Silverblue? Is that even usable for an autistic man’s desktop?

Rocky Linux was made by one of the founders of CentOS I believe. I would suggest giving it a chance based on that fact alone.

Currently rocking Fedora Silverblue on a mini pc. Insofar it feels like the flagship Workstation, just built on top of a system mostly divorced from the userspace. What you install from your end does not touch the base OS, unless it's a critical update to the base system of course. You can also roll back to previous deployed images. Layering packages with rpm-ostree and then rebooting gets redundant, but I can look past that for the stability. Get used to flatpaks, they're the recommended defaults.

OpenSUSE has a similar concept called MicroOS, but the offerings are either Release Candidate or Alpha.

 

[Dread First]

So... I'm trying to get my knowledge of Linux up to speed, and the PrivacyGuides writeup is giving me terminal amounts of fucking cancer.

The write-up starts off really strong and addresses major issues that Linux has, especially insofar as verified boot chains, Flatpak/Snap being inadequate compared to proper sandboxing, and the like (all 100% valid statements I agree with, mind you). However... their recommendations are abhorrent to me (i.e. Arch, Fedora, Tumbleweed), and their rationale is equally confusing.

These lunatics recommend that you stay with rolling release distros and their rationale is... not technically incorrect, but it's such a narrow paradigm from which to view the situation at hand. I'm an autistic Linux enthusiast like 90% of the people who frequent PrivacyGuides/PrivacyTools/etc but like... I do not have the fucking mental acuity to actually fucking handle maintaining a rolling release distribution like Arch, Fedora, Tumbleweed, or anything of the sort on a fucking Linux-based system. Linux as an ecosystem of broadly related operating systems who share the same kernel and overwhelmingly similar userland utilities (largely taken from GNU most of the time) is far too chaotic for me to trust with a rolling release solution.

Even though I didn't ultimately stick with FreeBSD because the software selection was too finicky for my tastes (excellent ports collection be damned), the one thing I will always praise it for doing better than Linux distros could ever hope to accomplish is their total separation of "core system" and "external applications." I know the situation has changed somewhat in the last decade because of how much power Silicon Valley consolidated within the realm of open source projects, but I'm 99.99999% sure that every fucking Linux distribution on the goddamn planet is literally just a slapdash amalgam of independently developed programs that just "coalesce" into a functional operating system when all the right versions align. It doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it used to, but a simple upgrade to a different system tool like Bash, glibc, or the kernel itself could completely bork your system if all the other parts that interact with each other aren't in complete lockstep.

FreeBSD (and other BSDs) handles this quite well because their core system is engineered entirely independently from the ports tree. The default shell, the C library, the kernel, bootloader, and all that other boring shit are all engineered together to make sure that they play nicely and don't break between upgrades. The package manager will default to quarterly package updates from the ports tree, but this is easily remedied by editing the proper text file and changing the parameter to "latest" so that you're always on the latest stable version available in the repositories. In practice, this means that you have up-to-date user applications while maintaining a core system that's less liable to break when you're applying security fixes. No such solution exists on Linux, which is a crying shame because FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer can only go so far.

Now let's think about my use case here: I'm autistic about Linux, there's a lot of Linux shit that I enjoy, but I don't log into my Linux drive often enough to really "maintain" it. If I only log into my Linux drive once or twice a month tops, what sense would it make for me to maintain a rolling release distribution if I would miss the advisory to implement fix foo before running "package-management-command update && package-management-command upgrade" in the terminal like I normally would for literally any other non-rolling release Linux distribution.

 

[XMassAllYearRound]

Guys just install mint, I learned how to use Linux there and it still is as good as it was 8 years ago in my opinion, if not better given right now it's just "Ubuntu: No flatpaks edition". It has access to all the packages that ubuntu has, some extra packages to restore the ones Ubuntu insists on installing as flatpaks, requires little maintenence given it's an LTS system and I think Ubuntu turning Firefox into a flatpak lit a fire under the repo mantainers given they're keeping up rather fast with the main release of ubuntu now where before they were lagging behind.

Mate version sucks though but I think Mate does that regardless of linux version.

 

[Mister Uno]

I use gentoo unironically
I'll agree its not for everyone, but I don't think I can go back to Debian or Fedora after using portage, particularly package USE flags, masks and slots. I also configure and install the kernel myself.
It doesn't even come with an installer, just a chroot userspace tarball, "figure out how to boot your system yourself". For me, this means using something like SystemRescueCD (it is Arch based) as a starting point to bootstrap a new gentoo install.

Gentoo lets you do whatever you want, and yes, including sawing your dick off, or you could manage the rolling release properly so you don't have surprises with major upgrade jumps.

I want to Gentoo, but I am too afraid to make the leap. When I used init I really liked it. Very simple.

 

[Aidan]

So... I'm trying to get my knowledge of Linux up to speed, and the PrivacyGuides writeup is giving me terminal amounts of fucking cancer.

The write-up starts off really strong and addresses major issues that Linux has, especially insofar as verified boot chains, Flatpak/Snap being inadequate compared to proper sandboxing, and the like (all 100% valid statements I agree with, mind you). However... their recommendations are abhorrent to me (i.e. Arch, Fedora, Tumbleweed), and their rationale is equally confusing.

View attachment 3741174

These lunatics recommend that you stay with rolling release distros and their rationale is... not technically incorrect, but it's such a narrow paradigm from which to view the situation at hand. I'm an autistic Linux enthusiast like 90% of the people who frequent PrivacyGuides/PrivacyTools/etc but like... I do not have the fucking mental acuity to actually fucking handle maintaining a rolling release distribution like Arch, Fedora, Tumbleweed, or anything of the sort on a fucking Linux-based system. Linux as an ecosystem of broadly related operating systems who share the same kernel and overwhelmingly similar userland utilities (largely taken from GNU most of the time) is far too chaotic for me to trust with a rolling release solution.

Even though I didn't ultimately stick with FreeBSD because the software selection was too finicky for my tastes (excellent ports collection be damned), the one thing I will always praise it for doing better than Linux distros could ever hope to accomplish is their total separation of "core system" and "external applications." I know the situation has changed somewhat in the last decade because of how much power Silicon Valley consolidated within the realm of open source projects, but I'm 99.99999% sure that every fucking Linux distribution on the goddamn planet is literally just a slapdash amalgam of independently developed programs that just "coalesce" into a functional operating system when all the right versions align. It doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it used to, but a simple upgrade to a different system tool like Bash, glibc, or the kernel itself could completely bork your system if all the other parts that interact with each other aren't in complete lockstep.

FreeBSD (and other BSDs) handles this quite well because their core system is engineered entirely independently from the ports tree. The default shell, the C library, the kernel, bootloader, and all that other boring shit are all engineered together to make sure that they play nicely and don't break between upgrades. The package manager will default to quarterly package updates from the ports tree, but this is easily remedied by editing the proper text file and changing the parameter to "latest" so that you're always on the latest stable version available in the repositories. In practice, this means that you have up-to-date user applications while maintaining a core system that's less liable to break when you're applying security fixes. No such solution exists on Linux, which is a crying shame because FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer can only go so far.

Now let's think about my use case here: I'm autistic about Linux, there's a lot of Linux shit that I enjoy, but I don't log into my Linux drive often enough to really "maintain" it. If I only log into my Linux drive once or twice a month tops, what sense would it make for me to maintain a rolling release distribution if I would miss the advisory to implement fix foo before running "package-management-command update && package-management-command upgrade" in the terminal like I normally would for literally any other non-rolling release Linux distribution.

Regarding rolling releases, I think they're overrated but it's not near as bad as you seem to think excepting Manjaro sometimes. So just don't use Manjaro.
What PrivacyGuides is sperging about there is relatively extreme anyway, you're not very likely to get pwned running vanilla Debian vs running Arch (btw) as a daily driver. All of the stuff on PrivacyGuides and PrivacyTools is like that.

It's Linux, use whatever you like.

As for the amalgamation of programs thing, well that's every OS. Windows and Mac just maybe hide it better and pay smart (and dumb) people to make that fact less obvious.

 

[Dread First]

Regarding rolling releases, I think they're overrated but it's not near as bad as you seem to think excepting Manjaro sometimes. So just don't use Manjaro.

Every time in the past that I've run a rolling release distro, I've had the unfortunate luck of being caught in the middle of a major change (i.e. Arch Linux migrating from SysVInit to systemd, Fedora upgrading to a new GNOME release which borks my extensions to make GNOME shell remotely usable, etc). I know that logically, the odds of shit like that happening again are minuscule, but I'd rather not chance it if I can afford to.

What PrivacyGuides is sperging about there is relatively extreme anyway, you're not very likely to get pwned running vanilla Debian vs running Arch (btw) as a daily driver. All of the stuff on PrivacyGuides and PrivacyTools is like that.

It's Linux, use whatever you like.

Well, I finally got Rocky Linux (9.x) up and running on my test drive. Obligatory neofetch screenshot for those who care.

I hate how all modern distros nowadays ship with GTK+ tooking instead of KDE, but it must be said: GNOME shell (especially with Dash to Panel on) is actually somewhat usable. Still far more bloated than the MX Linux Xfce install that I tinkered with a few months ago, but y'know: it's bearable.

As for the amalgamation of programs thing, well that's every OS. Windows and Mac just maybe hide it better and pay smart (and dumb) people to make that fact less obvious.

That's not entirely true. Linux specifically is an amalgam of various applications and programs that are all independently developed from one another. This includes core system tools like the Linux kernel, Bash, the C library, GCC, systemd, etc.

My original argument was that FreeBSD (and other engineered operating systems like OSX and Windows) does the "rolling release" shtick better because your core system utilities are managed separately from external applications you set up. With Linux as a whole, everything from the kernel itself to something useless and entirely optional like Firefox are all functionally the same: an external piece of software.

 

[Pavel Duracellov]

To me, Archinstall is like a coin toss, no matter the support (SSD, HDD). I always end up installing Endeavour because I'm too retarded to install Arch manually.

Archinstall tends to shit itself for no reason, last time I used it, it seperated my home and root partition and I didn't even have the option to disable it.
Try archfi, it's much more reliable and battle-tested.

 

[Neil McCauley]

The problem with these "user-friendly" distros, is that something will inevitably break which can only be fixed by interacting with the command line. Unfortunately, people who go for these distros are the same people who would never touch the command line. Coupled with the fact that these distros are niche, this means getting support for these issues is a miserable time for all parties involved. On a positive note, at least they describe what changes they are bringing to the table with this.

Every time something break the maintainer (GloriousEggroll from Lutris and Proton) just goes on Discord and tells everyone the commands to fix it at an almost Windows Command Prompt level of simplicity.

 

[soyjak]

Anyone who uses a rolling release as a daily driver is already plenty retarded in my opinion.

But I've ran Debian Sid as my daily driver for the last 5 years and I haven't had a single breakage.

 

[AnOminous]

I generally have a breakage of some sort on a monthly basis, but at least for years, every one of them is because of some dumb shit I decided to do myself that wasn't a good idea.

Exception being when Cinnamon exploded for no particular reason I could figure out. Seriously fuck Cinnamon.

 

[Safir]

What's the best partitioning scheme for a Linux laptop?

- 512 GB SSD, 32 GB RAM (max)
- no Windows, no encryption
- distro hopping
- normie home use
- several user accounts
- potentially massive docker shit

imma ping @Kosher Dill , sorry to bother you but $1500 is on the line and I like money

 

[Mikoyan]

What's the best partitioning scheme for a Linux laptop?

- 512 GB SSD, 32 GB RAM (max)
- no Windows, no encryption
- distro hopping
- normie home use
- several user accounts
- potentially massive docker shit

imma ping @Kosher Dill , sorry to bother you but $1500 is on the line and I like money

Single disk, normal use? I'd do just a single root. With distrohopping, if you prefer, keep /home separate to make it an easy swap out.

I gave up on autistic mountpoint minmaxing long ago, except with some of my special use ZFS datasets.