The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Win98SE]

I've got a question kinda linux related... My Thinkpad t480's motherboard finally took a shit. I'm researching replacement motherboards on ebay and noticed for only a few dollars more I can just replace the whole laptop. If I were to buy another t480 and throw my SSD in it, will it work? There may be small hardware differences, like no touchscreen (my old t480 has a touchscreen I don't use) but otherwise same processor etc.

Yes. I believe you'll just need to set up a UEFI entry on the new system unless you're using legacy boot methods.

 

[PFM]

Yes. I believe you'll just need to set up a UEFI entry on the new system unless you're using legacy boot methods.

Thanks. Yeah, legacy boot. I'll just use the old t480 for spare parts.

 

[AmpleApricots]

So far I like alpine on my Thinkpad tablet. I didn't install the default init scripts (which very thoughtfully are an optional package, god I wish all distros would just do this to prevent linux retard wars) but rolled my own and decided to use busybox inbuilt applets only. I haven't really handled a classic init like busybox' in a long time and actually like it quite a bit, maybe even better than runit I got a bit too comfortable with. It's a bit spartan but covers all the use cases I need on that device. Downsides of Alpine linux is the lack of even a few of the more common software packages in the common repositories. It's not difficult to build them yourself but it's not exactly low maintenance either.

Then I got bored and installed FreeBSD. An early observation: FreeBSD doesn't like anything radio related. Bluetooth works poorly or not at all. (yeah, linux bluetooth works better. Is there any OS where bluetooth actually works well?!) I resisted bluetooth for a long time and am still resisting it on the desktop, but on a mobile device with only one USB port you kinda need bluetooth and from what I could gather through research, the bluetooth code is basically abandoned. (this was not easy to find out to the point I'm not sure it's entirely true. Some of FreeBSDs documentation seems really outdated) OpenBSD even apparently just ripped bluetooth support out completely a while ago and never bothered looking back. WLAN is kinda, let's say, primitive. While my network adapter is supported it can only reach 802.11g speeds right now. Other things actually worked fairly well, including GPU and the touchscreen. (FreeBSD apparently started borrowing linux driver stuff quite a bit, and both GPU and wlan drivers are coming from linux, that's also why I believe their promise that wlan is gonna get better) There was some hackish solution to access the Thinkpad-unique battery control. Power consumption compared to Linux is about ~2W more in idle (which doesn't sound like much but is a lot for a mobile) although I doubt I optimized things as much as I did in Linux, especially considering that the CPU was on average 20C hotter than it is running Linux. (and linux is like, crazy efficient in idle on this thing, with screen off it goes down to 1-1.7W even beating many modern ARM tablets. The CPU cores even come fairly close to room temperature then - mind you, the computer is not sleeping in that state - it is still "on" and e.g. responding to commands via ssh)

Since I have used gentoo for over a decade and therefore obviously do not care about practical solutions, I've tried using the freebsd hypervisor bhyve to pass through the wlan card to a tiny Linux-VM and act as virtual router for the FreeBSD installation. This worked actually fairly well and I almost reached linux speeds. (For comparison, FreeBSD with it's own driver was about ten times slower in internet speed tests - 20 vs. 200 Mbps)

Otherwise really an interesting OS. Most striking feature is the coherence and the apparent reluctance to try running after the newest shiny in all regards. (Which I consider a big plus) Pity about the poor hardware support. Even if all hardware is supported, it's not supported quite as efficiently as in Linux, it seems. You can run Linux VMs to "drive" some hardware, just like you can maybe set up a minimal Linux "shim" with initramfs which boots directly into a FreeBSD VM which would be transparent to the user, basically having the hardware support done by Linux and the more abstract side of things done by FreeBSD. These approaches are pretty much the anti-thesis of low maintenance though, I think. For now I'll go back to Alpine. Maybe one day I'll own the perfect FreeBSD system.

 

[SilentDuck]

Otherwise really an interesting OS. Most striking feature is the coherence and the apparent reluctance to try running after the newest shiny in all regards. (Which I consider a big plus) Pity about the poor hardware support. Even if all hardware is supported, it's not supported quite as efficiently as in Linux, it seems. You can run Linux VMs to "drive" some hardware, just like you can maybe set up a minimal Linux "shim" with initramfs which boots directly into a FreeBSD VM which would be transparent to the user, basically having the hardware support done by Linux and the more abstract side of things done by FreeBSD. These approaches are pretty much the anti-thesis of low maintenance though, I think. For now I'll go back to Alpine. Maybe one day I'll own the perfect FreeBSD system.

At the behest of a classic gray-beard unix professor I remember avoiding Linux in favor of toying with FreeBSD. Was very glad I did as I wound up having to administer a FreeBSD server a few years after graduating. My critique which is mainly ignorant, biased and anecdotal is that with desktop *BSD even to this day is you are in the position of needing to buy or already own specific vendor hardware to be truly free of problems, many of which can turn out to be show-stoppers. Its just not meant for the non-server world. Not unheard of for a linux crowd but with BSD that list is a lot shorter and more critical.

When Yahoo was king they were the biggest FreeBSD shop out there but even they eventually abandoned it. Its like a million year old rock that isn't going to change to suite the whims of today. It's pretty cool but I'm not the autistic wizard of *NIX that computes for pleasure, such people will tell you BSD can do an orgy of anything and everything, in a caveat-free way. Unfortunately I'm just a simpleton that decided to start keeping an accounting of how much time I've lost in my life trying to make Unix Servers do desktop things that they don't want to. Eventually the ledger runs out.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

The best middle ground between Linux and BSD is an emphasis on the strongest Linux components coupled with BSD utilities, essentially?

 

[Kosher Dill]

pass through the wlan card to a tiny Linux-VM and act as virtual router

This is like the definition of "madlad" Qubes for hardware!
I suppose you can't argue with success though.

 

[Aidan]

I have a feeling 2023 will be the year of the Linux desktop.

At the behest of a classic gray-beard unix professor I remember avoiding Linux in favor of toying with FreeBSD. Was very glad I did as I wound up having to administer a FreeBSD server a few years after graduating. My critique which is mainly ignorant, biased and anecdotal is that with desktop *BSD even to this day is you are in the position of needing to buy or already own specific vendor hardware to be truly free of problems, many of which can turn out to be show-stoppers. Its just not meant for the non-server world. Not unheard of for a linux crowd but with BSD that list is a lot shorter and more critical.

When Yahoo was king they were the biggest FreeBSD shop out there but even they eventually abandoned it. Its like a million year old rock that isn't going to change to suite the whims of today. It's pretty cool but I'm not the autistic wizard of *NIX that computes for pleasure, such people will tell you BSD can do an orgy of anything and everything, in a caveat-free way. Unfortunately I'm just a simpleton that decided to start keeping an accounting of how much time I've lost in my life trying to make Unix Servers do desktop things that they don't want to. Eventually the ledger runs out.

Did the gray beard encourage casual use of FreeBSD like daily driving, or more technical usage that it's typically used for? I've met *BSD advocates but never had one push it on me as something I should use on my desktop.

That said sometime this year I will explore that experience on a tertiary machine just for fun. I think it's good to be familiar with some nuances as it opens doors just like knowing basic Linux does for people who seldom need to touch Linux.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Did the gray beard encourage casual use of FreeBSD like daily driving, or more technical usage that it's typically used for? I've met *BSD advocates but never had one push it on me as something I should use on my desktop.

I believe this is the position that @trollaxor has come to over the years. So that's, um, a thing.

I have enjoyed a quick fiddle with OpenBSD. The rc scripts make at least as much sense as old SysV init scripts.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Its just not meant for the non-server world. Not unheard of for a linux crowd but with BSD that list is a lot shorter and more critical.

I had direct flashbacks to the early 00s because Linux was exactly the same. You had to have the correct hardware. If you didn't it just plain wouldn't be usable. Wireless also was a total nightmare in Linux for the longest time. I used to have one of these Atom Netbooks that were all the rage in I wanna say the mid- to late 00s and the only way to get wireless working was to replace the wireless card with one that was actually supported by Linux. This barely is a thing anymore in linux, x86 computers and most common and even some uncommon stuff will just work, period. You still totally can run into weird edge cases and bugs though, for example intel gpu drivers being completely unable to support arbitrary refresh rates in specific constellations, specific things like that. (as example: for me it was important to get 50 Hz running for emulation on that Thinkpad. Just not possible because of a ratking of bugs that apparently has been around for years. The screen can do it.)

Compared to Windows, Linux is still way behind with multimedia stuff and I also wanna say not as efficiently using the hardware but Windows is such a shitshow at this point that even that marginal advantage in usage gets snuffed out by the billions of background processes and general poor performance of your average windows installation vs. a lean Linux setup. I don't use linux software because of it's ease-of-use or Multimedia features. I run it because I see it as pretty much the only choice right now for me. I just wouldn't be ok with that amount of blackboxing and lack of control over my own computer otherwise. Linux grants me a flexibility and amount of customization while still being performant and usable for day-to-day tasks that's unparalleled by anything else. That's why I have little understanding for all these terrible attempts to make the Linux Userland more homogenic and basically turn it into a poor man's Windows. We already have a poor man's Windows. It's called Windows.

The best middle ground between Linux and BSD is an emphasis on the strongest Linux components coupled with BSD utilities, essentially?

I kinda do that already basically, A lot of *BSD stuff has went into my repertoire over the last years. (e.g. doas instead of sudo) I have nothing against the Linux kernel, claims of bloat aside, it's as good as we can hope for and has some very cool features, like namespaces. The problem with Linux is mostly that a lot of the more common userland stuff is of questionable quality and scope. Combine that with nerds (often in dresses) wanting to plant their own flags and constantly reinventing the wheel and Red Hat manipulating in the background and you get to the total mess we are at now.

I like to completely throw over my entire workflow and try out new things every few months/years to not lose track of what's possible and also maybe learn new stuff. My next stop now will be shells as in my entire life, I haven't actually found a single shell I truly like. A lot of the more exotic and odd shells like fish or elvish have the problem that while often being a better interactive experience out of the box, they're trying to be too many things. A good shell these days IMO should be first and foremost a good interactive experience, instead they all also try to be new programming languages or completely change the way you're writing scripts which, IMO we seriously just do not need.

 

[SilentDuck]

I have a feeling 2023 will be the year of the Linux desktop.

Did the gray beard encourage casual use of FreeBSD like daily driving, or more technical usage that it's typically used for? I've met *BSD advocates but never had one push it on me as something I should use on my desktop.

That said sometime this year I will explore that experience on a tertiary machine just for fun. I think it's good to be familiar with some nuances as it opens doors just like knowing basic Linux does for people who seldom need to touch Linux.

No, this all was quite a while ago. I was bemoaning an AIX antique I had and he mentioned you could install a tiling system and use FreeBSD on your desktop, but I should learn it either way because it had taken over the tech industry (~y2k era) and free unlike AIX. The long dead academic graybeards of those days were not fans of Linux anything and some quitely seethed about such a thing even existing.

BSD is still formidable for networking, firewall, security, etc. and I'm sure many other things but I don't think knowing it gives you a vocational edge today (compared to something like Red Hat Enterprise or even Debian).

 

[SilentDuck]

I had direct flashbacks to the early 00s because Linux was exactly the same. You had to have the correct hardware. If you didn't it just plain wouldn't be usable. Wireless also was a total nightmare in Linux for the longest time. I used to have one of these Atom Netbooks that were all the rage in I wanna say the mid- to late 00s and the only way to get wireless working was to replace the wireless card with one that was actually supported by Linux. This barely is a thing anymore in linux, x86 computers and most common and even some uncommon stuff will just work, period. You still totally can run into weird edge cases and bugs though, for example intel gpu drivers being completely unable to support arbitrary refresh rates in specific constellations, specific things like that. (as example: for me it was important to get 50 Hz running for emulation on that Thinkpad. Just not possible because of a ratking of bugs that apparently has been around for years. The screen can do it.)

Compared to Windows, Linux is still way behind with multimedia stuff and I also wanna say not as efficiently using the hardware but Windows is such a shitshow at this point that even that marginal advantage in usage gets snuffed out by the billions of background processes and general poor performance of your average windows installation vs. a lean Linux setup. I don't use linux software because of it's ease-of-use or Multimedia features. I run it because I see it as pretty much the only choice right now for me. I just wouldn't be ok with that amount of blackboxing and lack of control over my own computer otherwise. Linux grants me a flexibility and amount of customization while still being performant and usable for day-to-day tasks that's unparalleled by anything else. That's why I have little understanding for all these terrible attempts to make the Linux Userland more homogenic and basically turn it into a poor man's Windows. We already have a poor man's Windows. It's called Windows.

I do actually recall buying a surprisingly expensive d-link PCI wifi card that was too slow anyway and posting in a certain distro forum for help in the correct newbie section and being ravenously shat upon by the resident server gorns/autists for wrong chipset/vendor and not having RTFM'd. It was an odd concept to buy hardware specifically for a peculiarity of a segment of an OS. The alternative is banging your head against the wall. At least in the days of DOS there could be eventual mercy upon your hardware mistakes. Not so with old timey Linux.

Atom netbook craze was great times because you could run Linux off the SD slot with persistence and not tie up USB ports or mess with dual booting. EEEbuntu! I settled on one but didn't keep it. Too small for my shitty eyes, and modable android/amazon tablets were the next thing and if you really wanted portability while dabbling with the arcane and unpredictable (early Cyanogen mod, etc) you have *arrived* fren.

Different today in 2023 is there is now an undeniable appetite with the technically inclined for something that is not Windows spyware. Distros are way easier to install, manage and not meltdown on you after the first week. Multimedia issues are managable compared to the days where working sound and Kodi not immediately crashing were both considered minor miracles.

 

[AmpleApricots]

BSD is still formidable for networking, firewall, security, etc. and I'm sure many other things but I don't think knowing it gives you a vocational edge today (compared to something like Red Hat Enterprise or even Debian).

Something I did stumble upon repeatedly when researching FreeBSD (and which was repeated like a mantra) is how Netflix and Facebook use FreeBSD on their servers. I don't know how true that is or how relevant the servers might be, so there's that.

Userland on FreeBSD is largely the same as on Linux when it comes to more complex, GUI driven software like browsers etc.. My guess is whatever you can do on any given Linux installation configured for desktop, you can do on FreeBSD. Just the kernel simply isn't as compatible or feature rich. If you have a reasonably powerful desktop (so the lost performance doesn't hurt) or an older one that's well supported and where everything is wired, you can probably use FreeBSD just fine on it if you don't need the excessive handholding and what I like to call "one-size-fits-none experience" of an ubuntu. If it is *better* I do not know. I feel that also depends on the user and how much the overlap is between use case and blind spots of FreeBSDs compatibility. Still, I guess it's fair to ask "why bother when there's Linux". That linux is overrun by terrible software like systemd is an understandable argument I've made myself in my past, but tbh not exactly a good argument since I've never once ran a serious system using systemd and I can guarantee you that you don't have to. I've successfully avoided even udev or eudev to this day. The only hard dependency to crapware I couldn't avoid so far is dbus, and that's because bluetooth. There's a good argument to be made that bluetooth itself is crap and should be avoided.

Atom netbook

I ran gentoo on mine. I am not kidding. Compilation happened with heavy help of the desktop, though. I didn't have a smartphone until a few years ago and still deeply dislike mobile OSes and while I had some fever hallucinations where I lived in a world where I'm absolutely carefree and do all my computing on an android tablet on a neat little stand with some chrooted linux for command line between juggling android apps as soon as my head clears I know I'd hate having that little control over what is happening on my computer. It is not the worst idea though if you don't care, especially if you don't care about stacking window management in your workflow and are perfectly fine with a "screen" like experience.

At least in the days of DOS there could be eventual mercy upon your hardware mistakes.

What saved linux (the kernel) was mostly to become a corporate product. Which it is.

--
I stumbled across yash, neat little shell. Only slightly bigger than OpenBSDs ksh linux port, doesn't try to reinvent the wheel but has nice little quality of life improvements, like a more modern completion and aliases in the middle of the command. I need to delve a bit deeper into the manpage and customization though.

 

[(not) y2k compliant]

Moved on to Kubuntu LTS about a year and a half ago after moving off of Win10 LTS 2019. Not my first distro by any means. The first full time Linux desktop as my main OS for me was running Gentoo back around 2004, and holy hell things have changed since then with systemD, pipewire, other pottering bullshit. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised so much has changed, its been years since I've used Linux outside of a VM as an appliance.
Been has been fairly smooth granted, have enjoyed Linux as a desktop in the time, whole lot better then in the past by a long shit. Most things I do have an analog for in Linux. It is really nice having bash and all the shit in /dev natively but unfortunately I haven't been able to replace 100% of all Windows applications I use. I still float my old Win10 install that was migrated in to being a Virt VM with a second GPU forwarded to it. Mostly just keeping Windows around for Photoshop, FLstudio, Autohotkey, and a few old games that don't run properly in Wine.

Spoiler: All of that said

I miss being on Win7. While I'm too skitzo to go back to MS, I'm not going to be one of those retards who lies to themselves. I loved Win7 and the versions leading up to, since that shit just werked. What else can I say.

 

[Hostile Poster]

I've got a question kinda linux related... My Thinkpad t480's motherboard finally took a shit. I'm researching replacement motherboards on ebay and noticed for only a few dollars more I can just replace the whole laptop. If I were to buy another t480 and throw my SSD in it, will it work? There may be small hardware differences, like no touchscreen (my old t480 has a touchscreen I don't use) but otherwise same processor etc.

Linux detect new drivers and remove old drivers automatically in theory,so you can put that ssd in whatever computer without issues.

 

[std::string]

I had direct flashbacks to the early 00s because Linux was exactly the same. You had to have the correct hardware. If you didn't it just plain wouldn't be usable. Wireless also was a total nightmare in Linux for the longest time.

I actually ran FreeBSD on my desktop during the early 00s because Linux and FreeBSD had broadly similar hardware support at the time. If you could run Linux you could most likely run FreeBSD.

Then Linux pulled way ahead and this is decidedly not true anymore. Kinda sucks because I really like BSD.

 

[Mr. Lambert]

Linux elitists lied to me.

They told me Mint was great and best for Wintards like myself. They said Ubuntu sucked and was Amazon spyware.
So I installed Mint and the driver manager kept giving me the Noveau driver for my Nvidia card, which is pretty damn useless and causes unbearable screen tearing. I got freezes practically doing anything with my dGPU. The repos sucked and guides from 2 years ago did not work.

Then I found Fedora, and I really liked it, and things just worked out of the box. But people said "Switch to a rolling release! You don't wanna miss out on the latest and greatest!" and "Fedora is Red Hat / IBM spyware with systemd which is a glowie backdoor!" *other schizo nonsense*.
So I installed Arch, and for the record, it wasn't all that bad. But after a while I got tired of updooting, and tired of dealing with unstable packages, and I could not feel comfy in my own computer just knowing that one sudo pacman -Syu could literally break an install I've been sitting on for months.

Had an Ubuntu stick on me. People say Ubuntu is garbo, but I tried it, and it just worked.
No hassle. No Nvidia driver bullshit. No partitioning drives. No bullshit. Even the problems I did have (specifically with dual monitors) I was able to quickly solve with a simple config edit.
The Ubuntu spyware they told me about? It's an opt out error reporting thing that's not enabled by default. The bloatware? Easily removed with choosing "minimal" install in the graphical installer. The Snap Store? Literally removed with two lines in the terminal. I replaced it with Flatpak and everything just works as normal.

/blog
But seriously, this whole process has taught me that you should just use whatever you feel comfortable using and stop listening to the cretins that actually use Linux. 95% of the time their experience of it comes down to running it in a VM on top of a Windows 11 install so they can screenshot their riced desktops and upload it to reddit.

 

[AnOminous]

They told me Mint was great and best for Wintards like myself. They said Ubuntu sucked and was Amazon spyware.
So I installed Mint and the driver manager kept giving me the Noveau driver for my Nvidia card, which is pretty damn useless and causes unbearable screen tearing. I got freezes practically doing anything with my dGPU. The repos sucked and guides from 2 years ago did not work.

If you have an NVIDIA card you pretty much have to suck it up and use their horrible drivers, because the open source versions are absolute shit. You sucked Satan's cock just by buying the thing, so cope with their blobs.

Also while I agree with your general message of don't listen to politically obsessed nerds, and instead just use whatever works for you, I wouldn't blame Mint for not installing those shitty drivers by default, as much of their userbase doesn't want them. It's not like it's hard to just go ahead and do the only sane thing, which is actually use their drivers for their cards because the alternatives are worse.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Linux elitists lied to me.

They told me Mint was great and best for Wintards like myself. They said Ubuntu sucked and was Amazon spyware.
So I installed Mint and the driver manager kept giving me the Noveau driver for my Nvidia card, which is pretty damn useless and causes unbearable screen tearing. I got freezes practically doing anything with my dGPU. The repos sucked and guides from 2 years ago did not work.

Then I found Fedora, and I really liked it, and things just worked out of the box. But people said "Switch to a rolling release! You don't wanna miss out on the latest and greatest!" and "Fedora is Red Hat / IBM spyware with systemd which is a glowie backdoor!" *other schizo nonsense*.
So I installed Arch, and for the record, it wasn't all that bad. But after a while I got tired of updooting, and tired of dealing with unstable packages, and I could not feel comfy in my own computer just knowing that one sudo pacman -Syu could literally break an install I've been sitting on for months.

Had an Ubuntu stick on me. People say Ubuntu is garbo, but I tried it, and it just worked.
No hassle. No Nvidia driver bullshit. No partitioning drives. No bullshit. Even the problems I did have (specifically with dual monitors) I was able to quickly solve with a simple config edit.
The Ubuntu spyware they told me about? It's an opt out error reporting thing that's not enabled by default. The bloatware? Easily removed with choosing "minimal" install in the graphical installer. The Snap Store? Literally removed with two lines in the terminal. I replaced it with Flatpak and everything just works as normal.

/blog
But seriously, this whole process has taught me that you should just use whatever you feel comfortable using and stop listening to the cretins that actually use Linux. 95% of the time their experience of it comes down to running it in a VM on top of a Windows 11 install so they can screenshot their riced desktops and upload it to reddit.

Mint defaults to the noveau drivers if you're using a Nvidia card for compatibility reasons. It's sort of a safe mode driver. All you have to do is switch to the proprietary drivers in the gui, same way as you do in Ubuntu and all its derivatives. It's an extra step you missed, but pretty trivial. The reason why people on here don't like Ubuntu and other of its derived distros is the direction Canonical is taking with shoving snap packages down everyone's throats. So far only Mint and Popos refuse to build the snap into their OS.

 

[Mr. Lambert]

Mint defaults to the noveau drivers if you're using a Nvidia card for compatibility reasons. It's sort of a safe mode driver. All you have to do is switch to the proprietary drivers in the gui, same way as you do in Ubuntu and all its derivatives

Let me be clear, when I installed Mint I went into it knowing that the proprietary drivers were the way to go, the problem was that the software manager was bugged or it wasn't giving me the correct driver. That's what I meant by "kept giving me the Noveau driver", I could select proprietary drivers, but I don't think it replaced them on a reboot. Instead, it defaulted to the Noveau driver and stayed that way, despite my choice. I would reboot my system only to find the Noveau checkbox ticked in driver manager. It wasn't properly installing the proprietary drivers. I tried everything including removing the files, messing with Nvidia config files, installing third party scripts and configs, nothing. It just got worse.

Mint uses the same driver manager as Ubuntu, and Ubuntu gave me the proprietary driver as soon as I selected it in the graphical installer. No problems.

The reason why people on here don't like Ubuntu and other of its derived distros is the direction Canonical is taking with shoving snap packages down everyone's throats. So far only Mint and Popos refuse to build the snap into their OS.

Snap Store gets removed in two terminal commands. Since when did Linux tinkerers lose the ability to use the terminal?

And sure I heard some bad things about how Snaps used to be, but I didn't see much of a problem with Snapped Firefox when I used it (granted, I did use it for only five minutes max). It functioned okay, I still ended up replacing it with a Flatpak out of habit.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Enlightenment usually hits people when they finally realize every distribution is just a collection of programs every other distribution usually also has and the true differences are just in a bunch of config files you can edit yourself as well.

Some people never get there.