The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[prollyanotherlurker]

alright. I moved everything over to my gentoo install from void. I do feel like if I go further than this. i might just want to do it with hyprland.

this is gentoo, with dwm, and st for the terminal. Nothing crazy. Like I said just wanted something to do.

Spoiler: my first choice

this is the one I think I like the most. I generally like more minimal wallpapers.

Spoiler: kiwis

this one is the second option. Idk what this is from lol but honestly you could make something look decent around it. I mean its got to be a kf reference right? the kiwis. the giant moon the the background. If not, its perfect. Also its subtle enough that people wouldn't quite think kiwifarms if they don't really know.

Spoiler: WARNING KEFFALS AHEAD!!

I also found this one when I was searching, and thought I had to use it. Nice having he kiwifarms ascii right over the very very not accurate keffals portrait.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

I can't run KDE because KWin 5 and 6 have a bug where it always vertically syncs to the lowest common refresh rate on all your monitors. They fixed this on Wayland 4 years ago but refuse to acknowledge it on X. TWin 3 works fine.

Going forward I imagine the X side of things is going to get less, and less work done.The refresh rate thing. As far as I know scaling and using multiple monitors is rough in general with X, Idk about the refresh rate thing. Since I don't see it talked about that much, but multiple monitors is one of the issues with X as a whole.

That, and worse security because of the nature of how X works. Which if you are using Xwayland applications on wayland, actually hurts wayland's security as well. It's definitely coming though. I give it a year or two, and I think things are going to start pushing to phase out X. At least looking at how things are now.

Personally I don't stress that much about that aspect. And I don't tend to use any of the full desktop environments besides sometimes I will use xfce, which both lxqt, and xfce are about to officially support wayland. If they don't already. I'll have to check if their wayland sessions have been released yet. So I feel like I notice the little quirks that might come with full desktop environments when I do use wayland.

Really to me the disappointing thing about wayland, is DWL is complete shit, if there were working patches for it, in a comparable way to dwm I might just fully move to that, and hyprland, and be happy enough to just drop X. As it stands though, sway is a worse version of i3, river is the same for bspwm, and I'm not that crazy about bspwm its fine, but I can get more out of i3, qtile, dwm, awesome etc. there is niri, it's fine, but I really prefer the more traditional tiling workflow. I do recommend people that like window managers that haven't seen it, check it out. It takes a bit of configuring to probably get it exactly how you want it, but it does have its place. I think its probably better for window horder types. That like having a ton of windows all over the place. Me I rarely have more than 10 totatl open, generally more in the area of 3 to 8.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

Really to me the disappointing thing about wayland, is DWL is complete shit,

Yeah... dwl being shit is a real let down. Even cwm's wayland port, hikari, is pretty shit too. If you're doing suckless, you have very limited options. Hyprland isn't considered suckless because its more akin to bspwm, but it's the best choice for a dynamic window manager at the moment. You could also try velox, but it was pretty buggy when I tried it. It hasn't been updated in a while.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I've been hearing "wayland will replace X next year for good" for over twelve sixteen (?!) years now and I'm pretty sure I'll still be using X in 2027. The wayland problems cannot be resolved as they are in the nature of the wayland protocol. The only way to resolve them is to add a load of custom crap to it. Whoever ends up doing this you'll come completely beholden to. Goodbye to choice. (and as we know from Windows, homogeneous software environments increase both amount of attackers and attack surface like nothing else)

I've been saying this often but the biggest critique about X security (that all programs can read all keyboard inputs and see other program windows) actually has a solution with trusted and untrusted programs that's a lot less retarded than what wayland is doing. You can even use it and it works. It would've made a lot more sense to expand on it.

Some things like screen tearing are fixed in Xs current master. For some reason they just absolutely delay making a new release, so it never ends up in most distros. Funnily these very same fixes found their way into the releases of Xwayland. How odd! Just build from master. If you have no idea how to compile a software package in linux, then I'm sorry but you made your bed to be always at the mercy of autists and tech troons and tech troons which are autists and you get what you deserve. Can't be ignorant of processes and the enviroment and demand full control and freedom in the same breath. It's just not how the world works.

The funniest thing about anything wayland for me is how barebones everything is (and has always been) and how they constantly move the goalposts re: things wayland was supposed to fix and somehow just ended up being the same or worse as in X. Then the usual suspects screeching and doing ad hominems when somebody dares to point this out.

I haven't used a full linux DE since ~ the mid-00s and they also somehow only got worse since then. Easily pretty much the worst the Linux userland has to offer, on average. Use X and one of the feature complete and very customizable WMs. That's as good as a desktop experience is going to get. Feature completeness means that you can set up a workflow for yourself you can rely on in years to come and don't have to go with the yearly newest trend some UI designer came up with in order to keep his job.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

RE: X11 security

I've yet to find an actual example of Xorg being hijacked to take down an entire organizations machine infrastructure.

Judging by how Wayland shills sound, your current xsession should have been hijacked by ninety-nine Russians.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I've yet to find an actual example of Xorg being hijacked to take down an entire organizations machine infrastructure.

That's because their definition of security is different to the one everyone else is using. It essentially boils down to "applications can read the screen", which they seem to think is a fundamental security flaw, rather than such an extreme edge-case that anyone exploiting it would already have direct access to your entire system and wouldn't need to exploit it in the first place. The inevitable outcome is that wayland breaks screen readers for blind and partially sighted people, but that's ok, because it's secure now.

 

[jeff7989]

It’s only really noticeable at night. If i play with the lights off, i can’t play it for more than 15 minutes.

If I would have known about the PWM, i would have Bought the LCD version.

Maybe I'm lucky because I'm not affected by any flickering, and I do play at night . Maybe my eyes are crap or I won a lottery with the panel.

@PCSX2


Based, fix your protocols of fuckoff. Wayland sisters are keeping wayland from realizing its true potential.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

The funniest thing about anything wayland for me is how barebones everything is

Truuuuu. If you ask me X isn't bloated ENOUGH.

 

[analrapist]

People talk about bloat, but man, a clean Xorg install is an order of magnitude smaller than your average rust installation. With a dwm-suckless userland, librewolf, it's not a big spacehog. The Rust parts are the bloatiest, no question.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

People talk about bloat, but man, a clean Xorg install is an order of magnitude smaller than your average rust installation

I like suckless concepts, but I don't find the obsession over SLOC to be very useful. The SLOC is all they really care about when they talk about bloat.
I don't use lf, or window managers, because of le bloat. I use them because they generally are faster to use in a lot of cases. Especially if you use a laptop. It's the same reason why people use AutoHotKey on Windows.
And it's not like you have to choose between Xorg and Wayland. You can use both, and 99% of people will use both because of Xwayland.

 

[analrapist]

I like suckless concepts, but I don't find the obsession over SLOC to be very useful.

I'm not trynna get into a holy war over it. SLOC is one metric among many. It pleases my autism to "do a lot with a little". That's the root of it for me.

I have "-wayland" in my USE and I have not had to compromise on that yet, praise Larry.

 

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RE: X11 security

I've yet to find an actual example of Xorg being hijacked to take down an entire organizations machine infrastructure.

Judging by how Wayland shills sound, your current xsession should have been hijacked by ninety-nine Russians.

I mean, I have no actual experience dealing with incident response to breaches on Linux systems, but I'm going to just wildly speculate that 'critical X11 security holes' are literally never involved. Yes, if you use the Gnome or KDE X screensavers to lock your screen, a l337 hacker can probably just hit every key on the keyboard hundreds of times and they will crash and the h@x0r will have full access under your account. Yes, there might be some bug that allows privilege escalation because an X server is running as root. Yes, the fact that X11 actually supports 'blind people' being 'allowed to use computers which are an essential part of modern life' does mean that a malicious X application can read your password if you type it in a plain text field in another window.

But I'm guessing that for the privilege escalation part, most actual Linux compromises have absolutely nothing to do with X being a well-designed system that supports network transparency unlike shitland, and instead look more like that hilarious fuckery where the chinks were exploiting lazy sysadmins that use a portable copy of Notepad++ and run it as administartor rather than just installing it properly, by dumping malicious plugins into the plugins directory, which would then get elevated to admin when they ran it as admin:

1. Compromise a 'regular' user account, check if it's a member of the 'sudo' group (in most desktop linux installs, it almost certainly is and almost certainly is the only real user account on the system) because it's unlikely the admins set up a non-standard config.
2. If it is a member of the 'sudo' group, create a new directory, add a line somewhere appropriate in .bashrc to stick it at the start of the PATH variable, or use 'alias' to repoint 'sudo' and 'pkexec' to that directory
3. Write 'sudo' (trivial) and 'pkexec' (mildly harder) binaries into there to capture the user password, pass it and the arguments on, and then ruuse the password to do something
4. 99.99999999% of the time the 'sudo' group member will now mysteriously fail to check- before running sudo- for any malicious 'alias' commands against 'sudo' or 'pkexec', despite the fact that the same people who pretend Wayland is better than X will claim this is something they will do. They will not even check their PATH, and look for malicious binaries in any of the directories. Hell, I don't
5. Because this very real actual security hole isn't addressed on most Linux distributions, the fake binaries will then use the captured credentials to drop some sort of persistant RAT running as root through systmd or a cron job

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

RE: X11 security

I've yet to find an actual example of Xorg being hijacked to take down an entire organizations machine infrastructure.

Judging by how Wayland shills sound, your current xsession should have been hijacked by ninety-nine Russians.

I would think OpenBSD would have adopted Wayland more quickly if it was a bigger deal.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

I like suckless concepts, but I don't find the obsession over SLOC to be very useful. The SLOC is all they really care about when they talk about bloat.
I don't use lf, or window managers, because of le bloat. I use them because they generally are faster to use in a lot of cases. Especially if you use a laptop. It's the same reason why people use AutoHotKey on Windows.
And it's not like you have to choose between Xorg and Wayland. You can use both, and 99% of people will use both because of Xwayland.

If I'm being actually serious.

To me. There are a few reasons I like the suckless concept.

One is how small the codebase is, leads to super short compilation times. On a fresh unpatched dwm. It's about 2 seconds at most. With 8 threads. Actually. Idk if they are using 8 threads. Since I have never actually added -j8 to the config.mk. So it could be even faster potentially. When you are compiling your programs does make life easier.

It also means me as someone who isn't a c programmer can actually look through the source when I need to, and start to at least vaguely understand what some things are doing. Larger programs. And ones that are more obscured, don't lend to that at all. It's not as important as the first.

Also this is something I had first heard from someone that knows a lot more about programming than I ever will. And that was, fewer lines of code, fewer bugs (obviously not literally). The more code added into something, the higher chance bugs will arise, and the higher chance for an exploit to be found. Obviously the quality of the code matters, and a program being small doesn't = good.

That one I have also seen echoed by the suckless people.

Finally, I just like how most of their stuff feels to use. The minimalism in ui to me, generally leads to a better feeling program. Less to distract from what is important.

Also it pleases my autism too.

 

[The Anarki Main]

-snip-

Not to mention that most enterprise systems and servers running Linux, which are the real targets of cybercrime, are headless and don't even have an active X server.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

XFCE 4.20 is released!

Spoiler: Gayland

Wayland

Important Notice: Please be aware that the Wayland support in Xfce 4.20 is experimental. It is recommended for advanced users only, as you may encounter bugs and experience incomplete functionality. Proceed with caution!

Thanks to Brian and Gaël almost all Xfce components are able to run on Wayland windowing, while still keeping support for X11 windowing.

This major effort was achieved by abstracting away any X11/Wayland windowing specific calls and making use of Wayland/Wlroots protocols. A whole new Xfce library, "libxfce4windowing" was introduced during that process. XWayland will not be required to run any of the ported Xfce components.

So far Xfce does not feature a compositor which supports Wayland. If you want to run Xfce in Wayland, Labwc and Wayfire will give you the best results. A detailed instruction on this can be found here. Please be aware that Wayland support is still experimental!

Plans are underway to add Wayland support to Xfwm4 while preserving its existing X11 functionality. However, such a restructurization will be a major effort and we cannot tell yet when/if it will be done, so please don't hold your breath waiting for it.

For few components and multiple features, it was not possible to port them to Wayland, partly because there are no standardized Wayland protocols available yet to provide the required services:

• Workspace support is missing (ext-workspace protocol was just merged).
• Systray icons will be missing for multiple applications (required to use StatusNotifier instead of GtkStatusIcon)
• Xfce4-settings: Keyboard and mouse settings so far are internal to the Wayland compositor and as such the according Xfce dialogs won't be available on Wayland yet.
• Power related keyboard handling (brightness keys, suspend, etc.) is internal to the Wayland compositor and as such cannot be supported yet by Xfce components.
• Wayland does not specify a native protocol for taking screenshots. However, xfce4-screenshooter already supports screenshots via the wlroots 'screencopy' protocol (entire screen). Screenshots of a rectangle selection or the active window are not yet supported via Wayland.

Some other Xfce components don't run at all on Wayland:

• Xfwm4
• Xfdashboard
• Xfce4-screensaver (porting to Wayland completed but not merged, as it requires the experimental libwlembed library)
• Xfce4-windowck-plugin (needs to be ported to libxfce4windowing)
• Xfce4-xkb-plugin (keyboard handling is internal to the Wayland compositor)

More detailed info on the current Wayland status can be found on our Wayland roadmap.
Scaling

Icons and thumbnail scaling was fixed for various components. Various missing icons for larger scales were added. Any blurriness when using Xfce components on a HiDPI display should be gone now.

They finally condensed the screensaver configuration, thank fuck.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

I just installed the new lxqt last night. And it kind of reminded me why I tend to use xfce instead when I use a DE. I mostly wanted to use it to try the option of having a Wayland compositor for the wm.

I will mess with it more, because some stuff could be me just not being used to theming qt applications to not look completely terrible. But also. I can say while hyrprland alone runs really well on my machines. Lxqt's Wayland stuff is not ready for use yet by the average person. For sure. They do make it really easy to swap out window managers/Wayland compositor. But besides that. Not sure how I feel about that.

I will probably try xfce's new one as well. I have a feeling might actually like it more. But they sound like they are at the same level of readiness as lxqt.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

I just installed the new lxqt last night. And it kind of reminded me why I tend to use xfce instead when I use a DE. I mostly wanted to use it to try the option of having a Wayland compositor for the wm.

I will mess with it more, because some stuff could be me just not being used to theming qt applications to not look completely terrible. But also. I can say while hyrprland alone runs really well on my machines. Lxqt's Wayland stuff is not ready for use yet by the average person. For sure. They do make it really easy to swap out window managers/Wayland compositor. But besides that. Not sure how I feel about that.

I will probably try xfce's new one as well. I have a feeling might actually like it more. But they sound like they are at the same level of readiness as lxqt.

with both lxqt's wayland session (via labwc) and kde's wayland session, I had issues with firefox crashing a lot and games would get stuck (only visually, the game still played in the background to the point I could pause and un pause it but it would just show the stuck frame no matter what even when alt-tabbing in and out). I ended up going to LXQT's X11 session and everything works better but I really had to install xfce's Thunar file manager and also xarchiver.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

using multiple monitors is rough in general with X,

The only issues I have ever run into with multiple monitors on Linux is that if you connect a fancy modern 1680x1050 or 1080p display externally to a Lenovo-transition-era Thinkpad with an ATI mobile GPU, the drivers in modern Linux by default often don't recognize the resolution and will only drive it at 1024x768. You need to add the modeline for the resolution manually with XRandr (trivial). I don't know if Wayland would even support a normal use case like that, everything just configures itself right?

 

[KingNothing]

double post