The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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Harry Kuntz said:
Mint and Fedora are the 2 best distros everyone seems to recommend these days.
I personally recommend Fedora above Mint, solely because KDE is an easy install option (most Windows like and imo most functional Desktop) and much newer software overall, most important if you play games via Steam or have newer hardware.
Both have very good live environments you can play with by booting off a USB. I recommend downloading and trying both and seeing what you like the most.
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I've heard KDE is pretty unstable but that might just be retards from /g/ with a poorly configured system
 
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They were once men said:
I've heard KDE is pretty unstable but that might just be retards from /g/ with a poorly configured system
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It definitely used to be very unstable, especially in the KDE 4 and early Plasma 5 days (Plasma 5 is mature and stable now). Plasma 6 was very unstable on launch although has gotten much better with time, before 6.2 it crashed constantly, I have had no crashes or issues since I updated to Plasma 6.2 a while ago.
I remember too that applying themes was a fast way to break KDE, although with Plasma 6 it seems to be much more stable for me, but your experience may vary.
I would still try both Fedora (KDE is best, just stay away from Workstation/GNOME and you'll be good) and Mint (All 3 Desktop options are good) on a live usb and play around with it.
 
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prollyanotherlurker said:
If you're new to linux. I still say mint. I personally am not a huge debian, or ubuntu person. But people just wanting something that works, and that isn't going to break. It's about as good as it gets. And from what I've heard the new version of cinnamon is actually pretty decent.
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Too bad Cinnamon still doesn't support Wayland, so scaling is completely borked. Fractional scaling being an alpha tier feature in 2025 is a joke.
I'm not going to defend Wayland to my grave like Redditors do, but scaling, particularly on laptops is something it does 1000x better then X.
E.g., being able to scale per display rather then 1 global scale like its 1985.
 
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They were once men said:
I've heard KDE is pretty unstable but that might just be retards from /g/ with a poorly configured system
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I have had no issues. No idea what retards do to make it unstable.

Seems to me that they just install loads of shit into the global system and eventually it causes you problems or bricks. After 20 years of software engineering you really need to use virtual environments if you want to just load up tons of random software made by who knows who and hope it all plays nice together. I learned this by bricking my PC several times doing exactly that! Or be extra safe and just have a baseline OS with your preferred settings you can load up if you need to.

Most absolutely do not do this however.

Don't use GNOME unless you for some reason like your computer to work like a phone that forced you to use a keyboard to swipe and shit.
 
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They were once men said:
I know that mint doesn't come with the most up to date software but you can just use flatpacks to offset that right?
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Yeah that's correct. Programs will take up more space on your drive but you have the benefit of it not messing with your system/dependencies, which has been a headache historically

It's a reason why I would also agree that Mint/Fedora are the better distros right now to try. They are built around Flatpak being the default way of installing user applications. Snap on the other hand, which Ubuntu is built around, is total dogshit. I would still install things like Firefox or Steam from the system packages though.

Desktop Linux is still is this weird in between phase transitioning from X11 to Wayland. KDE (Fedora) is fully Wayland now, but Cinnamon (Mint) is still in an Experimental phase. Some applications don't support it fully and you'll notice some programs using a compatibility layer called Xwayland. Just something to keep in mind

If you go with Fedora, look up RPMFusion and how to enable it because that's how you'll get a lot of proprietary things like Steam, Nvidia drivers and video codecs
 
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Illustrious_Virus300 said:
Yeah that's correct. Programs will take up more space on your drive but you have the benefit of it not messing with your system/dependencies, which has been a headache historically

It's a reason why I would also agree that Mint/Fedora are the better distros right now to try. They are built around Flatpak being the default way of installing user applications. Snap on the other hand, which Ubuntu is built around, is total dogshit. I would still install things like Firefox or Steam from the system packages though.

Desktop Linux is still is this weird in between phase transitioning from X11 to Wayland. KDE (Fedora) is fully Wayland now, but Cinnamon (Mint) is still in an Experimental phase. Some applications don't support it fully and you'll notice some programs using a compatibility layer called Xwayland. Just something to keep in mind

If you go with Fedora, look up RPMFusion and how to enable it because that's how you'll get a lot of proprietary things like Steam, Nvidia drivers and video codecs
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seems like fedora is the way to go since i have pretty modern hardware, i heard their installer is dogshit though is that still true
 
They were once men said:
seems like fedora is the way to go since i have pretty modern hardware, i heard their installer is dogshit though is that still true
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Unfortunately, the installer is still dogshit, but its not the worst one I've ever used. Some distros like Arch and Gentoo still don't have an installer after all.
The partitioning step in particular is the worst from memory, the rest is reasonably easy to figure out.
I wish you luck in your Linux journey.
 
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Yeah it's not great. Not immediately obvious how to setup the disks whereas the Ubuntus will just ask you to pick one. It's one of those things you only have to learn once though.
 
My experience with WiFi on Linux was that it either just worked, for example on my T420, both Mint and Arch, or that it just wouldn't work because whatever ancient hardware that I tried to resurrect with Lubuntu was too esoteric. So you either land a combo of Linux version and hardware that just works (95% of the time) or you land a combo that doesn't (5% of the time).

I also recall a live ISO of gparted failing to boot at one point since it didn't have the basic drivers for my system at that time, but at a later release it did and it worked. Definitely one of the weakest points of Linux that Windows deals with better. Drivers should be fully modular, not directly tied to the next major release/patch of the core OS.
 
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They were once men said:
Wanna start using linux again, is mint still decent? The only problem I had last time i used it is that the GUI wouldn't scale properly on 1440p display but that was some years back so they might've updated since then?
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If only it didn't have systemd, I'd have recommended Linux Mint Debian Edition. MX Linux is a good alternative though, very easy to use but might be a touch bloated if you like minimal installs, though you can pretty easily trim the excess fat off of it.
 
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Harry Kuntz said:
Unfortunately, the installer is still dogshit, but its not the worst one I've ever used. Some distros like Arch and Gentoo still don't have an installer after all.
The partitioning step in particular is the worst from memory, the rest is reasonably easy to figure out.
I wish you luck in your Linux journey.
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Arch does have an installer now.
Partitioning doesn't have to be difficult, it's just a lot of guides insist on doing a lot more work than modern systems really need. Nowadays you don't need a swap partition (if you even need swap to begin with you should first use zram compressed memory, and if even that isn't enough you use a swap file, not a partition), and keeping /usr and /home separate from the root partition is pointless for the average user), most people will do just fine with 500MB for an EFI partition, and the rest of the drive as an ext4 / partition. If you are a poweruser and do want to use a more complicated partitioning scheme, you'll probably want to use btrfs or zfs anyway, in which case you're still only using one partition and then letting the file system split that up into your subpartitions/datasets for you.

My first distro was Arch, I didn't find it terribly difficult to get into even though I'd only used MacOS before that, because the guides were such high quality. Once I'd learned Linux I switched to NixOS, and then more recently switched my desktop to Gentoo. While Gentoo is nice, I'll be switching back to NixOS this weekend, there's just something comfy about it.
 
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prollyanotherlurker said:

Something actually interesting. So towards the end. He points out that what they're calling a charity looks a lot more like a defense contractor. Talking about mitre. They bring in billions a year looks like they are paid by the government. And say they do things a government defense contractor would do. Not sure what the actual deal is with it. But interesting none the less.
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MITRE has always been an unofficial part of the government and is heavily embedded in the military industrial complex. Anyone who doesn't know that doesn't know much about MITRE.
 
Susanna said:
Arch does have an installer now.
Partitioning doesn't have to be difficult, it's just a lot of guides insist on doing a lot more work than modern systems really need. Nowadays you don't need a swap partition (if you even need swap to begin with you should first use zram compressed memory, and if even that isn't enough you use a swap file, not a partition), and keeping /usr and /home separate from the root partition is pointless for the average user), most people will do just fine with 500MB for an EFI partition, and the rest of the drive as an ext4 / partition. If you are a poweruser and do want to use a more complicated partitioning scheme, you'll probably want to use btrfs or zfs anyway, in which case you're still only using one partition and then letting the file system split that up into your subpartitions/datasets for you.

My first distro was Arch, I didn't find it terribly difficult to get into even though I'd only used MacOS before that, because the guides were such high quality. Once I'd learned Linux I switched to NixOS, and then more recently switched my desktop to Gentoo. While Gentoo is nice, I'll be switching back to NixOS this weekend, there's just something comfy about it.
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an actual guide on how to partition drives for arch.,

lsblk

look at the output and find the disk you want to use.

fdisk /dev/sd** (or whatever one you picked)

you can press p to show the current table and double check it.

if you are doing mbr press o if you are doing gpt press g

press n to make the first partition. (if you are doing mbr you have to press p after to select primary same for all other steps)

press enter to accept the default beginning.

since this will likely be your efi partition type +1G then hit enter to make it 1 gig

you can press t the pick the partiton type to label it now

press n again to make the second. and press enter 3 or so times to just take the defaults.

the press t again and and select linux root (not completely necessary)

you can press p again to check that everything is actually good and press w to write and leave. obviously you can change what's above if you want a swap or something,, you pick the size the same way you do if the efi partition. and if its mbr, you don't need an efi parition, you can just make a single big root partition so for that case it's particularly easy.

then for most people, i recommend either using ext4 or xfs.

so you need to format the efi if you have one with

mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/(whatever partition)
then root.

mkfs.xfs /dev/(whatever partition)
or
mkfs.ext4 /dev/(whatever partition)

I had to write a good bit to just give some small explanations, on what is happening. but its pretty fast when you are actually doing it. you could do it in 1-2 minutes easily.



oh. and to avoid a double post. drivers are definitely modular on linux. I wouldn't say because one distro didn't have some driver implemented in an iso the released that means it's not possible to just add it.
 
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<@insomnia> it only takes three commands to install Gentoo
<@insomnia> cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/ grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6
<@insomnia> that's the first one
 
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