The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Susanna]

Felix's video was very one-sided, and in the most bizarre way possible. It's like he knew absolutely nothing about Windows, but the moment he tried Linux he already got very adept at it, but didn't bother to do the same type of learning and research when he was on Windows. So he had the mental capacity and skill to troubleshoot his issues to make his life better, but he had to have that mental/emotional signal of "I'm not using Windows anymore, I'm using Linux, so now I can learn and research how to make it work for me". In the video he riced Mint, and Mint is meant to be the type of distro that 99% of people won't need to personalize OOTB. I'm still confused why people act like this.

I don't know, I think that's very relatable. I've used Windows, and learning how to do things in it was an absolute slog because it's just never convenient. "Oh you can definitely configure this, just regedit this long-ass string" or "access the config file under %applicationdatalocallow%/Microsoft/Edge/misc.ini", while on Linux you just go to .config or .local depending on whether you're trying to, say, install a plugin (local) or edit a configuration that doesn't have a convenient GUI (config). It's intuitive.

For example to get a right-click option in dolphin to compress/extract archives, you'd just install ark. Dolphin will recognise it and add the menu on its own (and if it doesn't you can do so easily enough in a GUI). It just works. Chances are my distro already preinstalled ark anyway. On Windows I can open .zips automatically, but what about .rars or .7z or .tar.gz? I have to install 7zip to handle those. So I have to go to this really old-looking site and download the installer (and make sure I pick the right one, because there's like ten options (you shouldn't expect normal users to know if they need 64 or 32 bit, or x86 or ARM, or an exe or an msi))). Then when I right-click, there's no 7zip option? I have to click Show More Options to see it, and normal users don't click things with scary labels like that. Fine, I double-click my rar. "Which program do you want to open this with"? 7zip isn't in that list. Okay, so despite being a normal user I manage to find the 7zip install folder, and I pick 7z.exe. Wrong, I actually needed 7zfm.exe.
This isn't intuitive at all. Granted most of the blame here falls on 7zip for being old-fashioned, but just look how much more work opening my .rar was on Windows than on Linux? My Fedora comes with Dolphin and Ark preinstalled, so I can just double-click the rar to open it, or right-click it to extract it.

When I use Windows, random tiny tasks I do without thinking on MacOS or Linux are suddenly massive chores. I'm sure a Windows user finds "wait, the file browser is called dolphin rather than just Explorer?" really weird, but to me at least (modern) Linux makes these things more intuitive. Or just take the home folder for another example. Mac and Linux are both quite good about making sure things go where they belong. On Windows everything gets dumped into Downloads and I'm expected to sort them out myself, and then when I go into Documents to load my spreadsheets, I'm greeted by a bunch of "My Games" folders instead. Why is that stuff there? I put my laptop away for the weekend then boot it back up on Monday (after having plugged it into the wall because of course it drained itself again), and after waiting the obligatory ten minutes for a vital security update, I'm greeted by a bunch of new apps on my menu, like Windows Solitaire Collection. I didn't ask for it, but whatever, solitaire's nice. Okay, got a bit of dead time, I'll play some solitaire I guess? Oh, I need to pay to unlock all but the basic klondike. Oh, there's ads on the side of the game screen... Oh, there's ads when I finish a game...
Linux generally doesn't give you preinstalled games, but the distros that do bundle some never have ads or shareware versions.

Even if I do suffer through doing all the configuration I need to get Windows to a usable state, chances are it will corrupt itself after a few months anyway, and oh look, the first step on Microsoft's forum is "reinstall Windows". You can see why I find this somewhat tedious? If somehow, say, konsole corrupted its settings file on Linux, chances are I could correct that by just deleting .config/konsolerc.

1. Linux Mint
2. Debian
3. Arch
4. Gentoo
5. Ubuntu
6. CentOS
7. Red Hat
8. Manjaro

Nothing else is worth considering

That wasn't the question. Mint and Ubuntu are both descendents of Debian, like CentOS (and Fedora, which you omitted for some reason) are descendents of Red Hat. I listed independent distros, and some of their more widespread descendents. I absolutely wouldn't recommend NixOS to anyone, but it gets its own number on the list simply because it isn't descended from any other distro.

 

[Max Weber]

Which is the eight one?

1. Red Hat
   • Fedora
   • CentOS
2. Debian
   • Ubuntu
   • Mint
   • Pop!_OS
3. SUSE
4. Arch
   • Manjaro
5. Slackware
6. Gentoo
7. NixOS

Void.

 

[Retarded Weeb]

I don't understand what the whining about there being 100 distros is supposed to accomplish. The Linux kernel is open source. Anyone can do whatever the fuck they want with it and make any distro/OS they want. There being a 100 distros is neither a problem nor a feature, it's just the natural consequence of the freedom involved. It's not something to necessarily boast about because not all those distros are necessarily useful and need to exist, but it's also not something that can be fixed and it's pointless even suggest it could be. The best that can happen is some company that runs a distro puts enough marketing effort into making their distro look like the "default" for newcomers, and we already have that it's called Ubuntu.

>nooooo but linuxfags all tell me ubuntu sucks and is for casuals!
So what. They also think Windows sucks too, but that won't stop you from running back to Windows because you don't want the responsibility of picking what flavor of Linux to run so clearly you don't actually care what those uppity linux cultists think.

 

[Spaced Outside Cargo]

2025 is the Year of the Linux Desktop:

I really like how he managed to tie in that a lot of windows-exclusive software is widely hated like adobe.
Im sure he’s getting along fine with gimp but i wish he would’ve recommended something else though since gimp is kind of a running joke at this point. I personally like krita as an art program.

ADDITION: I think the only reason pewds went into customizing the desktop is to scratch that itch unique to older zoomers/millenials of absolutely fucking up the old windows computer with uxstyle etc. This feeling probably isnt shared by many of his viewers though since a lot of kids grew up with ipads or chromebooks.

 

[snotang]

I'd guess that the absolutely most secure system would be Gentoo, because you compile the binaries yourself and can be absolutely certain nothing suspicious has been added in like what happened with xz. But that requires reading all to the code line by line.

The xz backdoor was added to the source tarball release by an authorized committer. Unless you were building specifically from git instead of from source tarballs, it did not matter whether you compiled it yourself.

It did, however, happen to matter whether you were using a distro that patched openssh to use systemd.

Now, my point is that the average Windows user doesn't even consider that something as simple as disabling the weather widget is possible on Windows. But the moment they go the Linux route, suddenly they go all-in on the ricing? Something isn't right here and that's what I find weird. As if people use their operating systems emotionally rather than practically. What I mean by this, the emotional attachment to Windows is that of hate. This hate then causes people to refuse to try and figure out why something is the way it is, but instead they rage at it and get annoyed by it endlessly. The emotional attachment to Linux is that of openness and freedom, and that leads to people going off the deep end with ricing. Except what the end goal those people had is achievable on both through more or less the same routes, but due to this emotional attachment they were under this false belief that they had to make the switch just to have a nice time using their computer.

I certainly couldn't claim that having to deal with windows never inspires any sort of emotional reaction.

A Windows user seeking control over their computer is like a subject of the UK seeking free speech. Sure, some may exist for awhile - heck, they may even score some activist "wins" by their standards - but as soon as they look elsewhere it becomes rather apparent that they've been looking in the wrong place, and it is far, far easier to simply go somewhere that shares your values.

On Linux, when you consider making some change, it is never a question of "can I do this" - the source is all available, there 100% exists a way to do what you want solely by editing it. Nobody has legal standing to sue you for understanding what your system does and modifying it.

I will freely state that I have never tried significantly customizing windows. For all I know, it is entirely possible to modify some things, within the scope of their initial design, by modifying some settings. Even if you don't need to modify a program, without its source code, you'll probably still need to do some amount of reverse engineering to get complete documentation (there is always an undocumented interaction - if there weren't, the documentation would be semantically equivalent to the source code). Maybe this can get you in legal trouble, maybe it can't. Maybe, like speech in the UK, it will get some people in legal trouble but not others.

Ultimately, your control over your computer only extends as far as the lowest level that you control the software at. Some people at AMD control the lowest levels of software on my computer. It's unfortunate, but it's a temporary compromise, and the scope of people able to interfere with my control over the upper levels is quite limited. Additionally, AMD has neither any justification nor any way to get away with breaking compatibility: the hardware does not change. The probability that I will try accomplishing something on my computer only to eventually hit a brick wall because AMD says "no" or changes something capriciously is basically zero.

And then there's you, advocating "run open source on Windows". Granting every jeet in Redmond control over your computer. Every change you want to make below the surface level is going to hit a resounding "no, and if you so much as mention this again I will bankrupt you in legal fees". They will break compatibility and you will be happy. They will push the forced updates and you will be happy.

You are an architect building on sand and wondering why everyone else you see building is doing so on stone. Perhaps they just have an emotional attachment to stone. It's just as achievable to put a structure on sand, after all.

Enjoy high tides, stalker child!

 

[GrimPortents]

Which is the eight one?

1. Red Hat
   • Fedora
   • CentOS
2. Debian
   • Ubuntu
   • Mint
   • Pop!_OS
3. SUSE
4. Arch
   • Manjaro
5. Slackware
6. Gentoo
7. NixOS

Friend, if you're going to suggest something Arch-based, Endeavour is the choice, not Manjaro.

 

[Susanna]

Friend, if you're going to suggest something Arch-based, Endeavour is the choice, not Manjaro.

Those aren't recommendations, they're the families and major sub-distros. If I wanted to recommend something Arch-based I'd just recommend Arch itself, it's a great distro and doesn't need any big changes. My actual recommendation to a newbie would be Fedora. it has a big community and good polish.

 

[Slav Power]

Friend, if you're going to suggest something Arch-based, Endeavour is the choice, not Manjaro.

I'm surprised she didn't recommend Asahi Linux, must've taken great restraint to not mention Macs.

 

[Susanna]

I'm surprised she didn't recommend Asahi Linux, must've taken great restraint to not mention Macs.

You don't need Linux on a Mac, they run MacOS.

 

[Cool kitties club]

On Windows everything gets dumped into Downloads

TBF this seems to be a web browser problem. Every modern browser defaults to just dumping shit in Downloads even stuff like Firefox and Brave it's always the first setting I check to allow to choose where to save shit. Chome make it more annoying by like saving to a var/cache location initially idk I only use Chrome when troubleshooting other people's shit boxes.

I've used Windows, and learning how to do things in it was an absolute slog because it's just never convenient. "

As someone who has actually tried to do data work on Windows it's such a fucking pain. The powershell equivalent of sed is just a command which calls the find and replace function of notepad, so it doesn't work on any text file bigger then a gigabyte or so. Normies wont ever see a text file this big but the human WGS reads sure are. The grep equivalent will always output metadata with the found text so you can just grep foo far.txt > filtered.txt without writing a bunch of garbage metadata along side it. The only solution is to install WSL (which is still very slow) or ssh into a linux machine. The entire windows ecosystem is non functional unless you are a gamer or an office drone.

 

[wmaf1488]

Ideally, the "Linux Desktop" shorthand, with a capital D

What about GNU/Linux distros like Debian, RHEL or SLES that are not usually used on the desktop or with a GUI

 

[Sangue e terra]

But that requires reading all to the code line by line.

Isn't this a meme for every FOSS software out there. That FOSS can easily be pozzed?

> "yeah, it's safe bro. just check the code"
> 6 gorillion lines of code

Sure, if other nerds look up and test it from time to time it should, hopefully be safe (assuming you are even keeping up with tech news/forums). As someone who doesn't code, I got a zero clue of what I'm looking at. I will do what every other person do: download that .exe/.AppImage and just run it, #YOLO.

 

[Legalize Asbestos]

I don't understand what the whining about there being 100 distros is supposed to accomplish.

Linux distros remind me of Protestants. (With Windows and Mac playing Orthodoxy and Catholicism, irrespectively.) You can have one towering OS finely controlled and managed by a corporation, or you can have 100 sects of DIY operating systems, with a new branch forming for every slight disagreement in doctrine, because there's no central authority to stop you. So long as the Kernel (the Bible) itself is respected, you can form a somewhat functional OS.

People bitch and moan and split hairs about 100 distros because every individual wants their sudo-scriptures tailored to their particular workflow and preferences and conflate 'not good for this purpose' with 'not good at all, you should join my sect instead, where we pour effort into the real correct doctrine.'

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Tons of problems with Wayland. My second monitor doesn't work. My third monitor doesn't work.

sounds like you've identified the problem, use a proper display server

Bluetooth doesn't work.

good thing this was on a desktop, so you shouldn't have any Bluetooth peripherals

Gaming is great BUT forget about Wayland because FPS drops.

well duh, yeah, forget about wayland

 

[Verpa Teutonica Ingens]

With Windows and Mac playing Orthodoxy and Catholicism, respectively

Denomination analogies aside, Windows is really more like Hinduism, being full of jeet shit, and Mac OS is more like Judaism, because of its ingrained ethnocentrism/brand-centrism.

 

[Legalize Asbestos]

Mac OS is more like Judaism, because of its ingrained ethnocentrism/brand-centrism.

It was also built on the back of a Polish-American, so that tracks.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Wayland because FPS drops

If you wanted to game on Wayland. Hyprland is what you would need to use. At least fps matters. They've allowed you to disable vsync for a while. The others I believe might, be about to implement it.

Too bad drew devault has had any kind of influence on Wayland at all. Maybe if it wasn't for him and his faggot friends, the other Wayland window managers and desktops would be a bit further along like hyprland.

 

[Slav Power]

Denomination analogies aside, Windows is really more like Hinduism, being full of jeet shit, and Mac OS is more like Judaism, because of its ingrained ethnocentrism/brand-centrism.

By that logic, both Windows and Mac are Hinduism because they're written by Pajeets, and Linux is Satanism because it's written by trannies.

 

[Verpa Teutonica Ingens]

By that logic, both Windows and Mac are Hinduism because they're written by Pajeets, and Linux is Satanism because it's written by trannies.

No, Linux would be atheism: how do you figure out if someone's a Linux user? Don't worry, he'll tell you. Though I suppose there's not much practical difference between the two.

 

[Slav Power]

and don't get me started on the recent development of shit getting installed in your user folder instead of program files

Devil's advocate: this is a good thing. Sure the path to which they get installed is retarded like all paths in Windows but the idea itself is good. When you install a program for a user, it doesn't need UAC elevation, as well as updated without UAC elevation. This is fantastic when you want to set up a system for someone that takes care of itself with no need to make workarounds to give it admin privileges in Task Scheduler just to do update jobs. All web browsers do their updates seamlessly thanks to that, and they don't require admin privileges to be installed.

Linux doesn't have this type of "userspace" and "system" program separation. Everything goes in the same Poettering linked dump folder that always requires root privileges to update and install extra software. That alone makes Mint somewhat unfit for the average user as they have to enter the root password even when they're installing something from the GUI app store, even if the thing that they're installing has no need to reside in the system folder. For example, there is no reason for you to give it full system access just to install Solitaire.

If it worked the way it does in Windows, where there's the unelevated user space, elevated system space, and the programs from user space can ask for elevation when needed, it would be much more accessible to the average user IMO.

As for the user folders: don't bother doing anything about them on Windows if you don't want a headache. I renamed my user account once and it was a CBT session of registry hacking and manually correcting hardset paths everywhere. NT was never designed with this type of /home/ style swaps in mind. Unix was, but Windows =/= Unix.