The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Akerman]

It is still a tui. But it does actually do a lot of the work for you. I actually do like the current arch install. If you are just wanting to get an arch system set up really quick to mess around with something. You can just pick a few options and basically in the time it takes to download the packages. You have a minimal system set up for you, to do whatever you want with it.

I haven't been able to use it yet because I've not had any excuse to reinstall. Seems like it makes enabling stuff like multilib, UKI and nvidia drivers very trivial to do before actually rebooting into the system and those were the things I disliked the most out of my manual installs. Not difficult, just annoying to have to do during the install or afterwards if forgotten. Next time I reinstall Arch on my desktop I am thinking of just manually setting up the partitions, then 'archinstall', choose a headless system w/ greeter, reboot and then build up my system from there. I can't see what else I personally would need to do manually that I can't do with the script.

I would still finish the install manually though, because I think if you choose the DEs it will pull in the meta packages which often includes stuff you don't want or make it tedious to remove packages that are part of the meta package set ala Discover in plasma-meta.

 

[Nothing Is Written]

It even got BTFOed out of its "Gamer" status by Cachy

Isn't Cachy RedHat forked? I'd rather discover I was born female than run a RedHat distro.

@Akerman regarding partitioning - I only selected one SSD as the root and boot drive using btrfs, and didn't touch the others during install (I think I have ~4 others still formatted as either NTFS or exFAT from my previous W11 system. What's the best way to reformat them and use them in Arch, and would they be used as storage only, or can I specify certain binaries like Steam to be executed and run from them? I also heard you can combine them as a single "drive" in theory but I'm unsure how that would function in practise.

Also why does everyone hate systemd? Challenge mode: don't bring up philosophical differences between UNIX and Linux etc., I'm speaking about functionality.

 

[Betonhaus]

is there a gui for setting up and managing a brtfs system with multiple OS volumes in it?

 

[ToroidalBoat]

https://kb.mozillazine.org/Session_Restore#Completely_disabling_session_store

If you haven't already tried that maybe that might help?

I suppose the quick way to test would be to create a new profile and see if the problem persists.

The unexplained writing BS is even if I use another version of Firefox so I don't think it's a profile thing. And the writing goes on even if I'm offline or browser is idle. Whatever it's writing it doesn't change the available space left on the drive, but what the hell is FF constantly writing and writing? And FF writes ~40x more than it reads.

I also tried those about:config tweaks which were suggested, but there is still that endless writing. Maybe I have to restart for that?

Oh yeah and the writing is worst when playing YT vid, less intense with visiting a new site, and least intense if just idling offline.

problem

And why is whatever it is so huge in size? If that is some session thing, shouldn't it just be kilobytes at most because it's URLs? But no, it's like a gigabyte a day or so.

[wallpaper]

oh hey it's that Mita

 

[Rust Troony]

Isn't Cachy RedHat forked? I'd rather discover I was born female than run a RedHat distro.

CachyOS is based off arch, they just compile with certain flags that make apps perform faster... half the time... on a good day, with the tradeoff being that it makes older cpus (or cheap cpus in the case of intel) incompatible. Pretty much a placebo distro outside a very few outcast that perform better with AVX2 and the kernel changes.

Also why does everyone hate systemd?

The only real reason is that its bloated just said three different ways. People hate that one project has a stronghold over almost everything in the underlying base of Linux outside the kernel itself, with one of the main notable contributors being a microsoft employee. Other people are mad that it takes up 100 more MB of ram than other init systems, and others fall for placebo that the alternative init systems boot up so much faster.

 

[Akerman]

regarding partitioning - I only selected one SSD as the root and boot drive using btrfs, and didn't touch the others during install (I think I have ~4 others still formatted as either NTFS or exFAT from my previous W11 system. What's the best way to reformat them and use them in Arch

It's basically the same as when you partition the system itself. Identify them with lsblk, wipe them with wipefs -a (driveb/c/etc) assuming you dont care whats on them, partition, reformat, then make the directories that you want to mount them to with some fitting name for w/e you want to use it for and finally the UUIDs to fstab so they automount. You can sudo mount -a to see if it works w/o rebooting. Maybe theres a better way to do it though if you prefer non terminal shit. LLMs can give pointers too if u dont want to read the wiki and step by steps for various specific desires like btrfs volumes, but I wouldn't rely on it because it 'hallucinates' (hits context/msg limits) constantly.

I think many use gparted instead for wiping, partitioning, formatting, etc but I can't speak to that personally. I decided very early on that if I was seriously going to use Linux then I would need to learn/use the terminal even if I hated it. Because eventually on Linux you just have to use it for something that doesn't have a GUI or w/e and when you can't you get stuck. I don't really hate it anymore after getting a hang of it, and even prefer it in some cases. - But the only time I ever used gparted was on SystemRescue to resize my Linux partition on my laptop for a BIOS update when I stupidly forgot to do it before nuking Windows. Anyways good luck in w/e you choose to do.

would they be used as storage only, or can I specify certain binaries like Steam to be executed and run from them? I also heard you can combine them as a single "drive" in theory but I'm unsure how that would function in practise.

Wouldn't the same as on Windows work with going to Settings and then Add Drive? Never had another drive for games myself. I would say maybe symlinks could work but there's some troubling history with that. Not exactly what you want to do and it has most likely been fixed since then, ofc, but it just reminded me of this peak Linux moment.

As for merging there is a project called mergefs that is supposed to do this IIRC.

 

[Ferryman]

People hate that one project has a stronghold over almost everything in the underlying base of Linux outside the kernel itself, with one of the main notable contributors being a microsoft employee.

I think this is the main reason for most people, myself included. The main draw of Linux is that you have nice, tight, granular control over everything. Soystemd replacing that granularity kind of defeats that purpose.

I found this guide a while back. I haven't actually tried it, but the guy has some autistic level of detail and runs Gentoo. I have my root on ZFS now, which is really easy to just snapshot and send.

Thanks for sharing that, I gave it a read through and looks like just what I need. Been thinking of running a headless Gentoo install on my Pi for a ZFS/torrent box rig instead to cut down on RAM usage, might be a fun lil way to set stuff up. Transmission, Ranger, SSH, could make it run at like -1 GiB ram at idle I think.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

unexplained writing BS

update:

Could be related to uBlock -- UB on, watching a YT vid gets many MB of writing when the vid starts*, and a few KB at most with UB off? But still writing. ~200 MB in 2 hours!

* (YT with UB on means many hundreds if not thousands of elements blocked.)

 

[triforce9001]

Why would I use systemd? OpenRC works just fine and is fast enough for me. I know systemd is more than an init system, but I really do not care about its other functionalities.

On another note: I find it kinda funny how people are suddenly excited to talk about linux. All it took was for that faggot to show his riced Arch setup and now linux is the hottest shit for some reason. Like, it's always the same, I am the weirdo for using some "odd" tech or whatever at first for decades and then suddenly whatever that "odd" thing was becomes mainstream and okay.

 

[Nothing Is Written]

The only real reason is that its bloated just said three different ways. People hate that one project has a stronghold over almost everything in the underlying base of Linux outside the kernel itself, with one of the main notable contributors being a microsoft employee. Other people are mad that it takes up 100 more MB of ram than other init systems, and others fall for placebo that the alternative init systems boot up so much faster.

Okay so I looked into this, and it's maintained by just under 400 people, a minority of which are "official", some are hackers, some from Intel... pretty much a good spread so I don't know how much stock we can put into that "one Microsoft guy".

Also, you can strip it to be less than 100MB during boot and leave the rest for post. It can be stripped to three inits which is pretty minimalist.

As for the monopoly, that's where I agree with you. There's dependency creep. I don't like that at all, but it's still modular in design.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I don't know how much stock we can put into that "one Microsoft guy".

"That one microsoft guy" is Lennart Poettering. Poettering originated systemd and is the overall developer in charge of both goals and direction. He's the reason it's such a bloated, over-extended mess and why it's currently worming its way into managing system updates and controlling the bootloader. He still routinely WONTFIXes bugs that he doesn't personally care about, even if they're breaking shit for people. Anyone who knew his history from pulseaudio wanted nothing to do with systemd, but it was forced on the entire linux ecosystem through a combination of malfeasance and political manipulation.

The whole "it can be stripped down" is meangless, when multiple fundamental system components are now completely entwined and mingled with its core libraries. It isn't modular, it is componentised. There's a difference.

 

[RACISM]

"That one microsoft guy" is Lennart Poettering.

I hate him so much. He is number one on my list of people who I will knock the fuck out if I ever meet them.

Anyone who knew his history from pulseaudio

The buggiest most unreliable piece of shit ever. I hated him and had him top of that list for this long before he ever wrote any of systemD. Every time I now go to do something I've known how to do for twenty years, I find this cunt has changed it all, usually to the gayest most convoluted syntax ever. Half the time the old systems and files are still there so you don't even know why changing them isn't working until you Google it. One of the most annoying is the changing of Wi-Fi card names. Everything used to be wlan0, now they all have their own unrememberable unique name like wx838464hdhxjskd. Meaning countless old scripts are broken. He's an absolute nigger.

 

[Betonhaus]

How much of the filesystem could be moved off of the root volume? Like /home and /boot/efi can be moved to different drives, but what is the bare minimum that absolutely has to be on the / drive? Could you get by with just /boot and /etc/fstab?

 

[Perfectly Innocent]

One of the most annoying is the changing of Wi-Fi card names. Everything used to be wlan0, now they all have their own unrememberable unique name like wx838464hdhxjskd. Meaning countless old scripts are broken. He's an absolute nigger.

Add net.ifnames=0 to your kernel command line if you want to live life like it's 2005.

There was a good reason to change it though...

To quote Red Hat:

Without consistent device naming, the Linux kernel assigns names to network interfaces by combining a fixed prefix and an index. The index increases as the kernel initializes the network devices. For example, eth0 represents the first Ethernet device being probed on start-up. If you add another network interface controller to the system, the assignment of the kernel device names is no longer fixed because, after a reboot, the devices can initialize in a different order. In that case, the kernel can name the devices differently.

 

[El Goblina]

Use systemd-networkd, and match your MAC instead of using these ugly card names... I'm sure the other networking solutions have similar, but really, using the ifname has never worked the way it ought to.

 

[Slav Power]

FOSS & WINE related, it seems like ReactOS project has finally started to move again. From the gallery it looks like someone actually got a recentish non-FOSS game like Paper's Please to run on it last year. And a build from March by a dev on the right looks very different to where the system was just a few years ago:

View attachment 7365577View attachment 7365588

Dunno if anyone here has messed with it recently, I assume it's still trash. It’s obviously still in alpha and unusable outside of novelty, but I am still sort of tempted to try to mess around with it again in a VM. Last time I did was half a decade ago and I couldn’t even get it to boot properly. I've checked in on the project periodically both before & since then and development has always been glacially slow, so if it is more energetic and it does seem to be then I also wonder what changed that. I suspect maybe it's the strides with WINE lately and them backporting stuff from the project?

If I had to run Windows software on a non-Windows OS, I'd still prefer the Wine CBT over ReactOS. At least Wine is meant to run modern Windows software instead of being perpetually stuck in Win2K/XP compatibility era. I remember messing with Linux once, installing Wine, running PortableApps off of my pendrive and being genuinely surprised that it just worked. Ideally Wine would be as transparent as WoW64 but eh.

Speaking of, curiosity question: I have a small issue on my Win11 laptop where if I enable both WireGuard back-to-home tunnel and Mullvad tunnel, even though apparently WireGuard is still connected, Mullvad makes it so that I cannot access my home network via WireGuard. I'd like for both to be always active so that all the WAN connections go through Mullvad while I can simultaneously access all the home LAN stuff via WireGuard. Is this strictly a Windows issue or is it more of a networking protocols/routes issue that also exists on Linux?

 

[jeff7989]

Speaking of, curiosity question: I have a small issue on my Win11 laptop where if I enable both WireGuard back-to-home tunnel and Mullvad tunnel, even though apparently WireGuard is still connected, Mullvad makes it so that I cannot access my home network via WireGuard. I'd like for both to be always active so that all the WAN connections go through Mullvad while I can simultaneously access all the home LAN stuff via WireGuard. Is this strictly a Windows issue or is it more of a networking protocols/routes issue that also exists on Linux?

If you use Mullvad application then there's a "share local network" option in VPN settings. Have you tried it?

 

[Celebrate Nite]

Dunno if anyone here has messed with it recently, I assume it's still trash.

Last time i tested it on a VM (which was like a year or two ago), it wouldn't let me get passed the login screen after a restart.

Might try it again though, this is the only distro that's vaguely interesting to me because it's trying to marry two opposite things into one.

 

[Slav Power]

If you use Mullvad application then there's a "share local network" option in VPN settings. Have you tried it?

Yeah, but I think it's more of a network stack issue. Technically I can have both tunnels active as I can see that my laptop is still connected with my router via WG, but the WG LAN route becomes inaccessible once Mullvad gets switched on, as if it's virtual NIC took priority. Hard to say if this is a Windows network stack issue or it's just how VPN tunnels are.

 

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How much of the filesystem could be moved off of the root volume? Like /home and /boot/efi can be moved to different drives, but what is the bare minimum that absolutely has to be on the / drive? Could you get by with just /boot and /etc/fstab?

A standard configuration would have /boot as a separate volume, traditionally with ext2 because any bootloader and any recovery floppy/CD you might possibly want to use is going to be able to read ext2 as opposed to ext3/ext4/Reiser/other newfangled inventions.

You would not want to try to split out the file /etc/fstab from the rest of the stuff in the /etc directory. I'm not sure how one would set up a normal init system to allow that, assume it would get confusing if possible.

Now of course you need a 'mount' command for the other partitions in /etc/fstab to get loaded by a standard init system. Which brings us back to the question of the Red Hat 'UsrMerge' conspiracy, to make /bin/ a link to a big pile of shit in /usr/bin/. By slamming everything into one directory and pretending that this is normal, they've 'conveniently' made it impossible without a bunch of fiddling to UN-seperate essential commands that you would want in /bin/ or /sbin/ to be available to mount a seperate /usr/ partition.

Yeah, but I think it's more of a network stack issue. Technically I can have both tunnels active as I can see that my laptop is still connected with my router via WG, but the WG LAN route becomes inaccessible once Mullvad gets switched on, as if it's virtual NIC took priority. Hard to say if this is a Windows network stack issue or it's just how VPN tunnels are.

Have you tried just increasing the priority on the WG LAN route at the command line?