The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[GNU Abyss]

So what I get from the discussion so far is that there's no consensus on whether Linux is a proper alternative to Windows. Due to performance issues and file size bloat I'm going to be nuking my windows 10 installation soon anyway, whether to reinstall it again, move to windows 11 (something I'm not keen on at all given my experience with win10, as well as complaints I've been hearing about win11) or move to Linux, which I have been researching for the past few weeks, specifically Mint.

Now I understand that there's a steep learning curve but since I'm not retarded I think with some time I'd get to knowing my way around it just fine. My main concern and question is how much time it will take me to be able to run MS Office/Adobe Suite analogous software, which I use for work daily. I also use my pc for gaming, but I'm willing to jump through some hoops and sacrifice older games if it means I'll have a smoother, more stable and responsive OS.

It depends on what you use the computer for and how deep/niche your use cases are. If you're way into Windows and you've got a specialized workflow with all the different programs, it's gonna be a pain in the ass and potentially unmanageable. Same for regular use of specialized, proprietary software for professional use. Normal things like browsing/games are OK. Light office usage too, maybe.

You can bypass the starting point of the learning curve by customizing Windows and fucking around with registry hacking. Bonus points for assembling a custom Windows ISO image with all the bloat removed that works post-install a la Ameliorated Windows.

I know this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but, a combination of Markdown/LaTeX for documents and something like pandas+jupyter for spreadsheets ended up feeling very comfortable for me in my undergrad. I had an electronics lab and I was able to auto-generate my lab reports using structured templates, including circuit diagrams, plots, etc. all with one script, and I was able to finish my shit a lot faster than people using google docs or even wolfram.

LaTeX for STEM stuff is pretty good. MS Office's math equation editor is pure, unfiltered AIDS. A lot of normal office stuff, in my experience, uses Google Docs & Sheets for easy collaboration - when it's not a job related to the government. Seems like regular companies don't give a shit about data collection. Link up your Google account and get back to work on Google's servers, wagie.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Gnome 2 was great, especially in that early KDE4 era where that was a buggy mess.

There are still some spregs keeping it going as MATE.

Linux on the Desktop was basically just better back in the day. Gnome 1 & 2 and KDE 1/2/3 were all fantastic and had nice BeOS themes that looked so good back when we had normal resolutions like 1024x768 and 1280x1024. Thank god for XFCE and theme addons like Chicago95 that work nicely on today's ridiculously high resolution screens.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

MS Office

I was under the impression MS Office can run via the browser? Adobe stuff will probably work, but you need to be more specific. I don't see why Office wouldn't work either. WINE has come a long way. You can run Elden Ring, Oblivion Remastered, Cyberpunk 2077, STALKER 2, DOOM the Dark Ages and many other newer games work with no problem. Even older stuff like modded Fallout New Vegas, Stalker Anomaly, and SWAT 4 work without issue. Even obscure Japanese visual novels such as Sharin No Kuni and YU-NO. All of this is stuff I've tested on regular ol' wine-staging with WOW64 and winetricks with nothing else. For most stuff, you just need winetricks -q dxvk and vkd3d. Some older games may require dotnet, vcrun or some old d3dcompiler/d3d9 stuff that winetricks can install for you. There's plenty of information on the internet to trouble shoot issues should they arise. And you could always ask people around here for help too.

If you really need that stuff for work, and you can not use alternatives such as Krita/GIMP/Libreoffice for whatever reason - you can either dual boot or use a Windows VM on Linux.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Looking at the stuff going on now with xorg. I feel like this fork really needs to actually succeed. If this isn't going to be the slow death of x11.

At least the original project looks to be just about as officially dead as it can be without them actually saying it's a dead project. So now it's going to be on this fork. Or some other fork if this one fails.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Isn't OpenBSDs fork, Xenocara, an actively maintained fork? Why can't that be adapted?

 

[Vesperus]

Isn't OpenBSDs fork, Xenocara, an actively maintained fork? Why can't that be adapted?

The impression I get is that Xenocara is just Xorg, but wrapped up to make it easier to plug in to BSD: The nuts and bolts of the code aren't any different.
(With the caveat that I might be a retard)

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

The impression I get is that Xenocara is just Xorg, but wrapped up to make it easier to plug in to BSD: The nuts and bolts of the code aren't any different.
(With the caveat that I might be a retard)

It's a variant of Xorg with reduced privileges. Something that can probably be added over to the X stack on Linux, but whether or not the specific changes applied for security purposes actually work without issue is another question.

 

[Slav Power]

Linux on the Desktop was basically just better back in the day.

It's funny how for all the bickering about how much better Linux is than Windows, both have deteriorated from their glory days a ton, and around the same time as well. GNOME 3 was in 2011, Windows 8 was in 2012. There must've been a paradigm shift there when everyone started chugging retard juice.

Thank god for XFCE

XFCE is great since it rips off the best Windows version ever made by Microsoft.

Like, fuck off with your XP/7 nostalgia or your KDE glazing. Windows 2000 was peak function over form. Zero wasted space, everything laid out in a sane manner, the DE got out of your way so that you could get on with your day using software you need to use, as all operating systems should be. XFCE is basically Win2k's desktop for Linux and it's the most based thing that you could use. Shove your bazillion KDE customizations and your TWM ricing up your ass and embrace desktop computing tradition.

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

Shove your bazillion KDE customizations and your TWM ricing up your ass and embrace desktop computing tradition.

What if I have made my KDE look and behave just like Windows 2000?
Xfce is nice to use (especially with Chicago95) and I would probably be using it if Wayland wasn't something I found necessary for my setup. (Inb4 the inevitable Wayland sperging)
There is an alpha quality Wayland session being actively worked on so it will be resolved eventually, Xfce development is really slow so I give it a few years.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

It's a variant of Xorg with reduced privileges. Something that can probably be added over to the X stack on Linux, but whether or not the specific changes applied for security purposes actually work without issue is another question.

I thought they added some more security fixes. I haven't looked at all of the one's they've added in. But I was under that impression at least.

If it's just with reduced privileges. That sounds more like the current version that's running on most linux distros. That uses either systemd, or elogind, to run xorg rootless. But just made to be openbsd specific.

Either way. If xorg is going to go on. It's probably will be worth changing, and fixing as much of it as possible. To address the things wayland addresses. Maybe now that it's not being held back by freedesktop. It will get a chance to actually implement some kind of isolation between programs. Fix problems for people with multiple monitors, work on HDR.

The reason I said if this fork, or another doesn't work out, this could be the actual start of the end for xorg. Is because it's been made pretty clear. Freedesktop isn't interested in doing any more bug fixes on xorg, and what people are going to be running is over time just going to stack up bugs, security flaws found, and not get anything, that people will actually want added. After time goes on, that is really going to start to show, even more than it does already, with the small fixes it has gotten.

 

[Akerman]

One of the worst pride logos I have ever seen, good work KDE team.
(src)

What if I have made my KDE look and behave just like Windows 2000?

Not Windows 2000, but I did find something good for this for Vista and Windows 7


AeroThemePlasma


VistaThemePlasma

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

Not Windows 2000, but I did find something good for this for Vista and Windows 7

Those are nice themes, but Aero isn't really my thing and I think its really overrated, especially as Zoomers are beginning to praise it online, for some reason only recently (not sure why).
I'm currently using the "Reactionary Plus" theme: https://store.kde.org/p/2138468
Its not really Windows Classic by default but with a Windows Classic colour theme and Windows 2000 icon set, it looks really good:

My taskbar is set up just like Windows 2000 too with a Quick Launch bar like setup, I do honestly prefer it to the way introduced in Windows 7.

Not perfect, but I am happy enough with it. I know Chicago95 is more complete but I want to stay on KDE for now.
It really does feel a lot like an older Windows version to use, and I love that. But also has some modern QoL benefits so its not completely stuck in 2000, I see that as the best of both worlds.

On another note, I played around with an old Linux distro today (Slackware 12.2) with KDE 3, and it really is amazing to use. Functional and lightweight.
There is a fork of it that is still made today, Trinity DE. https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
Haven't personally tried it but it seems good. Might give it a go at some point.

 

[Miller]

Red hat is deep in the X11 hating train and would likely be the last to support it, going kicking and screaming. Some BSD distros and such may be the first to support it, and if it's sufficiently stable then maybe more neutral distros (can't think of any off the top of my head). If it demonstrates itself as being superior then SteamOS may adopt it as they have full control of their hardware and experience, followed by Linux Mint as they are X11 by default and it would be trivial to ensure Cinnamon maintains support.

Probably the biggest problem would be if desktop environments and apps refuse to support it, Gnome would be actively hostile to X12 but KDE might be on the fence.

Do you think Red Hat and the others would be in favor of it if it was made under the MIT license?

 

[teriyakiburns]

GNOME 3 was in 2011, Windows 8 was in 2012. There must've been a paradigm shift there when everyone started chugging retard juice.

India started pumping out software graduates en masse about 15 years earlier and major companies began outsourcing to Indian shitshops around the same time. It took the jeets that long to work their way up to positions where they could actively shit over entire codebases.

There is a fork of it that is still made today, Trinity DE. https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

Trinity is kino. Once I'm done with my current contract and can afford to tinker for a bit, I'm going to try it out again.

 

[Akerman]

Trinity is kino. Once I'm done with my current contract and can afford to tinker for a bit, I'm going to try it out again.

Oh shit, Trinity is actually super nostalgic to me. You just reminded me how I really need to daily drive it one of these days. - All my school computers ran KDE 3.x and they all looked exactly like this:

I still have faint memories of that old dragon render, and somehow the legendary admin there convinced faculty to let him put games like SuperTux on every computer too IIRC, so once we were done with whatever we needed to learn in GIMP they let us play all the classic FOSS Linux games. I really need to shake the hand of whoever was responsible for all of this at my public school one of these days, introduced me to a lot of FOSS tools that I probably would have a shit time trying to learn to use now that Adobe has been jeeted and also that Linux was an option.

 

[Ferryman]

(Slackware 12.2)

Slackware is an absolute joy to to use and a close #2 to Gentoo. I have it running on an X230. Zero complaints, really good distro all around. In other news, FreeBSD is getting its 15.0 release later this year. Barring the cuck license and all that, how feasible do you guys think daily driving it would be? Definitely been hearing a lot more good things about it than bad so I'm strongly considering giving it a spin.

 

[Slav Power]

AeroThemePlasma


VistaThemePlasma

These are like 99.9% faithful to how Vista/7 actually used to look like, it's impressive.

Its not really Windows Classic by default but with a Windows Classic colour theme and Windows 2000 icon set, it looks really good:

My taskbar is set up just like Windows 2000 too with a Quick Launch bar like setup, I do honestly prefer it to the way introduced in Windows 7.

This shit I hate with a passion. Looks nothing like Win2k. The scaling is all off, the fonts are all off, everything is mismatched, a lot of elements aren't even themed and I'd rather use whatever stock theme the DE has instead of trying to pull off shit like this.

Though then again, this is also an issue of theming current day Windows. So much has changed in styling throughout the years, and so many programs just won't support whichever theming you're doing, or vice versa, that inevitably it will look mismatched and you'll just prefer to use some modern theme that won't clash as much. Ideally you'll use a dark theme to make everything dark as surprise surprise, we have also figured out that making every piece of the UI light colored isn't exactly the best when the screen that's displaying it operates on blasting light in your eyes from millions of tiny LED's all the time, so the dimmer they glow the better.

 

[analrapist]

Definitely been hearing a lot more good things about it than bad so I'm strongly considering giving it a spin.

We're in perfect configuration for a "year of the desktop BSD" any time now. Linux is becoming a playground for corporate horseshit.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Slackware is an absolute joy to to use and a close #2 to Gentoo. I have it running on an X230. Zero complaints, really good distro all around. In other news, FreeBSD is getting its 15.0 release later this year. Barring the cuck license and all that, how feasible do you guys think daily driving it would be? Definitely been hearing a lot more good things about it than bad so I'm strongly considering giving it a spin.

There's talks of improving laptop and wifi support for FreeBSD, one of the biggest pain points thus far.

 

[HootersMcBoobies]

Kdenlive can do video editing, but it's not great, Davinci Resolve is on Linux, but it doesn't work on every system.

Resolve can't do H264 on Linux, even if you use the paid version. Resolve can't do H265 on Windows without buying a $10 codec from the Windows store. Kdenlive can do both out of the box, or offer to auto-transcode clips as needed. It's come a long way. With some of the recent UI changes to Resolve, I actually prefer Kdenlive now. It doesn't crash constantly and corrupt your saves anymore. I recently worked on two hours of footage with it varying from 4k to 1024x768 and it handled it all really well.

Libreoffice and Onlyoffice (not Openoffice) are basically drop-in replacements for Office365

This is another tool that's come so far. Anyone remember the StarOffice days, when the whole project was run by Sun? A lot of the devs left due to Sun's involvement, created Libreoffice, and Sun gave over OpenOffice to Apache. Compared to the 2000s, LibreOffice is an amazingly good office suite replacement.

I was under the impression MS Office can run via the browser?

Yep and it works fairly well too. I once had my laptop die and someone lent me a replacement ancient Centrino laptop that was dogshit slow. I had a talk to give the next week and didn't want to reformat/setup the laptop, so I ended up doing all of it in the web version of Powerpoint. That was ~10 years ago and even back then, it worked pretty well.