The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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I did post in here before but a small update, I was given a craptop today by someone who was no longer wanting to use it (due to how bad it is) and the specs are pretty awful.

It's an ASUS VivoBook E210M with an Intel Celeron N4020 CPU and 4GB of RAM, which is unfortunately soldered so I can't even attempt to put a spare 8GB stick in it. In fact, the only thing you can even do to upgrade it (looking at teardown videos) is that you can put in a NVMe SSD. Other than that, nothing else you can do, and I don't really see the point in adding one.

It currently has Windows 11 preinstalled on it and you can easily assume how atrocious that it runs on this. Fuck whoever thought of soldered RAM with no extra slots being a good idea. I was given a few suggestions in here for what was to be my main PC but considering how dog shit this laptop is, what can I really use? Should I just install Arch on it?
 
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AnOminous said:
This but unironically.
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lol.webp
No irony here, sir!
Snackbarism said:
It currently has Windows 11 preinstalled on it and you can easily assume how atrocious that it runs on this. Fuck whoever thought of soldered RAM with no extra slots being a good idea. I was given a few suggestions in here for what was to be my main PC but considering how dog shit this laptop is, what can I really use? Should I just install Arch on it?
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You should be able to use basically anything that isn't a full fat desktop environment like KDE or Gnome, as long as you don't use too many browser tabs., I'd suggest Devuian with an XFCE desktop myself, keep it simple. You can use Chicago95 to get the most out of the limited screen real estate.
 
Snackbarism said:
I did post in here before but a small update, I was given a craptop today by someone who was no longer wanting to use it (due to how bad it is) and the specs are pretty awful.

It's an ASUS VivoBook E210M with an Intel Celeron N4020 CPU and 4GB of RAM, which is unfortunately soldered so I can't even attempt to put a spare 8GB stick in it. In fact, the only thing you can even do to upgrade it (looking at teardown videos) is that you can put in a NVMe SSD. Other than that, nothing else you can do, and I don't really see the point in adding one.

It currently has Windows 11 preinstalled on it and you can easily assume how atrocious that it runs on this. Fuck whoever thought of soldered RAM with no extra slots being a good idea. I was given a few suggestions in here for what was to be my main PC but considering how dog shit this laptop is, what can I really use? Should I just install Arch on it?
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Ah the eternal agony of a Linux techie. You know it's somehow useful but you don't know how, you can't give it away because nobody you know is proficient enough in Linux or can use it and you don't want to throw it away because that's wasteful for something that can be useful if only you can find that specific use case.
 
⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
I'd suggest Devuian with an XFCE desktop myself, keep it simple. You can use Chicago95 to get the most out of the limited screen real estate.
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Reminds me, I recently dumped KDE after running away from Wayland and getting back on X, and to make Gentoo easier to manage since KDE is really time consuming to compile (about 10 hours on 16 threads to emerge the basic Plasma environment + dependencies, then every time Qt updates everything KDE needs to be recompiled)
Went with Xfce and Chicago95 and been very happy with it so far.
Looks nicer then standard KDE, bit lighter on system resources too (not as much as you would expect though).
Not going back. And going back to X after leaving it for a while has only made me enjoy using it more, most programs older then a few years actually WORK without issues! I have KeePass Autotype back too which I have missed dearly.
 
Most of the complaints I see people making about Linux are solved by using FreeBSD. It has none of these RedHat things everyone is mad about. Are you that much of a GPL fundamentalist? Please don't tell me that it's too tinkery.
 
Itchy Hemorrhoids said:
Most of the complaints I see people making about Linux are solved by using FreeBSD. It has none of these RedHat things everyone is mad about. Are you that much of a GPL fundamentalist? Please don't tell me that it's too tinkery.
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You sound like a faggot but tbh I actually have used FreeBSD because it just does what it does.
 
Itchy Hemorrhoids said:
Most of the complaints I see people making about Linux are solved by using FreeBSD. It has none of these RedHat things everyone is mad about. Are you that much of a GPL fundamentalist? Please don't tell me that it's too tinkery.
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I would be interested to hear what problem FreeBSD actually fixes. For people on the desktop. I definitely couldn't think of any.
 
AspieNextDoor said:
I don't want to upgrade to Windows 11 so I decided to bite the bullet and learn Linux, is Mint really the best option for beginners? I'm completely tech-illiterate so anything more than copy-pasting commands is too much for me.
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I'd recommend Linux Mint. Ultimately, it is very simple to use and install, plus its GUI practically covers most things you would need. I would also tell you that using the terminal in Linux is not scary. For me, I have to dive into the terminal a bit more often than most since my distro I use (arch-based) has a lot more updates.

But Mint is really solid.
 
Speaking of the "wake to boot" issue, here's how my ThinkPad with Windows 11 fares when it wakes from hibernation.
From lifting the lid to seeing the Win11 loading throbber, it takes ~18 seconds.
Then to see the Win11 login screen it takes ~4 seconds. Then a few more for the IR cam to read my ugly mug and I'm on the desktop.

The bloated mess that is Win11 takes only 4 seconds to load up from hibernation and most of the time spent waiting is on the hardware to get it's shit together. No matter what you put on your machine, Windows or Linux, you gotta take the POST wait time into consideration, and with NVMe drives being commonplace nowadays, those now take more than loading the OS itself.
 
⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
Any Gnome developer worth his programming socks looks forward to completely rewriting his unoptimized Python hobby application from scratch every couple of years to support GTK5/6/7 with less features than ever before.
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"...his..."

Betonhaus said:
Where's Solus on the Linux rankings?
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Looks to be pretty healthy.


YoRHa No. 2 Type B said:
You have to be a pretty big faggot to run not only a Youtube channel but a tech/Linux focused one too.
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That one YouTuber obsessed with bash is a decent bloke. He doesn't suck cock as far as I'm aware.


OS sitrep:
  • Despite having an nVidia GPU, haven't encountered any issues in Arch using Wayland/Hyprland
    • It idles at 20-30% load though, with Firefox, QBittorrent, and Hyprland most likely to blame
  • I fucking hate btrfs so much it's unreal - thinking of reformatting to exfat4
    • Dynamic drive discovery and management is needlessly complex, but I understand why... I just don't need any of the features btrfs offers, and those I do can be done on an exfat4 system with extra packages
  • nftables.conf syntax is the most retarded shit I've ever seen and the CLI tool is convoluted for what little it does
  • I never realised how little I actually need a desktop, but file managers and discovery are headache inducing
    • ranger and fzf are great, and Dolphin is fine, but Hyprland does not like theming
  • Why the fuck is oh-my-posh so popular, it's a screen economy hog and all the themes I've seen are gay
  • I'm sad to see p10k is no longer under active development, but works fine
  • With a strict killswitch on my VPN, I don't really touch nftables anyway (probably a bad idea, but I like set and forget shit, especially with port forwarding managed by the VPN client)
  • AUR is excellent though diluted, but I like the yay wraps pacman
  • Rolling distros are... frenetic
  • DNS resolution is a cunt
  • No system failure after two months, but my dotfiles and general OS maintenance hygiene is very rusty (first time daily driving Arch)
  • KDE wallet keychain issues are retarded in Hyprland
  • VSCode works happily with pull and push requests, but again, Hyprland insists on instancing pop up windows in the most obscure screen locations (often off-screen, displaying about 15% of the instance)
  • My second monitor is apparently my primary monitor now for reasons I don't care to configure, but hope one day will just wake up and fix itself

Pic unrelated.

RDT_20250618_2053217761520072475306179.webp
 
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Betonhaus said:
Ah the eternal agony of a Linux techie. You know it's somehow useful but you don't know how, you can't give it away because nobody you know is proficient enough in Linux or can use it and you don't want to throw it away because that's wasteful for something that can be useful if only you can find that specific use case.
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Just think of all those PCs that are going to get thrown out because they can't be upgraded to Windows 11 due to their strict hardware requirements and mandatory TPM chip. Whilst some will have served their time and are at that point good enough for the bin, a lot of them could easily get a fresh lease of life as a Linux PC.

To be fair, Linux is not much of a barrier compared to how it used to be. The general web browser user could easily cope. If you are a gamer then as long as it's not fucked by anti cheat you can do it for the most part, compatibility is a lot better these days. Not everything is Linux friendly but it's better than how it used to be back in the day.

Looked into the craptop myself and seeing how there's been a few horror stories regarding the internal 64GB storage I have bought a 128GB SSD to go into it from eBay.
 
I would probably give them to a niece or nephew who's old enough to understand computers but young enough that they'll probably destroy it, and set up a nextcloud backup with deletion protection (with their and their parents consent and knowledge and possibly under their parents control) so that when it does they don't lose anything important. But browser sync would probably be enough and a nextcloud backup would be redundant
 
A while back I was given a Windows 7 era machine and was still figuring out what I wanted to do with it beyond Windows offline stuff. Then the sudden autistic desire of dualbooting it with the latest FreeBSD hit me.

Spoilered because this isn't the BSD thread.
>Minitool partition wizard on Windows to make the partition (had to format it to NTFS for the BSD installer to see it)
>boot the iso to install FreeBSD
>the partition/slice confusion comes back to me
>the entire partition I made is a BSD partition, then under that is the slice that's going to be UFS
>install done, boot up the iso again to run a shell because I need to make the slice bootable
>gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot ada0s4
>go back to Windows and add a Windows bootloader entry for FreeBSD with EasyBCD

Done. FreeBSD 14 and Windows 7 coexisting in the same disk. I expected more trouble and even forgot swap. But I am curious to see how it will do without it. In due time I'll be installing a desktop and whatnot.
 
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