The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Nothing Is Written]

Btrfs seems like a wierd choice. Either xfs which they obviously chose. Or if they wanted the things btrfs has. There is zfs, which seems like the obvious choice over btrfs for a server. I would think.

Btrfs seems like it's just there for Linux nerds that always need to be running the shiny new thing. They want the new file system with all the extra features, doesn't matter that they probably won't really take advantage of it. Or the new shell, with the extra stuff even though they probably don't even use half of the stuff bash can do (or bothered to learn about it) or replacing their cd command with zoxide, ls with some other unnecessary tool, etc. You get the idea.

That is the kind of person I feel like btrfs is for.

It's widely adopted at the enterprise level across tens of drives in either NAS or RAID setups, but being as I'm not an enterprise user who can be bothered RAIDing my four nvme drives together without abusing the FS beyond already telling it that it's btrfs is unjustifiable.

 

[DavidS877]

It's widely adopted at the enterprise level across tens of drives in either NAS or RAID setups, but being as I'm not an enterprise user who can be bothered RAIDing my four nvme drives together without abusing the FS beyond already telling it that it's btrfs is unjustifiable.

Enterprises typically don't run Linux as a NAS server. They'll use purpose built hardware like NetApp who has their own filesystem.

In attached storage things like RAID and snapshots are managed by the array so it will be typically ext4 or XFS. In local storage which seems to be uncommon I think most I've encountered still use hardware RAID on the array controller. Even if they use software RAID it's more likely to be MD often with LVM and once again ext4 and XFS.

Looks like even CoreOS, which often gets used for containers where ButterFS may make sense still defaults to ext4.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I've got a Synology NAS which defaults to using btrfs and it seems fine, at least for relatively undemanding home use.

 

[Rust Troony]

Gnome tranny(?) seething that their hecking valid wayland is getting rightfully dunked on for not having good enough accessibility features, despite their DEI pandering (A)

Spoiler: TLDC

WAHHHHH PLEASE STOP BEING MEAN TO US FOR PANDERING TO YOU BUT NOT ACTUALLY CARING. WE ARE TRYING. BUT WE ARE TAKING AWAY X11 THAT YOU NEED BECAUSE UHH, REASONS. RED HAT IS TRYING VERY HARD TO MAKE GNOME NOT SHITTY, BUT IS FAILING. I DONT GET PAID FOR THIS WORK SO BE NICE. WE INVESTED A LOT OF MONEY INTO BARELY ANY WORK. OUR BRAND NEWEST EXECUTE, NO NOT THE SHAMAN, IS PARTIALLY BLIND, SO THAT MEANS WE UNDERSTAND YOUR STRUGGLE USING OUR SHITTY DE.

PS TO DISABLED PEOPLE... I WORK VERY HARD. PLEASE BE NICE TO ME. GIVE ME THE REGONITION I RIGHTFULLY DESERVE (But if you dont want to thats okay... but give it to me please...)

First time using archive.ph, is it just the retards website that caused it to come out terrible or did i fuck it up?

 

[Nothing Is Written]

Enterprises typically don't run Linux as a NAS server. They'll use purpose built hardware like NetApp who has their own filesystem.

In attached storage things like RAID and snapshots are managed by the array so it will be typically ext4 or XFS. In local storage which seems to be uncommon I think most I've encountered still use hardware RAID on the array controller. Even if they use software RAID it's more likely to be MD often with LVM and once again ext4 and XFS.

Looks like even CoreOS, which often gets used for containers where ButterFS may make sense still defaults to ext4.

I've worked with banks that use btrfs in their DMZ servers, and I regret not asking them why. It was fairly common and there must be a reason.

Btfrs has software compatibility with some RAID setups, but it's really sketchy if you're not choosing the right array. Though this might be exclusive to Arch... not sure about other Linux distros.

In any case I regret everything and learnt a lot .

 

[Enig]

If XLibre fixes X11’s long outstanding issues with wildly varying levels of tolerance to 30-bit color then it’s instantly the crown winner for me. Wayland tears GPU performance apart in laptops for reasons as stupid as “more than four windows using XWayland at one time” and tragically it’s still more 30-bit compliant for now, so fixing X’s issues with it would be a major fist to the jaw for X.org

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

Gnome tranny(?)

Yep, its a troon. Not surprising considering they work on Gnome but always good to confirm it.

(https://tesk.page)

 

[Ferryman]

I look forward to the X11 wars. Very excited to see who ignores this fork and who jumps in.


Not by a lot. My take on it, most people who absolutely refuse to run Win11 will:

- stay on Win10, updates be damned;
- move to macOS.
These are the two big groups of Win11 evaders. Linux newcomers won't even register by comparison.

I've been seeing lots of people recommend Win 10 LTSC claiming that it has less bloat & telemetry. Regarding bloat it does seem true to some extent, but the telemetry's all the same. At least you can move around the taskbar on 10, no idea what the jeets were thinking locking it at the bottom on 11.

Stay on 10 until their hardware gets too old/slow to run Chrome or whatever, then buy a new machine and deal with 11.

People these days are too busy consooooming to learn how their machine actually works. The prospect of changing a machine every few years is grim. I've been using the same W541 since I was 14. God bless my father for telling me I'm being retarded when I'd ask for new gayming rigs every other year. 10 years later and it still runs without a hitch. The only things I've done to it are get a better processor and swap out the battery (which you can't do on most modern machines cause its all soldered now). Still a shame to throw so many good laptops away.

 

[Max Weber]

Artix has published some testing xlibre ISOs, XFCE, Cinnamon and MATE being the options.

https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,8301.0.html
https://artixlinux.org/download.php

Also, per their wiki, they plan to go all-in on it:

Q. Is Artix planning to replace Xorg woth Xlibre?
A. Yes, that is the intention. When the first Xlibre Server release is announced all packages will be built and moved to the galaxy-gremlins repository for broader and extensive testing.

 

[Baraka Obama]

I've got a Synology NAS which defaults to using btrfs and it seems fine, at least for relatively undemanding home use.

The implementation Synology uses is really clever, it's btrfs on top of mdadm raid. So you get parity bit and self healing features of btrfs without having to worry about the crummy RAID implementation, plus you can mix and match different drive sizes.

I wouldn't actively choose btrfs for a desktop distro partition but I've seen my xpenology NAS recover from some really tough situations with this setup.

 

[ZMOT]

Btfrs has software compatibility with some RAID setups, but it's really sketchy if you're not choosing the right array. Though this might be exclusive to Arch... not sure about other Linux distros.

suses used btfrs by default, which might be due to their enterprise version. snapshots are enabled by default, which probably makes support easier.
and most private users/workstations won't run a raid directly.

https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:BTRFS

wdym? It's literally called "Better FS". How can you hate that?

the actual name is "butterface"

There are still people using Win7/XP but not very many, the great majority of Windows users upgraded to 10. I admit that I don't really know what got people to upgrade, but we should not expect people to continue using Windows 10 forever just because 11 is 11.

win10 became less shit (ymmv) and was supposed to be the last windows, so might as well do the jump. which is another reason win11 chaffs some asses.

I also wouldn't compare it to happenings like xp->win7->win10 in the past, sure "gamers" will upgrade (normalfags that play games with anticheat), professionals will just use what's required for the job (and make it a tax deduction) or what their company forces on them, but joe normalfag who just wants to browse the internet, write some stuff and doesn't have much requirement is suddenly told he needs to buy new hardware for some reason...
some will do as told, but "win11? are you retarded?" has reached normalfag circles by now, so not only is word-of-mouth bad but more and more you got people who know what linux is and on top can use it. remember normalfags don't do any tech stuff themselves, they ask someone in their social circle or take it to some pc shop. the more people know and recommend linux, the more likely it is to end up on a normalfag pc to get more years out of that hardware, without any of those security issues (and MS bullshit, don't underestimate the hate people developed for teams).

I don't expect any big dents, rather a slow erosion that's already happening.

Start resorting to guerilla warfare. Break into their homes while they are at work. Install Linux on their PCs without consent. Most will be too lazy to switch back. User base increase achieved.

most won't even notice and think microsoft forced another update

 

[Slav Power]

I do wonder how much more popular Linux will get in the desktop scene once Windows 10 reaches its end of life in 4 months, especially considering the amount of hardware that won't work with 11.

What I truly wonder is when will the Linux community finally get their shit together, realize that the average Windows user won't touch Linux unless it's quite literally just like Windows, so as idiot-proof, locked down, and being able to run all the same software as Windows, which is antithetical to what the Linux community wants Linux to be, and finally reaches the level of self-awareness needed to ditch their doublethink of simultaneously wanting to be an open OS and wanting Year of the Linux Desktop™ to become a reality. One or the other.

People have pointed it out in this thread a few times now, but the biggest hurdle for Linux spreading is simply that 90+% of computers come with Windows preinstalled, and most people only ever use the preinstalled OS. Even if people hate Windows 11, they would sooner struggle with it until Windows 12 comes out (and is even worse) than figure out how to install a new OS themselves. That just seems insurmountable to them.

No matter how user-friendly desktop Linux gets, it'll only get widespread if tons of pre-built computers suddenly start coming with Linux preinstalled (like Microsoft will let that happen), or like all the Linux users go full evangelist and start sticking Linux on all their family and friends' computers and that successfully converts the more tech literate to do the same to spread the good word.

Even if you were to overcome that hurdle and make Linux a default on prebuild systems, you'd then hit the next barrier which is software interoperability, and you'd be coming up with even more excuses as for why Year of the Linux Desktop is not a thing. For example, gaming. Valve made Windows games run on Linux to sell their hardware, and the Linux community has jumped the shark to declare that Windows gaming is already there and you have no need to use Windows, spreading this myth and making the average Joe think that Linux is now Windows. It is not.

Once you go out of the realm of "install a game from Steam and play it", this Linux gaming being viable myth falls apart rather quickly. Try installing an old game from a CD/DVD. On Windows it'll do it as it's, to an extent, the same OS as it was back in the 90's. Of course, if the game had a shitty DRM like SecuROM that no longer works on Windows (because it was that shit), then it won't work, but the same applies to Linux. If it relied on an older wrapper that's no longer shipped with Windows, or is broken on modern Windows, like DirectDraw, under Windows it's a case of drag-and-drop of a single file to fix it. Under Linux you'd need to deal with Wine prefixes to achieve the same goal. If it's a DRM-less D3D9 game it will run instantly 99.9% of the time under Windows. Under Linux, tough luck getting that shit from the installer to Proton/DXVK yourself, assuming you're not using Steam to point to the Wine path where the game got plopped out and let Valve deal with it all.

And then you go into the realm of popular modern modding/tweaking tools like Special K and Lossless Scaling that outright won't work on Linux as they rely on fundamental Windows architecture. Lossless Scaling is especially a big one, it's the talk of the town all around the web, and it'll only work with Windows' underlying rendering API's. No X11 or Wayland, you either have DWM+DXGI or you're fucked. Or HDR support which is still a mess under Linux since it's Wayland only and Wayland is a steaming pile of shit. Unless Linux has dealt with all of it and it's as "just works" as Windows is, forget about your pipe dream. If overnight everyone used Linux you'd be getting plenty of posts on forums about issues that are unfixable under Linux, and inevitably getting fed up with people coming in with this expectation that Linux is just like Windows, telling them to fuck off, and them moving back to Windows, only to then cry about how Windows has a stranglehold on the OS market, getting angry at anyone who points out that you're being a retard. Same spiel as always.

tl;dr: No, if suddenly all prebuilts had current day Linux preinstalled, you'd only extrapolate the "Windows user gets angry that Linux is not Windows" issue to cosmic levels. Either accept that Linux won't replace Windows unless it becomes Windows, which the Linux community is against, or give up your YotLD pipe dream once and for all.

Do people actually use btrfs? I thought it was just a meme.
If I wanted to deliberately break a Linux system, would at least do something funny, like make PowerShell the default shell and NTFS the root filesystem.

I'd like to see someone daily drive something like this just to see how much it wouldn't break under such an unholy combination. See just how well Linux supports NTFS and how well Microsoft dealt with PowerShell 7 interoperability. Well, I guess the latter would be a non-issue since you'd just be running Bash/ZSH/Fish/whatever within PowerShell, like you can nest CMD/PS5/PS7 under Windows indefinitely.

 

[Toilet Paper]

Yep, its a troon. Not surprising considering they work on Gnome but always good to confirm it.

Lol that's The Evil "I can confidently say that code quality should be the least of your concerns" Skeleton. No wonder he doesn't care about people with actual disabilities, he's too busy being a bulwark of inclusivity for zero commit "contributors". Look at this absolute seething, when Wayland intrinsically breaks screen readers:

And this brief moment of clarity:

Yeah, I'm sure you aren't.
For our blind kiwis in the audience (all 2 of you), I added alt-text to these images so you can laugh with us at this troon dilating.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Btrfs is useful if you want smaller snapshots on your Timeshift configuration, but other than that it's a bunch of moving parts and should be handled with caution like all newer technologies. Whenever I move to Antix I'm going to just stick to a basic ass ext4.

 

[snotang]

Either accept that Linux won't replace Windows unless it becomes Windows, which the Linux community is against, or give up your YotLD pipe dream once and for all.

I, for one, believe that merely becoming Windows isn't enough; Linux won't replace Windows until every atom of Bill Gates' body is emulated so that he can continue to recite his "letter to hobbyists" on their screens forever with perfectly-simulated aging.

Are you sure you wouldn't be more interested in creating "The ReactOS thread"? After all, it is not only pursuing what you seem to think the future of computing will be, it's also already far closer to it than Linux.

Alternatively, consider this modest proposal: since there is no force on Earth that can cause Windows to be replaced with anything but Windows for the population of Windows Users (for the mighty and powerful Slav Power has decreed it to be so), we could simply exterminate the current generation of Windows Users, and raise new computer users to use Linux. This is after all how sociopolitical attitudes and beliefs usually end up changing - people are seldom actually convinced or converted, they merely die and are replaced with someone with different views.

If we achieve the Year of the Linux Desktop through mass genocide, will you finally stop bitching about it? You write like someone has taped your eyes open and chained you to a chair staring at nothing but people sperging about the Year of the Linux Desktop. Legitimately, why do you care so much about this? I don't get the impression you're just "dropping by to give some helpful tips on how to achieve widespread adoption", since your view is that this is functionally impossible. Does seeing silly people on the internet (somewhere - presumably not here) talking with naive optimism drive you into some sort of frenzied rage?

Try installing an old game from a CD/DVD. On Windows it'll do it as it's, to an extent, the same OS as it was back in the 90's. Of course, if the game had a shitty DRM like SecuROM that no longer works on Windows (because it was that shit), then it won't work, but the same applies to Linux.

I have done exactly this with Age of Kings and Age of Conquerors and found that it works in WINE and not in any remotely modern Windows, because the SafeDisc kernel driver no longer exists in Windows, but a shim does exist in WINE.

My brother literally had to install Linux in a VM in order to play.

 

[HalHalliday]

I've been seeing lots of people recommend Win 10 LTSC claiming that it has less bloat & telemetry. Regarding bloat it does seem true to some extent, but the telemetry's all the same.

That's not how you do it. You get Win 10 LTSC and then customize the ISO, you can basically throw away everything you don't want. E.g. I can't even change the keyboard layout, because the program just isn't there. Once you install it, you can run custom scripts to disable things even further, or set up the enviro as you like.

 

[volatile puar]

I've seen gaming channels complain about how classic Win7 era games don't work properly under modern Windows. Sure, they run, but they don't work quite the way they're supposed to, which is a problem if you actually care about playing the game as it was intended. Troubles with old software is not exclusive to Linux, and quite frankly in most cases they probably work better on Linux and MacOS (even on Apple silicon) than on Windows because WINE does a better job at backwards compatibility than Windows.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

If we achieve the Year of the Linux Desktop through mass genocide, will you finally stop bitching about it? You write like someone has taped your eyes open and chained you to a chair staring at nothing but people sperging about the Year of the Linux Desktop. Legitimately, why do you care so much about this? I don't get the impression you're just "dropping by to give some helpful tips on how to achieve widespread adoption", since your view is that this is functionally impossible. Does seeing silly people on the internet (somewhere - presumably not here) talking with naive optimism drive you into some sort of frenzied rage?

Slav will just ping Null with an unhinged text wall begging for him to turn the conversation his direction.

 

[Slav Power]

If we achieve the Year of the Linux Desktop through mass genocide, will you finally stop bitching about it?

You've started talking about genociding Windows users, not me. If you take operating systems this seriously, maybe it's time to calm down. Since you have troubles with basic reading comprehension, I didn't say "Linux should become Windows", I said "Linux won't overtake Windows and that's fine".

Legitimately, why do you care so much about this?

Reminder that I wasn't the one to initiate the "Linux will take over Windows because Windows X is shit" discussion here. So let me ask you this: why do you care so much about Windows? I thought it's been established that Linux won't be Windows and will never be Windows, and the Linux community doesn't want Windows users because they're all nigger cattle, yet here we are with the same old "preinstalled Windows is the issue" schtick.

Though I get it, Nick Alinsky's playbook of accusing your opponent of the thing that you yourself are doing. Except this isn't a political debate thread, this is an operating system thread. It's like Milwaukee vs Makita, and you're getting this emotional about what brand of power tools people use and how if Makita supported Milwaukee batteries then suddenly no one would be buying Milwaukee tools. Stop taking this shit so seriously and calm down.

Slav will just ping Null with an unhinged text wall begging for him to turn the conversation his direction.

Nah, I'm expecting you and all the usual culprits to cry to Null to make the Linux thread, if not the entirety of the I&T board, the same type of hugbox as the Man Hate Thread or the Ukraine War threads given how you always stop thinking and get emotional when someone criticizes Linux in any way.

 

[Noyciciw]

is Mint really the best option for beginners?

I've never used mint before, but I hear a lotta good things about it. Manjaro was my first distro, and I think it's a solid beginner choice as well.