The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[snotang]

You've started talking about genociding Windows users, not me. If you take operating systems this seriously, maybe it's time to calm down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_modest_proposal

If you can't understand why telling "The Linux Thread" - a thread full of people who of their own free will chose to use Linux, most of them having previously used Windows - that, effectively "the only thing that can replace Windows is Windows", might not be treated very seriously on its face, then see the above link to finally get the reference.

For months now you have very consistently mentioned "Linux cultists", "Linux elitists", etc, usually in the context of expressing disapproval of anybody advocating for using Linux in a way that you don't think it's good enough to be used for (e.g. Steam gaming good, photo editing bad). The consistency and frequency of these mentions suggests that you are seeing this behavior a lot, to be so constantly and vehemently decrying it. I'm not seeing this behavior, so I have to ask... are the Linux cultists in the room with us now? How am I supposed to interpret what you write other than as signs that you have a deep dislike of the state of discourse relating to switching to Linux?

To give an example, suppose you're talking to your boomer uncle and hear him exclusively use little derogatory phrases for things he dislikes: "the democrap party", "the washington compost", "the JustUs department", etc. You would rightly conclude that he has strong sentiments regarding these things.

I only care insofar as I constantly find myself pulled out of my skimming by what looks like obvious bait along the lines of "God wrote it in stone that that market share is for Windows and Windows clones only". You don't strike me as a baitposter, and it's becoming tiresome to engage with what I can only interpret as absurd hyperbole, so I'd rather skip that and try to understand where you're coming from. My most generous interpretation is that you are sincerely concerned about people being misled and frustrated by overzealous advertising, and have therefore adopted the (to my thinking rather extreme) position that to the greatest extent possible users should only be advertised software that is maximally similar to what they're used to - indeed, you seem to believe that they will outright refuse to use anything that isn't a Windows clone.

If that is indeed the case, I can just write off the statements that appear hyperbolic as products of that peculiar position and carry on with my skimming.

Also it's Saul Alinsky you're thinking of, no idea where you got "Nick" from.

 

[Susanna]

Anyone recommending a distro without systemd to newbies is an idiot. You don't have to like it, but it is the default, and if they run into trouble any guide or advice is going to assume they use systemd, because 99% of people do.

Arch was my first distro (though I had pretty good understanding of computer science and a lot of experience with OSX), and now that it has an installer I agree it can make a decent beginner distro for someone (specifically a power user) willing to read the instructions and learn, but my recommendation would be Fedora KDE. Big community, good defaults, easy to set up and run. Failing that, yeah, Mint is a tolerable Debian spinoff.

 

[Slav Power]

It's a shame he didn't stay gone

And it's a shame that despite people repeating this story every time they get fed up with me, they somehow don't get the idea of using that ignore button themselves. Personally, I'd love the ability to put entire threads and boards on ignore for example.

 

[Susanna]

And it's a shame that despite people repeating this story every time they get fed up with me, they somehow don't get the idea of using that ignore button themselves. Personally, I'd love the ability to put entire threads and boards on ignore for example.

The issue is that if we ignore you, we still get to see good posters replying to you.

 

[neal_rice]

Arch was my first distro (though I had pretty good understanding of computer science and a lot of experience with OSX), and now that it has an installer I agree it can make a decent beginner distro for someone (specifically a power user) willing to read the instructions and learn, but my recommendation would be Fedora KDE. Big community, good defaults, easy to set up and run. Failing that, yeah, Mint is a tolerable Debian spinoff.

Isn't fedora KDE fully Wayland now? I would be hesitent to recommend it given Wayland hasn't matured as fully as I'd like it to be. Last time I tried running fedora KDE my rig couldn't handle it despite being up to date (bought within last few years).

Maybe in three or four years from now I'll give it a good try again.

 

[Susanna]

Isn't fedora KDE fully Wayland now? I would be hesitent to recommend it given Wayland hasn't matured as fully as I'd like it to be. Last time I tried running fedora KDE my rig couldn't handle it despite being up to date (bought within last few years).

Maybe in three or four years from now I'll give it a good try again.

Probably is. But X11 is obsolete, and Wayland (through no effort of the Wayland devs, but still) is overtaking it in terms of features modern users care about, like hotplugging monitors, setting different display scalings, HDR, VRR, and so on. The only major thing still missing for me is remote desktop, which is a major hassle on Wayland but just works in X11, but I'm self-aware enough to know people who actually use this like I do are a minority. As for performance, I don't know. Wayland seems a bit more responsive to me, and has done so for years, but this could depend on all manner of things.

Remains to be seen if XLibre will be any good. I wish them luck, but for now Wayland is likely here to stay.

 

[Slav Power]

The issue is that if we ignore you, we still get to see good posters replying to you.

Option 1: tell the good posters to ignore me as well until average reply count drops to zero.
Option 2:

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    visibility: hidden !important;
    width: 0px !important;
    height: 0px !important;
  }
  article:has(div.messageNotice--ignored) {
    margin-top: 0px !important;
  }

 

[Retarded Weeb]

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.

My post was something of an exaggeration since I don't think Year of the Linux Desktop is really attainable, but I disagree with the way you look at it. I think you misjudge just how much the average person actually uses their computer for. Most people just use their computer to open a web browser and maybe open some simple media like pictures and video. That's all, and Linux or Mac could that just as well as Windows. Even a phone can do that, which is why there's a bunch of people with smartphones and no home computer. Every issue you bring up as to the software compatibility problem is something that only a minority actually care about.

Gaming on PC? Many people don't even do that in the first place, and many who do never venture past Steam games, which you yourself admit is already almost there.
Playing old games from CD? Who's doing that except enthusiasts who hoard old shit? Particularly enthusiast too because many who do want to play something old would just pirate an ISO and probably don't even a disc drive in their computer.
HDR? Lossless scaling? Special K? What like the breakfast cereal? I don't even have a grasp of what any of that is and I play games and fiddle with my computer, you think Joe Normalfag cares?

If every computer had Linux preinstalled then all the normiecattle would barely notice. The only people who would care are ironically the ones that fall into the middle-ground of being an enthusiast about stuff on computers, but not wanting to fiddle with their computer itself to fix things or get something cutting-edge working, and those people could more likely install Windows themselves without that much issue.

 

[neal_rice]

Sorry I didn't want to mess up your pronouns and offend you.

Girls don't exist on the capital-I Internet, silly!

 

[Snorky]

Reminder that I wasn't the one to initiate the "Linux will take over Windows because Windows X is shit" discussion here.

What? That wasn't even close to what I was saying. I was merely questioning how much of a bump in users Linux as a whole will get from the discontinuation of what is statistically still the most popular version of Windows in favor of an objectively inferior iteration. I don't even know how you or anyone else managed to abstract "Linux will replace Windows" from that, because that's an entirely different discussion altogether.

Arch was my first distro (though I had pretty good understanding of computer science and a lot of experience with OSX), and now that it has an installer I agree it can make a decent beginner distro for someone (specifically a power user) willing to read the instructions and learn

I would honestly disagree. As far as distributions go, Arch is a major test of one's patience and endurance, even with archinstall. Most distributions tend to have their packages precompiled so that downloading and installing them is as quick and easy as possible, but with Arch and similar distributions that is not the case. Many packages for commonly used applications (e.g. programs like Wine or LibreWolf) are scripted to compile the application from scratch by default (a very time and resource consuming task) instead of just downloading the binary and installing that. While you could easily write off some of the other technical quirks of Arch as excuses for the user to familiarize them with the Linux ecosystem, I don't know how you can really justify that one. Arch would honestly be more fitting as an intermediate operating system.

 

[Ferryman]

Anyone recommending a distro without systemd to newbies is an idiot. You don't have to like it, but it is the default, and if they run into trouble any guide or advice is going to assume they use systemd, because 99% of people do.

Arch was my first distro (though I had pretty good understanding of computer science and a lot of experience with OSX), and now that it has an installer I agree it can make a decent beginner distro for someone (specifically a power user) willing to read the instructions and learn, but my recommendation would be Fedora KDE. Big community, good defaults, easy to set up and run. Failing that, yeah, Mint is a tolerable Debian spinoff.

I specifically mentioned AntiX because it is super lightweight, modular and debian-based, so people coming off Mint or looking at guides will still be able to use good old apt for everything. The lack of systemd is just a nice little bonus.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Probably is. But X11 is obsolete, and Wayland (through no effort of the Wayland devs, but still) is overtaking it in terms of features modern users care about, like hotplugging monitors, setting different display scalings, HDR, VRR, and so on. The only major thing still missing for me is remote desktop, which is a major hassle on Wayland but just works in X11, but I'm self-aware enough to know people who actually use this like I do are a minority. As for performance, I don't know. Wayland seems a bit more responsive to me, and has done so for years, but this could depend on all manner of things.

Remains to be seen if XLibre will be any good. I wish them luck, but for now Wayland is likely here to stay.

There are some programs to use remote desktop with Wayland. I haven't tried them myself though because I've never actually needed it. I want to say you can either find them in the Gentoo recommended software or arch one for Wayland programs. There are two of them I want to say. But like I said. I haven't used them so I don't know how they work.

On people recommending arch based distros. I would say for a beginner probably pick endeavoros over Manjaro. There can be some problems with Manjaro a beginner wouldn't know how to deal with because of their package management. (I never had any issues when I used it but I have heard about people running into problems). But endeavoros should basically give people the Linux mint like, starter setup. While having the rolling release arch model.

Personally I don't like having my software picked for me. But I think people will probably need to use Linux for a bit before they have any real opinions on what they want installed anyway.

Most distributions tend to have their packages precompiled so that downloading and installing them is as quick and easy as possible, but with Arch and similar distributions that is not the case.

Are you confusing it with Gentoo or something? Generally you don't need to compile anything on arch. Even in the normal aur with browsers especially they will tend to have a *-bin package. And the normal arch repo tends to have most popular software.

But even when you do need the aur for something. There is the chaotic aur. It's the aur but the packages are built with an auto build system. You just enable it in your pacman.conf by following the directions on the site. And you have access to all the aur packages, without needing a pacman helper, or needing to compile anything.

 

[Susanna]

There are some programs to use remote desktop with Wayland. I haven't tried them myself though because I've never actually needed it. I want to say you can either find them in the Gentoo recommended software or arch one for Wayland programs. There are two of them I want to say. But like I said. I haven't used them so I don't know how they work.

On people recommending arch based distros. I would say for a beginner probably pick endeavoros over Manjaro. There can be some problems with Manjaro a beginner wouldn't know how to deal with because of their package management. (I never had any issues when I used it but I have heard about people running into problems). But endeavoros should basically give people the Linux mint like, starter setup. While having the rolling release arch model.

Personally I don't like having my software picked for me. But I think people will probably need to use Linux for a bit before they have any real opinions on what they want installed anyway.

I don't recommend Manjaro period, they're very unprofessional (letting their certificates lapse, telling users to set their clocks back until they feel like fixing it, DDOSing upstream Arch resources for years until upstream are forced to outright block them...) and the entire concept of holding back packages from when Arch releases them causes an order of magnitude more issues than it purports to solve (you get all the same issues, just a few weeks later, except you also get extra issues if you've installed stuff from the AUR because those packages don't get held back and often rely on libraries from the core repo, which will be incompatible).

Are you confusing it with Gentoo or something? Generally you don't need to compile anything on arch. Even in the normal aur with browsers especially they will tend to have a *-bin package. And the normal arch repo tends to have most popular software.

But even when you do need the aur for something. There is the chaotic aur. It's the aur but the packages are built with an auto build system. You just enable it in your pacman.conf by following the directions on the site. And you have access to all the aur packages, without needing a pacman helper, or needing to compile anything.

He mentioned Wine specifically, which does have special caveats. Namely by default it will want a slew of 32-bit libraries, which Arch doesn't supply as binaries (Arch are proud of having been one of the first distros to go pure 64-bit). I would think if you pacman -Sy wine it will grab a wow64-version, but he may be referring to some special "gamer-tweaked" version that doesn't have these defaults, or he's installing from the AUR to get a marginally more up-to-date version. In which case the install script will notice there are no 32-bit libraries, and download and compile essentially an entire 32-bit distro just to support this misconfigured Wine.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

He mentioned Wine specifically, which does have special caveats. Namely by default it will want a slew of 32-bit libraries, which Arch doesn't supply (Arch are proud of having been one of the first distros to go pure 64-bit). I would think if you pacman -Sy wine it will grab a wow64-version, but he may be referring to some special "gamer-tweaked" version that doesn't have these defaults, or he's installing from the AUR to get a marginally more up-to-date version. In which case the install script will notice there are no 32-bit libraries, and download and compile essentially an entire 32-bit distro just to support this misconfigured Wine.

I'm just wondering when gamers will actually be the most oppressed minority. I'm trying my hardest to oppress them and take away their right. But no one else wants to pick up the slack in the total gaymer death fight.

Anyway. Yeah idk sounds like something a gay and retarded gamer would think is important. Not sure what distro they actually suggest using if that's what they want.

 

[Betonhaus]

I feel like I should point out that the people recommending Arch or Gentoo or whatever as a newbie's first distro have never posted in the Weird and Cringe things you've seen while working in IT thread

 

[Snorky]

Even in the normal aur with browsers especially they will tend to have a *-bin package. And the normal arch repo tends to have most popular software.

True, but I feel like it would have been more intutitive to make it so that the *-bin package is the default one. I believe that used to be the case many years ago, but I might be misremembering things. The normal arch repo does tend to have the more popular software, but I've had a number of occasions where software I used like LibreWolf just weren't on it.

But even when you do need the aur for something. There is the chaotic aur. It's the aur but the packages are built with an auto build system. You just enable it in your pacman.conf by following the directions on the site. And you have access to all the aur packages, without needing a pacman helper, or needing to compile anything.

I wasn't aware that was a thing, I'll have to look into that. Cheers!

I would think if you pacman -Sy wine it will grab a wow64-version, but he may be referring to some special "gamer-tweaked" version that doesn't have these defaults, or he's installing from the AUR to get a marginally more up-to-date version.

It didn't start providing a wow64 version until just a few days ago following a transitory period that had started back in May, which happened to be right around the same time I was setting everything up to use Arch again. I was using the AUR to get a more up to date version because wine-staging on the regular repository was (and still is) out of date by a good bit, so that's admittedly definitely on me.

 

[Rust Troony]

Yep, its a troon. Not surprising considering they work on Gnome but always good to confirm it.
View attachment 7526485
(https://tesk.page)

Oh god a tranny jeet from Canada. Ticking every stereotype in the book.

 

[Redeemer]

Just gonna drop this here for distro warriors

what can I really use?

Imo: anything. The resource utilization in my experience is less to do with the guts of the system and more to do with what desktop env you are using and what programs you are running. I think pretty much any distro should be able to comfortably idle at <500MiB ram utilization with xfce or something. Even lower if you are using dwm or similar, but if it's your first Linux experience you probably want xfce. Its an interface comparable to windows xp.

 

[jeff7989]

I'll give Slavgger some ammo,

Archsisters, prepare for breakage tomorrow. Package linux-firmware has been split into multiple parts in testing, it will lead to "file exists" conflicts on update.
Here's a workaround, you'll see news soon:

# pacman -Rdd linux-firmware
# pacman -Syu linux-firmware

It's probably because firmware gets more and more bloated with time.
Source

Also make sure to install kwin-x11 if you get update for Plasma 6.4 or you will have no compositor in X11 session.

Edit.

Many packages for commonly used applications (e.g. programs like Wine or LibreWolf) are scripted to compile the application from scratch by default (a very time and resource consuming task) instead of just downloading the binary and installing that.

Nigger, that's AUR and not official repos, Arch is not Gentoo. If you don't want to compile then pull package-bin version.

 

[Betonhaus]

Is it possible to use linux without ffmpeg?