The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Palmer Bangs]

Thanks for the info. I was looking for a laptop that I could dual boot, but if I could put it on a usb to mess with , all the better.

I would also suggest WSL but sometimes you want a more isolated environment for learning. You can skip dual booting altogether if you use https://www.virtualbox.org/ to spin up a virtual machine. You attach whichever linux .iso you want to a new VM, and follow the installation instructions.

If you're an absolute beginner and want to dual boot still, back up your files first.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

I would also suggest WSL but sometimes you want a more isolated environment for learning. You can skip dual booting altogether if you use https://www.virtualbox.org/ to spin up a virtual machine. You attach whichever linux .iso you want to a new VM, and follow the installation instructions.

If you're an absolute beginner and want to dual boot still, back up your files first.

I personally. think burning an iso to a usb. and just booting into that is a really good option. the only think you need to know is how to get the iso on a usb, and there are plenty of guides a complete beginner could follow.

That and making sure you pick an iso with a graphical live environment, most do have that these days. Mint, fedora, opensuse, I think debian might even offer one, just not by default. Then all of the more new user friendly arch distros should have a gui live environment.

Then you can boot into the usb, have a system that you can play around with. None of the changes will be permanent, it will be pretty close to running on bare metal, and you don't have to worry about any of the virtual machine quirks and nonsense.

I think people should recommend doing that more. Just make sure you don't use the installer, if you don't want to install the distro, and you should be fine.

 

[Vesperus]

Out of curiosity, why do people now still prefer cygwin over WSL?
I used cygwin back a decade ago, but I've found WSL more ergonomic, am I missing something?,

Cygwin was written by Cygnus Solutions, unsung FOSS heroes (note that they chose a name that includes GNU because principals). It is therefore good.
WSL was written by MS pajeets (note that my phone autocorrects WSL to ESL because lol). It is therefore bad.

 

[Akerman]

I personally recommend new users try Linux by installing it on some old laptop from uni or w/e. The laptop is probably e-waste now anyways due to not being officially supported by Windows 11 & awful specs so there is no real loss in messing with it. The upside is you get an actual Linux environment rather than virtualization or having to dual boot which could be difficult to do for some.

 

[Zeftax]

Fucking shit. So I turned off the computer yesterday. Today it got stuck right after decryption. The hardware for my server onto which I intended among other things to do more regular and complete backups will arrive tomorrow. I think some of the more important data is backed up on other computers, but some data that has only sentimental value isn't. Well, I hope a live boot will still be able to fix this. The timing at least makes for a funny story if nothing else...

 

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Fucking shit. So I turned off the computer yesterday. Today it got stuck right after decryption. The hardware for my server onto which I intended among other things to do more regular and complete backups will arrive tomorrow. I think some of the more important data is backed up on other computers, but some data that has only sentimental value isn't. Well, I hope a live boot will still be able to fix this. The timing at least makes for a funny story if nothing else...
View attachment 7684175

Assuming that something has gone wrong with how you have things set up- an install of a new kernel package/generation of the kernel image, that didn't go quite right, etc, rather than a hardware failure, there should be options.

Assuming you're using Grub like a sensible person who doesn't jack off to the beauty of the UEFI design, simply taking the option of using a slightly older kernel in your grub menu might work.

If not, you should be able to boot into a live environment, and then either use a GUI file manager to mount the volume, or, if that doesn't work, you should be able to open it using the 'cryptsetup open DEVICEPATH MAPPEDNAME' then 'mount /dev/mapper/MAPPEDNAME /mnt' or whatever.

EDIT: If everything mounts up fine, once you've backed up the data, if you can figure out what the issue is you should (now being booted up with a running kernel), be able to chroot to the root install and fiddle fuck around to get the right /dev and other ancilary filesystems set up. At which point you can then work 'normally' (rerunning grub install scripts etc etc or whatever is neccessary to unfuck things). Doing that in whatever way your particular arch setup is set up for of course..

EDIT 2: I see Arch comes with a couple of nifty scripts for easing the cockpain of chrooting when you've fucked up your install. I wonder why that is! Pretty handy anyway. Guess I'll be installing the debian package for arch-chroot just in case.

https://packages.debian.org/unstable/arch-install-scripts

 

[DavidS877]

Fucking shit. So I turned off the computer yesterday. Today it got stuck right after decryption. The hardware for my server onto which I intended among other things to do more regular and complete backups will arrive tomorrow. I think some of the more important data is backed up on other computers, but some data that has only sentimental value isn't. Well, I hope a live boot will still be able to fix this. The timing at least makes for a funny story if nothing else...
View attachment 7684175

The good news is all your data appears to be there, depending on if it's using TPM or not you should be able to just move the drive. Alternately a live boot USB.

 

[Banana Hammock]

Huh. I was using a program called Upscayl to do AI upscaling of a couple photos, and it took me like 5 minutes per photo on Mint. I had to do some stuff on Windows today, and I got curious and decided to try it on Windows. I did a batch upscale of the same ten photos, and it took like 30 seconds for the full set. Does the Nvidia 3060 ti not do well on Mint? I'm using the 575 driver for it.

 

[Palmer Bangs]

I personally. think burning an iso to a usb. and just booting into that is a really good option. the only think you need to know is how to get the iso on a usb, and there are plenty of guides a complete beginner could follow.

It's been a long time since I've used a linux live CD but my experience was that it was really slow, and did not persist storage. Maybe that's changed, but having a VM open while able to google errors in your "main/dailydriver" OS is a huge plus to me.

 

[DavidS877]

Huh. I was using a program called Upscayl to do AI upscaling of a couple photos, and it took me like 5 minutes per photo on Mint. I had to do some stuff on Windows today, and I got curious and decided to try it on Windows. I did a batch upscale of the same ten photos, and it took like 30 seconds for the full set. Does the Nvidia 3060 ti not do well on Mint? I'm using the 575 driver for it.

Probably missing one of the 37 packages needed for CUDA and it switched back to CPU mode. Or similar problems.

 

[Banana Hammock]

Probably missing one of the 37 packages needed for CUDA and it switched back to CPU mode. Or similar problems.

Apparently if you don't turn off secure boot, it doesn't matter what driver you install because it'll only let you use nouveau. Very cool, Mint.

Update: My heavier games will actually load now, though I don't have the time to really put them through their paces.

 

[WhiteNight]

Today it got stuck right after decryption.

Hard to guess what the problem is without knowing your distro and version. But for example with the upcoming Debian you now need systemd-cryptsetup to bring up an encrypted volume. See this mailing list thread: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/07/msg00012.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/07/msg00019.html

 

[ZMOT]

I would also suggest WSL but sometimes you want a more isolated environment for learning. You can skip dual booting altogether if you use https://www.virtualbox.org/ to spin up a virtual machine. You attach whichever linux .iso you want to a new VM, and follow the installation instructions.

WSL is best use as a shell environment, not for GUI. this way you can almost seamlessly use it via windows terminal.

New to Linux and still learning. I picked up this book which hasn’t arrived yet and have been reading and watching various videos on the internet. Is there a website with a virtual setup that I can run basic script and learn more ? Any advice would be appreciated.

install oracle virtualbox, install debian headless, ssh into the box -> profit. that alone is a nice goal to figure out.

if that's too much at first (web based):

https://web.mit.edu/mprat/Public/web/Terminus/Web/main.html

https://cmdchallenge.com/

more tutorials games:
https://gitlab.com/slackermedia/bashcrawl (scroll down for online version)
https://github.com/veltman/clmystery (zip needed to unpack)

more stuff beyond the bash:

https://vim-adventures.com/

https://overthewire.org/wargames/

 

[Slav Power]

Huh. I was using a program called Upscayl to do AI upscaling of a couple photos, and it took me like 5 minutes per photo on Mint. I had to do some stuff on Windows today, and I got curious and decided to try it on Windows. I did a batch upscale of the same ten photos, and it took like 30 seconds for the full set. Does the Nvidia 3060 ti not do well on Mint? I'm using the 575 driver for it.

I'd recommend using chaiNNer and models from OpenModelDB instead, the ol' reliable method of upscaling from pre-2020 days of ML. Also worth looking into ComfyUI and SUPIR upscaling since it's way better than any standard 4x upscaler model due to it being a glorified ControlNet.

https://vim-adventures.com/

No matter how much I use Vim, I always confuse J and K when navigating. Then again, I only treat Vim as a CLI text editor for simpler jobs like config editing, I much more prefer GUI editors like Sublime Text for most work. I don't think I'd ever get used to using Vim as a full blown IDE, and that is without trying to turn it into one with those Neovim conversion packs. I want to keep my shit simple.

Anyways, some interesting FOSS news.

Google launches OSS Rebuild to boost trust in open source package security​

https://oss-rebuild.dev

It seems interesting given how those supply chain attacks are getting more and more prevalent, even reaching Linux with shit like xz that would go unnoticed and wreak havoc if not for some autist noticing their SSH session was taking 0.001s longer to initiate than usual. The FOSS supply chain needs to be reinforced, question is whether or not depending on companies like Google is the right way to go. Then again most of what makes the Linux kernel the powerhouse that it is today is thanks to those companies.

 

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Google launches OSS Rebuild to boost trust in open source package security
https://oss-rebuild.dev
It seems interesting given how those supply chain attacks are getting more and more prevalent, even reaching Linux with shit like xz that would go unnoticed and wreak havoc if not for some autist noticing their SSH session was taking 0.001s longer to initiate than usual. The FOSS supply chain needs to be reinforced, question is whether or not depending on companies like Google is the right way to go. Then again most of what makes the Linux kernel the powerhouse that it is today is thanks to those companies.

This just seems like something some dirty fucking indians had ChatGPT generate some fluff for.

Reproducible builds are not an 'innovation'. For example, F-Droid, which anyone who isn't insane already uses as much as possible instead of Google Play, does that shit.

This is the most Google-retarded shit possible. Here's my favorite part. It's written in Go because Google.. but none of the documentation mentions supporting whatever clusterfuck is Go packaging. It supports Rust Crates.io packages... as far as I know, you can't distribute binaries through Crates.io. It supports NPM.... if you are somehow downloading random binaries through NPM you should die. It supports Python pip/pypi packages. OK, fair enough, but anyone who would in theory implement this retarded Google shit is already using GitHub actions to automate publishing source and potentially even binary 'wheels' to PyPi.

 

[Nice Stick]

Is Devuan the least troon infested linux distro? I don't care about systemd, but I'd like to stay as far away from degenerates as possible.

 

[DavidS877]

Apparently if you don't turn off secure boot, it doesn't matter what driver you install because it'll only let you use nouveau. Very cool, Mint.

Update: My heavier games will actually load now, though I don't have the time to really put them through their paces.

That's weird. Debian, and I assumed Ubuntu and the derived distributions have had DKMS working with secure boot for years, absent a couple months when they broke it. Load a MOK into the secure store and then DKMS will sign the out of tree modules.

 

[Zeftax]

Hmm, I got home, created a live usb, relevant to the discussion here - windows overwrote the boot order to put itself on top , decrypted and mounted my root partition just fine, mounted boot and chrooted, updated all my packages and restarted, and it still gets stuck. Well, at least the data is okay - but this is perplexing. At least I have some fun for the evening.

 

[Banana Hammock]

I'd recommend using chaiNNer and models from OpenModelDB instead, the ol' reliable method of upscaling from pre-2020 days of ML. Also worth looking into ComfyUI and SUPIR upscaling since it's way better than any standard 4x upscaler model due to it being a glorified ControlNet.

I'll check it out tonight.

 

[analrapist]

Devuan the least troon infested linux distro

Artix dev has YWNBAWed troons. I'd argue Artix.