The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Froggy Fresh Sextape]

I don't get the systemd hate.

this thread's full of forever unemployed autists

just bail out now if you work for a living, there's nothing good or interesting here

 

[reactionary]

Any tips for someone running NVIDIA + Wayland in the year of our lord 2025?

Don't.

 

[Slav Power]

I just installed kdenlive because I'm going to need to edit something really quick. After I installed it, and the million dependencies, it literally called the hook to rebuild my initramfs. That's the kind of shit that makes me never want to use anything with a K at the beginning of it. Why the fuck should so much shit be installed for a video editor it triggers my initramfs to get rebuilt?

Not only that, I find Kdenlive to just be a shit editor that's unpleasant to use in general. You want a really good video editor for Linux? DaVinci Resolve is free and has a native Linux version. If you're willing to learn then Blender can do video editing as well. And for quick edits like cutting a clip there's Avidemux, wasn't updated in a while but it does the job well, as long as your source material isn't H.265, but that codec is a nightmare for anything that's not playback anyways.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Very fascist like tactics from people who supposedly fight fascists. Ironic and would be funny if it weren't for the fact people are getting seriously hurt or killed. Tag or write on my profile after the writeup I'd be interested to read about it.

I decided I will do it in 2 parts because I want to keep it somewhat digestible. I'll do the second part tomorrow I'm doing the first part tonight. I'm currently waiting for the video clips to upload to the site, which is slow af. Definitely slower than rendering them. Part of it is not wanting to deal with attempting to upload everything that would be there if I did it all in one post. Because there is a lot there.

Not only that, I find Kdenlive to just be a shit editor that's unpleasant to use in general. You want a really good video editor for Linux? DaVinci Resolve is free and has a native Linux version. If you're willing to learn then Blender can do video editing as well. And for quick edits like cutting a clip there's Avidemux, wasn't updated in a while but it does the job well, as long as your source material isn't H.265, but that codec is a nightmare for anything that's not playback anyways.

Seeing what people say that use Davinci. It sounds like their linux support is kind of shit. At least I know I have seen linux cast talking about how he's too fat and open suse brained to get it working properly or something. It could be that he really doesn't know what he is doing and it's easy to get it working. I would rather use something slightly worse, that just works though.

Also being completely FOSS is a plus.


edit: ok got the first half up

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/open-source-software-community.38130/post-22651660

 

[Plastic Bag]

I genuinely think Ubuntu is better for new users than Mint, its really not that complicated and it doesn't make it way too familiar so that there's still a dependency on Windows or Windows familiar visuals.

 

[Slav Power]

I genuinely think Ubuntu is better for new users than Mint, its really not that complicated and it doesn't make it way too familiar so that there's still a dependency on Windows or Windows familiar visuals.

Well, giving GNOME as the first desktop experience to Windows users is a surefire way to make them despise Linux. You might as well say new users should just install Arch with Hyprland because that means they won't have the Windows familiarity and that'll somehow compel them to learn Linux more. UI familiarity is not a bad thing since sooner or later they'll be running into the usual Linux difference walls like how the file system works, having to use the command line for certain tasks and so on the moment they step out of the predefined UI sandbox. Plus, Mint unshittifies Ubuntu by removing Snaps and other Canonical garbage, and offers Xfce/MATE variants as well, both of which are decent, simple, Windows-like and customizable DE's.

You have to decide: do you want Windows users to simply use Linux, or do you want them to learn Linux? The former is very much doable with Mint, the latter means you need a reality check about what the average Windows user's mental capability to learn tech is. Spoiler alert: no, 99% of people aren't tech obsessed nerds that love learning how their OS works, they just want it to work, get out of their way and don't demand from them to do anything about it for it to work.

 

[Esope]

I genuinely think Ubuntu is better for new users than Mint, its really not that complicated and it doesn't make it way too familiar so that there's still a dependency on Windows or Windows familiar visuals.

new user :
> double click exe file
> nothing happens
then the user learns that he needs to parameter wine to make it work
> it doesn't work
> forums points at 15 differents reasons why it doesn't work
> each reason explains why X is shit in Y linux flavor and why Z flavor is better
> user give up and reinstall windows

 

[Safir]

new user :
> double click exe file

Your hypothetical user who downloads an exe file for Linux and acts surprised won't know what an exe file is, because he'll have never seen a file's extension. He'd have a couple of weeks trying to remember the new icons ("where's the internet?") and then it's business as usual.

 

[Esope]

Your hypothetical user who downloads an exe file for Linux and acts surprised won't know what an exe file is, because he'll have never seen a file's extension. He'd have a couple of weeks trying to remember the new icons ("where's the internet?") and then it's business as usual.

if only it was that simple linux would be 40 % of desktop shares im just pessimistic i guess

 

[Ferryman]

sic.

Except I do. I'm writing this from Guix System. There is a real time investment to be made learning a niche system config scheme, and the docs certainly aren't BSD-tier, but neither are they as bad as you make them out to be. I hate to be that guy, but LLMs have a legitimate use case as search engines and teaching aids, and I cannot think of one instance where a problem I've had could not be solved by either jamming something in a container or looking through someone else's dotfiles, if not the manuals / System Crafters' guides & forum. I am under no illusion that it is the best OS ever, there is some stuff that just does not work. Thankfully, containers exist, and you can install Nix ontop of Guix, though I'm still tinkering with the latter so I can't speak on how stable that is. My point still stands, it is perfectly useable, and it is not nearly as difficult as people make it out to be. And I will never stop shilling it as such because of this:

Relative to NixOS, Guix SD's development is highly community-driven, with developer discussions occurring on publicly visible mailing lists. Users are encouraged to contribute, even if it's just a hazy idea. The Guix SD development team is also highly sceptical of corporate contributions, so if you're looking for a Linux distribution that's by the people and meant exclusively for them, it's definitely worth considering.

In a world where there's some corpo goon's fingers in every pie, Guix stands out as one of a handful of distros that is made for and by a tight knit community. That is worth the effort in my book.

 

[残念。]

Your hypothetical user who downloads an exe file for Linux and acts surprised won't know what an exe file is, because he'll have never seen a file's extension. He'd have a couple of weeks trying to remember the new icons ("where's the internet?") and then it's business as usual.

That was a actually me at one point. The windows users who are brave enough to try something new like installing a new operating system will probably have a basic idea of how windows works, but won't know the difference between that and a different OS.

 

[Slav Power]

That was a actually me at one point. The windows users who are brave enough to try something new like installing a new operating system will probably have a basic idea of how windows works, but won't know the difference between that and a different OS.

It's also annoying and counter-intuitive how you have to define everything by hand to be able to use Windows software under Wine. You want to run it? Oh you can't just double click it and have Wine deal with it, you have to do some specific method of running it, usually revolving opening the terminal. You want to pop in a DLL for game modding? Oh you can't just do that, you have to manually define that DLL override.

No matter how good Wine is at mimicking WinNT, it's usability is dogshit and it seems like the Wine team just doesn't give a solitary fuck about it, or about working on it at all given how they've been sitting on their thumbs for so long until Valve and that one weeb made Proton and DXVK to make games on Linux actually work. And being cut out of the Windows software ecosystem completely is one of the biggest deal breakers when it comes to Linux that seemingly no one in the Linux community cares about. It's always the superfluous shit that they recreate, like the desktop environment.

 

[Dread First]

Overall the documentation for NixOS is fucking garbage even Guix does have better one and theirs have half of the things missing from it and the half is outdated. Adding to that Nix lang is pure niggerware that needs to constantly defer to other languages such as bash to do anything.

Guix is legit a Gentoo-level IQ filter. The whole "declarative OS" thing is extremely easy to wrap your head around if you are an experienced Linux user. Even then, if you need more than max a week of daily driving to get the hang of it, I'm sorry, but the issue there is not in the OS, but between the chair and the screen.

The fact that you think so shows that you haven’t daily driven it at all. While the concept is easy to understand it doesn’t change the fact that their documentation is genuinely shit. For example there are services that aren’t described in it and the only way to know about it is using guix system search command and then to understand how to use it you need to read source code by using guix system edit. And when something is described there is significant chance that it is outdated(for example host-file) albeit thankfully Guix people aren’t retarded and you can still do things the old way with the only price being warnings.
The worst thing about it and infact the thing that made me stop daily driving it is however inherent to the design namely: Editing the system in manner unexpected by it’s designers is significantly harder than it is on normal mutable distro.

Except I do. I'm writing this from Guix System. There is a real time investment to be made learning a niche system config scheme, and the docs certainly aren't BSD-tier, but neither are they as bad as you make them out to be. I hate to be that guy, but LLMs have a legitimate use case as search engines and teaching aids, and I cannot think of one instance where a problem I've had could not be solved by either jamming something in a container or looking through someone else's dotfiles, if not the manuals / System Crafters' guides & forum. I am under no illusion that it is the best OS ever, there is some stuff that just does not work. Thankfully, containers exist, and you can install Nix ontop of Guix, though I'm still tinkering with the latter so I can't speak on how stable that is. My point still stands, it is perfectly useable, and it is not nearly as difficult as people make it out to be. And I will never stop shilling it as such because of this:

FWIW: I'm autistic enough to use Linux daily nowadays. I've been deep in the Linux rabbit hole since high school, and I even have a spare hard drive to satisfy my itch for distro hopping. I've already burnt myself out on fiddling with the usual Arch, Slackware, and FreeBSD. They're all fantastic systems, but the fun with those distros comes from the setup process. Once you have your test system up and running to an acceptable state, why bother maintaining it? Maybe I can commit to moulding FreeBSD into a proper Linux replacement, but I'm procrastinating hardcore on that task. Guix System (cheers for the correction), however, scratches that extremely autistic itch for something new to learn.

With Arch, Slackware, and FreeBSD, you can easily coast on the ArchWiki, the SlackBook and the FreeBSD handbook, and in many cases, copy and paste commands verbatim from either resource. Oh, you think the Slackbook is outdated? Think again, because Slackware is indeed that conservative with its changes. If I can copy and paste shit, am I really learning the fundamentals of the system? Or am I more likely just a filthy casual who got lucky with copying and pasting shit, and internalising the terminal through years of repeatedly typing in sudo apt update && sudo apt update -y or sudo dnf upgrade -y or nano ~/.bashrc, or WINEPREFIX=$HOME/PKHeX wine PKHeX.exe?

I have no aptitude for bash scripting, let alone Python, because I never bothered to try either. On the same hand, learning the ins and outs of Emacs and the endless rabbit hole therein led me to internalising the absolute basics of MacLisp. Yeah, it's in the context of an Emacs config from scratch, but it's still something! Then I get curious what kind of setup System Crafters is running, and I come across the Guix tutorials. I found his tutorials for the Emacs scratch config immensely helpful, so I started watching his Guix videos to learn more. I'm not sure if I'll ever set up Guix on my portable hard drive; I think it's a bridge too far to learn Guile Scheme if I'm barely internalising MacLisp. Even so? Guix went high up on my bucket list of shit to try in earnest. It won't be my daily driver, but to that effect: an environment where literally everything I can do on my computer is possible with Guile Scheme? It's like a pagan's pale imitation of Temple OS and HolyC.

 

[残念。]

No matter how good Wine is at mimicking WinNT, it's usability is dogshit and it seems like the Wine team just doesn't give a solitary fuck about it, or about working on it at all given how they've been sitting on their thumbs for so long until Valve and that one weeb made Proton and DXVK to make games on Linux actually work. And being cut out of the Windows software ecosystem completely is one of the biggest deal breakers when it comes to Linux that seemingly no one in the Linux community cares about. It's always the superfluous shit that they recreate, like the desktop environment.

If they made wine "just work" as well as mint does, there wouldn't be much reason to not switch to Linux.... Well I guess except for my case sometimes where I mess with old eeprom programmers, drivers are the issue there. Finally got one working in a virtual machine though, so there's that.

 

[acid_ra1n]

I genuinely think Ubuntu is better for new users than Mint, its really not that complicated and it doesn't make it way too familiar so that there's still a dependency on Windows or Windows familiar visuals.

only reasons i cant recommend it are snaps are really fucking buggy, it has a bug where the bootloader doesnt install to the drive you think it would, it permanently sticks to your uefi boot menu even if you install something else, and its so bloated i swear my ryzen 5800x with 32gb ram and gen 4 nvme ssd arent fast enough to run it
mint has none of these problems so it gets my recommendation

 

[reactionary]

And for quick edits like cutting a clip

If it's a single clip, you can just do ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 0:42.157 -to 1:12.183 output.mp4. If you want it to be Web-Compatible™ (i.e. optimized and playable on most devices), you can add some extra fun options like -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset veryslow -movflags +faststart etc.

 

[Slav Power]

If it's a single clip, you can just do ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 0:42.157 -to 1:12.183 output.mp4. If you want it to be Web-Compatible™ (i.e. optimized and playable on most devices), you can add some extra fun options like -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset veryslow -movflags +faststart etc.

Now the fun part is figuring out what's the easiest way to pull the clip timestamps from a media player, then have a nice and easy way to pass them into the command line without having to type them out by hand.

 

[reactionary]

Now the fun part is figuring out what's the easiest way to pull the clip timestamps from a media player, then have a nice and easy way to pass them into the command line without having to type them out by hand.

I usually just check them in mpv: if you click on the first timestamp it'll show you with the required precision. Typing it out is not as much of a chore as one may think.

 

[Baraka Obama]

If it's a single clip, you can just do ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 0:42.157 -to 1:12.183 output.mp4. If you want it to be Web-Compatible™ (i.e. optimized and playable on most devices), you can add some extra fun options like -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset veryslow -movflags +faststart etc.

I can never remember the ffmpeg syntax so I made a script to do this for me a while ago, cut-video.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Function to display help
show_help() {
    echo "Usage: $0 <filename> <start_time> <end_time>"
    echo
    echo "Extracts a portion of a media file between the specified start and end timestamps."
    echo
    echo "Parameters:"
    echo "  <filename>    The media file to process (any format supported by FFmpeg)."
    echo "  <start_time>  The start timestamp (format: HH:MM:SS or seconds)."
    echo "  <end_time>    The end timestamp (format: HH:MM:SS or seconds)."
    echo
    echo "Example:"
    echo "  $0 video.mp4 00:05:00 00:10:00"
    echo "  $0 audio.mp3 300 600"
    exit 1
}

# Check if the help option is used
if [[ "$1" == "--help" || "$1" == "-h" ]]; then
    show_help
fi

# Validate parameters
if [[ $# -ne 3 ]]; then
    echo "Error: Invalid number of arguments."
    show_help
fi

filename="$1"
start_time="$2"
end_time="$3"

# Check if the input file exists
if [[ ! -f "$filename" ]]; then
    echo "Error: File '$filename' not found."
    exit 1
fi

# Validate timestamp format (basic check for HH:MM:SS or numeric seconds)
if ! [[ "$start_time" =~ ^([0-9]+|[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2})$ ]]; then
    echo "Error: Invalid start time format. Use HH:MM:SS or seconds."
    exit 1
fi

if ! [[ "$end_time" =~ ^([0-9]+|[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2})$ ]]; then
    echo "Error: Invalid end time format. Use HH:MM:SS or seconds."
    exit 1
fi

# Extract basename and extension
basename="${filename%.*}"
ext="${filename##*.}"

# Generate output filename
output="${basename}_cut.${ext}"

# Extract the portion of the media file
echo "Extracting from '$filename' between '$start_time' and '$end_time'..."
ffmpeg -i "$filename" -ss "$start_time" -to "$end_time" -c copy "$output"

# Check if the extraction was successful
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
    echo "Extraction successful:"
    echo "  Output: $output"
else
    echo "Error: Failed to extract the portion."
    exit 1
fi

Similar to you I just copy out timestamps from mpv, plus I have a similar one to do the opposite, remove a section from a video. It's all much easier than using a full video editing suite.

 

[Aidan]

if only it was that simple linux would be 40 % of desktop shares im just pessimistic i guess

Most people don't do anything on their computer and if you forced them to use something like Mint, Fedora, or Ubuntu they would get by fine. 99% of what they do is in the browser unless they play games. Windows and Mac are the paths of least resistance so that's where people go. If you suddenly had to download Windows and install it yourself and store bought computers came with some flavor of Linux, then people would use Linux and probably install Chrome and be happy.