The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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At least DWM is built on top of shit that's been proven for decades and not by some firebrand pretender who thinks scope-creeping your gayland cumPOSitor is "based" while flaunting an anime pfp.

Speaking of Hyprland, there's been clones of those Omarchy-type distros popping up left and right at an alarming rate.
 
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Any reason to not use i3 over dwm? I don't really feel like writing and compiling C code whenever I want to tweak something but so many people swear by suckless.
 
Slav Power said:
Any reason to not use i3 over dwm? I don't really feel like writing and compiling C code whenever I want to tweak something but so many people swear by suckless.
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This is exactly why I use awm. It's a fork of dwm where all the parts you'd want to tweak are written in Lua. You can change your configuration or the functions that manage the behavior of windows and UI elements, then reload instantly with a hotkey, without even closing any windows.

It's the window manager where it's the least amount of effort to remove all the user interface elements, and just have it be a window manager for when you need some windows. And you can control those windows completely from your text editor.
 
Trans Fat 41g said:
At least DWM is built on top of shit that's been proven for decades and not by some firebrand pretender who thinks scope-creeping your gayland cumPOSitor is "based" while flaunting an anime pfp.

Speaking of Hyprland, there's been clones of those Omarchy-type distros popping up left and right at an alarming rate.
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JUST WEEREKS YOU GUUUUIZE is appelaing to the macfag audience that Omarchy appeals to, as well as other lazybones. Hyprland is popular because muh chud dev and how flashy it can look for ricers. One reason I do not see myself moving form it anytime soon is that it is arguably the most secure X11/Wayland graphical environment while also not being attached to commiedpedotroon endeavors like Gnome. I know that word has been raped by security trannies like our good friend Ariadne Conill of Alpine Linux, but the fact remains: it has a more robust app isolation and permissions system than any other compositor or X flavor, especially since it does not use wlroots. Anything that uses wlroots is 100% niggerlicious, courtesy of our good friend Drew "Nigger" DeVault.

Lately I've seen a lot of people switching to Niri, so Hyprland's days in the spotlight may be numbered. Surprised to see it has no coc, yet. Damn shame vaxry buckled to the tranny faggots, even if it isn't the dreaded "Contributranny Covenant" trash.
 
Slav Power said:
so many people swear by suckless
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The name should give it away altogether: suckless sucks less, it doesn't promise to never suck. There's a few gems in the suckless suite, there are theoretical advantages to the software that they peddle, but the practical reality often means recompiling dwm whenever you forgot a specific feature or flag, instead of mucking around in a text file to fix things on the fly. But hey, what do I know? I'm an unwashed peasant who prefers his mass market Linux distro slop.
 
Dread First said:
but the practical reality often means recompiling dwm whenever you forgot a specific feature or flag
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I use it and it's not that big of a deal honestly. Takes a few recompiles (which are very fast due to the minimal code base) when you set the system up for the first time but from then on it is just smooth sailing. But my setup is very minimal because I find "eye candy" to be very distracting, not sure about the ricers.
 
Zeftax said:
I use it and it's not that big of a deal honestly. Takes a few recompiles (which are very fast due to the minimal code base) when you set the system up for the first time but from then on it is just smooth sailing. But my setup is very minimal because I find "eye candy" to be very distracting, not sure about the ricers.
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The process of finding "the right colorscheme" is nauseating. I just stick to the default colorways for suckless software (and everything else) because who the fuck actually does any serious development when your choice of error color coding isn't screaming red?
 
Slav Power said:
Any reason to not use i3 over dwm? I don't really feel like writing and compiling C code whenever I want to tweak something but so many people swear by suckless.
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Some would argue that i3 is quite bloated. And that might be true on a memory constrained system.

It shows up as using a couple hundred megs of virtual memory on my machine right now. I'm sure most of that will just be X11 shared libraries, but dwm usage would be more like 10-15% of that.

That is enough to make me think about changing over if I start using my old 2-in-1 with 4gb of non-upgradable RAM again.
 
⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
That is enough to make me think about changing over if I start using my old 2-in-1 with 4gb of non-upgradable RAM again.
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It's funny you say that because Xfce is the "Ol' Reliable" of desktop environments. Xfce4's existed for well over a decade and it ran flawlessly on everything I threw at it over the years from an old 32-bit HP tower with a dual-core Celeron and 1GB of RAM to an Acer netbook with an Intel Atom and 2GB of RAM to my comically overpowered PC tower with 16GB of RAM and a Ryzen 5. Same also goes for Fluxbox, Openbox, and IceWM. Never saw the appeal in a standalone window manager (barring Fluxbox/Openbox) because Xfce4's just here chugging along seamlessly on ancient hardware. A shining example of a GTK+ environment done correctly; too bad it's fucking ugly as sin.
 
Dread First said:
It's funny you say that because Xfce is the "Ol' Reliable" of desktop environments. Xfce4's existed for well over a decade and it ran flawlessly on everything I threw at it over the years from an old 32-bit HP tower with a dual-core Celeron and 1GB of RAM to an Acer netbook with an Intel Atom and 2GB of RAM to my comically overpowered PC tower with 16GB of RAM and a Ryzen 5. Same also goes for Fluxbox, Openbox, and IceWM. Never saw the appeal in a standalone window manager (barring Fluxbox/Openbox) because Xfce4's just here chugging along seamlessly on ancient hardware. A shining example of a GTK+ environment done correctly; too bad it's fucking ugly as sin.
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It really depends on what you want to do. I fully agree that a 32-bit machine with 2-4 gb of RAM is VERY usable even with full fat Xfce in the present day... so long as you don't need to browse with multiple tabs in a full fat web browser. You can certainly open GMail on such a machine nowadays, up until the very latest Firefox release where those Mozilla faggots dropped 32-bit support, anyway.

Where I think going minimalist makes more sense is where you have machines like that Toshiba 2-in-1 or many Chromebooks where the processor is pretty recent, multimedia extensions for recent codecs and all that fancy stuff are all there, but they only have 4gb of non-upgradeable RAM and if you open more than 15-20 tabs of reasonably complex web pages they start to chug. In that case, nice to have a bit more headroom to open a few more tabs without the system shitting itself.

Of course, instead of stressing out over that, I'm using a 2013 laptop upgraded to an extreme 12gb of RAM right now, with full-fat i3wm.
 
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⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
It really depends on what you want to do. I fully agree that a 32-bit machine with 2-4 gb of RAM is VERY usable even with full fat Xfce in the present day... so long as you don't need to browse with multiple tabs in a full fat web browser. You can certainly open GMail on such a machine nowadays, up until the very latest Firefox release where those Mozilla faggots dropped 32-bit support, anyway.
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I haven't personally owned any 32-bit hardware for a little over a decade at this point, but it burns my ass that support's dropping all over the place. Plain old i686, PAE-enabled CPU with RAM that goes beyond 4GB? It's still perfectly capable! Hell, probably more capable than many modern low-end 64-bit chips. Linux was where I turned 15 years ago to make an old family PC tower usable again, it did so with aplomb, but now Linux is trending toward that "oi too old m8 not gonna support it no more" direction that Microsoft trailblazed a long time ago. Ironically, i686 support is still thriving in the BSD world both as officially supported architectures and through the ports tree. Meanwhile, binaries that worked on Linux 10 years ago are a real crapshoot if they still run now.

⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
Where I think going minimalist makes more sense is where you have machines like that Toshiba 2-in-1 or many Chromebooks where the processor is pretty recent, multimedia extensions for recent codecs and all that fancy stuff are all there, but they only have 4gb of non-upgradeable RAM and if you open more than 15-20 tabs of reasonably complex web pages they start to chug. In that case, nice to have a bit more headroom to open a few more tabs without the system shitting itself.
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Your example doesn't really ring in my head as "minimalist." A constrained system with 4GB RAM and a 64-bit processor is still capable of far more than you give credit for. LXQt exists, and you also have window managers that are basically miniature desktop environments unto themselves like Fluxbox and Openbox. You don't need to strip all the way down to dwm, coasting off <25MB for your initial graphical session on such hardware; that's just sheer lunacy. They're nowhere near as "sexy" as something like Hyprland or i3, they're nowhere near as minimal as dwm, but Fluxbox wins by having a taskbar and right-click to look for all your programs. Openbox wins by being endlessly customisable and still looking cool in the process. Both *box window managers are fairly bloated by window manager standards... but they're still heaps faster than even the most minimal version of Xfce4 you can get away with running.

⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
Of course, instead of stressing out over that, I'm using a 2013 laptop upgraded to an extreme 12gb of RAM right now, with full-fat i3wm.
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I wonder what the most powerful 32-bit processors and related consumer hardware are. I know that PAE theoretically expands your address space up to 16GB of RAM, but I never got to a point where I could run 2GB on a 32-bit system at the time. Too bloody expensive m8; need to wait until decades pass so the hardware's cheaper but also obsolete.
 
Dread First said:
I haven't personally owned any 32-bit hardware for a little over a decade at this point, but it burns my ass that support's dropping all over the place. Plain old i686, PAE-enabled CPU with RAM that goes beyond 4GB? It's still perfectly capable! Hell, probably more capable than many modern low-end 64-bit chips.
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I am allergic to throwing stuff away, and I lub my Thinkpad T60, but they can't really compare on performance. A modern N150, even a Pentium Silver from a couple years back, is going to rape any of the last hot shit 32-bit only chips that I have in it, or indeed one of the early 64-bit Core2 Duos that that Thinkpad could be upgraded to.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...Intel-Duo-T2700-vs-Intel-Pentium-Silver-N5030
Which is not to say it can't be useful. The CPUs are still fine for many things, the problem is the memory- and that PAE limit isn't the real one on any regular consumer hardware.... even with a Core2 Duo with AMD64 you can only run with a little over 3GB on that era of ThinkPad. And I have no interest in heating my home with a 15 year old pre-64 bit Xeon.
Dread First said:
Your example doesn't really ring in my head as "minimalist." A constrained system with 4GB RAM and a 64-bit processor is still capable of far more than you give credit for. LXQt exists, and you also have window managers that are basically miniature desktop environments unto themselves like Fluxbox and Openbox. You don't need to strip all the way down to dwm, coasting off <25MB for your initial graphical session on such hardware; that's just sheer lunacy. They're nowhere near as "sexy" as something like Hyprland or i3, they're nowhere near as minimal as dwm, but Fluxbox wins by having a taskbar and right-click to look for all your programs. Openbox wins by being endlessly customisable and still looking cool in the process. Both *box window managers are fairly bloated by window manager standards... but they're still heaps faster than even the most minimal version of Xfce4 you can get away with running.
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My point is that there's 'minimalist' and 'minimalist'. I mean, when I first used Linux, it was on a 486 that had 8mb of RAM (might have upgraded to 12mb at some point) and that ran X11 with WindowMaker and some graphical apps just fine (of course, it could also run Windows 95 and launch into games of Age of Empires if you weren't worried about it crashing after several minutes).

You can use a modernish laptop, which will be 64-bit, with 4GB of RAM, in a normal use case like browsing the web with multiple tabs (where my T60 is going to be taxed loading up one tab of XenForo). But in that circumstance the big issue for the 'modern' but memory underprovisioned machine is going to be running out of memory. That's where saving a hundred or so megs actually makes sense to me.

By comparison my T60, even restricted to 3GB of RAM, would never run out of memory web browsing, because it'd be unusable first just from the background load from any five webpages that aren't in the 'Professor Doctor' style. And using a few terminal emulators, some normal GUI apps (not Electron obv), I'd never get close to exhausting the memory available. So why not rice it up a bit.
 
Telvanni said:
So as somebody new to Linux (No longer touching Windows for 3 months) What's the deal with Hyprland?
I'm happy with KDE but Hyprland users swear by it.
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It’s a new tiling window manager that uses wayland and was made by a chud. Some people like tiling window managers because they let you navigate around windows with just your keyboard, and if you’re mainly using terminal programs that only accept keyboard input, then you can use your computer without having to touch a mouse. If you mainly use graphical programs that accept mouse input, you probably won’t see much benefit from a tiling window manager.

Angie Wormwood said:
From a quick Google, found on Overclock.net:

According to Wikipedia, Northwood had a 2.2GHz single-core. Released around 2002/3.
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Were there ever any 32 bit multicore x86 cpus? Iirc the Bebox used multiple cpus to do multithreading at a computer level back in the 32 bit days.
 
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The late 32 bitters are all incredibly power inefficient for what they are. Also all of them are soundly beaten by even lower end 64-bit ARM chips. It's incredibly hard to justify running these 32-bitters with anything but legacy OSes and software.

It is indeed funny though how even such low end machines become quite usable if you cut out anything "web".
 
AmpleApricots said:
It's incredibly hard to justify running these 32-bitters with anything but legacy OSes and software.
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AFAIK theyre just used for vintage builds. I guess some gen Xer: really likes the idea of a top end P4 system.
AmpleApricots said:
It is indeed funny though how even such low end machines become quite usable if you cut out anything "web".
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I used to browse the web on a 486 as late as 2003. It was slow by the end but usable. I hate the modern web.
 
First x86-64 AMD CPU was released in 2003. Intel's was a year later, although their mainstream x86-64 offerings only started in 2006. Sorry, but dropping support for 32-bit only software is only a serious issue worth protesting if you live in a third world shithole so poor that you cannot afford anything more modern than a Pentium II. The type of hardware that's being abandoned is between e-waste and "retro computing collectible" category. If you want a used computer for cheap, you will get one that has x86-64 instructions. Most likely a Haswell, that's over a decade old by now, still perfectly capable for desktop use, even web browsing, and it's still running circles around the last x86 only chips.

But I get it, neckbeard nerds go into a frenzy whenever support for legacy hardware is being dropped, even if it goes against any common sense. When Windows 11 dropped the 32-bit only versions, people were of course rallying with pitchforks, completely ignorant to the fact that 99.9% of them were already running 64-bit Windows 10 and couldn't tell a difference because WoW64 is that good at bridging the gap. Now that Linux is dropping support for i686 people want to hang Torvalds by the balls, even though the type of hardware that would need this support is nowhere to be found on the second hand market, and if you look at cheap used computers/laptops, pretty much all cheap and affordable offerings will be 6-10 years old, meaning they'll run 64-bit Linux without a hitch. Coffee Lake CPU's, AKA the 8th gen that is the minimal requirement for Windows 11's arbitrary TPM 2.0 demands, is 8 years old. Eight year old hardware is still piss cheap and if you put something like Debian with Xfce on that it's going to run like a rocket.

Obviously the discussion changes if Linux is dropping 32-bit support altogether. As in, no compatibility layer in the style of WoW64. That's just plain retarded and shooting yourself in the foot. Yes, I'm sure that people will use your OS if it deliberately breaks backwards compatibility with perfectly functional software just because some retard decided that there is no use case for 32-bit software.
 
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