Anyone know what the cause of one of the monitors going black screen for a second or two every so often? I think it has to do with my settings since the monitors are 2k and 165hz. I've lowered the refresh rate of the monitor doing it to 120hz and so far it seems to be ok. Ideally, I'd like both to be at 165hz.
edit: Linux Mint
You're gonna need to give us some diagnostic information. Not sure how willing you are to give us terminal output, so just a few basic questions.
a) Do you have an Intel GPU (iGPU or an Arc card), an AMD card, or an NVIDIA card?
- Always good to know what your graphics card is. Sometimes, but not always, it can be a problem with your GPU.
b) Have you been fiddling with the monitor's refresh rate on the monitor itself or through Linux Mint controls?
- Monitor refresh rate is a really finicky thing. Mint gives me the option to turn my HP monitor into a 75Hz display, it's capable of 75Hz, but I never manually turn on AMD FreeSync mode by fiddling with my monitor's controls. I always keep it in "Low Blue Light" mode. 9/10 I run both of my monitors at 1080p@60Hz
c) What's your current screen resolution across both monitors? Are the monitors joined or mirrored? Do you have FreeSync/V-Sync/etc enabled on the monitors themselves? Do you have any sort of fractional scaling enabled?
- Miscellaneous settings that could have a minor impact on their own, but might cascade if you're mixing and matching without keeping track of what you do.
If you stop talking about your homosexual bdsm relationship with windows in the linux thread, sure.
C'mon,
@Slav Power does bait us all into responding to him with our REEEing but it's not like he's a liar who never ever tells the truth. The thread handle here is literally "The autist's OS of choice." Autists naturally act shocked and appalled when someone goes against the grain. Slav Power is more than just a mere rabblerouser because he actually
uses Linux. He's said multiple times he's set up Linux Mint boxes for other people, he runs some type of Linux on its own, he's (presumably) used WSL, he's clearly got some knowledge about Linux that can only emerge from firsthand experience.
There are also genuine architectural differences between GNU/Linux and Windows where Linux arguably does some stuff better, but a whole cavalcade of crap that Windows does better and probably will continue to do better at until the heat death of the universe. Microsoft got a ton of shit during the 9x days for sticking with MS-DOS, slapping a 32-bit userland on top of a 16-bit OS based on MS-DOS which itself was impossibly ancient by the time Windows 3.1 and 95 dropped. I think there's a subconscious bias against Microsoft both for predatory practices
and the shit user experience everyone had before Windows XP launched and became ubiquitous. Even during the XP days, it was a hideously insecure mess until the first couple of service packs dropped and then we got Vista/7 which gave us streamlined User Account Controls.
Windows NT is
not a Unix approach to computing, and surprisingly? It's one of the few (widely-available) non-Unix computer operating systems left on the planet. We don't have BeOS, OS/2, Commodore Kernal, Amiga Workbench, not even classic Mac OS anymore. Servers everywhere run some variant of Unix be it a genetic Unix descendant like FreeBSD or some Linux distro like Ubuntu Server. Windows Server is
not a common sight anymore, and if it is, it's probably some legacy version like Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008. Windows NT is a wholly unique computing paradigm that was designed from the ground-up back when Windows NT was shipped separately as an operating system for business machines. GNU/Linux is a Unix clone that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It's
not a novel approach to computing because it's based on computing paradigms dating all the way back to 1969 at Bell Labs.
If I'm gonna be an autistic SOB who keeps using Mozilla Firefox to fight off browser monoculture despite viscerally despising Mozilla as a company, I should also be fair and give Windows the flowers it rightly deserves. Windows is paradoxically a monoculture unto itself in the home consumer, enterprise, and cloud computing spaces, yet in absolute terms? Windows is also a tiny minority of operating systems actively in use today. It derailed the thread a little bit a few pages back, but
@Slav Power and
@Overly Serious were genuinely helpful insofar as giving me context on how to do CMD/PowerShell crap in Windows if the urge ever struck me. Honestly? Pretty tempting proposition all things considered. I never even gave much thought to playing any MS-DOS games despite DOSBox being ubiquitous and all the downloads being less than 100MB.
That's why you want to install the binary kernel while installing gentoo.
That makes sense, probably worth fiddling with at some point, but I'm not gonna like it. Cheers for the clarification mate.
There are ways around that, but my point is. I just felt like portage, but missing all the things I like about portage.
Understandable, but I think you're missing the big distinction here between Portage and the Ports collection of any given BSD project. Portage is a package manager unto itself, the Ports collection on any given BSD is almost always a collection of makefiles, patches, and metadata sorted by category hiding in the
/usr hierarchy.
Maybe you glossed over what I said previously, but to recap: GNU/Linux, MINIX, OpenIndiana, etc are all built as clones of SysV Unix. It sounds like a minor footnote, but this is a
fundamental design philosophy divergence between Linux and BSD. SysV Unices like AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and so on are all built with
vendor-centric software management in mind. If I'm running HP-UX, I can certainly compile stuff built for any vaguely POSIX-compliant Unix system. Yet the overwhelming majority of software I would install
has to come from HP since they're the vendor that's giving me HP-UX in the first place.
All Linux distros inherit this vendor-centric approach to package management, which is why it's
such a longstanding ball ache for software developers to package Linux binaries in the first place.
The historic BSD Unix developed by the CSRG @ UC Berkley took a vastly different approach. The CSRG just started keeping track of makefiles, patches, metadata, and so on for software they knew for a fact would fetch and build on X/Y/Z system they had set up. It was also maintained by a university computer science laboratory, so profit motives, vendor lock-in, etc were
not a concern like it would be during the Unix Wars of the 1980s. It really was as simple an approach to package management as one could get at the time: just
cd /usr/ports/category/program && make install clean. Have some grad students do the hard work of maintaining the Ports collection in the interim, and bada bing bada boom: you have the birth of the BSD Ports tree as we know it today.
Daniel Robbins saw what FreeBSD (and all other BSDs by extension) did really well with the Ports collection, but he
had to rework it to fit the SysV Linux computing paradigm. Portage is
not universal the way Nix, Guix, or even NetBSD's
pkgsrc are. It's a Gentoo-specific package manager unto itself. Unless I'm horribly mistaken, you're unable to fetch an entire collection of Gentoo ebuilds, tuck them away into the
/usr hierarchy, then go
cd /usr/ebuilds/www/firefox && make install clean. You have USE flags, SLOTs, profiles,
equery u package-name, and all this other stuff in its place.
Is the BSD approach to the Ports collection tedious? Sure. Are there tools to automate various aspects of Ports management? Yes. Do these tools come anywhere close to what Gentoo has to offer? No. Is this a fundamental failing of BSD projects as a whole? Again: no. FreeBSD's approach to Ports management is very much in-line with the way traditional Unices of the BSD lineage did their shit. Modern conveniences like Poudriere and Portmaster were made to assist with Ports management, but it's very much an old school mindset sort of affair.
In the BSD world, you're never treated as a vendor's customer. You're treated as a proper system administrator who's
expected to either know Ports management inside and out already
or have the wherewithal to learn the ins and outs. There are man pages and dedicated sections of the FreeBSD handbook to get you squared away. If you don't have the gumption to do such a thing, just do what everyone else does: use the binary package management tools.
pkgng advanced considerably beyond what the original
pkg_add tools were capable of, it's now basically on par with
apt,
dnf,
pacman and so on.
There is slackware. Noone uses it, but that's sort of the idea with it. You get an entire repository of things with the base install, they go into their own part of the system. Then everything isn't part of that. But for slackware, you are truly on your own with everything outside of the base system, which does at least come with a lot, including a multiple choices for a gui (from what I remember). And with the default package management tools, it doesn't even worry about dependencies. There are third party package managers that do take care of that, but still.
This is how I
know you never properly internalised the BSD concept of a base system because you're invoking Slackware while also saying all the shit that
does not make it a singular, unified operating system.
Allow me to rephrase the central thesis once again:
a Linux distribution is not a complete operating system unto itself. Linux users think of the distribution they run as "what my distro ships with," and
not an engineered, tightly-integrated operating system. All BSDs are developed in a
single source tree. Slackware is not a complete operating system engineered under a singular source tree. In all practical terms, there is
no difference between Plasma 5 and the Linux kernel. All the components that make up Slackware are still "off the shelf" bits and bobs that Patrick Volkerding et all felt like including from various upstreams while hammering them together to play nice. This also applies to Alpine and Android since they use busybox or some variant thereof for the userland tools.
There's also no uniform standard for what constitutes a "base" in Linux. For all the memes that RMS gave us about GNU/Linux vs. plain old Linux, it really must be said: the GNU Project did itself no favours by haphazardly developing individual applications separately and then assembling them after the fact. GNU's an operating system... so that's why it's just a collection of disparate software utilities with different version controls, API/ABI incompatibilities between new versions, and no dedicated kernel (no, Hurd doesn't count because it's still not production-ready and never will be).
Slackware, Arch, Debian, Gentoo, even LFS's bases all share a lot of overlap: Linux kernel, GCC, glibc, coreutils, binutils, bison, groff, awk, sed, etc. Yet none of these disparate utilities are under a singular source tree, none of them are tightly integrated to ensure nothing breaks, it's all just "this magical amalgam of stuff at various version numbers that we know works." Fedora Rawhide, Arch Testing, Debian Sid, they all track the various upstreams
super close and breakages are hideously commonplace because it's literally "New glibc dropped... oh wait, the version bump borks our whole system. Time to roll up my sleeves and figure out why."
The reason why I'm hammering this point home so hard is because that distinction between "complete operating system vs. haphazard amalgam of stuff from various upstreams that
happen to work"
will fuck over any Linux user who comes to a BSD operating system and expects everything they know on Linux to transfer 1:1. Yeah, a lot of stuff will, but the most important bits don't. Even subtle differences between system utilities will screw you up if you're not careful.
make and
tar are BSD's own
make and
tar, they handle things slightly differently from GNU's equivalents. The Ports tree has GNU's versions, but they're explicitly packaged as
gmake and
gtar for software that specifically requires GNU tooling.
When I say that there are deep-seated design philosophy differences between the BSD world and the Linux world, I damn sure wasn't kidding. The entirety of any given BSD's base system is designed, engineered, tested, and shipped as a singular, cohesive unit. The entirety of any given Linux distribution's "base system" is basically the distro maintainers saying "this is a collection of crap we know works today, also we're gonna push out individual updates for core system utilities since they all come from different upstreams. Caveat emptor unless you're running an LTS distro."
my problem with freebsd is as a desktop operating system.
Again... you're
way off base with what FreeBSD as an operating system even
is, let alone what it's capable of OOTB vs. with Ports.
By default, FreeBSD doesn't ship with anything beyond core Unix libraries, utilities, the kernel, and associated kernel drivers. FreeBSD is a server OS... that's why it doesn't ship with so much as a LAMP stack, nginx, SQL, or anything else along those lines. FreeBSD is a server OS... that's why
xb360gp and
ps4dshock were integrated directly into the kernel that the base system ships with. Don't you remember what I told you about the hard distinction between "base system" and "ports?" Well, here you are
again conflating a failure of the Ports tree with a failure of the FreeBSD OS itself. All the server goodies are just as much a part of the Ports tree as GPU support, display servers, desktop environments, games, and so on.
The fact of the matter remains that FreeBSD is more than capable of being a desktop system, and the Ports tree has more than enough software to cover most of what you need or otherwise want. To be fair, it was a lot easier in the pre-systemd days where software developed on Linux assumed a vaguely POSIX-compliant environment instead of systemd, cgroups, and so on. You can't daily drive GNOME Shell due to how much it relies on systemd, Plasma's not an option unless you're willing to inflict Plasma 6 on yourself. Yet you still have Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE4, Enlightenment, IceWM, JWM, TWM, DWM, the list goes on and on. You lack PipeWire, but that's because it's such a recent innovation considering how PulseAudio was the big thing pushed by Linux people for well over a decade.
As a general purpose desktop computer OS, I can attest from personal experience that (barring Steam/GOG games because I haven't bothered to test yet)
it's more than capable of being a tool for both play and work. That's why the FreeBSD kernel ships drivers for all sorts of peripherals that aren't even remotely server-related like gamepads, sound cards, etc. Is it normie-friendly? Absolutely fucking not, but it was never meant to be. A normie-friendly, or hell even LInux-friendly, approach to desktop computing would imply that you, the user, are a vendor's customer and
not a proper sysadmin. You're the one who needs to make sure
dbus is enabled so that stuff like Plasma, MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE4, and so on load properly. You're the one who needs to remember to enable
lightdm,
sddm,
xdm, or whatever your display manager is to make sure that Xorg/Wayland starts properly on boot.
Is this a generally inferior experience to what Linux provides? In some areas, yes. In other areas, no. It's a wholly different system that shares
some overlap to Linux. You won't ever interact with ALSA because FreeBSD ships with
pcm. The latter has a different featureset, different means to interact with it, different configuration, etc to ALSA, but I can't say that
pcm is worse than ALSA because the fact of the matter is that I never tested it extensively. Conversely, tracking the latest packages in the Ports tree means that I have a rock-solid
foundation to build on while having all the latest and greatest software that the Ports collection has to offer (especially once you change "quarterly" to "latest" in
/etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf.
Once again: you're more than capable of waxing poetic about Gentoo's myriad features, you're more than able to extol the virtues of Wayland with a standalone window manager, you're clearly capable of learning and internalising new shit... but you're continuously bashing your head against the wall with FreeBSD while claiming "FreeBSD sucks as a desktop OS guise." Obviously, it's Linux that's getting the mainstream attention for a potential Windows alternative. FreeBSD won't ever come close, nor does the project want to. Yet all the tools and manuals are there for you to convert a utilitarian foundation into a proper desktop setup.
It just falls on you to actually have the wherewithal to learn the ins and outs of FreeBSD (or any BSD for that matter) so you can get from point A to point B in one piece. If you're just gonna bash your head against the wall and blame the OS for a skill issue, you should just come right out and say "I tried FreeBSD, couldn't wrap my head around it, not really my thing here."
System settings -> Night Light
