The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[ProudSkibidiTolietAryan]

View attachment 8362631
THE BOOTLOADER or embedded boards bios works almost COMPLETELY In qemu with just a FEW tweaks its fucking insane.

I now am going to make it see if I can boot the vmlinux and make it pass a "BFFS partition"

HAHAHA YASSS. Ill be honest I had NO fucking hope and its only been like 1 day and I got it this far
View attachment 8362635
See this its SCANNING AND FOUND A .TDF file that its now going to try and load.
(EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT [BOOTLOADER] IS MY QEMU CODE TALKING TELLING WHAT THE BOOTLOADER DID. [Bootloader} is the only time the bootloader actually talks )

(Showing the messages the bootloader prints ONLY via grep)

Hey this is a quick update on some INTRESTING things about this TVS bootloader.

First off the thing is polymorphic it seems. What that means is that instead of launching a VMLINUX or script by jmping to it like JMP vmlinuxmemoryaddress it instead MANUALLY SCANS THE NAND for the first .TDF and then loads

Anyways the reason likely for this is for a reason I mentioned in one of my very first posts about this actually.

Do you remember the Nintendo wii? Stay with me here ok. on the Nintendo WIi if you ever modded the console you have likely seen this screen before when making a nand backup of your console(STAY WITH ME I PROMISE THIS IS RELEVANT)

Now normally this would cause you to panic however if you check online youll see that this is perfectly normal.
"BootMii will begin backing up your NAND to the SD card, showing the progress on the screen. If your see any "bad blocks", don't worry; they're to be expected in the type of NAND chips used by the Wii."
On your X86 computer when you see a SINGLE bad block on your hard disk that typically means you should backup everything and replace it as soon as possiable. In embedded systems and similar that is not the case Its normal for blocks to be bad when they come out of the factory, Infact most chip makers say THEMSELVES that 6-12 blocks will likely be bad

Because some blocks can be bad that messes up offsets. They can't just do JMP vmlinuxstartaddress because if the offset is wrong by just 1 BYTE it will be starting in the wrong position. So instead it appears to scan.
EDIT I GOT IT FARTHER. it seems SOME parts of it are NOT polymorphic...

But I managed to make it go farther than before. Turns out it was with clearing interrupts that I was failing to do a step

Ive been redoing alot of stuff like making a PROPER GIC
or general interrupt controller

Now what this thing does is MOVE almost everything to RAM first thing for speed on startup. Its important to know that the BOOTLOADER of the TV only turns on when you PLUG in the power, When you hit the power button on the TV the main linux TV application is still running, when you turn it on via the remote your not booting up linux or anything. THIS IS NOT A FORM OF SPYWARE, This tv has NO form of internet, rather its just to speed up boot times.

 

[acid_ra1n]

I switched to Linux Mint on my PC back in November because Microsoft's push towards this "agentic" nonsense was the final straw.

When or if should I distro hop? Would I get significantly more performance out of, say, CachyOS with my Ryzen 7 7735HS and Radeon RX 7700S? Or should I have installed Cachy or something else Arch-like in the first place?

performance impact is supposed to be pretty negligible. cachyos does a lot of optimizations to recompile packages for your cpu and does some other fancy stuff to improve performance
but some people also swear by xorg for gaming
some people use zen kernel
some people debloat their systems
lots of things you can do to inch out a couple more frames but at the end of the day ur gonna want a distro that gets out of ur way and lets u do ur damn computing

 

[Baraka Obama]

All gaming optimized distros are garbage. either you can get the exact same results by installing Steam and/or Heroic launcher on Mint or you get maybe 1fps improvement from newer drivers at the tradeoff of having your system needign a clean reinstall after a year because of immutable nonsense.

IDK, I think there's less tweaking needed which is a big thing for a lot of people, and graphics drivers are preinstalled and just werk.

What do you expect it being immutable would result in needing a clean install? Unless you tried to override the protections and mess with things you shouldn't I don't see why you'd need that.

 

[Ahriman]

 

[Outer Space Traveller]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nHQv4blla7g

I felt compelled to say I like GIMP & Inkscape, but decided to watch the video. I agree with his arguments. It's sad indeed, how many of these projects (the "middle open-sourced ones", unlike the "big open-sourced ones") are the big question and how they lack the quality on what we see in Windows and Macintosh computers.

 

[analrapist]

When you hit the power button on the TV the main linux TV application is still running, when you turn it on via the remote your not booting up linux or anything. THIS IS NOT A FORM OF SPYWARE, This tv has NO form of internet, rather its just to speed up boot times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standby_power -- this is the phenomenon, and why you should have hard switches to turn off your electronic devices because many of them will chew through power for no good reason.

 

[Ahriman]

I felt compelled to say I like GIMP & Inkscape, but decided to watch the video. I agree with his arguments. It's sad indeed, how many of these projects (the "middle open-sourced ones", unlike the "big open-sourced ones") are the big question and how they lack the quality on what we see in Windows and Macintosh computers.

Krita keeps gaining more ground, and it's a fairly usable and competent replacement, while GIMP is still pants-on-head retarded to use.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Referring to them as "the open source drivers", implying the driver is fully source-available, is still grossly inaccurate. Most people don't or won't care but truth matters and good shouldn't be the enemy of perfect.

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

If being perfectly accurate matters that much, saying it's just some headers that are open source is wrong too.

When or if should I distro hop? Would I get significantly more performance out of, say, CachyOS with my Ryzen 7 7735HS and Radeon RX 7700S? Or should I have installed Cachy or something else Arch-like in the first place

Don't expect performance differences to be that huge from things like compiler optimizations. There can be some performance increases. But it's going to be minor. I would suspect if you were really going to see them at it it would be more likely to see them on gentoo, where you actually build for your cpu, instead of on cachy, where they are optimized slightly but still generic, because they need to work with a wider range of cpus. And even then, when I say you might see a difference on gentoo, that's when I'm saying it will only be very slight. As in not noticeable in day to day use, but technically measurable.

There are conveniences that you get from other distros though. And those are what I thing are the actual reasons someone should switch, if they decide to. As an example, if someone doesn't want to use systemd. Well technically they could chop systemd out of linux mint, and replace it. But that's impractical, and highly inconvenient. So they should probably just move to something that doesn't use systemd by default. In my case, I find using something like debian ends up making my life harder than using arch. But for some people it would be the complete opposite. So it really comes down to what you plan to do, what you want to use, etc.

And maybe cachyos could be completely perfect for your use case, maybe you would benifit from the things they add by default, and the changes they make to things. Or it could be that what cachy does would be completely useless for you. It's going to be up to you, and what you do.

 

[Dread First]

If being perfectly accurate matters that much, saying it's just some headers that are open source is wrong too.

It's just easier to say "Until NVIDIA goes full FOSS driver+Mesa stack the way AMD and Intel did, the NVIDIA drivers are basically in a state of limbo.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

It's just easier to say "Until NVIDIA goes full FOSS driver+Mesa stack the way AMD and Intel did, the NVIDIA drivers are basically in a state of limbo.

Or its easier to say the open-nvida drivers. I'm just saying it's pointless, and needlessly pedantic. And doesn't add any extra clarity to what the nvidia-open drivers are.

I think comparing them to the intel wifi stack is pretty much much good enough to describe how they are set up now.

 

[Retarded Weeb]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nHQv4blla7g

Not saying anything this guy says is wrong, but I'm starting to get caught on how this topic always wraps back to Photoshop. No one seems to be able to emphasize any problem open-source Linux software has except for specifically photo editing. Apparently, Adobe is single-handedly holding up Microsoft's market share for them.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Apparently, Adobe is single-handedly holding up Microsoft's market share for them.

Shades of Apple in the early 90s.

 

[acid_ra1n]

Not saying anything this guy says is wrong, but I'm starting to get caught on how this topic always wraps back to Photoshop. No one seems to be able to emphasize any problem open-source Linux software has except for specifically photo editing. Apparently, Adobe is single-handedly holding up Microsoft's market share for them.

so im ngl i really dont like these "youtuber tries linux" videos
99% of them refuse to use anything else other than adobe, even if they are the kind of channels to bitch and moan about how adobe gets worse every update and has the most predatory pricing model known to man
but then you actually look at adobe's share of the total windows install base and they barely make up 1% of all installs, if that
so you end up with videos that nobody can relate to because nobody actually uses adobe software, and they become content farm pieces instead of educational ones

 

[Hakase Shinonome]

When or if should I distro hop?

Immediately.

No one seems to be able to emphasize any problem open-source Linux software has except for specifically photo editing.

I can give you a multitude of problems. Any kind of creative software sucks. I don't care if you're a GIMP elitist, a KDENLive poweruser or a a Krita fanatic, they all suck balls. I was held back on using Linux specifically because my creative workflow did not translate at all, only when my specific program got ported to Linux did I actually try it out. I have tried everything, I have tried brower-based alternatives even, for video editing and photo editing, while still much, much better than shit like KDENLive, it still doesn't even come close to a fairly standard program like Paint dot Net. Its alternative, Pinta, has absolutely HORRENDOUS memory issues (maybe fix it with Rust:tm:!) when simply editing a fucking photo. And I mean, it goes from megabytes go gigabytes of RAM usage when zooming into a fucking photo. It's garbage. GIMP might be technically more apt, but God is the user experience ever horrible. I want to mimic Paint dot Net's keybindings, fuck you. You want a circle, fuck you. Kdenlive is just shit. Blender I just personally hate with it being so annoyingly non-user-friendly, especially for beginners, I'm sure it's perfect and amazing for you when you have any amount of experience in it, but this one is already cross-platform. And almost all cross-platform programs function perfectly fine and work well, because it's made with usability in mind for retarded Windows users who need buttons and menu's to use everything by. OBS, Firefox, Steam, qBitTorrent, all cross-platform programs that are all the best versions of their category. Purpose-made software, especially on Linux, suck.

Overall, Linux-based alternatives focus extremely on features but completely lack in UI/UX. Akin to having a website without stylesheets, sure, everything might be there to make something amazing, but the UI/UX is so horrible, you'd never find it. Yeah, you can edit and record video's with FFMpeg, overlays and all, but who in their right mind would choose FFMpeg above OBS?

so im ngl i really dont like these "youtuber tries linux" videos
99% of them refuse to use anything else other than adobe, even if they are the kind of channels to bitch and moan about how adobe gets worse every update and has the most predatory pricing model known to man
but then you actually look at adobe's share of the total windows install base and they barely make up 1% of all installs, if that
so you end up with videos that nobody can relate to because nobody actually uses adobe software, and they become content farm pieces instead of educational ones

I WILL SWITCH TO LINUX!*
*for 30 days, will switch back when editing this video. I will not actually use my computer during this time, I have a professional life and I need a computer to rely on not something that can break with me staring at it incorrectly. I do this out of spite for Adobe software, but I actually pay for this piece of shit software on a monthly basis, for some reason, even though I only use basic fucking splitting of clips and layering which can be done by literal infant's first video editor. I will not actually convince you to take the leap and switch because I will be bitching and moaning the entire way through about how xyz doesn't work because I'm a total fucking monkey that can't even operate their fucking coffee machine without someone coming over to help. I will not use the terminal because I find that too scary to type in commands, and if I have to, I will just copy and paste commands I find online because coffee machine.

 

[acid_ra1n]

o, I will just copy and paste commands I find online because coffee machine.

to translate linus's epic speech which gardner steam deck boy agreed with
i am pretending to be retarded because i have soft bigotry of low expectations so i will refuse to read anything, copy paste commands willy nilly, not ask anyone for help, complain about having too many options, and then claim i speak for most people
and yeah if the average user was actually that fucking arrogantly stupid i'd give up on linux being adopted by anybody because the "normies" he talked about would be irredeemable
that bullshit excuse falls through when you start reading youtube comments and talking to new users who are making the switch and in the first day of them switching over they prove linus's stereotype is dead wrong and he just thinks his audience is a bunch of mouth breathing apes

 

[Hakase Shinonome]

his audience is a bunch of mouth breathing apes

He's not exactly wrong, I'd say. His audience is brain-rottingly stupid, but so are most people who get into tech. Anyone who reads guides on what to buy or what to choose are mouth-breathing monkeys.

 

[GrimPortents]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nHQv4blla7g

I haven't seen Eric Murphy make a video in a hot minute and his github is dead. I hope he's doing well.

 

[acid_ra1n]

He's not exactly wrong, I'd say. His audience is brain-rottingly stupid, but so are most people who get into tech. Anyone who reads guides on what to buy or what to choose are mouth-breathing monkeys.

yeah i thought id find different audiences if i got into like the gamers nexus or louis rossmann communities
instead what i got was people who were very confidently wrong about fucking everything, was like being on reddit

 

[Zyklon C]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nHQv4blla7g

As an unabashed FLOSS advocate, this hurt my heart -- mostly because I couldn't argue with a lot of what he said.

Coincidentally, I spent part of the afternoon working in both GIMP and KdenLive. What he spotlighted in his video in the section on GIMP was something that annoyed me today.

And when I use Kdenlive, I always feel like I'm a few steps away from my project being corrupted. A few years back I felt my asshole clench every time Kdenlive updated because I knew there was a decent chance I'd have to recreate my project from scratch because of a crash. It's been better the last two years.

And I still can't use GPU acceleration to scrub across my time line, and GPU-based rendering is still experimental? In 2026? Get the fuck out of here.

In the end I stick with Linux and FLOSS because I like limiting the amount of information being farmed from me, but I no longer promote most stuff to normies.

 

[Intel® Core™2 Duo E8400]

It's dumb how Adobe doesn't port any of their software to Linux. They already have a multiplatform codebase (macOS and Windows) and use a custom UI framework, what's so hard about making it work that it's not profitable? Don't tell me it's about how hard it is to package software for Linux, they had PS 3.0 running on all of the wacky Unix flavors in the 90s no problem.
At least the Real Job™ CAD software has some sort of excuse, being Windows only (it's still retarded).

Is it because Linux user don't buy software? Well, nobody except Valve is trying to sell them any in the first place.

I just want good software on my system damn it. I'm retarded and I don't know how to use Windows or macOS