The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Hakase Shinonome]

I really fucking hate Bazzite, but it's like the perfect use case for Steve specifically.

I'm not arguing against that he uses it for testing, I hate that he's recommending it to newcomers who want a general purpose desktop and not a just-for-gaming desktop.

Steve, develop your own fucking opinions on Wayland vs. Xorg so you can actually understand the impact that display servers, compositors, and so on have.

You ask Steve what the difference is and he'd say "What's Xorg?". See video. He has no fucking idea, real fucking agonizing that this is what gets the most views in terms of Linux content. Can't wait for Linus to also spew some garbage out there about he fucked up his Linux installation once again by putting in random terminal commands for the bazillionth time.

EDIT: I enjoyed Linus' video probably more because he doesn't blabber on something he doesn't know anything about, unlike Steve.

 

[0gh]

In which case there is absolutely no point in using vim or the other nonsense as I can use the text editor to copy and paste and manipulate test from command outputs to a file in nano

Using VIM is mental illness, use nano if you want to do it in the terminal or open the file with w/e text editor you want

 

[DavidS877]

You do realize that unless you aren't using a desktop environment then you can already use your mouse to select text in the terminal, right?

You do realize that there is mouse support in the text console too. It's called GPM, although I don't think most distributions include it by default anymore.

In which case there is absolutely no point in using vim or the other nonsense as I can use the text editor to copy and paste and manipulate test from command outputs to a file in nano

ssh doesn't get along very well with your "GUI Editor"

 

[Betonhaus]

You do realize that there is mouse support in the text console too. It's called GPM, although I don't think most distributions include it by default anymore.

ssh doesn't get along very well with your "GUI Editor"

The gui editor runs on the client with the de, not the headless server you’re SSHing to. I swear it’s like you’ve never really used a computer before.

 

[DavidS877]

The gui editor runs on the client with the de, not the headless server you’re SSHing to. I swear it’s like you’ve never really used a computer before.

Right, and if I need to edit a local file that works great. And for that matter even on local files the choice is give a barely trustworthy GUI editor root access to edit fstab or just type sudo (nano|ed|joe|vi|vim|nvi|emacs|pico) /etc/fstab.

 

[Curry Teafag]

Well, the Steam Machine is here, are you going to buy it?

Of course not. When I saw the Steam Machine Verified numbers, I already knew it would end up being an overpriced piece of entry-level crap and likely slower than my 4-yo gaming laptop—and it is.

 

[Billy Herrington "Aniki"]

What I take exception to is how he's more or less "outsourced" the Linux knowledge to Wendell. I love me some Level1Techs from time to time, Level1Linux is okayish, but like... Steve, develop your own fucking opinions on Wayland vs. Xorg so you can actually understand the impact that display servers, compositors, and so on have.

Its better than Linus Sebastian using steam OS on his non steam machines.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

This is exactly why you don't use these things. Same with the nice UIs for package management and other system admin tasks.

I use a nice UI for package management. It's called 'nala'. It downloads packages in parallel and automatically updates before upgrading when you just run 'nala upgrade'. Noone needs anything more.

 

[Hakase Shinonome]

If Windows was also a "challenge" to use:

What's up guys, welcome to our epic Windows challenge. We know Linux is the most used operating system out there, but did you know there's a third usable system operating system, other than MacOS, which is a fine operating system under the lovely Unix we all know and love, but something called "Windows"?

It's quite a niche operating system, no one really uses it for mainstream tasks or for gaming even, but can we? We've set up a challenge to test how far we can get in our daily tasks using "Windows". For 30 days, how far can we get?

First step is, of course, to choose our flavor of Windows. We have a LOT to try out, so we see which ones we thought the general user would probably want to use. So we, of course, chose Windows 8. We chose this because we asked a chatbot specifically on which one we should use, and on the top of all the lists is Windows 8.

Now, finding a Windows 8 installation ISO was pretty tricky. There wasn't a simple .torrent file of the "Windows installation", which was very odd. All we could find was a "Windows Installation Medium Creator", which was an .exe file, a very odd thing seeing as most people use Linux, so why not just provide an ISO file? Very dumb of the company to not provide a thing, shame on you, uhh, "Microsoft".

The installation of the ISO was somewhat annoying. Windows does not support ext4, which is very strange, every single computer on the planet supports ext4 but this Windows-OS only supports their own proprietary "ntfs" partitions. Wow, this is so not user-friendly, big thumbs down for Windows on this part. We have to clean the entire drive of its partitions just to install this.

So, first thing we need to do is, uh, what is this?

What the hell is this? We need to log into its proprietary e-mail account system? Who the hell does that? How do we get out of this, is there a terminal? There doesn't seem to be a button to have a terminal show up. How about CTRL+SHIFT+F2, do we get a different desktop environment with a terminal? It doesn't seem to work.

Let's check chatgpt.com and ask it on how to let a terminal show up and skip the account creation. Well, I guess it's this command that u/trannychaser420 has posted on r/linsux. start ms-cxh:localonly, ah, that doesn't seem to work. u/avidwindowsuser1143 does recommend OOBE\BYPASSNRO, I guess that works. But having to look up commands to even create an account? Not the best thing in the world! Big downers!

Okay, so we're finally in the desktop environment, and-- What the fuck is this?

"Microsoft Onedrive"? "Microsoft Powerpoint"? "Bejewled"? "Candy Crush"? Is that even a Microsoft product? What the hell is all this stupid bullshit? Uninstall, uninstall, uninstall. What? Reboot? Why? Sure, I guess, we should reboot.

Okay, so we've rebooted, and-- it's back? What? I can't delete this bullshit? Okay then, this isn't turning out to be as smooth as I hoped it would be.

Let's install this github repo called "Windows debloater", that might work. Wait, why is my computer running slower than before, seems a bit odd. Let's check top, oh, that's not on here. Well, let's try out its specialized software for it called Task Manager, I guess. What the fuck is cmd.exe actively doing in the background, it's using 50% of my CPU.

Windows Debloater is a virus? What the hell? I thought Windows was meant to be a super safe, all-around OS, people lied to me. Let's delete that, I guess, if I even can. It's probably somewhere on my hard drive root folder. Where is it?

C:\ is root? Why is the slash backwards, is it trying to be cool and unique? It's just annoying. Why is my root folder already halfway full, it's a 256GiB drive! What the hell! Let's delete some useless crap that's on here, I guess.

I found that Reddit recommends uninstalling system32, some users even provided a command for it. The system32 folder does seem like bloated garbage, all these old files from 2004 and onwards, might as well try.

My entire system has corrupted, what the hell! I blame the developers, Microsoft, for this, I'll never-ever use Windows again!

 

[0gh]

Yes vim sucks, yes you can use GUI tools because they're better for most cases. Yes terminal stuff is also much more useful than GUI in many cases

If you want to access something on a machine you have ssh access to just use sftp mount

You can also do ssh -X and then open the gui app that's on the remote ssh machine if you really want to

That's what I like about linux, there's a way to do pretty much everything and have it work the way you want, regardless if some keyboard kungfu master thinks his way is better

barely trustworthy GUI editor root access to edit fstab

You can just read the code if you're so worried, or use software that only provides a GUI around fstab, plenty out there.

 

[Curry Teafag]

Let's install this github repo called "Windows debloater", that might work. Wait, why is my computer running slower than before, seems a bit odd. Let's check top, oh, that's not on here. Well, let's try out its specialized software for it called Task Manager, I guess. What the fuck is cmd.exe actively doing in the background, it's using 50% of my CPU.

Windows Debloater is a virus? What the hell? I thought Windows was meant to be a super safe, all-around OS, people lied to me. Let's delete that, I guess, if I even can. It's probably somewhere on my hard drive root folder. Where is it?

C:\ is root? Why is the slash backwards, is it trying to be cool and unique? It's just annoying. Why is my root folder already halfway full, it's a 256GiB drive! What the hell! Let's delete some useless crap that's on here, I guess.

I found that Reddit recommends uninstalling system32, some users even provided a command for it. The system32 folder does seem like bloated garbage, all these old files from 2004 and onwards, might as well try.

My entire system has corrupted, what the hell! I blame the developers, Microsoft, for this, I'll never-ever use Windows again!

So much more complicated than that cute little Linux debloater, rm -rf /.

 

[Dead Lion]

Real talk: no one [with an iota of common sense] jumps ship from Windows to Linux and expects a completely painless experience. You are literally transitioning from a Windows NT-based operating system to a Unix-like operating system. The underlying assumptions for each operating system family are wholly distinct from one another. They handle filesystems completely differently from one another. Stuff that's possible in Windows NT is either wholly impossible or possible with any number of caveats in Linux. The reverse is also true, and there's no shortage of stuff that's easier to do on Linux that you need to cut against the grain on Windows to accomplish.

You vastly overestimate how technically savy most people are. Most people have barely any idea what an OS is and as far as they're concerned the computer is a magic box that leads them to facebook, ms office and vidya. If they don't see a big. shiny button clearly labeled with a specific function they assume whatever they're trying to do is impossible and soldier on.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

I use a nice UI for package management. It's called 'nala'. It downloads packages in parallel and automatically updates before upgrading when you just run 'nala upgrade'. Noone needs anything more.

Ok. I've heard of it before and probably won't bother using it. I use whatever the recommended tools are from the distro maintainers, unless there is no good alternative.

Yes vim sucks, yes you can use GUI tools because they're better for most cases.

I have been burnt many times because of buggy admin GUI tools in Linux.

If you don't like Vim, there are many other CLI text editors.

That's what I like about linux, there's a way to do pretty much everything and have it work the way you want, regardless if some keyboard kungfu master thinks his way is better

It isn't about being a keyboard kung fu master. There are concrete reasons why you should use certain tools and avoid others.

Because you haven't been burnt by these tools yet does not mean you won't be.

You can just read the code if you're so worried, or use software that only provides a GUI around fstab, plenty out there.

Reading the code works when they are simple bash scripts and CLI tools.

It doesn't work on GUI apps because often there are probably several layers of abstraction in place between a button click and what actually happens in the backend, and spotting subtle bugs typically won't be possible.

You vastly overestimate how technically savy most people are. Most people have barely any idea what an OS is and as far as they're concerned the computer is a magic box that leads them to facebook, ms office and vidya. If they don't see a big. shiny button clearly labeled with a specific function they assume whatever they're trying to do is impossible and soldier on.

Those people won't be switching OS anyway. Are we going to pretend that your average grandma, a girlfriend who works as a hairdresser, is suddenly going to say to herself, "I am going to try this Arch Linux distro"?

The people that want to swap operating systems will already know what one is. It is up to them to do their research. There is plenty of material online now, which can be found easily. You can try most operating systems in VirtualBox/VMware, Kasm-style virtual machines online, and WSL.

It isn't 1998 anymore, where the only thing you have access to is a "Red Hat 7.3 for Dummies" at the local library, some sketchy forums where some dude is trying to tell you that your modem doesn't work because it is a "winmodem", mailing lists, and the best search engine is AltaVista.

 

[Hakase Shinonome]

I hate these dumb arguments that pretend that your average grandma or girlfriend who works as a fucking hair stylist is suddenly going to say to herself, "I am going to try this Arch Linux distro."

My little brother came to me today, asked "Should I try Arch?". He's never in his life even come close to even touching a command prompt. I told him, simply, "Fuck no".

It doesn't change the fact that some GUIs on certain Unix programs suck massive fucking balls and I won't defend shit like Gparted looking like it came from cavemen times.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

My little brother came to me today, asked "Should I try Arch?". He's never in his life even come close to even touching a command prompt. I told him, simply, "Fuck no".

Someone always says something like this. Yeah, sure, whatever. I don't care.

The vast majority of normie users that don't know what a web browser is aren't going to suddenly have this idea of replacing the Windows on their laptop. One of the major reasons is that outside of work, the only devices they use regularly are a tablet/phone/Smart TV/games console.

Much like old generals that are always fighting old wars. Many Linux desktop users think they are fighting battles that have long since been lost.

 

[Aidan]

My little brother came to me today, asked "Should I try Arch?". He's never in his life even come close to even touching a command prompt. I told him, simply, "Fuck no".

Why did you say that?

 

[Hakase Shinonome]

Why did you say that?

'Cause he's a fucking idiot that refuses to RTFM.

 

[Betonhaus]

Why did you say that?

Became if he tries it he will think Windows 11 Agentic OS would be better.

 

[Aidan]

I hope he does it to spite you.

 

[85CentSoda]

Much like old generals that are always fighting old wars. Many Linux desktop users think they are fighting battles that have long since been lost.

I didn't know anyone in the space back then, but I imagine there has got to be quite a few nerds who got big into Linux in the 90s and just never stopped fighting their own forever war. It was over as soon as Jobs revealed the iPhone at Macworld, though imo it really was appstore integration that sealed the deal. Not that anything I've said hasn't been common wisdom for ages now.