The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
linux is the lack of auto-updates.
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I adore not having to update my computer. The first thing I do when I torture another motherboard with a Linux installation, or any OS-installation for that matter, is disable auto update for any distro that has it. You will NOT install updates on my poor 64GB-worth-of-storage Thinkpad.

I have forcefully disabled Windows updates for at least ten fucking times now on my newest laptop, it still thinks I really should get updates, for my well-being. If Microjeet really cared for my well-being it shouldn't've locked trackpad drivers behind Win11 compatibility but here we are.

Just, y'know, update those keys once in a while. You don't want to be stuck in PGP key hell.
 
Hakase Shinonome said:
I adore not having to update my computer. The first thing I do when I torture another motherboard with a Linux installation, or any OS-installation for that matter, is disable auto update for any distro that has it. You will NOT install updates on my poor 64GB-worth-of-storage Thinkpad.
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I have never had automatic upgrades cause a problem as long as it was a normal, reasonable upgrade process like unattended-upgrades on Debian-based distros or apk-autoupgrade on Alpine (which hasn't done anything to cut into my storage on my Chromebook with a 32gb storage chip (and a SD card of course)).

Obviously, these idiotic 'software center' things on distributions that install 'snaps' and other such crap are an entirely different matter.
 
prollyanotherlurker said:
when I installed it it didn't have even the most basic things set up, like window switching, virtual desktops and it obviously didn't have keybinds for moving to them, it used the same shitty function key keybinds every DE uses. Not that those are the only things that I needed to change.

And how would editing all the KDE desktop related config files make what I said better? On something like kde where they have no intention of people configuring directly through those it just ends up making it a million times worse. The only thing those are intended for based on the priority they give documenting those is copying them and moving them into another install so you get your configuration without having to go through all the bullshit of setting things up again, like most desktops.
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I use kde as backup for other DWMs, just install the basic desktop package and it won’t come with 1000 semi-working apps.
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
It's kinda funny how despite everything, my favourite thing about switching to linux is the lack of auto-updates. I check the Discover Software Centre every now and again and it'll say there's a bazillion system upgrades waiting for me, yet if I click and go through them it's just 99.99% junk that I have no intention of updating right now. God forbid that LibreOffice is a version out of date or that the fonts file is ready to upgrade. I'll just bulk update every 3 months when my web browser is starting to get a few vulnerabilities.

I don't think I've updated a single thing so far that has made me go "huh, that was a worthy upgrade", it's just bits and pieces in the background that don't fucking matter.

It's night and day compared to the Windows thing of downloading updates no matter what I say and then to top it off, being unable to simply update the PC and shut down as it'd glitch and boot up again.
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i’ve always been told that you should be updating more often than that, are you watching each package in case of a vulnerability?
 
Hakase Shinonome said:
I adore not having to update my computer. The first thing I do when I torture another motherboard with a Linux installation, or any OS-installation for that matter, is disable auto update for any distro that has it. You will NOT install updates on my poor 64GB-worth-of-storage Thinkpad.

I have forcefully disabled Windows updates for at least ten fucking times now on my newest laptop, it still thinks I really should get updates, for my well-being. If Microjeet really cared for my well-being it shouldn't've locked trackpad drivers behind Win11 compatibility but here we are.

Just, y'know, update those keys once in a while. You don't want to be stuck in PGP key hell.
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yeah. I had an arch install I hadn't booted into for months. Usually the one big issue I run into with arch is that exact case. I had like 1000 packages to update, and the keys were long expired. I mean, it probably also didn't help that I didn't realize the laptop wasn't plugged in after I started the update, and it died at some point during it, which could have been where things went particularly wrong that time.

I was able to get it fixed fairly easily, but still I could see that being a problem for someone not comfortable with that kind of troubleshooting. In general I recommend updating within a month if at all possible.
 
Betonhaus said:
Not going to lie it'll take a while for me to finish it, and it's literally just going to be a python project that has basically these two windows:
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10 foot UIs are more work than you'd expect, and all you get is a minimal feature set that lets you be slightly lazier in operation, at the expense of it being awkward/unable to accomplish the long tail of operations you didn't plan for. So your scope has to expand to cover all those other actions, or you have to accept falling back to a keyboard/ssh/etc input for those tasks. It's hard to stop at a minimal feature set unless you're positive you'll only use the machine as an appliance. It's easier if you can stay inside one application that covers everything you want, like you'll notice that Steam Big Picture or Kodi take over the entire UI and keep the user away from multitasking. If you only need Jellyfin, Plex, Kodi, YouTube, Netflix, Steam, RetroArch, and Firefox, those are mostly safe to just kill and restart as needed instead of multitasking. This might even be preferred on a low spec machine, or on a better machine you could put them in separate workspaces.

You also might not need the launcher/switcher windows at all. One time I set up an MPD server in my car, it was completely headless and piped the audio into aux input, and I managed the playlist from a phone client. I wanted to add physical buttons but never got around to it, it did one thing and worked well enough for me. If you ever watched much broadcast TV, recall how you'd just remember which channel was which, we didn't really need a TV Guide Channel to tell us the options. This is how many people use desktop workspaces too, they just remember which number workspace goes to which task. So especially if the target audience is just you, you can drop a lot of bullshit to make the project more approachable. Just food for thought, I like seeing people design their own tools, and primitive tools are often good enough.
 
This won’t make sense for another decade but I’m from the future. DHH won, he killed codes of conduct, ai prs are now in almost every project, and anyone that rejected ai got so far left behind that only hardcore Linux users that hate ai still use them. Everyone uses ai daily and if they need a program they tell ChatGPT to make it and it makes it. DHH was right when he said we have unlimited tokens we can fix anything. Any bug is resolved in a matter of days, Linux is the most secure it’s ever been, xorg is now vibe coded and fully maintained.
 
acid_ra1n said:
This won’t make sense for another decade but I’m from the future. DHH won, he killed codes of conduct, ai prs are now in almost every project, and anyone that rejected ai got so far left behind that only hardcore Linux users that hate ai still use them. Everyone uses ai daily and if they need a program they tell ChatGPT to make it and it makes it. DHH was right when he said we have unlimited tokens we can fix anything. Any bug is resolved in a matter of days, Linux is the most secure it’s ever been, xorg is now vibe coded and fully maintained.
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"Erm but like... some vibe coded application became unmaintainable like 3 years ago because the person making it didnt understand the code and I laughed at it therefore AI is BAD!"
 
acid_ra1n said:
This won’t make sense for another decade but I’m from the future. DHH won, he killed codes of conduct, ai prs are now in almost every project, and anyone that rejected ai got so far left behind that only hardcore Linux users that hate ai still use them. Everyone uses ai daily and if they need a program they tell ChatGPT to make it and it makes it. DHH was right when he said we have unlimited tokens we can fix anything. Any bug is resolved in a matter of days, Linux is the most secure it’s ever been, xorg is now vibe coded and fully maintained.
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Is the font rendering in every app still broken?
 
Tap Water Enjoyer said:
As an update to my zswap post: it turned Unreal Engine 5 slop from a stuttery mess into a 99% smooth experience on a shitty hdd, which somehow runs even better than on a SATA SSD without zswap. I love how I can just tweak some Linux setting to drastically improve performance, like back in the day when you could just go into a game config and tweak anything to turn the game from an unplayable mess into working well on any specs. For example I remember when early Payday 2 would run 10x better by simply lowering shadow resolution in a config, which seemed like magic. Now majority of games (which are UE5) don't let you edit almost anything anymore. So it's nice to be able to do this stuff again.
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Very similar to my setup, 16 GiB zswap file. I use lz4 instead of zstd and have swappiness at 100. Is zstd generally considered to be better than lz4? As for swappiness I think I will raise it just for curiosity sake, but I basically never run out of memory while compiling or doing any heavy work. I was at max RAM usage and swap while compiling some stuff just a second ago. No trashing, even while watching YT videos at the same time.
 
Akerman said:
Very similar to my setup, 16 GiB zswap file. I use lz4 instead of zstd and have swappiness at 100. Is zstd generally considered to be better than lz4? As for swappiness I think I will raise it just for curiosity sake, but I basically never run out of memory while compiling or doing any heavy work. I was at max RAM usage and swap while compiling some stuff just a second ago. No trashing, even while watching YT videos at the same time.
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lz4 should be slightly faster. zstd will have a slightly better compression ration by default but will be slightly slower. (or more cpu intensive). So you are trading off one thing for another. For swap I think lz4 is probably what you want.
 
Akerman said:
Is zstd generally considered to be better than lz4?
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zstd achieves better compression ratios than lz4 (about 3x compared to 2x ratio on typical pages) at the cost of a bit of increased CPU utilization for compression and decompression. On any modern desktop (or even laptop) CPU it's still too fast to matter and because the higher compression ratio lets zswap keep more pages in RAM before actual (real) swap I/O happens, zstd is substantially faster in real-world use. Unless your use case is extraordinarily CPU-bound and/or your CPU is ancient, zstd is the right choice thanks to the denser pool. Both are supported and provided by default in most distros. In fact I think zstd is the default option anyway on most distros (it's certainly the fallback when a user-requested alternative isn't available).
 
Akerman said:
Very similar to my setup, 16 GiB zswap file. I use lz4 instead of zstd and have swappiness at 100. Is zstd generally considered to be better than lz4? As for swappiness I think I will raise it just for curiosity sake, but I basically never run out of memory while compiling or doing any heavy work. I was at max RAM usage and swap while compiling some stuff just a second ago. No trashing, even while watching YT videos at the same time.
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From what I understand you always want swappiness to be above 100 while using zswap. Since zswap is way faster than disk io, high swappiness encourages its use and in turn prevents unnecessary disk use. Obviously it prevents disk swap, but most importantly it helps prevent unnecessary disk re-reads of cached files. This part is what really hurts the performance during intensive tasks, especially if it keeps repeating.

Arch wiki:
  • A higher swappiness of 100 or beyond is desired (by definition) when the IO cost of swapping is equal or lower than the cost of reading from a file. This can happen when the swap is not backed by the disk, especially in the case of zram. This can also happen when swap IO is being intercepted/cached by a lower-cost mechanism such as zswap.
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I will be upping mine to 175-200 to test.
 
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I use zram only, with a swappiness of 200 and a size equivalent to 40% of RAM size because, at least on Proxmox, I used to run into OOM situations repeatedly with higher settings once it filled up.
 
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