The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Stasi]

After years of using Mint decided to give Manjaro a go last year (used it before but not in a long time). Having a good time. Run updates last night and on completion xfce starts spazzing out. After a reboot get dumped straight into tty. No log-in screen, no gui. Do a bit of troubleshooting and had to reinstall xfce. It was completely gone.

Get back into GUI desktop environment and realise after the update Manjaro somehow purged most of my applications. No idea why or what happened. Back to Mint I go

 

[Win98SE]

JACK appreciation post.

I occasionally ran JACK for music production, but decided to give it a shot for everyday desktop use. Some cool shit I've got running now:

• PulseAudio -> JACK so regular applications don't freak out
• Compressor for equalizing audio levels of videos with shitty mixing, etc. Don't really give a fuck about dynamic range on a random YouTube video or livestream.
• Ducking via sidechain compressor. If I've got a video or music on in the background and happen to want to watch a quick video in my web browser, the audio in the background automatically lowers its volume, then ramps back up a few seconds after the new audio stops.
• Network audio routing. Great for routing audio to different rooms, or continuing to listen to something when I'm in a different room than the one playing the audio. Very low latency, too.
• MIDI controls. I've got a miniature MIDI controller with a bunch of sliders and knobs that I can assign to the various plugins and volume levels.

There's non-JACK ways of doing all of this, but I've yet to find an easier way than just dealing with the initial learning curve of JACK and then spending a few days working out the right way to go about everything. With something like PulseAudio I was having to write custom solutions for stuff like ducking.

 

[GethN7]

After years of using Mint decided to give Manjaro a go last year (used it before but not in a long time). Having a good time. Run updates last night and on completion xfce starts spazzing out. After a reboot get dumped straight into tty. No log-in screen, no gui. Do a bit of troubleshooting and had to reinstall xfce. It was completely gone.

Get back into GUI desktop environment and realise after the update Manjaro somehow purged most of my applications. No idea why or what happened. Back to Mint I go

I noticed Manjaro has that issue. It's based on Arch but want to larp as pseudo-Ubuntu with it's update scheme. End result is that it sometimes craps the bed hard after updates because it tries to keep up with Arch but also not change up too much via Ubuntu, and the end result is sometimes it messes up a lot.

 

[Ascendancy0]

I used Mint for a while and It was pretty comfy. I currently use Windows 10, but in the future I might switch to Fedora/Ubuntu with GNOME or Cinnamon.

 

[Oni and Only]

Linux won't save you from firmware rootkit.

 

[Dick Justice]

After years of using Mint decided to give Manjaro a go last year (used it before but not in a long time). Having a good time. Run updates last night and on completion xfce starts spazzing out. After a reboot get dumped straight into tty. No log-in screen, no gui. Do a bit of troubleshooting and had to reinstall xfce. It was completely gone.

Get back into GUI desktop environment and realise after the update Manjaro somehow purged most of my applications. No idea why or what happened. Back to Mint I go

Spoiler: never forget manjaro is arch

 

[knobslobbin]

I won't use any distro that sticks with systemD.

 

[Dread First]

I noticed Manjaro has that issue. It's based on Arch but want to larp as pseudo-Ubuntu with it's update scheme. End result is that it sometimes craps the bed hard after updates because it tries to keep up with Arch but also not change up too much via Ubuntu, and the end result is sometimes it messes up a lot.

I love how 7 years after Allan McRae (one of the major Arch devs) made this blog post about the issues with Manjaro, nothing has really changed about their development model.

If you really wanna join the pseudo rolling release bandwagon, just install LMDE or even CentOS Stream (or FreeBSD-STABLE if you really wanna put some hair on your chest). I've tried maintaining an Arch setup for a few months and the biggest problem I still have with it is that it's far too current. Linux as a whole is effectively a bed of chaos when it comes down to stability. You need a perfect combination of userland utilities, kernel, and applications to actually maintain some semblance of normalcy and all it takes is a shitty glibc update that gets pushed out to bork your whole system.

 

[Dick Justice]

LMDE is nice and a Good Thing™ if you like Cinnamon but beyond that it doesn't have much reason to exist.

 

[Ask Jeeves]

I love how 7 years after Allan McRae (one of the major Arch devs) made this blog post about the issues with Manjaro, nothing has really changed about their development model.

If you really wanna join the pseudo rolling release bandwagon, just install LMDE or even CentOS Stream (or FreeBSD-STABLE if you really wanna put some hair on your chest). I've tried maintaining an Arch setup for a few months and the biggest problem I still have with it is that it's far too current. Linux as a whole is effectively a bed of chaos when it comes down to stability. You need a perfect combination of userland utilities, kernel, and applications to actually maintain some semblance of normalcy and all it takes is a shitty glibc update that gets pushed out to bork your whole system.

I usually archive my entire package list before any update and if something shits the bed and I don't have the time to correct it I just restore.

 

[cecograph]

I've not managed to bork my NixOS installation yet, and I'd be impressed if I ever did. The system is specified declaratively, and everything keeps its dependencies cleanly separated. You can happily (and I have needed to in the past) install two versions of the exact same package compiled against different libcs without worrying that anything bad is going to happen.

 

[Ahriman]

After years of using Mint decided to give Manjaro a go last year (used it before but not in a long time). Having a good time. Run updates last night and on completion xfce starts spazzing out. After a reboot get dumped straight into tty. No log-in screen, no gui. Do a bit of troubleshooting and had to reinstall xfce. It was completely gone.

Get back into GUI desktop environment and realise after the update Manjaro somehow purged most of my applications. No idea why or what happened. Back to Mint I go

See, this is a major pain in the ass. And it's what holds me back for years from trying out Arch.

I already do Linux work by trade, so as much as I enjoy using Linux, I want to pick up my rig and play, no bullshits. Can't be bothered to troubleshoot and fix things on my own personal time as well, I am not an autist.

TL;DW it's pretty good so far.

I run Linux Mint on my work laptop -- nothing fancy, I need things to work with not much hassles so I treat it as a tool. But I kinda want to go back to Linux 100% on my personal laptop and I am weighing my options.

 

[Coffee Shits]

I upgraded an old 5.x MySQL instance today. Surprisingly painless, just dropped a removed directive in /etc/my.cnf and was good to go.

 

[Ahriman]

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/06/an-update-on-easy-anti-cheat-support-for-wine-and-proton

Once this is sorted out, I might just make the jump back to Linux.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Can I get a recommendation on a Linux distro? I'm looking for something to use as a secondary OS for those occasional things that are impossible or impractical to do on Windows.
Ideally it would:
- Natively support whatever the most common package format is for closed-source packages - everything I've seen about converting packages from one system to another indicates that it's a nightmare.
- Support consumer hardware such as Nvidia graphics cards and wi-fi
- Not require you to whip out a compiler (or God help you, an assembler) unless you're actually writing code yourself
- Have a reasonably stable self-updater that lets you get security patches and whatnot without nuking the system
- And as long as I'm dreaming, have some sort of "remote desktop" feature that can actually be remoted into from non-Linux systems

A bonus would be if it can avoid notorious soy-pits such as GNOME without too much hassle.

 

[Citation Checking Project]

Can I get a recommendation on a Linux distro? I'm looking for something to use as a secondary OS for those occasional things that are impossible or impractical to do on Windows.
Ideally it would:
- Natively support whatever the most common package format is for closed-source packages - everything I've seen about converting packages from one system to another indicates that it's a nightmare.
- Support consumer hardware such as Nvidia graphics cards and wi-fi
- Not require you to whip out a compiler (or God help you, an assembler) unless you're actually writing code yourself
- Have a reasonably stable self-updater that lets you get security patches and whatnot without nuking the system

Wouldn't a 'buntu derivative do it?

- And as long as I'm dreaming, have some sort of "remote desktop" feature that can actually be remoted into from non-Linux systems

Look into Xpra, that's what I use. There's a Wangblows client.

A bonus would be if it can avoid notorious soy-pits such as GNOME without too much hassle.

Install 'buntu, install not-GNOME? KDE got very good in recent years, I'm being told.

 

[Chad Nasty]

The only distros of linux are kali (offensive security image) and ubuntu (for microcomputers).

Otherwise im a straight windows guy. I like VS as an ide, programs i need integrate with it and i dont have to spend a bunch of time configuring things because im generally satisfied with how it runs. Outside of development necessitating linux (beyond a VM), im happy not using it.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Look into Xpra, that's what I use.

My God, if this works I'll owe you all the internet stickers there are.

I'll try out Lubuntu and see how things go. The last time I tried it was years and years ago, and it seemed pretty fragile at the time, but I spun it up in a VM and it at least seemed to self-update without collapsing into a singularity, so that's promising.

 

[Sam Losco]

Look into Xpra, that's what I use. There's a Wangblows client.

I use RealVNC. It's pretty easy to setup and use, but does require having an account. Windows, Linux, and Mac GUI clients and server.
Free users are limited to 5 computers and it forces connecting through their cloud shit, so if you don't have internet, it don't work. That's my biggest complaint with it. Because of that shit, it can be laggy at times as well. If you become a paypiggie to them, it allows direct connections. Which seems backwards to me. Seems like they would want to offer their cloud access as a pay feature and limit free users to direct connections. Makes it harder to do truly remote connections then because you'd also need either port forwarding or a VPN set up.

I previously tried out TightVNC, but their Linux client is fucking Java based and I hate Java. I think I had problems with that one too, but can't remember what.

Edit - Oh, I think the TightVNC problem I had was encryption settings not working right.

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

Can I get a recommendation on a Linux distro? I'm looking for something to use as a secondary OS for those occasional things that are impossible or impractical to do on Windows.
Ideally it would:
- Natively support whatever the most common package format is for closed-source packages - everything I've seen about converting packages from one system to another indicates that it's a nightmare.
- Support consumer hardware such as Nvidia graphics cards and wi-fi
- Not require you to whip out a compiler (or God help you, an assembler) unless you're actually writing code yourself
- Have a reasonably stable self-updater that lets you get security patches and whatnot without nuking the system
- And as long as I'm dreaming, have some sort of "remote desktop" feature that can actually be remoted into from non-Linux systems

A bonus would be if it can avoid notorious soy-pits such as GNOME without too much hassle.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/