The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

melty said:
I just started using Linux Mint Cinnamon and in kind of struggling. It's my first time using Linux after dabbling with it in a virtualbox, and I really wanted to get away from Windows products and especially Windows 10. I got a roomy new 2TB SSD and with a little effort got Mint running on it. I also actually kinda like doing stuff from the command line, when I was a kid my dad used MS-DOS for years so that was my first experience with computers until he upgraded to Windows 3.1.
The first thing I wanted to do was install a game. This is a game that's known to run well on Linux and has several different methods of installing and running it on Linux, you can do it through Lutris, Steam, etc. After several hours of trying different methods that didn't work I got it installed, but it runs like garbage, which isn't supposed to happen. I didn't expect everything to be ez pz but this was a little more of a struggle than I thought it would be and I spend a lot of time in this game so it's a big deal if it's not playable.
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Mint should have never touched the win7 drive. Do you not have an option to boot it in grub? What was the game that doesn't work, anyway?
melty said:
So now I'm wondering if I should partition the SSD and try to get Windows 8 running on another partition and just ditch both the other hard drives, stick with Windows for now, and dabble in Linux when I feel like it. Would this be the most reasonable thing to do? Or am I letting myself be too easily deterred?
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Migrating from one Windows to another is hell I wouldn't wish on anyone. Given the option I would always try to ghetto rig my current install working again, no matter what it takes. Fwiw in my experience because it's a paradigm shift everything in *nix seems much more difficult and insurmountable than it really actually is for the first week-to-month. I as a rule caution patience for that reason (same as I would for Mac or BSD), but you know your situation better than I.
Kosher Dill said:
Are you using UEFI? Multi-booting with multiple drives seems to be an absolute nightmare in my experience. I'd say do anything else but that. One drive with multiple partitions, one OS running in a VM inside the other, or just two completely separate computers.
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Didn't consider this. Always switch to legacy bios if you can. I wouldn't be surprised if it's UEFI that's fucking you.
 
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Kosher Dill said:
Are you using UEFI? Multi-booting with multiple drives seems to be an absolute nightmare in my experience. I'd say do anything else but that. One drive with multiple partitions, one OS running in a VM inside the other, or just two completely separate computers.
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Sort of... first of all I should mention I built this computer very nearly a decade ago and had help, so I'm kind of fuzzy on specifics of how I set it up. But I've pretty much always been running both hard drives because for awhile I used some programs on one and not the other, and for extra space, etc.
Every once in awhile I would connect another hard drive to move files and ran into some issues that I now realize are due to this, but just brushed them off as long as I could get things to work. So this problem existed before I started messing around with Mint. When I reboot my PC it brings up Windows Boot Manager and gives me the option to select from Windows 7 or the other drive (2008 server). But if the 2008 server drive is disconnected then I get BOOTMGR error, unless I go into the UEFI and then I can set the boot order for anything that is not the Windows 7 drive. I don't think it even sees that one.
So at this point what I'm doing is if I want to boot Mint, I go into the UEFI and select that SSD as the primary boot drive and it just boots that. If I want to use Windows 7 I have to go to the UEFI and select the Windows 2008 drive, and then when I reboot I can select 2008 or 7 from Windows Boot Manager... so no I didn't install Grub yet like I probably should. But I'm not sure how well it will even work with this. Maybe the best thing is to try to repair the Windows 7 drive. It was probably never set up correctly and it just never bothered me enough to fix. I really don't want to use Windows 10 (I have to use it at work and it sucks) but the dropping of support for Windows 7 is starting to affect some of the programs I use. Also I'm planning to get a new motherboard, new processor, etc soon.
 
Mint Cinnamon is what I use, this is really the ideal setup for a beginner to Linux, but I have liked it enough that it's my distro despite having used linux for 10+ years. Cinnamon is sort of a combination of gnome when it didnt suck + the non gay parts of kde. It still needs some more work (dual monitor issues persist), but I recommend it.

At the moment, I dual boot (almost never use windows though) What you want to do is install Windows first, and then install linux over that on a different partition or drive. I actually use 3 separate SSDs - one is my home partition, one is root, and the third is win10. Once you install nix over Windows, its going to use grub as the bootloader. Windows' boot loader hates anything but other copies of windows.
 
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melty said:
When I reboot my PC it brings up Windows Boot Manager and gives me the option to select from Windows 7 or the other drive (2008 server). But if the 2008 server drive is disconnected then I get BOOTMGR error, unless I go into the UEFI and then I can set the boot order for anything that is not the Windows 7 drive. I don't think it even sees that one.
So at this point what I'm doing is if I want to boot Mint, I go into the UEFI and select that SSD as the primary boot drive and it just boots that. If I want to use Windows 7 I have to go to the UEFI and select the Windows 2008 drive, and then when I reboot I can select 2008 or 7 from Windows Boot Manager... so no I didn't install Grub yet like I probably should. But I'm not sure how well it will even work with this. Maybe the best thing is to try to repair the Windows 7 drive. It was probably never set up correctly and it just never bothered me enough to fix. I really don't want to use Windows 10 (I have to use it at work and it sucks) but the dropping of support for Windows 7 is starting to affect some of the programs I use. Also I'm planning to get a new motherboard, new processor, etc soon.
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I will be the first to confess that I am totally incapable of understanding how the fuckery that is UEFI works in any detail, but I have picked up a little over the years.

Firstly- I'm pretty sure Grub has been installed on the Linux SSD. It will likely just be installed with a configuration that doesn't cause it to present a boot menu, in such a way that it immediately loads Linux.

I haven't tried to make dual boot work in a coon's age, but I would suggest for your scenario- Win 7 and Linux- that you try one of the tools around for updating the Windows Boot Manager setup to a) add an option for booting to your Linux install b) do whatever you might need to do to make the Win7 drive 'independent'.
If looking at b), I would start with the question- do you really need to remove the Server 2008 drive? If not, maybe just leave it there. If you do want to put another drive in its place, and you're doing UEFI booting, I imagine there might not even be a UEFI boot partition on your Win7 drive. I imagine there should be guides around, around how to shrink the existing partitions on that drive and add one, and do whatever it takes to populate that partition. Obviously, back up anything you can't afford to lose.

If you're planning to get a recent mobo and processor, it may well not work with Win7. Honestly, you're probably better off with Win10, if you go that way.
teriyakiburns said:
Quite honestly, the only reason Pulse won out over JACK for general use audio is because poettering leveraged his relationship with red hat to push it into mainstream distros. Same as he did with systemd a few years later.
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Lennart Poettring should hang (legally and with due process) for his interference in the adoption of Linux on the desktop.
 
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teriyakiburns said:
They're both made by people who decided it would be easier to make a bloated mixer layer on top of ALSA instead of improving the documentation for dmix, or contributing improvements to ALSA would have mitigated the need for their vanity projects. The only possible advantage PipeWire could have over pulse is that it doesn't involve Poettering, but given it's being developed by a bunch of Pulse devs, I'm not sure it will actually be any improvement. It's pretty much just a case of "we want to capture the high-end audio scene but we made pulse too complicated for that use-case, so we're starting over from scratch". In other words, they're trying to steal JACK's market and roll it all into the same soggy bag of shit.
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It's the Red Hat cycle: Make crappy software, force everyone to use it, realize it's crap after everyone went through the effort to adopt it and make it somewhat stable, make new crappy software that breaks the old shit to replace it, repeat.
See HAL, DeviceKit, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit, ....
 
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I installed Artix xfce on my laptop. I'm not noticing any of the problems I had when I installed it on my Udoo Bolt. Seems like its improved. Not sure if I'd recommend Artix for beginners though. But its gotten better out of the box.

I did try KDE, but it wasn't working right. After updating it, it would prevent me from opening anything. Like I could if I started the apps (terminal, browser, file browser) within a minute of booting into the DE. Xfce is giving me none of that.

edit: still doesn't come with wget and FUCKING cups for some ungodly reason.
 
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Been having a lot of problems with ubuntu lately, mostly freezing and having to restart every few days. Sometimes when taking a video fullscreen it'll just freeze the entire PC. I'm gonna reinstall but wondering what distros to try, I'm a developer and pretty adept at dealing with computers. I dual boot windows so its strictly for work and some light reading and browsing the internet.

Very few prerequisites: need intellij for java/kotlin, discord, brave browser, protonvpn. That's pretty much it.
 
Jones McCann said:
Been having a lot of problems with ubuntu lately, mostly freezing and having to restart every few days. Sometimes when taking a video fullscreen it'll just freeze the entire PC. I'm gonna reinstall but wondering what distros to try, I'm a developer and pretty adept at dealing with computers. I dual boot windows so its strictly for work and some light reading and browsing the internet.

Very few prerequisites: need intellij for java/kotlin, discord, brave browser, protonvpn. That's pretty much it.
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What is your GPU? Were you using Wayland? I've found that Wayland just isn't ready for prime time yet, despite some distros switching to it by default, though I don't know if Ubuntu is one of those.
 
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Spasticus Autisticus said:
What is your GPU? Were you using Wayland? I've found that Wayland just isn't ready for prime time yet, despite some distros switching to it by default, though I don't know if Ubuntu is one of those.
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It's a GTX 970 but I haven't installed any drivers. I'm not sure what wayland is but I haven't installed it
 
Jones McCann said:
It's a GTX 970 but I haven't installed any drivers.
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Then you were probably using the open-source Nouveau drivers, which suck because Nvidia won't play nice with open source. If you install the official Nvidia drivers you will probably have a much better time, and even if you switched distros you'd probably still have the same problem if you don't use the official drivers.
 
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I've recently become interested in understanding the roots of Linux and have picked up some old books on that subject. The most relevant one would be The Unix Programming Environment.

It's interesting to see which things have and have not changed. Some examples appear to work on modern Linux and/or MacOS exactly as they did in 1984. Other examples don't. Sometimes, it's easy to figure out why that's the case (e.g., the working directory has been removed from the default PATH, so you now have to execute your scripts differently from the book's examples).

Just for fun, I decided I want to run an emulated Seventh Edition Unix so I can get the book's examples to reliably return the expected results. The best option looks like SimH.

Anybody here tried this out? Have any other recommendations/alternatives that could be cool?
 
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Have used the same dwm config for like 6 years.
After I invested into learning the hotkeys for a tiling window manager, I can't imagine going back to anything else.
 
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