The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Aidan]

Wow, and I was expecting to have to grapple with some janky Windows Movie Maker style Qt Monstrosity. I never imagined I could just do it. Anyway, this is exactly what I was looking for, thanks.

Sir, this is The Linux Thread.

 

[Carpe Jugulum]

Hey, I would suggest to try out Timeshift, it saved my ass countless times whenever I did something stupid.

If you break your system, can you tell us how you fix'd it?

Ah yes ty, I remember thinking “gotta get that” and forgot.

Happy to regal with any of my stupidity. It refused to install on my SSD so I’m running it off my spare HDD which is making funny noises and I’m thinking of getting a dedicated SSD for it and cloning it across. Not sure how that will work out.

 

[TheBest]

Ah yes ty, I remember thinking “gotta get that” and forgot.

Happy to regal with any of my stupidity. It refused to install on my SSD so I’m running it off my spare HDD which is making funny noises and I’m thinking of getting a dedicated SSD for it and cloning it across. Not sure how that will work out.

There are several programs out there that can clone your disk and even compress it. Clonezilla is a good program.

 

[Tom Nook's Gloryhole]

Decided to dual boot Debian to give it another try. I was a big fan of it years back but eventually wanting to crossplay Xbox games on PC required switching to Windows 10.

So far with my new Debian build? Nothing but pain. My keyboard keeps disconnecting with keys getting stuck, I can't mount any of my other drives to access them (or even access my own home folder) and it straight up does nothing when I try to shut it down. I'm guessing something has gone seriously wrong with the install but I can't understand what, given that there's no updates available via the terminal.

 

[Aidan]

Decided to dual boot Debian to give it another try. I was a big fan of it years back but eventually wanting to crossplay Xbox games on PC required switching to Windows 10.

So far with my new Debian build? Nothing but pain. My keyboard keeps disconnecting with keys getting stuck, I can't mount any of my other drives to access them (or even access my own home folder) and it straight up does nothing when I try to shut it down. I'm guessing something has gone seriously wrong with the install but I can't understand what, given that there's no updates available via the terminal.

I had issues years ago with a seemingly botched Debian install. Didn't think much about it since a re-install fixed it but maybe it's a thing?
Debian is good but not as user-friendly as some of the more popular distros out there. I'd recommend trying different user-friendly distros in a virtual machine and dual-booting whichever one works.
I've never had issues with PopOS, Mint, or Fedora installs but they're each hefty compared to Debian. Manjaro works pretty well though their "build your own" whatever has always been trash versus just fully doing it yourself.
EndeavourOS is the current trendy arch distro but I've had issues with it both in VMs and on a Thinkpad, for what it's worth.

 

[PFM]

FOSS GUIs tend to just leave a lot to be desired quite a lot of the time, and in particular will disrespect theming within the OS (or the user's choices) inconsistently - which is quite a major annoyance for a paranoid twat like me who likes things to be consistent. Once you've decided to actually optimise it for 'whatever' platform so you respect its general conventions in GUI you've bloated it up quite a bit.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but after having not fucked with Windows since 7 and now being forced to use 11 for work, I'm 1000% more grateful of what Linux UI's offer. It's so fucking frustrating using 11 I can't put it into words.

 

[Tom Nook's Gloryhole]

I had issues years ago with a seemingly botched Debian install. Didn't think much about it since a re-install fixed it but maybe it's a thing?
Debian is good but not as user-friendly as some of the more popular distros out there. I'd recommend trying different user-friendly distros in a virtual machine and dual-booting whichever one works.
I've never had issues with PopOS, Mint, or Fedora installs but they're each hefty compared to Debian. Manjaro works pretty well though their "build your own" whatever has always been trash versus just fully doing it yourself.
EndeavourOS is the current trendy arch distro but I've had issues with it both in VMs and on a Thinkpad, for what it's worth.

What's funny is that Debian is, in my experience the most rock solid Linux OS I've ever used. Years back I switched from either Linux Mint or Ubuntu to Debian and didn't have a single issue in 2 whole years. It's easily the longest I've gone using linux without having to reinstall it from scratch.

I'm just curious if a single piece of hardware is incompatible which is fucking everything up. I'll try switching things around later and see if it makes a difference but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[Tomboy Respecter]

I worked with a female data analyst programmer. She did not put effort into her appearance and I'm pretty sure was autistic given her C++ rambling. She was somewhat energetic, though. Only one out of a couple hundred professionals I met. You'll never get your tomboy programmer gf.

She sounds like the perfect woman tbqh, minus the tomboy part and being lazy about appearances.

 

[Ahriman]

**raises hand**

I’m fairly new to linux tbh but have been meaning to try it for years and wanted to try it on my old laptop to see if I can get it running a bit less shit than it does. So me being me, I put linux on the gaming PC first (as you do) and besides a game randomly remapping a mouse button that I can’t figure out for the life of me, it’s going ok.

Anyway, hi frens. I give it a week before I break it irretrievably. When I do you may all mock me.

Edit: me retard

Welcome aboard, frenette. Keep dabbing on them troons.

These days, distros are fairly resilient, depends on what you want to do or the kind of hardware you're using.

Edit: also, pretty nice https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy

 

[Slav Power]

Out of a few snippets I've seen, is it commonly agreed that DistroTube is a completely bent FOSS extremist that strongly believes every single thing that is not FOSS is absolute useless garbage that is completely unusable and should not be used by anyone, and that is his only single point of reference to declare that?

 

[Frail Snail]

Unintentional, considering I'm on Windows right now.

FOSS GUIs tend to just leave a lot to be desired quite a lot of the time, and in particular will disrespect theming within the OS (or the user's choices) inconsistently - which is quite a major annoyance for a paranoid twat like me who likes things to be consistent. Once you've decided to actually optimise it for 'whatever' platform so you respect its general conventions in GUI you've bloated it up quite a bit.

(There's a reason, for instance, that K-Meleon, an old, long-dead FF fork actually came about: it was because the dev realised that drawing the UI functionality with native Win32 functions was far more optimal than Mozilla's XUL language. Another great example of a FOSS project that uses native UI functionality to make the application feel more 'at home' is the MacOS-exclusive OpenEmu, an implementation of libretro which I remember spinning up on a MacBook Air years ago - RetroArch itself just felt alien on that computer in comparison, I'm gonna be honest.

Another example I could use is how 'out of place' UWP applications feel in Windows 10, they feel 'tacked on top' of the Win32 API, alongside everything else added post-Windows 8 Consumer Preview...)

At least 'cross-platform' these days doesn't tend to mean something like Java though, thank fuck. Back then a different runtime environment could cause chaos (and then there was Microsoft doing their weird shit with the JVM after actually writing a pretty good implementation that beat Sun's own one by quite a bit).

I don't work in software dev, I'm just an end user, but I hope what I'm saying makes sense.

I have a different gripe with FOSS GUIs. Why are there barely any programs that decouple program logic from presentation? Proprietary software and programs that intend to make the author money can't do that because they come to users as a single offering. It's a well known fact that engineers can't make a decent user interface even if you put a gun to their head, unless that interface is for power users and experts.

As an example, there's program X. If it's F/OSS, it would be best to split the functionality into libX, a CLI program that uses libX and can start as a daemon listening for IPCs, and a GUI. Now, when the GUI is shit, someone that is actually good at designing interfaces can make a new one and treat talking to the program logic like you would treat APIs in webshitting. The idea is, in fact, almost identical to programs with a web GUI, but IPC and a rendering pipeline without browser engine code bloat levels is better.

Out of a few snippets I've seen, is it commonly agreed that DistroTube is a completely bent FOSS extremist that strongly believes every single thing that is not FOSS is absolute useless garbage that is completely unusable and should not be used by anyone, and that is his only single point of reference to declare that?

Unlike with hardware people on Youtube, I don't think there's a single person I would listen to on the platform when it comes to OS and software.

 

[AnOminous]

Well, in my mostly generic Mint install, Cinnamon exploded as it inevitably does, so I switched over to KDE Plasma, which luckily I had installed in case Cinnamon turned out unsatisfactory (again).

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Out of a few snippets I've seen, is it commonly agreed that DistroTube is a completely bent FOSS extremist that strongly believes every single thing that is not FOSS is absolute useless garbage that is completely unusable and should not be used by anyone, and that is his only single point of reference to declare that?

He's a schizo, but not enough to go full GNU/Hurd(? the fuck?), thank god he's not advising against the use of proprietary drivers often needed to make shit work.

 

[AnOminous]

He's a schizo, but not enough to go full GNU/Hurd(? the fuck?), thank god he's not advising against the use of proprietary drivers often needed to make shit work.

Case in point, the shitty NVIDIA binary blob drivers. There are also open source drivers but frankly they blow chunks.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

I also should chime in on the Command Line vs. GUI debate.

To me it isn't even about complexity (Mutt) nor simplicity (Nano and Vim), but consistency. Sometimes, redundancy issues, but that's an end-user problem. For the consistency part you have variations of the Vim-like keybindings to make basic functions less of a trial and error balance out of the box. That, and there's only so much you can do with ASCII and Curses that you'd have to be in the wrong group of programmers to make an unusable interface.

 

[Aidan]

Out of a few snippets I've seen, is it commonly agreed that DistroTube is a completely bent FOSS extremist that strongly believes every single thing that is not FOSS is absolute useless garbage that is completely unusable and should not be used by anyone, and that is his only single point of reference to declare that?

He's alright in my opinion but often lacks self awareness on real world practical workflows.
I've no doubt many (most?) of his videos are just finding some open source utility, reading the man page, and making the video and I think that's nice for exposure to stuff you may not stumble upon otherwise.

He has conceded in some videos that he understands some people have no choice but to use certain software, namely students and employees.
I will say that DT has been in the Linux realm so long on top of him being him that he's out of touch the struggles of actual noobs. You can say "read the man page" or "RTFM" all day but that is itself a learning curve as dumb as it may sound and many people forget that.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

I didn't mean you, I meant the general attitude that excuses absolutely shitty design in favor of functionality. This is actually a good thing if functionality is why you're in, but it is not a great sales pitch for an OS if it looks like hot vomit on the screen.

That's why a lot of people like ZorinOS.

Seriously have you ever installed absolute stock XFCE4? Whoever made those defaults does not have eyes. Who the fuck is mixing variable-width fonts and fixed-width fonts everywhere?

EndeavourOS' custom theming for XFCE4 is pretty good though.

The idea is, in fact, almost identical to programs with a web GUI, but IPC and a rendering pipeline without browser engine code bloat levels is better.

The reason why web GUIs became a thing is that front-end designers know how to design websites but nobody knows fucking QML or whatever. I'm fairly sure all modern windowing toolkits are capable of this but good luck.

 

[PFM]

Can anyone suggest a cheap USB WIFI dongle?

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

Well, in my mostly generic Mint install, Cinnamon exploded as it inevitably does, so I switched over to KDE Plasma, which luckily I had installed in case Cinnamon turned out unsatisfactory (again).

It's genuinely strange to me how often I hear 'my distro just shat its pants' and everyone seems okay with it.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

It's genuinely strange to me how often I hear 'my distro just shat its pants' and everyone seems okay with it.

Computing, what can I say, sometimes you just get numb to bullshit.