When folks will stop with the “If Linux won’t become another Windows, it’ll fail” mentality? Linux is not Winblows – and we really mean it. To “increase adoption” users need to acknowledge (only) this – that both Windows and Linux differs from one another and that won’t change in any time soon.
I’ve been using Xubuntu LTS on my work laptop some 10 years now. All the customization I do is remove snaps and add flatpaks. It just works.
I have RHEL and derivatives on my work machines, where I spend most of my day. I don’t like the RPM package system, which they tried to improve upon several times already. I don’t like Gnome, is too opinionated for me.
I had a colleague who used Gentoo, to claim superiority. His laptop spent most of the day burning kilowatts with the fans blowing. Not for me. Having everyone build packages from source is very unneficient. "Oh, but the security of building your own binaries! " Well, did you look at the code you’re building? No? Well then.
I end up always going back to the DEB ecosystem, with a XFCE desktop. Lately I’ve been using Manjaro with XFCE and Flatpaks, no AUR.
Most distributions are fine honestly. Ubuntu is clearly not my thing. Not a fan of Redhat-based distribution either. I wanted to appreciate OpenSuse as they’ve been supporters of KDE for a long time but wasn’t comfortable with Yast.
Apart from that, Manjaro is awesome, Arch amazing, Debian brilliant, etc.
I don’t even remember how many years it’s been when Yast was actually needed. It’s optional since quite some time. Even installing the OS itself could technically be done through Calamares but I don’t think that’s worth the effort.
I get it. It does have a learning curve. This being said, I would argue that without selinux Linux can’t really be meaningfully secure. It’s worth learning. Seljnux exits elsewhere too. I deploy Debian with selinux and it works well there as well.
The problem with SELinux is that everyone rushed to push it out, alongside packages affected by it without support for it. So it was a crapshoot whether or not you’d have something working each time. That is better now, but was initially a colossal pain in the ass for about five years or so.
Fair. But audit2allow makes it really easy to add support for apps without policies. For custom in-house apps I use this to spit out some nice policies that can be rolled out.
What put me off selinux is that the officially documented way of generating a new policy is to run a service unconfined, and then generating the policy from its behaviour. This is backwards on so many levels… In contrast policy-based admission control in kubernetes is a delight to use, and creating new policies is actually doable outside of a lab.
You could preemptively write the policy if you know the context and policies you want to apply. I just don’t think it’s worth the time when you can generate a policy with two commands.
Honestly, depending on whether you count it or not, LFS. I have not tried Gentoo yet, though I want to one day, for the learning experience, and yet I already know that compiling everything is not something I enjoy.
I can get by with OpenSUSE and Void (kinda), I’ve used Debian for a few weeks, I’ve used Fedora for a month or so, I’ve used Ubuntu for a bit, I’ve tried PopOS for a week or two, I’ve used NixOS for a few months, and I’ve used Arch for most of my time on Linux.
Currently I’m on Arch, but I don’t like rolling releases that much. At the same time, I am also not a fan of immutability, as there are some programs I need that cannot be installed on an immutable distro, so that’s why I’m on Arch. Why am I only using these 2? Because they are the only distros that have all the packages I need (excluding the specialist software that I need for university). By the time I discovered Distrobox (which would solve this problem), I was already on Arch. I’ve also done some changes to my setup and as such, I’ll need to wait for some new features to make their way into program releases and into the NixOS Stable repo with the following release. Until then, I’m on Arch.
Gentoo is useless for learning how things work. Back in the 00s when I still had time to hang out at events it was always quite ridiculous at what kind of basic stuff the gentoo crowd got stuck at - and with the tooling 15+ years more polished now I’d expect what is actually going on is way more hidden than back then.
If you do want to understand how things work just build a minimal system - either on spare hardware, or qemu/kvm. Don’t go with systemd, or other fat userland options - that just makes you compile a lot of dependencies not adding value for learning.
Use some lean init (or just write one yourself), and some lean shell.
I’d just start from very simple kernel and static init, and work my way up to adding more functionality. I’d use kvm with rootfs on p9fs - that allows playing with it without having to build images. I can throw together the initial invocation, if you’re interested.
Then start building simple core elements in a language allowing easy static linking - I’d use C with dietlibc or go. Start adding core userland programs, explore initramfs (without using something like dracut), add dynamic libraries and explore the dynamic linker, … - if you’re interested we could set up a matrix channel for questions (typically with some lag, though), and do a github repo to follow along.
LFS iirc goes for full desktop - the high level userland is very complex, but easy to understand when you know the basics. You pretty much learn how to compile lots of libraries - which has limited use. A full LFS style desktop I’d no longer recommend nowadays - it’s just too many dependencies to deal with. I used to build my own system (not following LFS) until the Xorg fork made it sigificantly more complicated - and things got just worse since then, and I never was using a complicated UI stack.
edit: I had a few minutes, so I’ve thrown this together github.com/bwachter/lll - you should easily get a kernel with a custom init running, and have enough to start experimenting. If you or anyone else is interested to go deeper I’ll set up a matrix channel for guidance.
I put commands in a bash script, with a parameter for each one, and it lists them all if I don’t give a parameter. So for example it goes “arch upgrade” instead of having to remember “pacman -Syuu”.
I use paru and the default is “paru” with no parameter for the upgrade. But I am on your team here: I have to Google everysingletime the -Q params for all the queries and I have been using arch for almost 2 decades now: “who owns this file?” “what are the deps of this package?” “Which packages are installed?” “Which packages I explicitly installed vs dependencies?” Not a single one of them is intuitive to query with the pacman command line for some reason.
Are there any programs that can animate a cat to chase my mouse across the desktop? Or a guy who runs up window borders and tries to wrangle the mouse?
I tried oneko for a day and wow… not my thing. Constant distraction and I didn’t get much done that day, lol. Not recommended for the work computer at least.
Manjaro. I had previously already used Antergos and Ubuntu, but after Antergos stopped I needed something like it. So I installed Manjaro in my secondary PC (with old components). I constantly got into trouble with the manual kernel version selection thingy. I was used to kernel updates being part of the normal update process, and suddenly I had to manually pick the new one. I constantly ran into incompatibility issues with older or newer kernels, vague update deadlocks where I couldn’t update things because they depended in each other, and I absolutely hated having to use a separate program for updating the kernel. Now the PC runs Fedora and I’m liking that a lot more so far…
Manjaro ships with a LTS kernel, which is marked “recommended” in the kernel selection tool. By default you don’t have to do anything, don’t ever need to use the kernel selection, and you won’t experience any problems, it works like any other distro.
The issues you described are caused by selecting one of the non-recommended kernel versions. It’s assumed you know what you’re doing if you do that.
Exactly I really don’t get the argument there. Manjaro’s handling of kernel selection is brilliant. Multiple LTS kernels, a recommended one, bleeding hedge and experimental ones. There’s something for everyone and it’s super easy to use.
It’s not so much an argument, it’s my personal experience. My experience was just not great. Maybe I did something wrong, but I’ve had a way better experience with Antergos, Arch, Fedora, and Ubuntu.
Idk what was wrong then, but I constantly had issues with packages being out of date due to the kernel and not wanting to update. Dependencies were constantly a mess. I’d rather just have normal Arch or Antergos/Endeavor
hyprland has this, but you have to configure it. It’s called Submaps. Some other tiling window managers/compositors (notion for example) have it too, but not to that extent. (notion can be enhanced by Lua scripting, tho.)
The idea is, after the first key of the sequence the meaning of a set of keys change. You could configure those to change the meanings again etc until you finally reach whatever depth you wanted and it performs an action.
However, be warned that hyprland is currently developed by very elitist people who like to support onky a very small set of distributions (primarily Arch btw) and have not much interest in other peoples Ubuntu shenanigens and the likes. It is extremely hard to install in Ubuntu and similar, requiring you to do minor edits to build scripts and source code in multiple languages and finding required library versions from build errors that do not mention them.
Seems like your USB drive is formatted with a filesystem that doesn’t support large files like FAT32, if you are able to, try formatting into exFAT in Linux with:
Alright, I’ve used your code, sudo mkfs.exfat -n LABEL /dev/sdb1
but the console returns this
<span style="color:#323232;">exfatprogs version : 1.1.3
</span><span style="color:#323232;">open failed : /dev/sdb1, Device or resource busy
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">exFAT format fail!
</span>
what’s the problem here? I’ve cleared out all storage on the drive, and made sure that it isn’t opened in the file explorer, and it shouldn’t be reading/writing anything because it’s empty.
You must unmount the drive before formatting. And also know that formatting wipes the drive, so if there is anything on there you want to keep, back it up beforehand
And triple check the device path, you don’t want to unceremoniously unmount and obliterate one of your non-system drives (shouldn’t be able to unmount your system drive)
This may or may not be advice from learned experience
It not only has to be not 'open' in the explorer, but properly unmounted. Tools like mkfs dont do that for you, its just not their job. (and might be unwanted or stop your from making mistakes like accidentally overwriting the wrong drive)
try umount /dev/USBDRIVE
If that still complaints about Device or ressource busy, then something is still using it.
Either try to close things that might be the culprit, reboot and try again or, if installed and you are compfortable, you can check which processes using lsof -D <path where drive is mounted to> (you can get that location using mount | grep <path to usb drive>)
I did, discord was a mess (the systray icon not working and couldn’t stream audio), no parsec host support and other little things.
Yes, there are alternatives/workarounds but it’s too much of a hustle to play some games if the alternative is w10, I already know how to optimize it/solve common issues and for this specific case “it just works”
I tried Linux Mint, then I switched to Nobara and I had issues with discord in both, the systray icon not showing green when I was speaking/muted and I was unable to screen share a program with sound (then I looked up and found it’s a discord problem not giving a shit about linux users).
Then the gaming part was pretty messy, specially when I tried to run pirate games or games like league of legends, I spent 2 days trying to make league of legends work with lutris (i don’t play that game anymore so now it shouldn’t be a problem)
The funny thing is that I have a linux server on which I self host a lot of services and I’ve been tinkering with it for +4 years now, I’m pretty used to Debian and Fedora in the terminal, but when it comes to desktop I get lost pretty easily.
The discord thing is improving (slowly), also partly it now recognizes Linux games launched from steam, but not proton ones. I haven’t tried lutris or anything yet, but I haven’t booted into windows for weeks now.
I’ve also become more comfortable with Linux in general so that’s likely helped too.
That’s really cool! I know some regex and I tried to learn vim regex, only to find out it’s a rabbithole so deep I’m afraid to look into. The feeling when you press enter and your carefully crafted regex does exactly what it’s supposed to do is awesome though. Good luck!
Vim is on my list of things to learn. I didn’t even know vim had its own regex, but I suppose that makes sense. I’ve messed with vim a bit, but have stuck to nano so far.
It was already split by a fit Latvian girl of a Yarr-harr, fiddle-dee-dee persuasion, if you catch my drift. I really am afraid of fucking something up, so I’ll try other methods before splitting it further.
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