rodbiren

@rodbiren@midwest.social

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(Constructively) What is your least favorite distro & why?

I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit...

rodbiren,

I used the default v3 kernel that Cachy installs by default. My guess is the workloads I have are Ram I/O bound and that just doesn’t mesh with the scheduler. I’m literally rooting for it to be faster because I want caring about scheduler and optimization to matter, but freaking stock Linux Mint ran the loads faster.

rodbiren,

I swear it is my machine or something, but despite CachyOS claiming being faster and more optimized I have yet to benchmark it as faster than the stock kernel for things I play around with. I wrote an application in rust to process a large text file and it both compiled and ran slower on CachyOS. I play around with llama.cpp and again it compiles and runs slower on CachyOS. I want to like Cachy, but right now all I can see is a bunch of window dressing to stock Arch with KDE and a couple of themes that I would rather change to default.

Also, why in the hell am I being asked to make a wifi password encryption key with the damn USB installer? CachyOS is not the only one. A lot of KDE using distros pop up the encryption window when you setup WiFi on the install image. Why? You want me to temporarily encrypt my wifi password on a temporary live image??? I just slows me down.

Anyways, I’m sure I’m crazy and clearly it is fast for somebody, but I can’t even get games to benchmark higher.

rodbiren,

Well if you are doing work on you computer you find rewarding and it functions I would quit while you are ahead. Getting into distro hopping and caring about Linux internals is a bit like being a car enthusiast. You can either have a car to drive it or have a car that you fart around all the time tweaking bits, replacing it, breaking it, developing strong opionons about things almost no one cares about.

So to you want to be a driver or an enthusiast? By using Linux at all you can essentially consider yourself part of the “car club”, but there is a whole heck of a lot else to learn.

I'm so frustrated rn.

I have been distro hopping for about 2 weeks now, there’s always something that doesn’t work. I thought I would stick with Debian and now I haven’t been able to make my printer work in it, I think I tried in another distro and it just worked out of the box, but there’s always something that’s broken in every distro....

rodbiren,

Linux Mint is where I always go crawling back to. I have hopped so damn much. Mint sometimes needs a newer kernel installed, but I’ll be damned if that Ubuntu base doesn’t help with printers, graphics drivers, and scanners. Getting that to work on Arch was a blast and a half, on Mint I literally just turned my network printer on and it found it. IDK, you can do anything and there is always some issue eventually.

rodbiren, (edited )

Well, it turns out only a handful of companies actually make image modules. I would say it is better in terms of US based support, firmware, hardware design, and the fact it meets TAA and buy America compliance. I’ve seen these cameras in the DoD and even in the oval office. If you want a camera that is absolutely not spying on you I can vouch for these because I have watched the firmware get built on these.

rodbiren,

I was product manager at a company that made PTZ cameras based on Linux. The company was acquired a few times but still actually manufactures them in Minnetonka MN. Kind of fun working at a place the had development, manufacturing, support and engineering in one building.

www.legrandav.com/Products/…/RoboSHOT-12E-USB/

rodbiren,

I’ll take something from 2005 as a compliment to Linux Mint. Having installed it in 2006 you are absolutely correct. It’s shockingly boring lack of constant UI paradigm shifts almost makes me forget about the OS completely. I’m at the point in my Linux journey where I see slow adoption of new things as good. I accept others have setups that mint does not work for, but I would wager there is no Linux DE better suited as a first suggestion to try depending on the newness of the hardware. If you have 5 monitors of differing resolutions and frame rates then sure, there are better DEs.

rodbiren,

Had really good experience with this option. Namecheap seems quite reasonable. Also, self hosting on other’s domain can cause a lot of issues as you try creating enough paths for everything. I have found subdomain routing to work much better as a lot of applications get sad when their host url is something like blarg.com/gitea or something.

rodbiren,

If you have uncapped bandwidth you could run a syncthing relay server. Syncthing rocks as a file sync option and I host my own.

relays.syncthing.net/

rodbiren,

I constantly check out dell refurbished for deals on workstations. Pretty good Linux compatibility in my experience, workstation hardware, and they have 50% deals all the dang time. The precision line of workstations looks like it would meet your needs.

rodbiren,

Handles graphics drivers, printer drivers, looks like a windows without the influence of advertisers, what I consider a consistent theme, and best of all it is mind numbingly boring. Prepare yourself for the heart pounding activity of predictable updates, uncomplicated booting, running familiar applications, doing work, being productive, not even actively thinking about your OS.

rodbiren,

I get them whole and eat them whole. So dang cheap. Like $3 for a 5lb bag. I get made fun of endlessly by some, but I joke that if it were a bag of Doritos no one would bat an eye and that says a lot about the state of things. My wife joked that I have “car carrots” and just leave a big bag of carrots in the car if the weather permits.

I am never hungry for a snack if I eat 2lbs of raw carrots.

rodbiren,

I love me some salty food so I feel the pain. I’ll echo the sentiment of not buying it in the first place. Will power is an exhaustible resource.

I find that it almost doesn’t matter what I snack on I just want to snack. I will literally buy a huge bag of carrots and just eat those. Or my other favorite is toss a couple of strained cans of garbanzo beans in an air fryer, spray a bit of cooking spray, toast those suckers for 25 min, and salt/season them for a protein heavy snack that actually has fiber. Cheap, easy, and gives me similar vibes to a potato chip in an incredibly more healthy way.

rodbiren,

I second the motion on ghostwriter. Had a nice focus mode, looks good, isn’t distracting. I use syncthing to backup everything. It’s my jam.

rodbiren,

2ish years is the Goldilocks zone of job hoping. Less then that and you look more trouble than you are worth. More than that and you miss out on real pay raises. Though of course if you have it good then you don’t have to jump.

rodbiren,

Mint is surprisingly loved and disliked from what I have seen. Having used it since 2007 I am in the category that likes it for what it is. But I am somewhat surprised by the open hostility it gets for simply existing. Main arguments being that it is a dinosaur, uses X11, should not exist because anything not KDE or GNOME is just diluting desktop Linux and is part of the problem. It has no fancy corporate sponsor, it has a small team, and it for sure has warts, but you can claw Linux Mint from my cold dead hard drive because I have distro hopped like an addict and it just checks the boxes for me. It shows up and works, even on newer hardware with a little tweaking here and there, but I can use Nvidia, find network printers without effort, scan, install and update flatpak, backup the system, game, and get actual work done that is not fiddle farting around with esoteric configs all the time. I can post on actual forums with actual users on it and not some discord where someone will just post memes over my questions. I have a strong feeling it will exist for a long while given it’s history. And it is mind numbingly borning as an OS. I just sit down and compute, what a concept.

Good dumb TV for my living room media center?

Just had my old dumb LG TV die after 9 years of working just dandy. I lack the desire to root around for a dead capacitor so I am currently in the market for an approximate replacement to act as the display for my Linux media center in my living room. I figure this is the right crowd for finding a non-invasive TV so my Linux...

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