The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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acid_ra1n said:
ok so guix chads i need ur advice
im thinking i wanna eventually run on this chinkpad guix with exwm and just live in emacs for this particular computer
is systemcrafters a good resource, and if so what order should i follow their guides in
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System Crafters is one of the best resources, yeah. If you're keen to read you can go over the manual and cookbook, but otherwise, the tonybtw video gives you a pretty good first step into Guixxing. The way I did it is to just play around with implementing stuff you already kinda know in Guix. Take your WM or DE for example; see if you can't figure out how to apply dotfiles or GTK settings with Home, then mess around with tweaking SDDM or something via your config.scm and build from there. Sky's the limit! Trust me, once you play around with it a bit, you'll catch the declarative configuration bug real quick.
 
BubbaRobot887 said:
no one wants to use their software
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Three-quarters of corporate desktops are Windows.

SchizoDaemon said:
I often know it's probably going to fail because there are Byzantine bureaucratic processes involved and ancient software involved that is essentially for running something incredibly important and was built on Visual Fox Pro or some such nonsense.
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If there's no need to change software, businesses will usually see the cost as dead money. I recently encountered a laser cutter controlled by a computer running Windows XP. It works perfectly well, and no manager will ever sign off on changing it.
 
Phoronix forums having a normal one
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Everyone else is raising their kids to hate rust too, right?
 
SchizoDaemon said:
However, all the 64-bit NT variants of Windows were pretty solid, as they were all based on Windows Server.
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32-bit versions are also based off of Windows Server. Has been like this since Vista due to XP and pre-reset Longhorn being quite insecure and broken.

SchizoDaemon said:
Probably. Generally, though, Windows XP was slow as well if you had most of the effects on, even on machines with relatively good GPUs
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:thinking: I have had a laptop with a C2D T6400 and a GMA 4500mhd which I doubt would have had much issue with XPs rendering considering Vista's Aero glass never really made much of a performance impact on it and an IBM ThinkCenter using whatever budget shit was available in 2003 that ran XP just fine until my electrical installation decided it had enough of it. You sure that slowdown was a GPU bottleneck issue and not just the explorer taking 15 minutes to open because both your 5400rpm drive and Pentium M were struggling to cope with all the 5000 background processes (pre-installed for good luck :)) running (less we not also forget slow SWAP memory and how much slower it used to be)?

Slow HDDs, the need to use SWAP and the billions of both installed and running OEM pre-installed processes are honestly what I suspect to be a big cause for bad performance on Vista back then.
 
SchizoDaemon said:
  • Linux was IMO barely usable. Lots of stuff didn't work, and getting X working wasn't easy. BSDs weren't great either.
  • Windows had 3 or 4 consumer versions that were still supported at the time. Getting XP to run on anything past 2004 was a PITA because XP didn't have SATA drivers and machines were phasing out floppy controllers. I had a XP 64-bit install ISO where I had streamlined service packs and drivers.
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My experience with either was the complete opposite of yours. You probably were just unlucky with your hardware choices.
 
Curry Teafag said:
My experience with either was the complete opposite of yours. You probably were just unlucky with your hardware choices.
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No, I bought hardware that would work well with Linux. I had fairly standard hardware at the time.
jeff7989 said:
Switch SATA mode from AHCI to Legacy/IDE, easy.
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No, it wouldn't detect the drives at all. You needed to slipstream the drivers. Older Linux distros wouldn't work either.
the rat said:
32-bit versions are also based off of Windows Server.
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It looks like you were right. However, 32-bit versions of Vista and 7 always seemed to work poorly. I don't think it was hardware with low specs either. It ran poorly on relatively well spec'd machines.
the rat said:
Slow HDDs, the need to use SWAP and the billions of both installed and running OEM pre-installed processes are honestly what I suspect to be a big cause for bad performance on Vista back then.
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While that is true for any OS. If you turn off all the graphical effects in XP and use the old Windows Classic-style UI. Everything was much snappier;
 
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SchizoDaemon said:
It looks like you were right. However, 32-bit versions of Vista and 7 always seemed to work poorly. I don't think it was hardware with low specs either. It ran poorly on relatively well spec'd machines.
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I really have no idea what you're talking about.
  • It is silly to talk about whether a NT based version of Windows (whether NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, SBS or Vista or whatever bullshit names they give them nowadays) is 'based on Windows Server'. They are all just NT.
  • I am skeptical that 32-bit versions of Vista/7 ran 'poorly' for you, unless you were running software that had a variant that been explicitly recompiled for 64-bit processors (pretty rare in the time period) or you were exceeding the RAM limits. Regular 32-bit software ran no better- possibly slightly worse- on 64-bit Windows. And on 7, you couldn't even run OG SkiFree or Microsoft Bob without something like WineVDM I can still run a T60p Thinkpad with i386 Linux today just fine.. sure, it'd be nice to have the 64-bit proc, but because it's way faster regardless of the architecture, and because nowadays many distros are abandoning i386, but that's just a convenience thing.
SchizoDaemon said:
While that is true for any OS. If you turn off all the graphical effects in XP and use the old Windows Classic-style UI. Everything was much snappier;
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Yes, Windows has greatly declined since the point where you could just disable the Theming Service and everything would work better. Removing that choice was a Poettring-esque decision.
 
BubbaRobot887 said:
I got mint on my PC and so far everything is running fine.
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I also recently switched to Mint from Windows 11 and I had a lot of smaller issues with it which I figured out over time (mostly). Here's some simple tips:
  • First of all set the power plan to "performance" in "Power Management" app. Sounds stupid, but for some reason I didn't think of that at first.
  • If the colors are all washed out, go to "Color" app and pick a better profile (in my case it was Artifex Software sRGB ICC).
  • Do not listen to others telling you to tick the "Disable compositor for full-screen windows" as this will cause issues with dropped inputs while gaming. I spent so many hours trying to figure out what was the problem and it got me killed so many times.
  • Enable auto-mount on boot in "Disks" app by selecting a disk, clicking the cogs and going into "Edit mount options". There you can also edit its name from some gibberish to a custom, short one.
  • If focusing on cursor is annoying to you, too then go to "Windows" app and change the "Window Focus Mode" to "Click".
  • For fps locking use "DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60 %command%" in launch options, an in-game fps lock or even vsync, do not bother with 3rd party ones as the input lag is insane. They're nothing like RTSS on Windows.
  • Steam will have a broken focus and window issues, don't waste your time trying to fix it. It's not worth it.
  • Steam's performance overlay for GPU usage will most probably be broken, too. Just use something external for it specifically.
  • Configs of games ran through Wine will be found in /steamapps/compatdata/, non-Wine at /home/.config (hidden by default). I spent way too much time trying to figure out where my .ini configs were.
  • If you're paranoid about not having Windows Defender, there's always chkrootkit and clamAV you could use..
  • Set up a Timeshift backup. You will want to go back to it if anything goes wrong. I found it useful despite usually shrugging such stuff off.
  • Timeshift WILL NOT care about whatever you're doing and will create an automatic snapshot while you're gaming or working. Similarly to Windows Defender scans. You can turn off automatic snapshots and do them manually every some time if it will be overly annoying to you.
  • Remember you can press CTRL + SHIFT + T to open terminal and type "killall [appname]" in case something freezes. You can also bind "Kill Application" in Custom Shortcuts in "Keyboard" app.
  • Default screenshot keys open a menu asking you where to save the image, you can change it in the aforementioned shortcuts menu so it goes directly to clipboard like on Windows.
  • If you feel like the system is using swap (virtual memory) too much, you can always change "swappiness" to a lower value like 10.
Those are my personal experiences with it as a basic user, they may be wrong or not the most optimal but I think this will save you A LOT of time and frustrations.

I like Mint so far and even though I had to re-learn the basics after switching from Windows. Some games even stopped stuttering and in overall the system just feels way smoother. The only drawbacks are the daily shader downloads and higher VRAM usage. My final straw which caused me to switch was Hindosoft actively prohibiting me from disabling the forced "Efficiency mode". It was being forcibly applied to applications like Steam and while trying to turn it off nothing worked, including the registry edits. No such problem exists on Mint. And if there was, I could probably just freely change it. I'm still somewhat overwhelmed by Linux as a whole, but I've been pretty satisfied with it. And my PC fans don't start spinning like crazy doing Defender scans or other bullshit when I go AFK for few minutes.
 
⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
I really have no idea what you're talking about.
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It's perfectly possible that both of us had completely different experiences of using the same operating systems.
⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
  • It is silly to talk about whether a NT based version of Windows (whether NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, SBS or Vista or whatever bullshit names they give them nowadays) is 'based on Windows Server'. They are all just NT.
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Microsoft in the late 90s to the late 2000s had releases of various NT versions for PPC and Alpha. Later they had releases for Itanium and x64.

XP 64-bit for both x86 and Itanium was based on Windows Server 2003. It wasn't the same as XP Home/Pro.

I thought this carried over to Vista and 7. Apparently this wasn't the case, and I have already admitted I was incorrect.

So while they are all technically NT, the versions for the other architectures that aren't 32-bit x86 were quite different.
⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
  • I am skeptical that 32-bit versions of Vista/7 ran 'poorly' for you, unless you were running software that had a variant that been explicitly recompiled for 64-bit processors (pretty rare in the time period) or you were exceeding the RAM limits. Regular 32-bit software ran no better- possibly slightly worse- on 64-bit Windows.
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Intel Core 2 Duo 64-bit machines were night and day faster at the time than the 32-bit machines that came before them. I went from a 2002/2003 Athlon XP 2500+ to a Core 2 Quad. The Core 2 Duo and Quads were so much better than the stuff that came before them, and that includes the Athlon 64 machines. So maybe it was to do with that. However, there were issues all the time with Vista at my first real dev job. All the machines were the same HP Office Pentium 4 pizza box-style workstations with 2G of RAM.
 
ScooterL said:
If there's no need to change software, businesses will usually see the cost as dead money. I recently encountered a laser cutter controlled by a computer running Windows XP. It works perfectly well, and no manager will ever sign off on changing it.
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You'd still want that shit air-gapped. I was still using XP on a virtual machine excluded from the Internet but I wasn't using it to run potentially dangerous equipment.
 
Baraka Obama said:
I used Legacy/IDE mode to install Windows 98 and XP from retail discs last week. You don't need drivers at all.
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It seems to depend on the board. At the time I specifically remember creating slipstream CDs for my housemates and I as we all had similar issues. Here are some similar problems with IDE/SATA from boards of a similar vintage

e.g. https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=74152

I asked Gemini specifically about the board I had, which was the Abit NF7.0 version 2. Maybe these issues were specific to the boards I was using at the time.
Apparently there were issues around FakeRAID on Linux and OpenBSD.

I don't own these boards anymore, and without verifying myself, I couldn't say for certain what the exact issues were.
 
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⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
yes and that was the case regardless of whether you ran 32 bit or 64 bit operating systems
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I found that XP-64 bit ran much better on these machines. As previously stated, Windows XP 64-bit is based on Windows Server 2003. It is a better OS IME.

Once Vista 64-bit SP1 arrived, I think most people ditched XP, especially if they had newer Core Quad machines like I did. I had the misfortune of having to use Windows XP 32-bit on quad-core machines in 2010 due to retarded IT policy.
 
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SchizoDaemon said:
It seems to depend on the board. At the time I specifically remember creating slipstream CDs for my housemates and I as we all had similar issues. Here are some similar problems with IDE/SATA from boards of a similar vintage

e.g. https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=74152

I asked Gemini specifically about the board I had, which was the Abit NF7.0 version 2. Maybe these issues were specific to the boards I was using at the time.
Apparently there were issues around FakeRAID on Linux and OpenBSD.

I don't own these boards anymore, and without verifying myself, I couldn't say for certain what the exact issues were.
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You asked an AI chatbot how it works and got two threads that aren't really relevent (2nd one talks about a RAID card).

I've done it on at least 4 different systems.

IDE is usually easier to deal with for Win98 but for XP? SATA came out when XP was the main OS, the reason all the boards have Legacy/IDE was so that it just worked with XP. AHCI mode for a long time was seen as unnecessary unless you wanted hotswap drives (most didn't need it) or esata, and any perf difference wasn't really an issue until you get into SSDs circa 2010.
 
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