The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

Windows 10 at launch you may not remember but it was horrific

Oh I was there, supporting desktops and Windows 10 when it released. And it was a bad product when launched. If Microsoft didn’t have all the data collection and AI shoe horned into their OS, 10 would be their best OS since 7.

 

[Ferryman]

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

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.

 

[ScooterL]

no one wants to use their software

Three-quarters of corporate desktops are Windows.

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.

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.

 

[jeff7989]

XP didn't have SATA drivers

Switch SATA mode from AHCI to Legacy/IDE, easy.

 

[SCV]

Phoronix forums having a normal one


Everyone else is raising their kids to hate rust too, right?

 

[the rat]

However, all the 64-bit NT variants of Windows were pretty solid, as they were all based on Windows Server.

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.

Probably. Generally, though, Windows XP was slow as well if you had most of the effects on, even on machines with relatively good GPUs

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.

 

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Phoronix forums having a normal one
View attachment 9051501

Everyone else is raising their kids to hate rust too, right?

NO INDIANS
NO TROONS
NO RUST
NO SYSTEMD

 

[Curry Teafag]

• 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.

My experience with either was the complete opposite of yours. You probably were just unlucky with your hardware choices.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

My experience with either was the complete opposite of yours. You probably were just unlucky with your hardware choices.

No, I bought hardware that would work well with Linux. I had fairly standard hardware at the time.

Switch SATA mode from AHCI to Legacy/IDE, easy.

No, it wouldn't detect the drives at all. You needed to slipstream the drivers. Older Linux distros wouldn't work either.

32-bit versions are also based off of Windows Server.

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.

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.

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;

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

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.

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.

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;

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.

 

[Tap Water Enjoyer]

I got mint on my PC and so far everything is running fine.

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:

Spoiler: Some 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.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

I really have no idea what you're talking about.

It's perfectly possible that both of us had completely different experiences of using the same operating systems.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

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.