The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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Hakase Shinonome said:
I want to grant my apologies to any Ubuntu hater out there; while I'll still give out Ubuntu to newbies, if someone has very limited space on their drive, I won't ever recommend it. Ubuntu is great for trying to learn the basics of the Unix landscape.

Snaps are so fucking horribly terrible that to anyone who wants to go above in their Unix-pipeline into learning it, I'll recommend literally anything else. Ubuntu slows the FUCK down whenever the drive runs out of space, even when it's at 90%. I forgo shutting down or rebooting my computer because my fucking Ubuntu setup takes 5 TO 10 fucking minutes to boot, if I include booting up Firefox, 15-20 minutes.

I can't stop talking about how fucking terrible snaps are, and they're just forced upon you. I installed Ungoogled Chromium via flatpak and it runs twice to four times as fast. They're both the same idea of sandboxing the environment for safety, but I don't know how such a massive company as Canonical can make such a botched version that it's like running a computer 50x slower than it actually is, astounding.

i use arch + hyprland btw
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As much as I dislike Ubuntu and would prefer you recommend Linux Mint to beginners, are you sure that’s not a hardware problem or a fragmentation problem? If the drive is 90% full then it’s possible that there aren’t a lot of contiguous free space so the system has to spend time searching for them or breaking up files to move around then finding all of the file fragments. What filesystem are you running, or this might be a problem in the ssd firmware
 
Hakase Shinonome said:
I want to grant my apologies to any Ubuntu hater out there; while I'll still give out Ubuntu to newbies, if someone has very limited space on their drive, I won't ever recommend it. Ubuntu is great for trying to learn the basics of the Unix landscape.

Snaps are so fucking horribly terrible that to anyone who wants to go above in their Unix-pipeline into learning it, I'll recommend literally anything else. Ubuntu slows the FUCK down whenever the drive runs out of space, even when it's at 90%. I forgo shutting down or rebooting my computer because my fucking Ubuntu setup takes 5 TO 10 fucking minutes to boot, if I include booting up Firefox, 15-20 minutes.

I can't stop talking about how fucking terrible snaps are, and they're just forced upon you. I installed Ungoogled Chromium via flatpak and it runs twice to four times as fast. They're both the same idea of sandboxing the environment for safety, but I don't know how such a massive company as Canonical can make such a botched version that it's like running a computer 50x slower than it actually is, astounding.

i use arch + hyprland btw
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No one should ever inflict barebones Ubuntu desktop upon themselves in a post-17.04, post-dissolution of Ubuntu Software Centre, post-Unity world. Flat-out. Not even other shitty clones like Zorin or Pop_OS either. It's either Linux Mint or bust for Ubuntu variants. It's really that simple.

I will, however, earnestly go to bat for Ubuntu Server. Ubuntu desktops stopped caring about the whole "Linux for Human Beings" shtick like 9-10 years ago, but y'know what? Ubuntu Server honestly does feel like "Linux for Human Beings." LTS versions ship standard 5 years of support, the free Ubuntu Pro subscription bumps that up to 10 years of support (and without any hurdles to jump through like with the RHEL developer programme), The server docs on the official Ubuntu portal are legitimately excellent stuff; comparable to and even surpassing the old desktop documentation (official and community). I even have the official CLI cheat sheet printed out and pinned to my wall. Mind you, I don't necessarily neeed to know how to do stuff like systemctl start foo BUT I do have an assload of other commands I scrawled all over the margins for obscure shit I'm working on for my home server.

Yeah, there are 100% better choices on the "market" than Ubuntu Server. My logic for choosing Ubuntu Server boils down to "I don't like updating Debian every 2-3 years and the old+oldold+oldoldoldstable nomenclature gives me pause for thought. I just wanna set it, forget it, and never have to touch SELinux or Firewalld." Lo and behold... it was either Ubuntu Server or Slackware. I'll save Slackware for whenever Patrick Volkerding decides to drop Slackware 16.

I use the official Fedora Cinnamon spin which ships with Xorg bee tee dubs.
 
If your drive is over 85% capacity it's time to upgrade your storage or free up space. This is even more important for SSDs. The OS and file system can only do so much for you at that point.
 
Dante Alighieri said:
I get that you're trying to be an asshole here but snapshots are so incredibly easy to do that I'm not sure what kind of own you're thinking you're getting.
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I don’t think he’s being an asshole. If you aren’t already an expert at Arch you will likely break your system at least once, possibly just by installing updates without checking the release notes.
 
Betonhaus said:
What filesystem are you running, or this might be a problem in the ssd firmware
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>implying i use an ssd
Naive. And it's an issue on multiple platforms I've tested it on. Ubuntu is the first thing I download before trying out anything else.

Betonhaus said:
I don’t think he’s being an asshole. If you aren’t already an expert at Arch you will likely break your system at least once, possibly just by installing updates without checking the release notes.
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It's not that difficult to fix arch-related issues; if you're posting here, you know how to fix an arch installation.
 
DavidS877 said:
I don't have any problems at 96%.
/dev/md4 90T 85T 4.3T 96% /bfd
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I doubt it’s that hard for the system to find contiguous free spaces big enough to fit even lord of the rings 4K bluray rips
Hakase Shinonome said:
>implying i use an ssd
Naive. And it's an issue on multiple platforms I've tested it on. Ubuntu is the first thing I download before trying out anything else.


It's not that difficult to fix arch-related issues; if you're posting here, you know how to fix an arch installation.
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if you’re using a rust disk as your boot drive in 2026 then that’s going to be even worse for fragmentation and makes your problem go from “huh something funky must be going on” to “well no shit your computer gets slow when the drive is almost full”

And everyone learns something for the first time eventually. There’s no guarantee that someone learning Arch posting here will not fuck ip their system at least once and already knows to have backups set up.
 
Staying up trying to make tweaks to prevent my system from crashing makes me reevaluate my decision of booting up a shitty Fedora clone. I hate it, but it is what it is. What is the consensus on other similar distros such as CachyOS and Batocera? I've only ever heard surface-level things about them but I show a lot of skepticism on Cachy when reading positive reviews because depending on the hardware it also might cause alot of issues such as stuttering and slowing down. Batocera seems to be only good for emulation.
 
Stephanides said:
Staying up trying to make tweaks to prevent my system from crashing makes me reevaluate my decision of booting up a shitty Fedora clone. I hate it, but it is what it is. What is the consensus on other similar distros such as CachyOS and Batocera? I've only ever heard surface-level things about them but I show a lot of skepticism on Cachy when reading positive reviews because depending on the hardware it also might cause alot of issues such as stuttering and slowing down. Batocera seems to be only good for emulation.
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Batocera is meant for emulation boxes, not a full linux distro. CachyOS only really benefits compared to Arch itself whenever there is a experimental feature not yet upstream, like right now with Valves VRAM optimization. Outside of that most performance benefits are placebo at best.

You got three options running Linux. Linux mint for older systems or stability, Fedora for bleeding edge packages, or Arch. Everything else is either going to give you a worse experience, or are filling in a niche.
 
With regards to Arch, you can do what I did and use the EndeavourOS disc image to install and it's just as easy as Mint or Fedora. Set up btrfs and Timeshift and you'll be good to go in case of most emergencies.
 
Rust Troony said:
You got three options running Linux. Linux mint for older systems or stability, Fedora for bleeding edge packages, or Arch. Everything else is either going to give you a worse experience, or are filling in a niche.
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I use both Mint and Fedora (kind of). Bazzite sucks but I didn't have any prominent issues when I play or emulate games, other than the fact that it can be very grueling trying to use ROM hacks that translate Japan only games into English. I had to use a Distrobox container to use commands that make it actually work. Maybe if I'm not too stubborn I might switch to Fedora.
 
Rust Troony said:
CachyOS only really benefits compared to Arch itself whenever there is a experimental feature not yet upstream, like right now with Valves VRAM optimization. Outside of that most performance benefits are placebo at best.
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Derivative Linux distros often have very superficial changes that can be enabled in the upstream distro by spending 5 minutes reading the manual/wiki entry.
Rust Troony said:
You got three options running Linux. Linux mint for older systems or stability, Fedora for bleeding edge packages, or Arch. Everything else is either going to give you a worse experience, or are filling in a niche.
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I've always found Debian, Arch, Gentoo, Fedora and RHEL (and the clones) to be the only proper distros. Most of the other distros don't really need to exist, IMO, or they are niche distros meant for a specific purpose.
 
Stephanides said:
What is the consensus on other similar distros such as CachyOS and Batocera?
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I use arch (btw) but I have swapped to the cachyOS repo and kernel and have had no side effects from what I can tell. I do think it improved my performance in certain games. If you are interested in cachy you can just use arch and forward over their gaming stuff.
 
Stephanides said:
Staying up trying to make tweaks to prevent my system from crashing makes me reevaluate my decision of booting up a shitty Fedora clone. I hate it, but it is what it is. What is the consensus on other similar distros such as CachyOS and Batocera? I've only ever heard surface-level things about them but I show a lot of skepticism on Cachy when reading positive reviews because depending on the hardware it also might cause alot of issues such as stuttering and slowing down. Batocera seems to be only good for emulation.
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Rule of thumb: Most downstream distro rebuilds and variants are fucking awful.

Oh cool, Pop_OS has custom NVIDIA images... but System76's COSMIC desktop environment fucking sucks, and they went Wayland-first in a driver space that historically had awful Wayland support. No fucking wonder why Linus Sebastian had so much more trouble than Luke did; skill issue was like 70% of the problem, but Pop_OS! is definitely the remaining 30%. Sweet, Bazzite is a rebuild of Fedora Atomic meant for GAMERS(tm)... still won't spare me the headache of hosting my own custom image whenever my needs deviate from the standard use case, and then rebasing to it after every major upgrade. Good for a set-top box HTPC rig you got going on, but definitely not worthy of proper daily driver desktop usage unless you completely lack any executive function.

You see where I'm coming from? If you're gonna go for a downstream variant, it better do something exceptionally well and corner the market in such a way that upstream can't ever hope to match.

Linux Mint earns its keep as a double downstream variant. Directly downstream of Ubuntu, itself downstream of Debian. Linux Mint unfucks any given Ubuntu LTS release, the team goes out of its way to maintain older tooling that both upstreams deprecated, and they're very slow to integrate ecosystem changes. Oh, and they have a Debian edition too. Ubuntu earns its spot as a Debian Sid rebuild whose entire claim to fame was making Debian understandable and usable by human beings. Sadly, they've long since abandoned the desktop as their primary focus but hey, at least they have a proper LTS Debian-based server distro out on the market. Artix genuinely has a leg up on other Arch variants because they deliberately eschew systemd and maintain a parallel package base to systematically omit and remove systemd dependencies. That's on top of the team explicitly providing first-party XLibre support. I could go on and on, but you get my point.


Batocera is 100% an appliance operating system. You never use Batocera on anything other than Raspberry Pis or mini PCs that you use as a DIY retro vidya console. Using Batocera as a legitimate daily driver desktop operating system is a novelty at best and a red flag for deeper personal dysfunctions at worst.

CachyOS is something I'm highly distrustful of. I can appreciate their hyper-optimised amd64v3 custom kernels, the project is very pretty to look at... but Arch is not a distro you wanna be downstream of. Artix's success is despite the fact that it's an Arch variant. I've fiddled with custom kernels and custom packages in Arch Linux many years ago, and the result was always "tons of fun in the beginning, but the pain of maintaining it long-term killed all the joy it once sparked." Not to mention that there's always a niggling "is this a problem with CachyOS, Arch Linux, Proton, my current software setup, or a fundamental issue with my own hardware?"


I'm a Linux Mint man. Give me Mint MATE, Mint Cinnamon, Mint Debian, even Mint Xfce, and I'm coasting. It's comforting, familiar, and truly feels like "home" in ways that no other distro on the "market" can ever claim. Sadly, my current PC runs afoul of Linux Mint's included kernel selection. I gotta wait until Mint 23 drops. So I chose a Xorg-forward Fedora spin (Cinnamon) instead. Fedora 43 lacked ntsync, but come Fedora 44 and all versions of Fedora now have ntsync enabled by default. Suddenly, the grass ain't looking as green as it once did on Nobara's side of the fence. I'm not inherently opposed to Fedora rebuilds, but the best one available right now (Nobara) ain't tryna become the Red Hat ecosystem's equivalent to Linux Mint. GloriousEggRoll also ain't Clem, nor should I expect him to be.

When the only downstream rebuilds of Fedora worthy of consideration are Bazzite (ew) or Nobara (tempting but still no), and they're both hyper-opinionated rebuilds meant specifically for gaming and not general usage... why should I even bother with them when mainline Fedora exists? What the fuck else is there? BLAG? They discontinued the project because they realised how fucking stupid it was to maintain a pure-FOSS rebuild of Fedora... itself already as close to pure-FOSS as you can get while still having binary firmware in the kernel.
 
so i did actually buy something from a ryf certified company. i wanted a wifi adapter for my chinkpad and got one from thinkpenguin. was way the fuck overpriced but i was ok with doing it cause it saved me some headache looking for libre compatible wifi adapters and support small linux company blah blah blah.
naturally it works seamlessly with linux-libre i just plugged it in logged in and was on my wifi.
 
Does anyone have a better source based distro non-gentoo? I submitted a set of patches to gentoo for compile failures and got promptly told to fuck off since I told a maint to quit acting like a woman some time back because they got mad on irc for someone clowning on kent overstreet's AI delsuions.
Good job retards, now you get none of my patches. I guess it's finally time to release my own version of gentoo called necktoo and make it GPL + NIGGER

Also anyone have experience with libudev-zero? https://github.com/illiliti/libudev-zero
 
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