The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Ukraine is Big Gay]

That's right. It's my computer and I'll install whatever I want on it.

With freedom comes consequences.

 

[Meth Reindeer]

A few years ago on one of his livestreams, a superchatter asked him how he affords to live on his own land without having a job. Luke went quiet for a minute and then mumbled something about "a passive income". I couldn't find it again with YouTube's transcript feature so don't quote me, but eek.

I haven't watched his content for ages but I seem to remember him explaining that he makes some money from renting out land for logging companies to grow renewable wood on. Maybe I am misremembering. It's a long-term investment where they grow fast growing trees and cut them down for building materials. He also rattled on about how it's cheaper to live in buttfuck nowhere and kept his needs low.

 

[85CentSoda]

Tux Racer

OK, fine. What about SuperTuxKart?

 

[analrapist]

SNES, MegaDrive/Genesis, PS1, PS2 and PS3 emulators work well on Linux via AppImages

If you gotta use AppImages to make emulators work, you runnin some serious slop distro. Most of them are so straightforward to build even the Linux Mint crowd wouldn't struggle. Most of them run better on Linux than Windows.

 

[monk]

1) if you really need to game and are installing lots of closed source proprietary junk just to get your dopamine hit, do it on a SEPARATE machine or separate partition than where you store your sensitive private data. This way if any of the junk that you install to get your dopamine hit happens to have malware or a backdoor that compromises your system, you're not completely fucked.
2) if you're still young enough to get off the addiction of gaming, consider doing so, if you can't, then just keep doing whatever, I don't care

3) keep your private data in an encrypted volume, at least LUKS, or if you know how to use it, ZFS. Having your data in an encrypted volume achieves 2 things. 1, it stores it in a safe state when the machine is off, so that anyone with physical access to it can't just take the drive out or boot into single user and steal all your data. 2, it prevents a class of attacks that use the drive firmware to exfiltrate private data from privileged to unprivileged processes (the likelihood of you being a target for such an attack is low, but if you happen to work in IT and have credentials to access stuff that attackers will want to have access to, you might be targeted by a higher level attacker)

4) never unlock your private data volume in an OS where you run closed source proprietary code.
Conversely, never run closed source binary proprietary software in an install where you keep any sensitive data. Exclusively only FOSS software for the machines with the highest threat levels.
Have different machines for different threat levels and data security needs. Don't mix stuff.

5) SSDs are so cheap nowadays you can just have each OS on a different SSD and unplug the one you're not using, to prevent them from messing with each other's bootloaders (this applies particularly for dual booting Windows and Linux, but also if you have more than 1 Linux install, they will all share the bootloader, so one install might break another - I haven't dual booted for a long time so I'm not aware how breakable EFI is, BIOS GRUB was pretty reliable.) Particularly stuff like kernel cmdline will not get set correctly for other partitions than the one you're updating the bootloader from (os-prober will detect them and add them to grub.cfg but the cmdline settings from that OS might not get applied)
If you have laptop with an ExpressCard slot (like a Thinkpad) you can get M.2 to ExpressCard adapters, which take M.2 NVME SSDs, so you can swap out the entire boot drive just as easily as swapping a SD card. I use them and they're great. You can have different distros that you can swap into different machines very fast. If your machine dies, just take the ExpressCard out and put it in another machine, and you're back up without even turning a screw.

6) systemd absolutely was buggy garbage in the beginning, they fixed a lot of bugs over time so now it's pretty stable, but it's still a monolithic bloated piece of glowie-made software that's guaranteed to have intentionally planted 0-days, some were found and patched already.

7) regarding Gentoo enshittification, someone already posted about many forced changes they made over time that broke some stuff (iirc static dev), forcing a session manager and dbus for x11, forcing merged-usr, them using Fedora kernel patches for gentoo-kernel instead of preferring vanilla-kernel, the developers of Portage and OpenRC stalling and not merging PRs for months, Portage still being in Python and slow as fuck (the planned rewrite in C was abandoned). The split that happened when Google and others took over control of the Gentoo Foundation, leading to some devs splitting and creating Funtoo (that afaik is dead now). The original creator of Gentoo regretting that he left the Foundation vulnerable to takeover and not keeping it in his strict control. Other than that, it's still a good distro that has more customizability than almost any other, and I still use it on my machines.

8) re: Debian, I don't know exactly, but I think they got pozzed by taking in diversity devs and have a lot of women and jeets in leadership positions now. Luckily they didn't break stuff yet afaik, but I'm not confident. The particular reason why I don't trust Debian is that instead of leaving init system choice to the user, they forced systemd, which means its users are forced to have any backdoors and 0days that systemd has. Some that are more particular about minimizing the attack surface of their machines want to not use systemd because of the aforementioned reasons, particularly because of its large attack surface, complexity, history of security bugs, and it being made by feds meaning they definitely can put some 0days in the code.

 

[dame dudi jench]

To append to this I also highly recommend physically unplugging any drive that isn't the dedicated drive for the linux install until you're done with said install because there's a nasty ass habit of the windows drive intercepting the EFI/Boot files or the installer going "This looks good there's already an EFI folder lol" and now your OS won't boot without both drives plugged in. So if your windows drive is wiped or screws up you can't boot into your linux install.

TL;DR: Unplug the other HDDs/SSDs except the one you wanna install linux onto, then when you're done with all the installation hook them all back up. Then you can do the whole grub update/efi thing for linux to recognize the windows drive without the linux boot files being on the wrong drive. It saves a lot of potential headache imo.

You can fix the whole EFI/boot issue after the fact manually if you already goofed it up- but this is my caveman ass "I'm getting old" low tech solution.

i'm the kind of retard this could easily happen to, and i have installed pop_os on a second hard drive in my windows machine twice, learned linux from zero, and set up refind after fucking it up and having to reformat a bunch. when i gave up on pop_os, i reformatted the linux drive but otherwise didn't touch boot tables or the original windows partition. the refi boot selector still came up but booted fine w/o linux on the system.

1) if you really need to game and are installing lots of closed source proprietary junk just to get your dopamine hit, do it on a SEPARATE machine or separate partition than where you store your sensitive private data. This way if any of the junk that you install to get your dopamine hit happens to have malware or a backdoor that compromises your system, you're not completely fucked.
2) if you're still young enough to get off the addiction of gaming, consider doing so, if you can't, then just keep doing whatever, I don't care
3) keep your private data in an encrypted volume, at least LUKS, or if you know how to use it, ZFS. Having your data in an encrypted volume achieves 2 things. 1, it stores it in a safe state when the machine is off, so that anyone with physical access to it can't just take the drive out or boot into single user and steal all your data. 2, it prevents a class of attacks that use the drive firmware to exfiltrate private data from privileged to unprivileged processes (the likelihood of you being a target for such an attack is low, but if you happen to work in IT and have credentials to access stuff that attackers will want to have access to, you might be targeted by a higher level attacker)
4) never unlock your private data volume in an OS where you run closed source proprietary code

what sensitive private data am i supposed to care about that much?

 

[seri0us]

what sensitive private data am i supposed to care about that much?

Tax documents, family photos, personal projects, crypto currency wallets, .stl gun files, etc

 

[Hakase Shinonome]

I had to switch from Wayland Gnome (Ubuntu) to X11 Gnome (Ubuntu) because Discord Screensharing sucks massive fucking cock, and I've noticed that drag and drop actually fucking works in X11 and just plain doesn't in Wayland. In Wayland, it enjoys sending an empty file over instead of an actual fucking file, but it works fine on X11, very queer indeed! Also, X11 does feel somewhat quicker, but that might be placebo. Will provide more results later.

 

[Rust Troony]

I had to switch from Wayland Gnome (Ubuntu) to X11 Gnome (Ubuntu) because Discord Screensharing sucks massive fucking cock, and I've noticed that drag and drop actually fucking works in X11 and just plain doesn't in Wayland. In Wayland, it enjoys sending an empty file over instead of an actual fucking file, but it works fine on X11, very queer indeed! Also, X11 does feel somewhat quicker, but that might be placebo. Will provide more results later.

drag and drop and every other basic feature that should have been inside wayland a decade ago is supposed to be handled by the compositor chuddie, whine to gnome that they suck and watch as they do nothing but call you a bigot racist transphobic nazi. btw because you keep complaining, we are removing the x11 session entirely next release so you cant use it nazi, have fun with your broken half working desktop.

 

[Tap Water Enjoyer]

Tax documents, family photos, personal projects, crypto currency wallets, .stl gun files, etc

Remember when that chudbuds streamer downloaded the wrong minecraft mod, got hacked and had her legal documents leaked? Just don't be her lol.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

I had to switch from Wayland Gnome (Ubuntu) to X11 Gnome (Ubuntu) because Discord Screensharing sucks massive fucking cock, and I've noticed that drag and drop actually fucking works in X11 and just plain doesn't in Wayland. In Wayland, it enjoys sending an empty file over instead of an actual fucking file, but it works fine on X11, very queer indeed! Also, X11 does feel somewhat quicker, but that might be placebo. Will provide more results later.

Ah but have you considered that Xorg is deprecated and obsolete and being replaced and unmaintained, you chud?

 

[SchizoDaemon]

If you gotta use AppImages to make emulators work, you runnin some serious slop distro.

Some of the emulators have licences where they can't be distributed with the package manager (DuckStation). Some can be installed via package manager.
When I wrote the comment, I was specifically thinking about RPCS3 and DuckStation.

Most of them are so straightforward to build even the Linux Mint crowd wouldn't struggle.

I could build DuckStation myself or RPCS3, or I could just download the AppImage, which takes me all of 20 seconds.

I don't understand why people insist on making things hard for themselves when they don't have to.

I had to switch from Wayland Gnome (Ubuntu) to X11 Gnome (Ubuntu) because Discord Screensharing sucks massive fucking cock, and I've noticed that drag and drop actually fucking works in X11 and just plain doesn't in Wayland. In Wayland, it enjoys sending an empty file over instead of an actual fucking file, but it works fine on X11, very queer indeed! Also, X11 does feel somewhat quicker, but that might be placebo. Will provide more results later.

Discord screensharing works better under Wayland, as you can actually share the sound. I've not had any issues with drag and drop unless it's been a permissions issue because of a flatpak or it's been from an SMB drive.

What is likely to have happened is that whatever is managing your clipboard isn't dealing with Wayland and XWayland stuff. I had this issue with OpenCode and Gnome Console.

 

[SchizoDaemon]

keep your private data in an encrypted volume, at least LUKS, or if you know how to use it, ZFS. Having your data in an encrypted volume achieves 2 things. 1, it stores it in a safe state when the machine is off, so that anyone with physical access to it can't just take the drive out or boot into single user and steal all your data. 2, it prevents a class of attacks that use the drive firmware to exfiltrate private data from privileged to unprivileged processes (the likelihood of you being a target for such an attack is low, but if you happen to work in IT and have credentials to access stuff that attackers will want to have access to, you might be targeted by a higher level attacker)

I encrypt the drives on all my machines.

All my passwords are kept in KeePassXC, as well as my SSH creds and other shite like that. I have to manually unlock the archive. Stuff can't be stolen easily.

Security is about taking reasonable precautions, which are dependent on your threat model. Not locking everything away and making everything a PITA.

never unlock your private data volume in an OS where you run closed source proprietary code.
Conversely, never run closed source binary proprietary software in an install where you keep any sensitive data. Exclusively only FOSS software for the machines with the highest threat levels.
Have different machines for different threat levels and data security needs. Don't mix stuff.

Or you can just use VMs and/or user accounts. This is more than good enough.

SSDs are so cheap nowadays you can just have each OS on a different SSD and unplug the one you're not using, to prevent them from messing with each other's bootloaders (this applies particularly for dual booting Windows and Linux, but also if you have more than 1 Linux install, they will all share the bootloader, so one install might break another - I haven't dual booted for a long time so I'm not aware how breakable EFI is, BIOS GRUB was pretty reliable.) Particularly stuff like kernel cmdline will not get set correctly for other partitions than the one you're updating the bootloader from (os-prober will detect them and add them to grub.cfg but the cmdline settings from that OS might not get applied)

Or use something like Qubes or just VMs.

systemd absolutely was buggy garbage in the beginning, they fixed a lot of bugs over time so now it's pretty stable, but it's still a monolithic bloated piece of glowie-made software that's guaranteed to have intentionally planted 0-days, some were found and patched already.

Every piece of software is buggy garbage in the beginning. You actually need to have it out in the wild and have people find problems with it.

Also, this idea that 'monolithic' means 'bad' is asinine. The Unix philosophy makes sense for some things; it doesn't for others. Simply saying "it is monolithic garbage" doesn't really tell me anything. You need to tell me why. BTW don't say 'surface area', because lots of small components / utilities / programs interacting in certain ways can introduce their own set of security issues.

If there are 0 days and exploits deliberately inserted in them, you need to prove it. I am personally fed up with hearing conspiracy shit without anything to back it up.

Trust me, I don't like the state (I lean towards anarchism) and have a healthy distrust of the authorities. But you have to show me some actual fucking evidence, because I've heard so much of this FUD and scaremongering over what turns out to be a storm in a teacup or outright bullshit.

Debian, I don't know exactly, but I think they got pozzed by taking in diversity devs and have a lot of women and jeets in leadership positions now. Luckily they didn't break stuff yet afaik, but I'm not confident. The particular reason why I don't trust Debian is that instead of leaving init system choice to the user, they forced systemd, which means its users are forced to have any backdoors and 0days that systemd has. Some that are more particular about minimizing the attack surface of their machines want to not use systemd because of the aforementioned reasons, particularly because of its large attack surface, complexity, history of security bugs, and it being made by feds meaning they definitely can put some 0days in the code.

A good portion of Linux, BSD and open-source software in general has the diversity bullshit up, or the BLM banner or the "I stand with Ukraine" bullshit.
Linus himself has some proper shitlib politics, and RMS himself doesn't understand the need for things like Monero, and the state can do no wrong.
If I were not to use any of it because of that, I would probably resort to only using my Amiga.

Perfect is often the enemy of the good. Debian is a solid distro that only got better over time as far as I am concerned.

 

[The Ugly One]

Windows 11 somehow finding new and exciting ways to disappoint as it packs more shit into it's already thoroughly shitted pants has done more for linux adoption than anything in the past decade.

The whole Microsoft stack has become so bad it's a marvel to behold.

1) if you really need to game and are installing lots of closed source proprietary junk just to get your dopamine hit, do it on a SEPARATE machine or separate partition than where you store your sensitive private data. This way if any of the junk that you install to get your dopamine hit happens to have malware or a backdoor that compromises your system, you're not completely fucked.

what if i have open source malware compromised by an agentic ai supply chain attack

 

[Ukraine is Big Gay]

i'm the kind of retard this could easily happen to, and i have installed pop_os on a second hard drive in my windows machine twice, learned linux from zero, and set up refind after fucking it up and having to reformat a bunch. when i gave up on pop_os, i reformatted the linux drive but otherwise didn't touch boot tables or the original windows partition. the refi boot selector still came up but booted fine w/o linux on the system.

Other way around tends to be my own problem is why I mentioned, The windows drive tends to either by intent or unfortunate incident grab the linux EFI/Boot on some distros even if you are absolutely certain you are installing everything to the correct drive. So you can pull your linux drive and windows will work, but if you pull your windows drive your linux drive won't.

I'd rather take 10 minutes to unplug things and put them back after the fact juuuust in case than having to spend an hour in gparted afterwards moving everything over/making a little boot partition and running a bootfix.

It could be utterly ancillary and pointless to do and I got unlucky but I'm passing on the savings of my own fuckup.

 

[DavidS877]

I don't know how you people have such troubles with stuff that has worked fine for years. Not to mention how long it would actually take to get near an NVMe drive buried under the graphics card, where the slots usually are.

 

[Betonhaus]

I don't know how you people have such troubles with stuff that has worked fine for years. Not to mention how long it would actually take to get near an NVMe drive buried under the graphics card, where the slots usually are.

Cheap PSUs

The one thing I will NEVER EVER cheap out on and I've never had a system die on me, not even my aliexpress server.

 

[Ukraine is Big Gay]

I don't know how you people have such troubles with stuff that has worked fine for years. Not to mention how long it would actually take to get near an NVMe drive buried under the graphics card, where the slots usually are.

I gotta take parts out and put them back regularly and help build things or clean them out but my 10 minutes isn't that far off. And I'm only mentioning it because "IDK could happen" so mileage may vary if someone is more comfortable with the after part of software than fucking with their hardware so that's a a fair consideration.

But I'm speaking also from a bias of being stuck in microsoft everything for two decades and I suspect it's the microsoft part of the equation fucking with it again.
IE: Win10 at least loves to intercept the fuckin' boot in my own experience. No idea about 11, 11 is why I switched to linux on my home setup in the past 2 years.


I've accepted (likely due to the previous MS ecosystem) even as a industry dreg that computers on the software side of things are 75 percent logistics and replicable routine and 25 percent outliers that have a logical reason for the problem SOMEWHERE but it tends to be fixed or band-aided by what might as well be a voodoo ritual. And you're on the clock and not paid to meticulously diagnose and resolve the root cause- Merely do what you must to keep the sputtering operation moving forward. Shit like....

Someone back in the day being unable to host a game without hamachi installed on their specific system and on but no one actually connected TO hamachi with them. And without it they don't show up in online lobbies. Persisted even on fresh installs.

Not my doing or my involvement here but also recalling a previous job where one of the front desk women's WinXP machines back in the day even on a clean new drive and a different install medium or key entirely still monthly corrupting over and over a very specific part of the OS with no sign of malware and no specific software that can be traced as the blame and always in the same way so someone just set up a ad hoc solution to on an automatic schedule to refresh/replace the specific part that corrupts before it corrupts and it "worked fine" with a dozen asterisks to that statement.

And once you experience the joy of a server having to have a specific emotional support mouse (unused btw just... plugged in) to boot up or restart you are doomed to start tacking on what feels like schizo magical thinking about edge cases and outliers.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Other way around tends to be my own problem is why I mentioned, The windows drive tends to either by intent or unfortunate incident grab the linux EFI/Boot on some distros even if you are absolutely certain you are installing everything to the correct drive. So you can pull your linux drive and windows will work, but if you pull your windows drive your linux drive won't.

I'd rather take 10 minutes to unplug things and put them back after the fact juuuust in case than having to spend an hour in gparted afterwards moving everything over/making a little boot partition and running a bootfix.

It could be utterly ancillary and pointless to do and I got unlucky but I'm passing on the savings of my own fuckup.

This Is The Way. Or well, it is at least _mostly_ safe (in that things can be written into NVRAM that will cause confusing bot issues and needing to reenter your BitLocker recovery key). Or, if it isn't, it is the way that should be preached to those who ask 'hey I am sick of windows 11 jeets are pretty shit how to make laptop work on linux instead'?

I am a huge nerd. My personal collection of computers includes closer to 10 than 5 computers, most of them old clankers, including my lovely T60 and several thin clients and random ARM SBCs.

The only one I have set up so I can dual boot between Windows and Linux on is my desktop. Which has eight hard drives (plus the two NVME SSDs) in it. Now, I don't actually boot to Windows on it, because gaming on Linux pretty much Just Works. BUT if I'd actually been using Windows for anything I wanted to continue working, I would have backed up EVERYTHING on there before even starting to install Linux.

We cannot just say 'using Linux is easy' to people who have 1 computer to work with. That can fuck them up. We ESPECIALLY cannot say 'lol just write a USB stick with Fedora/Arch/whatever random bullshit and start dual booting'.

We need to make sure that those who are keen to make their lives better by moving off Windows, understand what's involved.

It is technically possible for someone who understands how UEFI works to resize an existing NTFS partition and set up a Linux partition scheme and install Grub UEFI components in a way that will not fuck over an existing Windows install, sure, but there is nothing that will hold your hand and stop you doing shit wrong.

Does that mean that doing that will fuck your ability to boot Windows up? Well no. But we nerds who even know a little bit about UEFI know that OEMs have a shitty habit of provisioning too small UEFI partitions and awful crap like that that can cause everything to get fucked up, it's irresponsible to recommend doing something that could cause someone not to be ale to boot your own PC (without having a backup plan).

THAT'S ALL FINE.

As long as people who are looking to try Linux know that either
a) they can try it safely from a nice fast USB flash drive/SSD, without doing anything that will touch their main system's UEFI setup
b) OR they need to accept that they might accidentally blow away their entire ability to access data on their Windows install if they do something wrong and fuck up, and that they must have access to another computer/friend with another computer and preferably some Linux knowledge who will help them out, so they can burn a new install/recovery USB if they screw the pooch

If they can accept those risks, especially if they can safely blow away their entire Windows install, then absolutely, that's a great point to start from- install Linux Mint or another simple to set up distribution like Devuan, and take it from there.

But noone should feel pressured into doing something where you need to be a enthusiast for alternatives to the IBM PC BIOS to understand what the fuck is going on to stop your computer from letting you browse facebook.com.

 

[Ukraine is Big Gay]

But noone should feel pressured into doing something where you need to be a enthusiast for alternatives to the IBM PC BIOS to understand what the fuck is going on to stop your computer from letting you browse facebook.com.

Telling on my own ass entirely here, If not for having the training wheels to ease into it with the newer for dummies friendlier distros in the past years and the huge push to make more things "Just work" from the blessed autists working on it or with it. I wouldn't have ever learned how actually navigable and easy peasy convenient some of the terminal actually is or how sensible the base OS design philosophy can be. I wouldn't have even installed the OS in the first place for home use before this.

Because holy fuck even after a couple years I'm still thoroughly impressed over the most mundane elements. And I don't care if it's babby's first newbie shit that is news to no one,
I adore the way it handles root and home and the fact it creates a more respected separation between under the hood OS and "My shit".
It's like a miracle after dealing with the scattershotting of everything in windows from settings to individual program entries to your personal data spread across a dozen windows folders, roaming, local, roaming north, roaming south, roaming up your own ass etc.. That made backing up such a pain people just defaulted to the "clone the whole damn drive"

Because my previous linux experience was just limited exposure at work and mostly just gradeschool level wrote memorization with no investment or freedom to interact beyond previously documented handbook problem>solution or error>command flows because I'm the glorified unplug and replug it guy, not the actual wizard on call.

And even still, I don't want to come home from work to simulate more work or obsessively tweak my daily driver computer like it's a summer project car.
I'm not shitting on anyone who does, I specifically don't want to. I also don't want your favorite distro changed to suit me.
So having a johnny punch clock version I can both use no fuss no muss and to shit up and learn on my own time is nice.