The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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Can't we go back to the 90s/early 2000s, when open source turbo autistics were actually knowledgeable and skilled? Unironically, I would take a wife killer to write my FS over the retards we have now (btrfs, Oracle's garbage, had a critical data loss bug in kernel 7.2 RC).

Every modern Linux user should take it upon themselves to rent a "Linux for Dummies" type book from their local library (bonus points if it has a CD), run that version of Linux under QEMU for a few days, and actually understand just how much work the average user had to do back then, but crucially: how much more self-sufficient they became as a result of it.
 
Setting up a router with Free/OpenBSD or a really light Linux a la Alpine isn't hard at all if you're keen to read a couple man pages. OpenWRT has LUCI as a web interface IIRC, never really used it much. If you have an old OptiPlex or other minipc you can get a really beefy router and or entry point for >100$.
I am aware, but the root of the issue lies in wireless chips and repurposing old devices. There isn't much choice or quality when it comes to home grade radios for APs, majority of hardware manufacturers don't even have open source drivers, which means you are stuck with OEM crap.
I really and truly am loathe to say it, but barring just building your own router with open hardware, you're far better off just buying Mikrotik gear at this point for networking equipment (wired and wireless). Some of what you described here with OpenWRT's current maintainers and ever-decaying decrepit ecosystem was part of the motivation, but "$200 for 8 ten-gigabit SPF+ ports and routing/switching at wire speed plus firewalling and all the usual Linux trappings" was a major selling point.

Yeah, RouterOS is closed-source special sauce on top of Linux, but I can't bring myself to care anymore, not with faggots like OpenWRT's showrunners offering non-competitive alternatives buried in political horseshit that's honestly more alarming than the prospect of having a router running software from the Baltics I can't directly inspect. The shit's fast as fuck, reliable, easy to work with, and they cram more features into these god damn things out of the box than even OpenWRT does with add-ons. You can even cram (certain) docker containers on the damned things (you shouldn't, but by god you can, and we all know "being willing to give the user silly toys they can hurt themselves with" is a true sign of a based hardware vendor).

My only recommendation is to never be in a big rush to jump to the absolute latest-and-greatest RouterOS update, especially if it's a new major/minor version, until at least a couple days' worth of bitching on their official forums have passed and you can get a sense for whether the inevitable "something broke!" complaint is an actual fuckup by Mikrotik (fairly rare) or the more SOP "user fucked something up that would have shown up on reboot anyway regardless of upgrade status and is blaming everyone but himself." They do occasionally screw up and introduce bugs in updates, but it's easy to roll back (it's also pretty easy to unbrick after a failed update attempt via their provided TFTP+recovery app).
 
The shit's fast as fuck, reliable, easy to work with, and they cram more features into these god damn things out of the box than even OpenWRT does with add-ons.
Not to mention still having proper AppleTalk support because they aren't rushing to upgrade to some new-fangled Linux kernel from this decade that drops useful features for no goddamned reason at all.
 
Unironically, I would take a wife killer to write my FS over the retards we have now (btrfs, Oracle's garbage, had a critical data loss bug in kernel 7.2 RC).
Use ZFS instead. It's trustworthy, has good tooling, and is much more intuitive than btrfs, which suffers from being developed to be a file system rather than a storage management system.
 
Turns out you niggers were absolutely right about it not actually being that hard,
I found a specific flag that also lets you auto-mount USB- and other ejectable media. It’s very handy if you have a HDD mounted via USB. It’s called “lazy” or something like that, forgot it’s exact terminology. But it allows your computer to boot without waiting literal minutes for the USB to respond with an error code.
 
Use ZFS instead. It's trustworthy, has good tooling, and is much more intuitive than btrfs, which suffers from being developed to be a file system rather than a storage management system.
Ceph's good too if you've got a pile of computers with random hard disks in them and have a day or so to spend learning some fairly esoteric but fun stuff.
 
Yeah, RouterOS is closed-source special sauce on top of Linux, but I can't bring myself to care anymore

Apologies for being so blunt, but you're a fucking retard if you ever cared in the first place. Early Android already proved that the Linux kernel itself can be tightly integrated with proprietary special sauce (a la HTC, Motorola, and so on). Asuswrt router firmware itself operates on a similar level: most of it is FOSS but all the fun stuff is still proprietary. That still doesn't stop Asuswrt-Merlin from existing.

The most optimal solution for the routing problem is a mini PC with pfSense, a good switch, some long ethernet cables, and good signal beacons. It's a huge pain in the ass, only the truly dedicated/insane ever do it and maintain it long term, so that's why RouterOS and Asuswrt exist. No sense to care one way or the other about it if you're already an informed consumer.
 
I found a specific flag that also lets you auto-mount USB- and other ejectable media. It’s very handy if you have a HDD mounted via USB. It’s called “lazy” or something like that, forgot it’s exact terminology. But it allows your computer to boot without waiting literal minutes for the USB to respond with an error code.
Yeah, lazy in the fstab basically means "remember where to put this, but don't actually try to mount it until I try to access that location".
Mind, you should avoid putting removable drives in your fstab at all. Modern linux will automatically mount these to a persistent location (for example /run/media/username/partuuid) when you click the drive in your file manager. This mount is persistent, so the next time you insert that drive, it will be mounted to the same folder, so you can still symlink to files on the drive, or add it to your $PATH, etc. If you let your DE handle these things, you'll find it a very smooth experience.
Plugging a USB drive into my computer I get a little popup at the taskbar asking what I'd like to do with it, including opening the file manager to the mounted drive, and automatically mounting it without the notification next time I plug the same drive in. It also mounts with sane defaults, such as synced writes, so the "file transfer" bar will accurately reflect progress on moving files to the drive, and if I unplug the drive without properly dismounting it after the file transfer says done, nothing bad will happen (as long as you use a reasonable file system for removable drives, of course, like don't use btrfs or zfs on a removable drive). But with a standard USB flash drive, formatted to vfat, it's a very smooth experience, just the same as MacOS or Windows actually. Using fstab to set this up manually is not only more work, you're much more likely to get something wrong and create issues (like making the OS time out an attempted mount every boot, or mounting without synced writes so you risk data loss when you unplug it).
 
Can't we go back to the 90s/early 2000s, when open source turbo autistics were actually knowledgeable and skilled?
HRT; crack; something something.

I don't mind thee slopification in the sense that no-shit quality goes down if you add hundreds of thousands of low-effort retards to a field,
however the true and honest autists seems to be drowned out.
There is no GNU II: GNU/Hate or similar. No place to be, just npm and graveyards of cool ideas that never got past the toy phase.

You mentioned forking OpenWRT. I think the only good example of a fork living a healthy life beside the original, is Clang.
What else? Because surely not Sneedacity or racist Godot.
LibreX doesn't count because the original might as well be dead.
 
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Apologies for being so blunt, but you're a fucking retard if you ever cared in the first place.
It hurts because it's true. :heart-empty: That was back in my starry-eyed idealist days when I still found it obnoxious that companies were so tight-lipped about how their radios worked. Not that their secrecy really helped much since the chinks love to steal via espionage and most companies farmed out all their manufacturing to China and just straight-up gave 'em most of the secret sauce anyway, but it was still a nuisance to have to deal with binary blobs with compatibility shims just because I didn't want to boot Windows to use a good GPU or a laptop's integrated wifi adapter.

Meh. Turned out not to really matter. All the promises open source made about security and "safety" have all proven moot since the hardware vendors just started baking in whatever "evil" they wanted to into the "management layer" anyway. "Run whatever you like on our chips!" says Intel, "we run fucking Minix separately on a different little bit of the chipset you can't touch or see that has full access to everything on your system anyway, so fuck you!" Then the AMD fans got cocky right up until AMD cleared their throat and said "hey guys check out all the 'management' features of our PRO series chips! Oh and that spyware shit's baked into our stuff too."

The whole security game was always about just not putting important stuff on the wire to begin with, not handing it over and hoping encryption could save us. We should have realized that sooner when the feds gave up seemingly out of nowhere trying to block public access to strong cryptography that they'd just figured out a better way to get what they wanted.
 
Use case?
None that I would use, but they exist. The symlink example could be storing bulky files on a removable drive, for example a Steam games library, the $PATH one would be for storing command line software on a drive, though I've no idea why you would want to, stuff you run from the command line is generally either tiny or AI, in which case you wouldn't want to bottleneck a model by loading over USB.
This is the Linux thread, Windows is over there, OSX is down the hall.
Yeah I'm a Mac user, but only a GNU cultist doesn't think the average Linux user prefers durable, convenient solutions.
 
I had to play musical chairs with my drives and I’m grateful nothing broke and there wasn’t any data loss. I moved all of Jellyfin’s thumbnails and its metadata off of the data pool because I was getting latency but the root drive didn’t have the space for all the extracted subtitles so I moved everything to a 1tb sata ssd but it was a little slow because it was ext4 so I swapped it to my downloading drive because that was a 1tb nvme but I can handle a little latency in downloading so I moved that to the 1tb ssd but since that was also being used as a backup for Nextcloud but Nextcloud was overkill for my needs so I removed Nextcloud and installed seafile and out that on a spare 250gb sata SSD but I somehow swapped drives around when changing the mount points so I had to transfer everything from the download drive to the seafile drive and vice versa.
 
Use ZFS instead. It's trustworthy, has good tooling, and is much more intuitive than btrfs, which suffers from being developed to be a file system rather than a storage management system.
Sorry if I gave the impression that I am a btrfs user (I am not). I stick with ext4 for the most part, a simple and fire tested FS. The 7.2 RC data loss fiasco was recent enough that I felt like referencing it when mentioning Hans Reiser, the turbo autistic boomer that murdered his russian wife.

HRT; crack; something something.

I don't mind thee slopification in the sense that no-shit quality goes down if you add hundreds of thousands of low-effort retards to a field,
however the true and honest autists seems to be drowned out.
There is no GNU II: GNU/Hate or similar. No place to be, just npm and graveyards of cool ideas that never got past the toy phase.

You mentioned forking OpenWRT. I think the only good example of a fork living a healthy life beside the original, is Clang.
What else? Because surely not Sneedacity or racist Godot.
LibreX doesn't count because the original might as well be dead.
The reason most of these forks don't go anywhere is because projects are being forked by retards with zero skills, for sociopolitical reasons. When forked by skilled spergs and for the correct reasons, they have a much higher chance of succeeding. XOrg, LibreOffice, Proton, yt-dlp (which is the only way I watch sloptube these days) to name a few. There are also successful forks of flavor of chrome and flavor of firefox browsers, but until they fully decouple from mudzilla and goolag, I won't consider them for examples.

As for XLibre, that was a dumpster fire from the start. If you didn't see Enrico Weigelt as a schizo retard after the XOR "incident" or his constant regressions with AI slop, you should really read https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,10283.0.html (the XLibre retards start posting en masse at around page 3). Imagine being so shitty and retarded to drive away the only distro willing to ship your slopware as default. Just because freedesktop is full of faggots forcefully pushing for gayland, doesn't mean they weren't right about Enrico boy.

OpenWrt needs a fork not for sociopolitical reasons, but because the project is a mess. It's bleeding skilled contributors, merging AI slop, fully dependent on microslop proprietary services, some repositories go months, if not years, without developer activity, despite bugs pilling up and them being shipped as packages by default in most official firmware images. If you try to mention these things in their forums, the usual sycophants will pile up on you and the occasional mod will give you "trust issues" excuses for not accepting new maintainers.
There is no other option for many devices other than going the buildroot approach, pulling what's missing from OpenWrt repos, but this is a huge amount of work each time you need to deal with a new device.
Do I have faith a new large scale fork of OpenWrt will take place, or for that matter, be successful? Nope. Does it really need a fork because the current maintainers have ego and decision making issues? Absolutely. There are smaller, niche forks of OpenWrt around, like the chink ImmortalWrt, but for the most part, they seem to suffer from the same problems.
And yes, if it was an option, I would have long stopped using SlopWrt. Unfortunately, most devices I get from donations and repurpose them for multiple networks are either going to end with OpenWrt or the trash bin. I am going with the former, but if this fucking project doesn't get its shit together, the trash bin will be saving a lot of time and headaches in the future.
 
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