BartyDeCanter

If you want to have a fun “before times” theme, try something BeOS flavored. Or go really obscure and try to find one that matches the Dano leak.

Hi! I’ve been seeing your questions here and I think some basic terminology and background will help you out.

I’m going to try and avoid too much “whell acktully”, but there will probably be some.

A kernel is the core of any operating system, it usually provides basic hardware support for programs to use, and in the case of Linux, hardware drivers, filesystems, low level networking protocols and other very close to the hardware support.

But a kernel can’t really do anything by itself, so we run programs on top of it. Some of these are also very low level and most people don’t deal with them or know they are there, while others are things like web browsers, video games, and whatever else you directly use every day.

For Linux, there are often multiple programs that provide the same or similar functionality, with different features and tradeoffs, at all levels of the system. With Windows or Mac, there is often only one version of the low level programs that they provide and you never know is there.

Because of all the options, different groups have put together different sets of these programs together, along with configuration files, and installer programs. These are called distros, short for distributions. Different distros make different choices for at least as many reasons as there are distros. Also in Linux, a program plus whatever files it needs are often called packages.

Since even a small distro may contain thousands of packages, management of them is very important. Most distros have a package manager program to help deal with that and the package manager is how you will install most packages, though as always there are other options. A package manager is similar in some way to an app store from Mac or windows, only not shitty.

Some distros make a lot of package choices for you, others make you make basically every choice. Most are somewhere in between. So-called beginner distros are usually ones that have made all the choices for you, and aimed those choices at being easy to use for people that have only experienced Windows or Mac.

A desktop environment is an integrated graphical interface that has a bunch of programs that all work together and have a similar look and feel. You may also hear about a window manager, which is like a very minimal desktop environment that doesn’t come with a lot of features by itself.

Different distros provide different desktop environments by default, or maybe none at all! Some make it very easy to switch from one to another, but some don’t.

Most DEs try to look like either Windows or Mac in order to feel friendlier to new users. Window managers generally don’t, as they are assumed to by used by people with a lot of experience who want something very specific and will take the time to make it happen.

Some common DEs and what they sorta look like are:

• Gnome - Looks a lot like Mac, not particularly customizable, good keyboard only support
• KDE - Looks a lot like windows by default, but quite customizable.
• Cinnamon - Also looks like Windows, but forked off of an old version on Gnome a long time ago
• LXDE - Also looks like windows by default, often used on very low end hardware
• Cosmic - Looks like Mac but very customizable

And here are some common distros and their default DEs

• Fedora - KDE
• Mint - Cinnamon
• Debian - Offers a choice, but defaults to Gnome
• Ubuntu - A custom version of Gnome, but also comes in a KDE and LXDE version
• PopOS - Cosmic

I hope this helps!

Wow! I could not have asked for a better example of this. The quick insult that might just be a simple attack on my intelligence but might also have a specific in-group meaning? It’s perfect! chef’s kiss

You sir/madam/theydam have made my day. I salute you.

Have you ever had the experience of having a short conversation with someone but you can’t figure out what they mean? Like, the words they are saying make sense, and you can parse their sentences, but the meaning is incomprehensible?

Then you realize that they are part of a religion, political ideology, or some other subculture that you’re not deeply familiar with and it’s pretty clear that you just glimpsed 1% of the mental framework that they operate in, but because you don’t know what the other 99% is you can’t figure out if you agree, disagree, or just learned something?

Have also ever noticed that they tend to get Real Mad when you ask them question because the conversation quickly switches to in group/out group dynamics and you just revealed that you’re not in whatever group they are? And they also probably have very specific definitions of words and phrases as part of their mental framework that you don’t know, so both sides completely misunderstand each other?

Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is, what the fuck are you talking about Jessie?

I’m not certain of the last time I had hardware where sleep didn’t just work in Linux. It’s fine in my oldest laptop that only has limited hardware support for sleep modes and extremely good on everything else.

In short, yes, Fedora, Ubuntu, or whatever will be able to install on your laptop just fine. Since you seem relatively new, I would suggest Mint as it is aimed at new users.

App installers, the way you are accustomed to from Windows, aren’t really a thing in Linux. Most applications are installed by your distro’s package manager. For those that aren’t, there is often a choice of either downloading a package for your distro ( debs in the case of Debian-derived distros like Ubuntu and Mint, rpms for Fedora and friends ) or using something like Flatpack. But really your package manager will handle most things you are looking for.

Yeah, but isn’t paint.net an independent project? I’m fairly sure the .net part of the name refers to the library it was built with at one point, not that it is part of MS’s .NET division.

And even if the filesystem doesn’t become corrupted, individual files can become inconsistent or incomplete. Such as if two files reference each other, but one completes its write to the new version while the other is still in flight when power goes off.

Not all modern filesystems are CoW like btrfs. ext4 is merely journaled, which means that there are rare instances where it can be corrupted, but recovery is fast. However in both cases you can still end up with individualy inconsistent files if, say, the power goes out while the CoW b-tree is percolating up and so the file never gets updated or if the ram cache never has a chance to flush.

Don’t forget that DHH is a rascist piece of shit.

It runs just fine on any of the Intel era machines. If you can get it for a good price, that would be a fantastic Linux system.

If you don’t want the M1 anymore, I’ve been wanting to give Asahi a try…

Ha! I recently went through a similar process, trying to get some hardware working for a different project that would close some 15+ year old bugs. AI helped me find it, getting sidetracked by several other small bugs in the same few files along the way.

I then wrote the actual fixes myself as a series of very small PRs. They’re all just a handful of lines each, enabling certain hardware flags, properly bounds checking loops, getting a timer initialization corrected, etc. They are all the sort of thing that once you see where they are, the fix is extremely obvious.

In the meantime, the project has adopted a very strict no AI assistance at all policy after some internal debate that almost tore the project apart.

So now I’m sitting on almost a dozen fixes for longstanding problems and have no idea if I should lie and say yes, I found these entirely by myself, or tell the truth, probably get kicked out of the project, and see how much of a shit storm they cause.

For the most part you would just build the same machine as if it was a Windows gaming machine. That said, there are a few things to know:

• AMD has historically had better video drivers on Linux than nVidia, though nVidia has made some changes that has improved things quite a bit
• You want a basic, well supported common distribution if you’re not extremely familiar with Linux. Don’t go with some weird niche distro because you heard it will get you 1% better frame rates. Things like Steam and Lutris are well supported on the common easy distros. I would suggest Mint as it is Debian based, and basically everything supports Debian derivatives.
• Not every game will work, but a whole lot will. The things that are most unlikely to are competitive online games with anticheat root kits. If those matter to you, then unfortunately you’re better oft in windows.
• Take a look at https://www.protondb.com/ for a list of what is well supported and any information if they need some trick to run.

That’s quite right, which is why nwipe (the core tool of ShredOS) has a different mode for SSD vs HDD.

It you really care, throw this on a usb stick and sleep well. It replaces to old dban system, which has gone commercial. https://github.com/PartialVolume/shredos.x86_64

Not exactly self-hosting, but I’ve worked at two different academic labs that had unique issues and small budgets.

The first was on top of a mountain at 3km elevation. The low air pressure meant that all hard drives had a lifespan of no more than a year before starting to have issues. This was in the pre-SSD days. The “solution” was to boot from a floppy, never compress data, and have a student return the drives to a low elevation and swap them for the prior ones every six months.

The second was at a place that was using old Datacube MaxVideo hardware that we would never have the budget to replace. It would crash if the room temperature got above about 18C, so we set the thermostat to 15C. Which doesn’t sound too bad until you’ve tried sitting at a desk for 8 hours where everything is 15C and the heat is just slowly leaving your body into the chair, the desk, and the keyboard. And then you walk outside where it is 32C and instantly start sweating because you’re still in several layers and fingerless gloves.

I have a NAS that had a similar problem, every week or two it would stop responding. From the logs it was clear that the machine was running fine after going non-responsive, but either the NIC or something else network related was crashing. However, the logs weren’t capturing the exact issue. I wrote a script to ping Google every 10 minutes, write a bunch of debug data to disc if it failed, and then reboot.

And it has never happened in the year since. I have no idea what the root cause was, but sending those pings out seems to have fixed it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc

For a status bar, you can use tmux. Take a look at things like Oh-my-tmux, TPM, and more at https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tmux