# Linux users unite!



## Nightowl217

Ohai guys, Hows it going?
  Well i guess i should tell my story... Back in 2007, I had an old pentium 3 that i figured i could get some more use out of. So i did some research, and heard some good things about Ubuntu 6 (or 7 i forget) Well that computer only lasted a bit longer, (like 2 moths ) but, even after i got rid of the computer, i found myself craving the Ubuntu... feel. Well, long story short, i am now a Debian user, and i love love LOVE linux! ^^ Being 'Free' (as in freedom!) is part of why i love FLAC sooooooo much, well that and the sound quality. XD


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## Eisenhower

I use a fair bit of Linux/Unix. It's nice, clean and fast. Lots of great open source software out there. I use Ubuntu.
  For doing coding stuffs, it is pretty much the best. It also costs approximately nothing.
   
  I am really sweet at breaking it too.


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## Cappuccino

I poke around /g/ quite a bit and dicovered Linux that way, so I decided to install Ubuntu on a tiny 2gb mini HDD and plug it into one of my harddriveless Toshiba lappys lying around. It worked for like 20 minutes, then went kapoot and I couldn't open any programs, and then wouldn't boot up, but from my meager (is that the right word?) experience, I was very impressed. It even had the snap to side screen window thingy that 7 has!


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## nmxdaven

Run windows 7 on my main laptop  but back home its all linux all the time.
   
   
  Main media server - Slackware
  Main desktop - Ubuntu + scientific linux
  Untra portable laptop - Backtrack 4 + scientific linux


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## Randall DZM

I use ubuntu on my laptop and arch on my desktop at home.


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## fubar3

Xubuntu is the best.  Not too much eye-candy, but fully functional and easy to use.


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## tylerlong

I run gentoo on my desktop, and debian on my laptop.


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## chickpea

I use W7 at work (unfortunately), but at home I have used Sabayon (derivative of Gentoo) since 2007.  God I love everything that is about linux and open source software.  It has really changed my life in terms of how I interact with computers.  There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING I can't fix on my computer.  I have done everything possible to break my linux installs over the years.  Needless to say, like most linux power users, the only application that is ALWAYS open is a terminal emulator.  Who knew how awesomely powerful they are?  *nix users that's who.  In fact, I am usually really pissed off if I need to do something in a GUI nowadays.  Scripting in the shell is just some much easier and faster.  
   
  Transcode to flac?  just use flac on the command line.  flac [filename] boom, done.  flac /dir/* boom, batch processing done.
   
  It just really doesn't get any better than linux.  Windows has gotten better, but man it still isn't even in the same league as linux for functionality.


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## Nightowl217

Quote: 





chickpea said:


> I use W7 at work (unfortunately), but at home I have used Sabayon (derivative of Gentoo) since 2007.  God I love everything that is about linux and open source software.  It has really changed my life in terms of how I interact with computers.  There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING I can't fix on my computer.  I have done everything possible to break my linux installs over the years.  Needless to say, like most linux power users, the only application that is ALWAYS open is a terminal emulator.  Who knew how awesomely powerful they are?  *nix users that's who.  In fact, I am usually really pissed off if I need to do something in a GUI nowadays.  Scripting in the shell is just some much easier and faster.
> 
> Transcode to flac?  just use flac on the command line.  flac [filename] boom, done.  flac /dir/* boom, batch processing done.
> 
> It just really doesn't get any better than linux.  Windows has gotten better, but man it still isn't even in the same league as linux for functionality.


 

 True that man. Linux has changed my life too. I just love the efficiency of everything about it. I remember trying to use some of the other distros out there, but have always ended up coming back to Debian. Its nice and simple, and most importantly, it works for me. The GNU operating system and linux are truly a beautiful thing.


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## RyanA

Ubuntu here, I was running vista before and the computer was horribly slow at just about everything. Now it's nice and quick.


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## codymaust

I've been using Linux almost exclusively for the past 2 years. I do all of my development in Linux, except for my work. I still have to use W7 for work, and I have been spending a lot of time with W8 on my laptop, but I really do love everything about Linux.

Crunchbang is my favorite minimalist distro, but Ubuntu is my top for being beautiful and stable. I spent about 2 months with Arch, which was such a good learning explerience for linux.


What do you guys think about Canonical's plans for taking Ubuntu mobile?


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## micrors4

I am a big fan of Ubuntu and using it right now to type this post, I run it on all of my computers and on my dell poweredge server to teach myself new things like setting up apache and configuring it as a mail server.  I love the idea of Canonical's plans for Ubuntu on mobile devices and can assure you I will be first in line to buy the first device it launches on as the idea of having one unified system is an awesome idea.


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## Coop

My personal laptop currently runs W7, but only because the 128GB SSD is a bit too small to run dual OS (and unfortunately, I still need Windows for some applications). But my desktop runs Ubuntu.
  My work laptop is W7/Ubuntu dualboot, I prefer the Ubuntu, but unfortunately some company policies are in the way of using it full-time. I hope my request for a memory expansion will be approved, then I can run W7 in a virtual machine (at a usable speed).
   
  The systems I work on mostly run CentOS...


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## laen

Can't quite remember how it started, but it had to do something with wanting to host (and fool around with) websites for myself, and Windows just couldn't properly do it. I do remember the horror at the start, Debian. No idea what version it was, but I was having major library problems, and once it was finally running somewhat, i decided to just.. let it run, for a while. Sick of all those dependency and library problems, I wanted to understand what I was doing (wrong), and how it all worked. I wanted to know what it was I had installed, why I needed it, how everything depended on everything else, and that's how I landed on the Gentoo website.
   
  Strange as it might sound, no more What's, and actually managed to get a Gentoo server up and running properly. Not long after, friends got ear of this server, and started to request accounts on it, and I turned it into a free hosting service
   
  In the meantime, or somewhere in between Debian or Gentoo, desktop-wise tried one of the first unstable releases of Fedora. Probably because all the configuration with USE flags and what not on Gentoo was just a bit too much at that time for a desktop. It was terrible. Next summer holiday, i was installing my Gentoo desktop and that's when my knowledge really started to grow.
   
  I'm now a *Unix Engineer* thanks to all the above, still running *Gentoo Linux x86_64 Hardened No-Multilib* on my servers and Lenovo Thinkpad x201 (should've damn waited for the x220, as it was released close after I got this one, and is the last one with the proper normal keyboard).
   
  The minimalist that I am, I don't run an actual DE (Desktop Environment) or DM (Desktop Management) software anymore, and am quite fine with *suckless.org's dwm* (Dynamic Window Manager), which is a tiling window manager not based on screens like the usual tiling WM, but on tags. I've given up on Webkit-GTK after handing in some patches to make stuff work and seeing the direction it was going to, switched to Opera, and with that started to live *without GTK+ or QT*.


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## proton007

Archlinux + KDE 4.9 here.


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## orby

debian + fluxbox on my laptop.
   
  Win7 for gaming on my homecomputer.


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## ximkolo

I used Linux for years, if i decide im gonna run one its arch though.  on my on free will and desire I run windows 8 on all my computers and typing this in bed on surface rt. work I use windows 7 and apple garbage that I hate.  just a preference thing at this point but I respect Linux.  I guess what I hate the most about it is how easy it is now.  before it was more like an os that you can mess around and learn in, now distros like Ubuntu make it seem like I might as well use windows because of the way its built. im a programmer for a living so I know what to do, its just not fun anymore for me.  I was thinking about getting back into it though.


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## ayaflo

ubuntu natty nerhwal(?) going on as of now ..


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## proton007

Quote: 





ximkolo said:


> I used Linux for years, if i decide im gonna run one its arch though.  on my on free will and desire I run windows 8 on all my computers and typing this in bed on surface rt. work I use windows 7 and apple garbage that I hate.  just a preference thing at this point but I respect Linux.  I guess what I hate the most about it is how easy it is now.  before it was more like an os that you can mess around and learn in, now distros like Ubuntu make it seem like I might as well use windows because of the way its built. im a programmer for a living so I know what to do, its just not fun anymore for me.  I was thinking about getting back into it though.


 
   
  I guess Linux needs both aspects, for both new and experienced users.
   
  There's still a learning curve though. I don't notice it now, but about 5 yrs ago I started from Ubuntu because it was the easiest. Then turned to Arch, then LFS for fun (thats properly hardcore, but package management can be an issue), then back to Arch.
   
  Gave Gentoo a try, but didn't really find any benefit from compiling everything. An SSD gave much more boost, modern hardware is already more than sufficient.


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## ximkolo

Also I was just talking about this with a coworker last week.  Now its like its my job to haggle around making software work.  When I get home and in my free time I just want it to work.  I still like Linux and I'm sure that I will get back into it again soon, but just need to have more free time, lol


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## TwinQY

The family was raised on Unix, so Slackware was my first experience on computers. Then it was a gradual transition to Debian, then Ubuntu when that came out, and now I use mainly Arch + DWM/XFCE for home use, and Gentoo/FreeBSD for everything else. The Windows paradigm is still so alien to me, and I don't game frequently, so whenever I go and use someone else's computer, I get pegged as a "computer illiterate", because it takes me forever to navigate through something I've barely used. I ask them where the terminal is, and they just stare at you blankly. "Doesn't that black box only come up when your computer breaks or something?"
   
  Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Gave Gentoo a try, but didn't really find any benefit from compiling everything. An SSD gave much more boost, modern hardware is already more than sufficient.


 
  People always seem to think that compiling is mainly for performance boost. Not really the case for modern hardware and architectures It's really about the complete and total modular control at the package level, and how handling them can be so elegant with Gentoo. Really the best of both world from Linux and BSD. If only Arch wasn't so convenient for home use...


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## proton007

Quote: 





ximkolo said:


> Also I was just talking about this with a coworker last week.  Now its like its my job to haggle around making software work.  When I get home and in my free time I just want it to work.  I still like Linux and I'm sure that I will get back into it again soon, but just need to have more free time, lol


 
   
  Hmm... I think my setup is exactly like that. Everything works, there's no more fiddling to do.
   
  And the best thing, the flexibility of the file system.
   
  I was surprised when my network was up and running, while Windows plainly said it didn't have any driver.


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## micrors4

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> The family was raised on Unix, so Slackware was my first experience on computers. Then it was a gradual transition to Debian, then Ubuntu when that came out, and now I use mainly Arch + DWM/XFCE for home use, and Gentoo/FreeBSD for everything else. The Windows paradigm is still so alien to me, and I don't game frequently, so whenever I go and use someone else's computer, I get pegged as a "computer illiterate", because it takes me forever to navigate through something I've barely used. I ask them where the terminal is, and they just stare at you blankly. "Doesn't that black box only come up when your computer breaks or something?"
> 
> People always seem to think that compiling is mainly for performance boost. Not really the case for modern hardware and architectures It's really about the complete and total modular control at the package level, and how handling them can be so elegant with Gentoo. Really the best of both world from Linux and BSD. If only Arch wasn't so convenient for home use...


 
  People are always freaked out about that little "black box" So when I was in a Starbucks a few weeks ago I was just updating my computer so I hadn't bothered to boot into the desktop environment in debian.  I guess a customer thought I was hacking or something cause all this text was just scrolling by on my screen while I sat and watched, the manager came over and asked me to leave for suspicious activity.  I asked him why but he wouldn't tell me what I did and just said a customer had complained about me, I left because it was late and I didn't feel like fighting with him, but seriously I think people watch to much TV or something, we need to educate them.


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## proton007

Quote: 





micrors4 said:


> People are always freaked out about that little "black box" So when I was in a Starbucks a few weeks ago I was just updating my computer so I hadn't bothered to boot into the desktop environment in debian.  I guess a customer thought I was hacking or something cause all this text was just scrolling by on my screen while I sat and watched, the manager came over and asked me to leave for suspicious activity.  I asked him why but he wouldn't tell me what I did and just said a customer had complained about me, I left because it was late and I didn't feel like fighting with him, but seriously I think people watch to much TV or something, we need to educate them.


 
   
  Ha, I'd feel smug if I was in your situation...


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## ximkolo

Ok, I will give you that.  My home server/router/von is all Linux based.  I attempted that on windows and it was the biggest fail in my computer history.  It was just so broken.  But this weekend I get Monday off for the holiday and I am going to be getting a Linux up again.


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## proton007

Quote: 





ximkolo said:


> Ok, I will give you that.  My home server/router/von is all Linux based.  I attempted that on windows and it was the biggest fail in my computer history.  It was just so broken.  But this weekend I get Monday off for the holiday and I am going to be getting a Linux up again.


 
   
  Honestly I was surprised but the Linux ecosystem is pretty mature nowadays. Saved me a big chunk of money, which I used for better hardware.


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## micrors4

Once Steam gets most major games on Ubuntu I will be getting rid of windows because that is the only thing keeping it on my HDD right now.  The Linux ecosystem has come along way, but Ubuntu has really pushed it especially with the software center that simplified installing programs and tweaks plus when you download an application it opens in the software center and installs through that just like you would on a Mac.  I have had a some time to play some indie games on my laptop under Ubuntu and they run super smooth on it although it is an Alienware M11x so I'm not sure how the games would run on a slower laptop, but they do seem well optimized.


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## proton007

Quote: 





micrors4 said:


> The Linux ecosystem has come along way, but Ubuntu has really pushed it especially with the software center that simplified installing programs and tweaks plus when you download an application it opens in the software center and installs through that just like you would on a Mac.


 
   
  Agree.
 However, Linux has always had distribution specific repositories, you just needed to type some words onto the terminal, and you could have the package installed and running. The GUI helped, but its more of a wrapper.
  The "Oh, you need to compile blah blah" is FUD thats been spread around for cheap article bait. In my 6 years of linux usage, the number of times I've compiled stuff is < 10.
   
  I hope Steam helps improve this stance.


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## micrors4

I think the only thing I usually have to do in terminal is CD'ing to something, everything else is just copy and paste.  The only time I have to compile something is when I making my own Android ROMs or Linux builds for my tablets, but most people aren't going to be doing that to often.


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## proton007

Quote: 





micrors4 said:


> I think the only thing I usually have to do in terminal is CD'ing to something, everything else is just copy and paste.


 

 Exactly. Aside from the fact that I find the terminal is better in some respects, most users don't have to use it.
   
  I also think its conditioning. Most students in schools get started with windows (somehow they think they're teaching computers, when its really just teaching windows), atleast that was the case with me, I had to discover linux on my own (I was getting sick of Vista), and ended up wiping my windows partition the first time 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




. But then it gradually unfolded, and I saw the light.
   
  I think the more ppl start using linux in their homes and schools, the younger generation will also adopt it.


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## ozz

My PC is dual booted with Win 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu is definitely faster .
  I still use my MBP with 10.8 as my go to machine.


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## TwinQY

Quote: 





micrors4 said:


> I think the only thing I usually have to do in terminal is CD'ing to something, everything else is just copy and paste.  The only time I have to compile something is when I making my own Android ROMs or Linux builds for my tablets, but most people aren't going to be doing that to often.


 
   
  But there's so much more you can do with CLI! Time some scripts with cron, batch rename some music, the possibilities are endless! If it wasn't for the fact that most of the Internet nowadays is visually-based (I can still use elinks to surf a good majority of it though, including Head-Fi), and that 10-bit 720p mkvs look horrible on framebuffer, I would just install tmux and run pure CLI (and the speed benefits...oh, the speed benefits) . 
   
  Agree with stuff like Arch and other binary distos, the need to compile is greatly lessened. Apart from the occasional custom kernel update, or the occasion weird package dependency to purge out.


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## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> But there's so much more you can do with CLI! Time some scripts with cron, batch rename some music, the possibilities are endless! If it wasn't for the fact that most of the Internet nowadays is visually-based (I can still use elinks to surf a good majority of it though, including Head-Fi), and that 10-bit 720p mkvs look horrible on framebuffer, I would just install tmux and run pure CLI (and the speed benefits...oh, the speed benefits) .
> 
> Agree with stuff like Arch and other binary distos, the need to compile is greatly lessened. Apart from the occasional custom kernel update, or the occasion weird package dependency to purge out.


 
   
  Agree.


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## laen

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> But there's so much more you can do with CLI! Time some scripts with cron, batch rename some music, the possibilities are endless! If it wasn't for the fact that most of the Internet nowadays is visually-based (I can still use elinks to surf a good majority of it though, including Head-Fi), and that 10-bit 720p mkvs look horrible on framebuffer, I would just install tmux and run pure CLI (and the speed benefits...oh, the speed benefits) .
> 
> Agree with stuff like Arch and other binary distos, the need to compile is greatly lessened. Apart from the occasional custom kernel update, or the occasion weird package dependency to purge out.


 

 Been using Gentoo, as said before, on machines where the improvements do matter (so, for the slow crap), and it's not so much improvements because compiling makes everything faster, but because the memory footprint and sometimes the file size of the binaries shrinks, making old Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 snappy enough to be a production web server.
   
  But I never really cared about the compiling, you can keep using the machine while the compile is running, and that's what I do. To give an idea, compiling the whole system and everything on it, on a Core i7, only takes around 2 hours.


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## TwinQY

Quote: 





laen said:


> Been using Gentoo, as said before, on machines where the improvements do matter (so, for the slow crap), and it's not so much improvements because compiling makes everything faster, but because the memory footprint and sometimes the file size of the binaries shrinks, making old Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 snappy enough to be a production web server.
> 
> But I never really cared about the compiling, you can keep using the machine while the compile is running, and that's what I do. To give an idea, compiling the whole system and everything on it, on a Core i7, only takes around 2 hours.


 
  Agree. When your casual day-to-day machine on the go is a 12 year old Celeron, compiling makes a drastic difference in memory usage and size (especially when the hard drive only has 8Gb). What I usually do is have the smaller Celeron grab notifications for updates, sends the source to a desktop through SSH, which compiles it with all the proper flags (chroot preserved for that specific machine), then sends it back, leaving me with stuff to install later. Compiling can also be useful when the packages suddenly decide to include other dependencies by default (Stuff for X dragged in by vim, on a headless server? Right...) and you need the flexibility to strip that out.


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## micrors4

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Exactly. Aside from the fact that I find the terminal is better in some respects, most users don't have to use it.
> 
> I also think its conditioning. Most students in schools get started with windows (somehow they think they're teaching computers, when its really just teaching windows), atleast that was the case with me, I had to discover linux on my own (I was getting sick of Vista), and ended up wiping my windows partition the first time
> 
> ...


 
  At my high school we used windows in the CS classes but we also had macbook pros in the TV production classes so we at least got experience with two different OS's, however now in college I have access to computers running Fedora for the CS and computer engineering majors which is pretty neat as I haven't really been able to play with Fedora too much, but having experience gave me a huge advantage as most students had no idea how to use it at first and the potential it has.  Even being taught the Linux system, most students still choose to use PCs or macs to do any work, which I find crazy because it is so much easier in Linux because it plays nice with everything.


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## thehumantornado

Anyone here use a roku box?  I just set up plex on fedora and it's pretty nice.  Surprised how easy it was too once I got the firewall sorted. 
  Now all my movies on my linux box can stream to the tv; does music too, but don't see myself using that much.
   
  oh well, just happy it's working...


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## micrors4

No, but I use my media server to stream media to my PS3 for playback on the TV, its the ultimate setup because I can play blurays, games, and stream media all with one unit.


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## ophan

Does your media server setup include some kind of transcoding element? Most of videos unfortunately don't play on the PS3 and I'm looking for a solution that would allow me to avoid the hassle re-encoding my entire library.


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## micrors4

No, I have to convert the media as I get it because my server isn't powerful enough to do on the fly transcoding for multiple devices so I just use my gaming PC to take advantage of the GPUs to transcode the video quickly before uploading to the server.  I suggest freemake video converter as it is very powerful and well designed plus you can't go wrong with the price ($0).


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## TwinQY

I'd put handbrake as a good alternative to freemake. Freemake is much more user-friendly though!
   
   
   
  Has anyone tried Mint 14 on a Live USB? Was really surprised how everything worked out of the box. I have this monitor where every single OS has failed to detect the proper resolution. Had to stick with xrandr -r in the .xinitrc, Grub boot codes. Mint just took it and made it perfect, no adjustments. I don't think Mint 13 had even done that.


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## Parall3l

Debian user here.  Tried Openbox a while back and didn't really like the way it feels, will give it another try later. Currently using GNOME and Xfce4. Anyone know a good font? Using FreeSans right now. Heard Freetype is good.


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## micrors4

Yep, I always loved linux mint, it was the first linux OS I ever used but I now run Ubuntu on all my machines and the only reason I  keep windows around is to play games but that will soon change with steam on ubuntu.


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## proton007

Quote: 





parall3l said:


> Debian user here.  Tried Openbox a while back and didn't really like the way it feels, will give it another try later. Currently using GNOME and Xfce4. Anyone know a good font? Using FreeSans right now. Heard Freetype is good.


 

 There are a lot of sans-serif fonts you can get from google fonts, and they're all free.  However, in my experience the font aliasing in Linux makes most sans-serif fonts look the same, or similar.
   
  Openbox is good (light and fast), but it doesn't have any effects, and depending on the desktop environment, theming (ie integration between the WM and the widget toolkit) can be a hit or miss.
   
  Also, not sure if it'll work on your system, but try the infinality font config, it improves the font aliasing, and you can distinguish between different sans serif fonts.


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## proton007

Quote: 





micrors4 said:


> Yep, I always loved linux mint, it was the first linux OS I ever used but I now run Ubuntu on all my machines and the only reason I  keep windows around is to play games but that will soon change with steam on ubuntu.


 

 Linux mint to me seems like Ubuntu made better. They listen to their users, and MATE and Cinnamon are pretty good.


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## TwinQY

Quote: 





parall3l said:


> Debian user here.  Tried Openbox a while back and didn't really like the way it feels, will give it another try later. Currently using GNOME and Xfce4. Anyone know a good font? Using FreeSans right now. Heard Freetype is good.


 
  Always stuck with Dejavu Sans Mono and Consolas. Sometimes Liberation. Make sure to patch your freetype with Infinality, makes all the difference.
   
  Used to run Debian on the desktop machine, then realized I could get the exact same desktop, and with more frequent spotential security updates and just having to deal with a simpler package manager, with a simple Arch install.


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## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Always stuck with Dejavu Sans Mono and Consolas. Sometimes Liberation. Make sure to patch your freetype with Infinality, makes all the difference.


 
   
  I'm using Dejavu Sans Mono for my terminal, but the mono font looks a bit spaced out for other purposes.


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## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> I'm using Dejavu Sans Mono for my terminal, but the mono font looks a bit spaced out for other purposes.


 
   

   
  Dejavu looks decent across the board. I actually can't stand it on the terminal, since it seems a bit too round, and that feeling messes with my work flow 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





. Had to tune infinality to get it to not suck horribly though. Can't imagine a better system font!


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## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Dejavu looks decent across the board. I actually can't stand it on the terminal, since it seems a bit too round, and that feeling messes with my work flow
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

 From what I see, thats Dejavu Sans, not Dejavu Sans Mono. But I agree its a good font overall.
  Source Sans is also nice.
   
  You're using Gnome 3?


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## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> From what I see, thats Dejavu Sans, not Dejavu Sans Mono. But I agree its a good font overall.
> Source Sans is also nice.
> 
> You're using Gnome 3?


 
  Huh, guess mono's my xterm font...whoops. Yeah, it is Sans. Source Sans is very good. 
   
  No, just DWM. Can't get used to floating windows anymore.


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## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> No, just DWM. Can't get used to floating windows anymore.


 

 In some ways I agree with you. Its much more comfortable to be able to use the keyboard most of the time, they're really good for working,  and these WMs are fast.
   
  I have openbox on my laptop to keep things light, but I use KDE on my desktop because hardware wise its pretty capable.


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## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> In some ways I agree with you. Its much more comfortable to be able to use the keyboard most of the time, they're really good for working,  and these WMs are fast.
> 
> I have openbox on my laptop to keep things light, but I use KDE on my desktop because hardware wise its pretty capable.


 
  KDE is fantastic; functional, configurable, and oh so pretty. Desktop integration is one of the best implementations I've seen. It's what spurred me to try and learn Qt, that uniform look.
   
  Most of the apps I actually use is GTK based, so I have to stick with XFCE on the desktop for the prettier integration. Every DE I touch seems to magically transform into something based on the keyboard though. Currently trying MonsterWM on a VM, but I think I may have to stick with dwm. It just feels minimal, but not for the sake of being as minimal as possible. i3, xmonad, and spectwm are just so fun to mess with as well! 
   
  Has anyone actually tried Steam for Linux? Had to replace an old machine with a decent rig (first time having modern, up-to-date hardware in years) so maybe I'll try that gaming thing again.


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## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> KDE is fantastic; functional, configurable, and oh so pretty. Desktop integration is one of the best implementations I've seen. It's what spurred me to try and learn Qt, that uniform look.
> 
> Most of the apps I actually use is GTK based, so I have to stick with XFCE on the desktop for the prettier integration. Every DE I touch seems to magically transform into something based on the keyboard though. Currently trying MonsterWM on a VM, but I think I may have to stick with dwm. It just feels minimal, but not for the sake of being as minimal as possible. i3, xmonad, and spectwm are just so fun to mess with as well!
> 
> Has anyone actually tried Steam for Linux? Had to replace an old machine with a decent rig (first time having modern, up-to-date hardware in years) so maybe I'll try that gaming thing again.


 
   
  I guess mal works well for laptops, especially if you don't want to carry a mouse around. 
  I haven't tried Steam on it, seems there's no game currently I'd like to play with Steam. I'm mostly into racing sims, and thats the only reason I dual boot windows at home.


----------



## micrors4

I haven't tried steam either but I have played some modern 3D games in Ubuntu and they do run much better than in Windows if you have a lower powered computer.  Unfortunantely there are just not that many games yet but it has come a long way in the last couple of years so Steam should really push it even further.  Does anyone know how hard it would be for a company to port a game from mac to linux?  I feel like the two are similiar enough that it might not be to hard and could be within reason for companies to do.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





micrors4 said:


> Does anyone know how hard it would be for a company to port a game from mac to linux?  I feel like the two are similiar enough that it might not be to hard and could be within reason for companies to do.


 
   
  I'm totally not familiar with Macs, but if they follow OpenGL or some other common implementation then it should be easier.


----------



## Parall3l

Just gave Crunchbang another go, much better outside of a virtual machine


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





parall3l said:


> Just gave Crunchbang another go, much better outside of a virtual machine


 
   
  Openbox?


----------



## Parall3l

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Openbox?


 
  Yep


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





parall3l said:


> Yep


 

 How's the visual integration like? I mean, what kind of widget toolkit does crunchbang use?  The last time I tried it, it looked best with GTK+.


----------



## Parall3l

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> How's the visual integration like? I mean, what kind of widget toolkit does crunchbang use?  The last time I tried it, it looked best with GTK+.


 

 I'm not sure what you meant by that exactly, but tint2 and conky (the top taskbar and the system monitor software) are very customisable. I just kept it in a greyish color, but people have made rounded green taskbars and whatever before.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





parall3l said:


> I'm not sure what you meant by that exactly, but tint2 and conky (the top taskbar and the system monitor software) are very customisable. I just kept it in a greyish color, but people have made rounded green taskbars and whatever before.


 

 What I meant is that Openbox itself is just a window manager. The rest of the UI elements, like buttons, scrollbars etc. are drawn by either GTK (Gnome Like), or QT (KDE Like).
   
  Normally, when you use Gnome or KDE, the window manager, panel etc is a part of the desktop environment, so the themes etc. match properly. When using openbox, the window manager is replaced with openbox, but the rest of the apps are still using GTK or QT. So, the themes and looks don't match as well, and need some work in order to make it match.


----------



## Parall3l

proton007 said:


> What I meant is that Openbox itself is just a window manager. The rest of the UI elements, like buttons, scrollbars etc. are drawn by either GTK (Gnome Like), or QT (KDE Like).
> 
> Normally, when you use Gnome or KDE, the window manager, panel etc is a part of the desktop environment, so the themes etc. match properly. When using openbox, the window manager is replaced with openbox, but the rest of the apps are still using GTK or QT. So, the themes and looks don't match as well, and need some work in order to make it match.




Well here's a screencap with screenFetch in my terminal


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





parall3l said:


> Well here's a screencap with screenFetch in my terminal


 
   
  Compositing's off? I thought it turned on by default on !#.
   
  Quote: 





proton007 said:


> How's the visual integration like? I mean, what kind of widget toolkit does crunchbang use?  The last time I tried it, it looked best with GTK+.


 
  It's still heavily gtk, with Onyx as the openbox theme, and greybird or some other GTK3 skin, from the looks of it. Not as fun to play with as before, since they keep on squeezing all the Gnome they can in there.
   
  Anyone have any suggestions on icon themes, new compositors? Still using the boring old Faenza and Compton.


----------



## Parall3l

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Compositing's off? I thought it turned on by default on !#.
> 
> It's still heavily gtk, with Onyx as the openbox theme, and greybird or some other GTK3 skin, from the looks of it.


 

 What's compositing and greybird 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





 I just got the stock version and messed around with tint2 and conky.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Compositing's off? I thought it turned on by default on !#.


 
   
  I think Openbox is a non-compositing WM, but it allows stacking.


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> I think Openbox is a non-compositing WM, but it allows stacking.


 
  #! has another compositor included, that I thought ran by default. I think it's xcompmgr or something.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> It's still heavily gtk, with Onyx as the openbox theme, and greybird or some other GTK3 skin, from the looks of it. Not as fun to play with as before, since they keep on squeezing all the Gnome they can in there.


 
   
  I think its hard to be Gnome free, because a lot of the GTK apps are developed under Gnome. Web Browsers like Chrome, terminal based apps, and certain music players are the only ones that can be used without Gnome/KDE.


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> I think its hard to be Gnome free, because a lot of the GTK apps are developed under Gnome. Web Browsers like Chrome, and terminal based apps are the only ones that can be used without either of these.


 
   
  Almost got it stripped down on my rig, but my rig is horribly spartan and sparse, so maybe not the best example. Nothing gtk3 here. Compile flags for the less obvious things come a long way!
   
  It is rather hard when you want to include popular stuff in there, but sometimes they just push stuff that barely makes it go over the edge, and sometimes they get lazy and put everything Gnome underneath for convenience, and splash some other DE on top, selling it as a different flavor. Xubuntu, Mint XFCE, and the likes.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> It is rather hard when you want to include popular stuff in there, but sometimes they just push stuff that barely makes it go over the edge, and sometimes they get lazy and put everything Gnome underneath for convenience, and splash some other DE on top, selling it as a different flavor. Xubuntu, Mint XFCE, and the likes.


 
   




  XFCE is a desktop environment in its own right...so I don't think it uses Gnome, but yes, its based on Gtk2. The issues with Gkt2 and 3 are a big headache, because a lot of the apps haven't yet been ported to use Gtk3.
   
  I think the best way to take it is to get the Arch vanilla installer, and then only install the stuff you need.


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Xubuntu is a desktop environment in its own right...so I don't think it uses Gnome, but yes, its based on Gtk2.


 
  Look at the underlying toolsets, littered with Gnome dependencies. Gnome system tools, stuff that isn't even mandatory for integration because there's already a XFCE equivalent for it. The list goes on. Really just a XFCE in the graphical sense. I think it's more GTK3 now though. 
   
  The lack of AIF on recent ISOs makes it way more fun to install by default (although you could have done the same thing without it). Still wish there was an automated process for UEFI stuff.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> The lack of AIF on recent ISOs makes it way more fun to install by default (although you could have done the same thing without it). Still wish there was an automated process for UEFI stuff.


 
   
  I spent a week figuring out how to install it on my UEFI based motherboard, mostly because the bios didn't really make it clear that the cd needs to be booted in uefi mode.


----------



## Parall3l

Any of you guys know about Ubunchu? It's a comic about, well, Ubuntu and other linux related stuff.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





parall3l said:


> Any of you guys know about Ubunchu? It's a comic about, well, Ubuntu and other linux related stuff.


 
   
  Just checked it out. The japanese can make a manga out of anything...pretty amusing though.


----------



## Puranti

Fedora 17 + Gnome reporting in,
  Recently I've been from crunchbang to windows 7, but the playback was clipping from my HDD, then on opensuse but I settled for fedora now.
  It's been a while since I used gnome and was pretty upset about it at first but now after some tweaking it's fantastic although it's more power hungry than kde and, of course, openbox but really nice-looking.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





puranti said:


> Fedora 17 + Gnome reporting in,
> Recently I've been from crunchbang to windows 7, but the playback was clipping from my HDD, then on opensuse but I settled for fedora now.
> It's been a while since I used gnome and was pretty upset about it at first but now after some tweaking it's fantastic although it's more power hungry than kde and, of course, openbox but really nice-looking.


 

 Yeah, openbox is pretty fast as well, in terms of drawing windows, but it has no aliasing or multi colors, so the looks can take a hit.
  I'll take a look at fluxbox or pekwm, they provide a little bit of eye-candy.


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Yeah, openbox is pretty fast as well, in terms of drawing windows, but it has no aliasing or multi colors, so the looks can take a hit.
> I'll take a look at fluxbox or pekwm, they provide a little bit of eye-candy.


 
  For sheer eye-candy, FVWM and Windowmaker are da bomb.


----------



## bbarnes1

just updated to linux 12.10.... not a unity fan.  Decided to switch to linux mint MATE to show gnome 2 some love


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





bbarnes1 said:


> just updated to linux 12.10.... not a unity fan.  Decided to switch to linux mint MATE to show gnome 2 some love


 

 I used to be a Gnome 2 user. It was an awesome DE, until it got screwed up by Gnome 3. I moved to KDE, also an awesome DE.
   
  Its good to know MATE carries on that awesomeness, and its being further refined, I like the UI changes that are being made.


----------



## Ech0

Archlinux user for 6 years +/-. Fluxbox / Openbox on Video & Music Servers and Gnome 3 on my laptop. Hated it at first, moved to KDE & then came back to Gnome. I've gotten used to it and like it now. 
   
  I haven't tried FVWM that I can remember. I think I'll give this a try.


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





ech0 said:


> Archlinux user for 6 years +/-. Fluxbox / Openbox on Video & Music Servers and Gnome 3 on my laptop. Hated it at first, moved to KDE & then came back to Gnome. I've gotten used to it and like it now.
> 
> I haven't tried FVWM that I can remember. I think I'll give this a try.


 
   
  It's the most ugly, functional pile of a WM that I can barely use (FVWM, not Gnome). 
   
  Quote: 





bbarnes1 said:


> just updated to linux 12.10.... not a unity fan.  Decided to switch to linux mint MATE to show gnome 2 some love


 
   
  It's immensely weird to see myself on there as the only post. MATE looks nice.


----------



## Dissonant

I knew there'll be a thread on here! Those who browse the anime thread will recall me reminiscing of the time I ran Arch on my decrepit laptop. The topics discussed on this thread were more than sufficient to give me a blast of nostalgia (despite having only given up Linux for 2 years). In those 2 years though, several projects I once looked forward to have died, fluorished or simply kept in the periphery by certain new projects. Cue incredibly long post on my opinions of such progress after doing some reading up.
   
  Firstly, I am honestly staggered by the progress Elementary OS has made. From an icon theme, to a GTK theme, to a full distro derivative with unique applications in such a short span of time is staggering. Looking at the Youtube videos of the latest beta, I actually think it is quite polished. Perhaps further refinement could put it on equal footing with Ubuntu in terms of mainstream prominence, but I am inclined to think it will only be reached by reaching a stage where Elementary can separate itself from Ubuntu and building from scratch. This will unfortunately, be likely to take very long, given the differing aims of both projects. It does look nice, but it is not my cup of tea. And from what I have seen on Youtube, the effects seem a bit choppy, though that could also be a consequence of the screen capturing program. Nevertheless, I do wish them good luck in what they do: bringing consistency and beauty to the Linux desktop - even if some aspects certainly looked to be more than merely inspired by Macintosh . I once participated in their crowd-sourcing project to choose the default wallpapers for the Alpha or something and it was refreshing to say the least to see such attention to detail on the devs' part. Luna looks quite promising, considering I booted the first release (Jupiter?) on LiveCD for a bit. Who knows, I may even install it someday.
   
  Going on, I am still not sure if the new interface paradigms introduced by Unity, Gnome-shell (and subsequently Gnome3) _et al_ are suitable for non-touchscreen usage. That was an opinion I held when I installed Gnome-shell over Ubuntu 9.10 and one that remains unchanged, even with the introduction of Elementary's interpretation (Dash?). I think, in general, such interfaces are quite jarring on the keyboard and mouse - both of which, need I remind you, are still very much the _de facto_ interface device - unless you use a tiling WM; then, I stand corrected. I honestly cannot see the replacement of both devices by the touchscreen in the short run to such an extent as to justify changing to such an interface. Although, it may also be my rose-tinted glasses interfering with my judgement. I can't deny, though, it is pretty darn... pretty and quite sane. I can therefore see the relevance of MATE at least for now. However, I say the above as an inveterate fan of *box-style WMs (PekWM, Openbox and Compiz-standalone), so I may (will) be biased.
   
  Finally, a short question: how far has BTRFS progressed? It seemed to be the next big thing after Ext4 (which, I recall, was termed as an interim solution). Looks like it hasn't received mainstream adoption yet. I was looking forward to it as an alternative to JFS, Ext4, and ReiserFS/Reiser4 (we all know what happened to the latter filesystem).
   
  Of course, given how I am quite out of my depth right now (I was too, back then), please excuse me for any ignorance on my part and feel free to educate me or disagree with this ignorant boy.
   
  By the way, FVWM and E17 still look hideous, imo. Sorry.


----------



## proton007

@Dissonant
  In terms of UI, there are only a few ways in which you can draw windows. Rounded Square, or square. Similar with buttons, round, rounded square, or square. One seems to be taken by OSX, the other one by Windows.
  So I guess if you want a good looking desktop, you'll either end up looking similar to Windows or Mac.


----------



## Dissonant

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> @Dissonant
> In terms of UI, there are only a few ways in which you can draw windows. Rounded Square, or square. Similar with buttons, round, rounded square, or square. One seems to be taken by OSX, the other one by Windows.
> So I guess if you want a good looking desktop, you'll either end up looking similar to Windows or Mac.


 
  Haha. I agree, though I experimented with chevron-shaped windows before. The assymetry got to me though. That said, looking at all the projects out there, the Linux desktop is quickly becoming more polished in terms of usability and cosmetics. The only contention I have against that is the increasing number of inter-dependencies making the desktop less modular. I guess the great thing about WMs is how modular they are, by virtue of how isolated they are compared to whole DEs. Then again, I was trained in Arch, so my opinion would be biased towards the Arch Way. I can't see myself dedicating the time to reinstall - and I swore not to meddle with partitions on my new laptop because apparently my parents thought I broke the old laptop. Well, using the pacman -Syyu to force an update despite numerous conflicts would tend to destroy your X setup . Thank goodness some of the configs I love were uploaded online to be salvaged. I literally love my old setup so much that I save the old screenshots on my new Windows laptop just to look at it like a lovelorn lover.
   
  Unity is pretty awful though. My friend lent me his throwaway netbook and I tried the new Ubuntu. Very chunky - too chunky for me, though some theming may remedy that. The new GNOME is quite a departure too. That said, despite being quite harsh on stuff like the Elementary Project, kudos must be given for some innovations in terms of UI. Their implementation of scroll bars, for instance is totally new, as far as I can make out, and is very usable. And I like how they implemented virtual desktops to be flexible. Definitely a refreshing change from a set number of workspaces. Something I expect to be very popular when refined - my experience spans till the first release of Jupiter.


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





dissonant said:


> I knew there'll be a thread on here! Those who browse the anime thread will recall me reminiscing of the time I ran Arch on my decrepit laptop. The topics discussed on this thread were more than sufficient to give me a blast of nostalgia (despite having only given up Linux for 2 years). In those 2 years though, several projects I once looked forward to have died, fluorished or simply kept in the periphery by certain new projects. Cue incredibly long post on my opinions of such progress after doing some reading up.


 
   
  Yeah, I remember you bringing it up there. Finally found this place, huh? It's weird to see anime Linuxers, most are bound to Windows because of all those VNs that don't work properly in WINE. 
   
   


> Firstly, I am honestly staggered by the progress Elementary OS has made. From an icon theme, to a GTK theme, to a full distro derivative with unique applications in such a short span of time is staggering. Looking at the Youtube videos of the latest beta, I actually think it is quite polished. Perhaps further refinement could put it on equal footing with Ubuntu in terms of mainstream prominence, but I am inclined to think it will only be reached by reaching a stage where Elementary can separate itself from Ubuntu and building from scratch. This will unfortunately, be likely to take very long, given the differing aims of both projects. It does look nice, but it is not my cup of tea. And from what I have seen on Youtube, the effects seem a bit choppy, though that could also be a consequence of the screen capturing program. Nevertheless, I do wish them good luck in what they do: bringing consistency and beauty to the Linux desktop - even if some aspects certainly looked to be more than merely inspired by Macintosh . I once participated in their crowd-sourcing project to choose the default wallpapers for the Alpha or something and it was refreshing to say the least to see such attention to detail on the devs' part. Luna looks quite promising, considering I booted the first release (Jupiter?) on LiveCD for a bit. Who knows, I may even install it someday.


 
   I've been looking at Luna since the dev releases. From horribly buggy and incoherent (they were using GDM or LightDM or something, it broke the background rendering, icons broke, ugh), to something actually original. It's really the Gnome 3 Mint that had been always left unnoticed. Part of what Mint does the best (user-inclined interface polish) I feel eOS does with great aesthetic appeal and simplicity. The other part (driver support, support in general)...err, they'll get to that.
   



> Finally, a short question: how far has BTRFS progressed? It seemed to be the next big thing after Ext4 (which, I recall, was termed as an interim solution). Looks like it hasn't received mainstream adoption yet. I was looking forward to it as an alternative to JFS, Ext4, and ReiserFS/Reiser4 (we all know what happened to the latter filesystem).
> 
> Of course, given how I am quite out of my depth right now (I was too, back then), please excuse me for any ignorance on my part and feel free to educate me or disagree with this ignorant boy.
> 
> By the way, FVWM and E17 still look hideous, imo. Sorry.


 
   
  FVWM hideous? Blasphem...okay, it's pretty bad. Not gonna lie. 
   
  It's become semi-stable enough for simple, simple home and personal use. I'd still recommend backing everything up at least twice. Anything required beyond that, it's still not stable enough.
   
  In fact, I've been using it on a partition with Gentoo on for a while, just to see when it'll break. Considering that I'm still writing this, and haven't experienced anything blown up, fractured, smoking, dissipating, horribly mutilating, guts-ejecting-from-my-eyeballs worthy, sodas spontaneously combusting,  or monitors shooting gamma rays into my esophagus, that says a lot about everyday stability. I'd still give it a week before any of the above actually happens though.


----------



## proton007

Just took a look at Elementary OS, and I'm in awe.
   
  Its so beautiful and soothing, perfect for showcasing how good GTK can look. Being based on GTK3, I would say this is what Gnome 3 should have done.
   
  I'm not so sure about their decision to include their own apps inside, but otherwise, its pretty nice, especially for a beginner.


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Just took a look at Elementary OS, and I'm in awe.
> 
> Its so beautiful and soothing, perfect for showcasing how good GTK can look. Being based on GTK3, I would say this is what Gnome 3 should have done.
> 
> I'm not so sure about their decision to include their own apps inside, but otherwise, its pretty nice, especially for a beginner.


 
  The bundled apps like Dexter and Postler are very well done, high quality stuff. Before I stripped off GTK3 stuff, Postler was my default mail client. Liked it even more than Claws, which I was using before. The interface is infinitely more polished, it was light as air, the features weren't weirdly bundled and tucked away in various places, and Hotmail worked well enough with it.


----------



## Dissonant

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Just took a look at Elementary OS, and I'm in awe.
> 
> Its so beautiful and soothing, perfect for showcasing how good GTK can look. Being based on GTK3, I would say this is what Gnome 3 should have done.
> 
> I'm not so sure about their decision to include their own apps inside, but otherwise, its pretty nice, especially for a beginner.


 
   
   
  Quote: 





twinqy said:


> The bundled apps like Dexter and Postler are very well done, high quality stuff. Before I stripped off GTK3 stuff, Postler was my default mail client. Liked it even more than Claws, which I was using before. The interface is infinitely more polished, it was light as air, the features weren't weirdly bundled and tucked away in various places, and Hotmail worked well enough with it.


 
  It'll be hyped to hell and back for good reason - primarily consistency and beauty. But its not my cup of tea.. neither does it seem to be for some of us. Nevertheless, if they use a purpose-built kernel and start from scratch, to remove any conflict both in branding and in packages with Ubuntu, I may use it for convenience's sake. However, I look forward to playing with WMs again, once I get the guts to mess with Arch post-systemd. I can barely remember what packages I installed . Thank goodness for the fantastic documentation. The blocky *box aesthetic is now officially in vogue since the guys at Redmond adopted it for Metro! Though it really perplexes me why people are using PekWM so rarely. Its quite stable for me and can look better than Openbox. Its also in active development!


----------



## mosshorn

I've been having urges to go Arch or revert back to Crunchbang, which while annoying to setup at times, was one of my favorite distros of all time.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





mosshorn said:


> I've been having urges to go Arch or revert back to Crunchbang, which while annoying to setup at times, was one of my favorite distros of all time.


 

 Crunchbang is easier to install than Arch, because Arch has gone into pure command line install, which means the instructions need to be followed closely, and network needs to be ready before install.


----------



## mosshorn

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Crunchbang is easier to install than Arch, because Arch has gone into pure command line install, which means the instructions need to be followed closely, and network needs to be ready before install.


 
  Very true, it was just getting #! to look properly aesthetically that took a bit of work.


----------



## TwinQY

dissonant said:


> It'll be hyped to hell and back for good reason - primarily consistency and beauty. But its not my cup of tea.. neither does it seem to be for some of us. Nevertheless, if they use a purpose-built kernel and start from scratch, to remove any conflict both in branding and in packages with Ubuntu, I may use it for convenience's sake. However, I look forward to playing with WMs again, once I get the guts to mess with Arch post-systemd. I can barely remember what packages I installed . Thank goodness for the fantastic documentation. The blocky *box aesthetic is now officially in vogue since the guys at Redmond adopted it for Metro! Though it really perplexes me why people are using PekWM so rarely. Its quite stable for me and can look better than Openbox. Its also in active development!




Thought Openbox and dmw were feature-complete at this point. They still get compatibility and bug fixes I think.



mosshorn said:


> Very true, it was just getting #! to look properly aesthetically that took a bit of work.



How so? Comes with a bunch of themes and stuff preconfigured. Though it is a hassle to grab some stuff without the AUR




proton007 said:


> Crunchbang is easier to install than Arch, because Arch has gone into pure command line install, which means the instructions need to be followed closely, and network needs to be ready before install.




There's always Archboot for the script inclined. Although I bet most of us can cook up a nice bash install script, setup up the network, and grab it from git/what have you. Barring the occasional esoteric piece of hardware, where some fiddling with mkinitcpio might be needed, most modern machines don't differ too much install-wise, it's the post-install process that can be bothersome.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> There's always Archboot for the script inclined. Although I bet most of us can cook up a nice bash install script, setup up the network, and grab it from git/what have you. Barring the occasional esoteric piece of hardware, where some fiddling with mkinitcpio might be needed, most modern machines don't differ too much install-wise, it's the post-install process that can be bothersome.


 
   
  Yeah, and spend a couple of days compiling the system. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





 I tried it with LFS, it was a worthwhile experience, very educational, but not good in terms of repeatability, and maintainability.


----------



## TwinQY

proton007 said:


> Yeah, and spend a couple of days compiling the system.  I tried it with LFS, it was a worthwhile experience, very educational, but not good in terms of repeatability, and maintainability.




Compile time's always a good excuse for slacking off. Just leave it there so you won't be able to do any work with the machine for a while  But seriously, people really need to start using surrogate machines for compiling for slow hardware (Anyone try to compile a 2.6 LTS kernel on a Pentium II? Takes days, literally)

Anyone willing to maintain their own LFS = Too much free time. Super fun to build though. Baremetal was really educational as well.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Compile time's always a good excuse for slacking off. Just leave it there so you won't be able to do any work with the machine for a while
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

 I was planning on a Gentoo install once, and I found this equation online; 
   
_t_ being time,
   
  f[_waste of time_] → ( t[_compile_] - t[_relevant learning curve_] ) / t[_performance gain between compile sessions_];

 if f > 1, then you've wasted your time.


----------



## TwinQY

Thread revival
  Quote: 





proton007 said:


> I was planning on a Gentoo install once, and I found this equation online;
> 
> _t_ being time,
> 
> ...


 
  LOL isn't that from Awebb?
   
   
  Recently, I've been trying to compact my VMs, and through some strange twist of fate, managed to delete every other VM but the XP one. No snapshots, nothing like that. And I have a bad habit of not backing stuff up. But reinstalls are always a good learning opportunity, keeps me on the ball. And by chance I happen to find a new hardened uclibc profile for Gentoo (yes, it's been that long since I've reinstalled). Cool beans. So now I'm shuffling between alpine or Gentoo for my wall calendar/alarm project. Also found a snapped-in-half Libretto netbook, which I might just salvage the screen for. Now all I need are tiny speakers.


----------



## TwinQY

Anyone use Exherbo here? I think the reputation for it being completely inaccessible is a bit over the top. They even have an install guide (which is the typical install through chroot & livecd shebang that most don't need, but still a good gesture since it's sort of offical). I don't even develop for them and have been using it happily for a while now. Paludis and nothing but paludis as the package manager is great - it might possibly be one of the most powerful package managers on the face of this earth. And the package quality is top-notch as well.


----------



## laen

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Anyone use Exherbo here? I think the reputation for it being completely inaccessible is a bit over the top. They even have an install guide (which is the typical install through chroot & livecd shebang that most don't need, but still a good gesture since it's sort of offical). I don't even develop for them and have been using it happily for a while now. Paludis and nothing but paludis as the package manager is great - it might possibly be one of the most powerful package managers on the face of this earth. And the package quality is top-notch as well.


 

 I experienced the crude split of folks back then into Exherbo, after having quite an amount of other developers leave because of their behavior. Even though I'm not afraid of any trolling or harsh behavior (I'm a big fan of the suckless.org community after all), I stuck with Gentoo. I do have Exherbo on the list to try though, not sure if I'd ever make the switch, but I've got the idea they have quite some neat things they developed rolling out of their fingers, definitely worth a try and look at in the future when time allows .
   
  Is there anything like the hardened variant, GrSecurity patches, on Exherbo?


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





laen said:


> I experienced the crude split of folks back then into Exherbo, after having quite an amount of other developers leave because of their behavior. Even though I'm not afraid of any trolling or harsh behavior (I'm a big fan of the suckless.org community after all), I stuck with Gentoo. I do have Exherbo on the list to try though, not sure if I'd ever make the switch, but I've got the idea they have quite some neat things they developed rolling out of their fingers, definitely worth a try and look at in the future when time allows .
> 
> Is there anything like the hardened variant, GrSecurity patches, on Exherbo?


 
  Also a big suckless fan. Still waiting for sta.li to come out of planning. I think things have cooled down a lot since '09, quite amiable (to an extent, these are still Exherbo devs) on IRC. Structure and package quality, as mentioned, are immensely satisfying. 
   
  No hardened kernels (the hardened-sources from gentoo might work, haven't tried), profiles, or otherwise. Will have to be built by hand. I used uclibc this time around, so didn't want to get into too much complexity and mess with hardened as well.


----------



## laen

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Also a big suckless fan. Still waiting for sta.li to come out of planning. I think things have cooled down a lot since '09, quite amiable (to an extent, these are still Exherbo devs) on IRC. Structure and package quality, as mentioned, are immensely satisfying.
> 
> No hardened kernels (the hardened-sources from gentoo might work, haven't tried), profiles, or otherwise. Will have to be built by hand. I used uclibc this time around, so didn't want to get into too much complexity and mess with hardened as well.


 

 Good to hear!
   
  Any specific reason for using uClibc? It never was intended for desktops/laptops afaik, reading this isn't too convincing either: http://lists.uclibc.org/pipermail/uclibc/2003-November/028204.html.


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





laen said:


> Good to hear!
> 
> Any specific reason for using uClibc? It never was intended for desktops/laptops afaik, reading this isn't too convincing either: http://lists.uclibc.org/pipermail/uclibc/2003-November/028204.html.


 
  Started out when I was in need of a system for a very old subnotebook with 64MiB ram and 2GB storage, to be used as a bedside movie rig, and the extra space is much appreciated. It's gotten much better, though I'm still inclined to migrate to musl for the learning experience. Also need a base system for embedded work, and it's come in quite handy.
   
  Have only half the ram used with links+mplayer on framebuffer, so I guess it's working out fairly well


----------



## laen

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Started out when I was in need of a system for a very old subnotebook with 64MiB ram and 2GB storage, to be used as a bedside movie rig, and the extra space is much appreciated. It's gotten much better, though I'm still inclined to migrate to musl for the learning experience. Also need a base system for embedded work, and it's come in quite handy.
> 
> Have only half the ram used with links+mplayer on framebuffer, so I guess it's working out fairly well


 

 Ah ye, I'm in for that as well as I _just_ remembered I've got an OpenMoko FreeRunner lying around I need to put something on! Surely a good idea to go the uClibc path on that I'd say .


----------



## 34cupablanca

I use Mint a lot, it's very good, although my fave is Fedora.


----------



## BLACKENEDPLAGUE

Using Ubuntu 12.04 GNOME remix on this computer, very nice


----------



## TwinQY

Sounds nice. Just upgraded my 10.04 install used for recovery and GRUB on the lappie into 12.04.2. Unity's real nice. Don't think there's a DE out that I feel's worth the hate anymore. Though I would just stick to WM or framebuffer+tmux if I had to.


----------



## Maverickmonk

Using valgrind for memory analysis of c projects in my computer science couse, and since it's not windows compatable I'm now dual booting with Kubuntu 12.04. I love the operating system, it's the perfect balance between XFC (which I found to be incredibly fast and TOO minimalist) and gnome, which was pretty and all, but not as quick. With KDE I love how I can have multiple desktops and tab between them, and still have the luxury of the "snap to" commands.
   
  Learning to work with bash commands has been...a fun challenge, I'll say, but I am coming along with it. Now, I do have one big challenge that's giving me all sorts of hell: Audio.
   
  Amarok has given me nothing but problems. my chief difficulty is that I'm trying to use files from my windows partition, and after shutting down and restarting my pc, it loses them from the directory. It also crashes when trying to play mp3's, eventhough all the codecs are installed. It's pretty obnoxious. I'm going to attempt to install wine and then jriver on my linux partition. *shakes head* all I want to do is be able to listen to high quality tunes when I code. Is that so much to ask?
   
   
  Note: I love computers, but they tend to not love me. I messed up this installation every way possible, and if it hadn't been for the genius that is our university's sysadmin, I would be doomed.


----------



## TwinQY

Can a desktop be TOO polished?
  Oh yeah. Case in point - Chakra.

  Seamless integration.
  Aesthetic polish like no tomorrow.
  Can't say that this is all good, as it does make it difficult to be productive while you're drooling over your own desktop. Probably a more legitimate complaint than I make it out to be.


----------



## BLACKENEDPLAGUE

Too polished? Are you insaiyan?


----------



## TwinQY

Oh yeah, way too polished. Gotta try it to see. Splash screen, launcher, tweaks, everything. Too. Much. Polish.
   
   
  Ooh, fancy: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwODM


----------



## proton007

Hmmm... I think KDE itself is pretty polished as of now, especially the 4.10 release. I use the vanilla release on Arch.
   
  Funny thing is, KDE is the only desktop on which I haven't replaced the default theme. It just looks so good by itself. I've downloaded plenty, but everytime its like...naaah...it looks alright, just change the wallpaper.
   
  Looking on the other side, I used to replace mostly everything in Gnome/Xfce.


----------



## BLACKENEDPLAGUE

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Oh yeah, way too polished. Gotta try it to see. Splash screen, launcher, tweaks, everything. Too. Much. Polish.
> 
> 
> Ooh, fancy: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwODM


 
   
  In a choice between crunchbang and Chakra, Chakra would be installed on all the things.


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Hmmm... I think KDE itself is pretty polished as of now, especially the 4.10 release. I use the vanilla release on Arch.
> 
> Funny thing is, KDE is the only desktop on which I haven't replaced the default theme. It just looks so good by itself. I've downloaded plenty, but everytime its like...naaah...it looks alright, just change the wallpaper.
> 
> Looking on the other side, I used to replace mostly everything in Gnome/Xfce.


 
  Yeah, Oxygen's pretty nifty. Only theme that comes close to that kind of integration and that many icons would be KFaenza with maybe QtCurve.
   
  I use Caledonia because secretly I'm a Windows fanboy. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			




   
  Quote: 





blackenedplague said:


> In a choice between crunchbang and Chakra, Chakra would be installed on all the things.


 
  Chakra is, again, way too nice. So nice. 
   
  Stable repos are so much better than Manjaro's.


----------



## BLACKENEDPLAGUE

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Yeah, Oxygen's pretty nifty. Only theme that comes close to that kind of integration and that many icons would be KFaenza with maybe QtCurve.
> 
> I use Caledonia because secretly I'm a Windows fanboy.
> 
> ...


 
  Well if it's stable vs. nice then of course stable wins. I can't be bothered to use Debian or Arch


----------



## Riku540

Discovered Ubuntu 12.10 when Valve released Steam for Linux and was promoting it a couple weeks ago. A lot of people unfortunately installed it just to get a free, limited in-game Tux penguin, but for me I ended up loving it and it is now my main OS.
   
  Still very new and figuring things out, but love what I've experienced so far. I'm hoping Valve's push for Linux gaming succeeds.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





blackenedplague said:


> Well if it's stable vs. nice then of course stable wins. I can't be bothered to use Debian or Arch


 

 Well, Arch may be rolling release, but its not that bad in terms of stability. I've never faced any issue in my 5 years of usage (I was using ubuntu before that).  Ofcourse, it doesn't work out of the box, so yeah, its not completely fool proof.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





riku540 said:


> Discovered Ubuntu 12.10 when Valve released Steam for Linux and was promoting it a couple weeks ago. A lot of people unfortunately installed it just to get a free, limited in-game Tux penguin, but for me I ended up loving it and it is now my main OS.
> 
> Still very new and figuring things out, but love what I've experienced so far. I'm hoping Valve's push for Linux gaming succeeds.


 

 Haha... good to know.
   
  My mom started using Ubuntu 12.10 on her new laptop, but wasn't really comfortable with Unity, she was used to the old Gnome 2.X interface of Ubuntu 10.04.  Now she's using the fallback mode, it works well enough for her needs.
   
  If I have any complaints against the Distros, its only this. The forking and changing of Gnome has been troublesome for the non-techie users. It seems it never stabilized after 2.8. Now you have Gnome 3, Mate, Unity and Cinnamon to choose from, they all have their quirks.


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Well, Arch may be rolling release, but its not that bad in terms of stability. I've never faced any issue in my 5 years of usage (I was using ubuntu before that).  Ofcourse, it doesn't work out of the box, so yeah, its not completely fool proof.


 
  Glib broke (couple of times), so did X (infamously), whole kerfuffle about consolekit and WMs. In fact, most introduction of new feature sets like on fontconfig a while back or even transmission with gtk will break at least two things. And quite a few are exclusive to Arch as well, or at least found out through Arch first. But literally *2 minutes* on google and some good old strace and journaling will fix it. In fact, apart from maybe 5-6 severe issues since the last two years, there hasn't been anything that couldn't be worked around immediately without a bug fix (which eventually comes except for obscure bugs). 
   
  A great deal better than Gentoo though. And orders of magnitude better than Sid 
   
  That's not saying that rolling release is a bad thing, and for the most part people won't even notice these bugs as they...ahem, roll along (I'm sorry) every day. And "stable" repos can get deprecated and break just as fast. Guess my point is that everything has bugs so deal with it 
   
  (geez I make the issues sound really bad when I re-read it)


----------



## BLACKENEDPLAGUE

Honestly as a windows baby I kind of hated Unity. It was alright on desktop but a pain on netbooks. So far the only DE that works well personally is gnome, but then again I haven't tried KDE or the smaller ones on desktop yet.
   
  And seriously, all these people saying "HURR IF YOU AREN'T USING A 1337 DESTOP ENVIRONMENT YOU AREN'T DOING LINUX" are contributing to the still (though not as) unpopularity of the linux kernal


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





blackenedplague said:


> Honestly as a windows baby I kind of hated Unity. It was alright on desktop but a pain on netbooks. So far the only DE that works well personally is gnome, but then again I haven't tried KDE or the smaller ones on desktop yet.
> 
> And seriously, all these people saying "*HURR IF YOU ARE USING A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT YOU AREN'T DOING LINUX*" are contributing to the still (though not as) unpopularity of the linux kernal


 
  Fixed for ya 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



   
  Wait how does the DE have anything to do with the Linux kernel?
   
  I don't really think popularity's a goal for most - we just want our schi*t to work.
  From http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm


> [size=medium] Linux is not interested in market share. Linux does not have customers. Linux does not have shareholders, or a responsibility to the bottom line. Linux was not created to make money. Linux does not have the goal of being the most popular and widespread OS on the planet.[/size]
> [size=medium]  [/size]
> [size=medium] All the Linux community wants is to create a really good, fully-featured, free operating system. If that results in Linux becoming a hugely popular OS, then that's great. If that results in Linux having the most intuitive, user-friendly interface ever created, then that's great. If that results in Linux becoming the basis of a multi-billion dollar industry, then that's great.[/size]
> [size=medium]  [/size]
> ...


----------



## BLACKENEDPLAGUE

That was pretty refreshing to read


----------



## TwinQY

Holy....
Did anyone else on Arch get X updated to WAYLAND?!@#!
  Nvm mesa merge


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Holy....
> Did anyone else on Arch get X updated to WAYLAND?!@#!
> Nvm mesa merge


 

 I wonder why wayland is being installed as a dependency??


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> I wonder why wayland is being installed as a dependency??


 
Dunno, asked on IRC, checked the forums, guess not too much attention on this yet. Found one thread mentioning the mesa stuff but didn't include Wayland. Sort of able to guess why but pure speculation. 
   
Now to try the mailing lists...
   
  Nvm...again. Mesa has been supporting Wayland for a while now so it's a dependency. Maybe it'll compile if I strip it off the config.


----------



## laen

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> And quite a few are exclusive to Arch as well, or at least found out through Arch first.
> 
> A great deal better than Gentoo though. And orders of magnitude better than Sid


 
   
  I couldn't disagree more. I have never seen such a top notch QA as is going on with Gentoo. But Arch, yeah.. worst of the worst, the amount of crap is neverending. The default install is broken. The packages are broken. If a user asks help on a software channel because it's not working for him, 70% chance he's using Arch.
   
  Quote: 





blackenedplague said:


> And seriously, all these people saying "HURR IF YOU AREN'T USING A 1337 DESTOP ENVIRONMENT YOU AREN'T DOING LINUX" are contributing to the still (though not as) unpopularity of the linux kernal


 
   
  It's kernel. Ker-nel, it's a 6 character word, and rather easy to read and write, why do I keep seeing this "kernal" everywhere. Beside that, I've never heard anyone claim you need a 1337 desktop to be doing Linux, from what I know Linux is rather popular, and the kernel has nothing to do with popularity - if, it's praised for its hardware support.


----------



## BLACKENEDPLAGUE

Quote: 





laen said:


> It's kernel. Ker-nel, it's a 6 character word, and rather easy to read and write, why do I keep seeing this "kernal" everywhere. Beside that, I've never heard anyone claim you need a 1337 desktop to be doing Linux, from what I know Linux is rather popular, and the kernel has nothing to do with popularity - if, it's praised for its hardware support.


 
   
  U WOT M8


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





laen said:


> I couldn't disagree more. I have never seen such a top notch QA as is going on with Gentoo. But Arch, yeah.. worst of the worst, the amount of crap is neverending. The default install is broken. The packages are broken. If a user asks help on a software channel because it's not working for him, 70% chance he's using Arch.


 
   
  Hmmm... I think you have some truth, but maybe telling it in the wrong way.  The default install works alright, I've installed it on two systems recently. There have been some issues currently due to the shift to systemd, but other than that, I've never faced any problem with the official packages.
   
  The Arch wiki is really good, and has helped me learn a few concepts in the past. Regarding problems, yes, I've seen that Arch forums have solved a lot of problems. That also means the Arch community solves more problems than others, and its helped me to solve issues on other distros, many a times. I haven't seen a lot of Gentoo forums in this respect, but it either means Gentoo users don't face problems, or that their problems are already solved on the Arch forums.


----------



## Stitch

dubble post 0o


----------



## Stitch

Another linux user cheking in 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			




   
  It started about 10 years ago with red hat 6.3 iirc, very basic graphical installer and lots of things needed to be installed with commands. Didnt have much time for it and game or even 3d support was non-existend so i didnt use it much but it did got my interests poked. A few years ago i decided to try it again, with suse 11.3 this time. having a ati radeon card i was semi-screwed since fglrx didnt work half decent with ati cards at the time. X kept crashing after driver changes etc, apart from a horrid experience with 3d support i still used for simpler/casual things because its just felt nice; Stable, fast, and very easy to work with after getting used to it, mainly prefered gnome at the time.
   
  This time im in for good 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



  I thought i install w7 on my pc, xp was on it for 3+ years and it got slooooooooow. Windows 7 lasted for an hour i think, got 1 crash and was cursing and whatnot at it because mr gates decided to put everything somewhere else or just completely remove menu's. I downloaded linux and kinda rage-quit windows 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



  Since i was comfortable with suse i thought to start there, downloaded suse 12.4 live and put it on a flashdrive(no dvd at hand). Too bad it seems suse live doesnt boot from usb...
  Now running mint 14 kde for now, just installed and customized it a bit. I used to prefer gnome but the brief time i tried cinnamon and mate didnt really do it and cinnamon acted a bit weird with the legacy ati drivers. Prolly gonna try the gnome versions later on. But i was gaming a fair bit an used it less and less.
   
  Im still trying to decide what im gonna try next and eventually settle for, Mageia seems promising and suse netinstall is supposed to work from flashdrive.
   
  some shots of my DE


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





laen said:


> I couldn't disagree more. I have never seen such a top notch QA as is going on with Gentoo. But Arch, yeah.. worst of the worst, the amount of crap is neverending. The default install is broken. The packages are broken. If a user asks help on a software channel because it's not working for him, 70% chance he's using Arch.


 
    
  You're going to have to quantify how the default install or packages are broken. 
   
  Frequency of bug reports and direct correlation towards lackluster quality of packaging is fallacious at best, as it would be disregarding one simple piece of logic - that the Arch userbase is larger (not that that's good or anything) and would therefor notice more bugs/ would also put in the effort to submit one due to the stigma placed on the community. Also a relatively inexperienced userbase so more often than not they submit bug reports for EVERYTHING. 
   
  If one was to pay attention to upstream bug submissions one would also notice an overwhelming amount of Fedora and vanilla Slackware users. Does that mean anything? Not in particular. Just the audience in particular is privy to that sort of stuff.
   
  Also, one cannot judge stability without having used it for a significant period of time. I've had a crappy Gentoo install for 6 years and it's been borked significantly more often that the 4-5 year old Arch install (and considering the major infrastructure changes within Arch that is either sheer luck on my part or a great achievement). Same hardware. But those are personal anecdotes and as such I can't substantiate or generalize an opinion towards either distros from said anecdotes. I would still have to quantify my opinions accordingly.
   
   
  Quote:


stitch said:


> Another linux user cheking in
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
  KDE + good?
  Oh that really means you need to check out Chakra


----------



## Stitch

I saw some shots of it, looks slick indeed.
   
  I've got a seemingly big issue at hand now. I was using my NTFS drives as i was in windows without a hitch. But i wanted to continue the tedious task of ripping my entire cd collection(200+) to flac. Suddenly it cant write to my music partition anymore, tuns out i cant acces any NTFS drive anymore directly. If i first go to /home and then to the NTFS drives its ok......
  This is the error, i tried the interwebs but i couldnt find anything usefull, only a reference to ntfs-3g wich is already installed and reinstalling didnt fix it....
  edit; Amarok can read from the drive....


----------



## HPiper

Running a dual-boot Win7 and Ubuntu. No problems with either. I couldn't find a cd ripper I liked for Linux, so I rip em in windows and listen in Linux, works like a charm! Funny how Linux can access windows files and such but windows can't see my Linux stuff. I love Ubuntu, only problem I have is finding quality software for it, but I get by.


----------



## Stitch

hpiper said:


> Running a dual-boot Win7 and Ubuntu. No problems with either. I couldn't find a cd ripper I liked for Linux, so I rip em in windows and listen in Linux, works like a charm! Funny how Linux can access windows files and such but windows can't see my Linux stuff. I love Ubuntu, only problem I have is finding quality software for it, but I get by.




In KDE both k3b and konquerer work like a charm. Maybe one of em works on gnome too?


----------



## proton007

The lesser Win 7 I use, the crappier it seems. Every time it has a bucketload of updates to install, and a couple of times it shut down my pc during gaming because it auto-restarts during updates, unless I manually postpone it (the window for which I couldn't see because of the game being full screen). It just seems to be doing something or the other totally unrelated to the user applications (high disk and cpu usage).
   
  Oh, and really enjoying the KDE 4.10 release. Works almost perfectly.


----------



## Stitch

What distro are you using with kde 4.10? And is much better than 4.9? So far I really like 4.9


----------



## laen

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Hmmm... I think you have some truth, but maybe telling it in the wrong way.


 
   
  I'm really good at telling things the wrong way, so that could surely be the case .
   
  Quote: 





proton007 said:


> The Arch wiki is really good, and has helped me learn a few concepts in the past. Regarding problems, yes, I've seen that Arch forums have solved a lot of problems. That also means the Arch community solves more problems than others, and its helped me to solve issues on other distros, many a times. I haven't seen a lot of Gentoo forums in this respect, but it either means Gentoo users don't face problems, or that their problems are already solved on the Arch forums.


 
   
  The Arch wiki was an almost direct copy of the Gentoo wiki, before the datacenter it was in burned down and all data was lost because the idiot who hosted it didn't have offsite backups. So, yeah, that wiki content Arch users praise, is not an "Arch thing" to praise. Arch Linux has of course added to it in the past 2 years.
   
  The reason you may see less similar Gentoo forum topics of which you see Arch forum topics may point to the lack of QA as I have pointed out before. That, and the lack of quality devs (I mean, everyone can build from source, but come on.. what I spot on the Arch forums is stuff that should've been sorted out and known to the dev before the package went live).
   
  The size of the userbase or amount of filed bugs as TwinQY points out, is _not_ a measure of quality, a lesser amount of silly bugs that should have never landed in a live system might be, but even that is debatable. I see Gentoo devs reporting bugs upstream (as themselves, not as "X doesn't work in Gentoo")"), to simply get it fixed at the source and not requiring Gentoo-added patches next software release. Patches, not just bugs, actually fixing stuff for software and delivering patches to projects, is a measure of quality.
   
  That last thing can be seen in the Gentoo Hardened project, where software is fixed (PIC for example) with patches created for it, submitted upstream and available in the repo as long as required. There's nothing like that available in the Arch wiki, not even an info page or reference to what a user can expect from his installed software.
   
  But oh well, as you mentioned, you had problems with Gentoo for years.. Gentoo does somehow require you to make choices on what software support you want, you're your own maintainer of the environment you install it on. If you're lacking experience and time and mess it up, "crap in, crap out".


----------



## gopanthersgo1

I want to run Linux REAL bad, but my boot drive is full (64GB SSD) and I game everyonce in a while... Also, I use stuff like Audition and stuff... Maybe I'll run Gentoo or something on my 64GB SSD when/if I get a 256GB for a boot drive...


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





gopanthersgo1 said:


> I want to run Linux REAL bad, but my boot drive is full (64GB SSD) and I game everyonce in a while... Also, I use stuff like Audition and stuff... Maybe* I'll run Gentoo or something *on my 64GB SSD when/if I get a 256GB for a boot drive...


 
  TBH my / partition separate from /home usually takes up at the very most 5GB. So if you have a separate mechanical drive with enough space for media (keep in mind that Linux reads NTFS easily so you can keep the same media files and documents on your Windows install and just make the Linux install mount it during boot, then keep a small-ish /home partition for essentials like config files, etc) you could dual boot rather easily.
   
  And starting off with Gentoo without knowing much about what you're about to get into is maybe not the best idea, since people get a bad impression when they associate Linux in general with Gentoo. Arch is relatively easier to get into, less complexity, even OpenSUSE or Mint would be a better start.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

twinqy said:


> TBH my / partition separate from /home usually takes up at the very most 5GB. So if you have a separate mechanical drive with enough space for media (keep in mind that Linux reads NTFS easily so you can keep the same media files and documents on your Windows install and just make the Linux install mount it during boot, then keep a small-ish /home partition for essentials like config files, etc) you could dual boot rather easily.
> 
> And starting off with Gentoo without knowing much about what you're about to get into is maybe not the best idea, since people get a bad impression when they associate Linux in general with Gentoo. Arch is relatively easier to get into, less complexity, even OpenSUSE or Mint would be a better start.


HDD is always full, but I'll try moving programs off it (I only have a couple 200MB ones though...


----------



## laen

Quote: 





gopanthersgo1 said:


> I want to run Linux REAL bad, but my boot drive is full (64GB SSD) and I game everyonce in a while... Also, I use stuff like Audition and stuff... Maybe I'll run Gentoo or something on my 64GB SSD when/if I get a 256GB for a boot drive...


 

 I personally wouldn't advise Gentoo, even though it would easily fit on 8GB. It's just too much work in most cases, and I mean time spent on configuration and tweaking and tuning in terms of getting everything to work perfectly together (which is why quite some people, even here, are complaining Gentoo isn't stable - it just takes a lot of reading, learning, and understanding to get software to work exactly as you'd want to).
   
  I wouldn't advise Arch either, due to (as mentioned by someone else) huge amount of bugs/problems/lack of packaging quality/etc (bugtracker overflowing, forums filled to the notch). I'm sure there are people who get it to work right, but it's - like Gentoo - not always worth the time.
   
  If you're a starter, take one of the better known ones.. Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, or even OpenSUSE and so on. See http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major for the well known major distributions.
   
  There are some distro's out there that actually focus on Audio production and quality: use a realtime kernel by default, have a software set to get you working and playing right away, and so on. Some of these are listed at http://linux-sound.org/distro.html and that list is quite old (03/08/2011) so there might be more interesting stuff around.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





stitch said:


> What distro are you using with kde 4.10? And is much better than 4.9? So far I really like 4.9


 
   
  Archlinux.
  4.10 is a more polished version, and the biggest change I can notice in daily use is their notification system. Its much more organized now. Apart from that, it seems to be consuming lesser memory. All bells and whistles enabled, it takes a little under 1 GB out of the 8 GB I have.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





laen said:


> I'm really good at telling things the wrong way, so that could surely be the case .
> 
> 
> The Arch wiki was an almost direct copy of the Gentoo wiki, before the datacenter it was in burned down and all data was lost because the idiot who hosted it didn't have offsite backups. So, yeah, that wiki content Arch users praise, is not an "Arch thing" to praise. Arch Linux has of course added to it in the past 2 years.
> ...


 
   
  I'm not that familiar with the history of Gentoo to be able to comment, so you may be right, but as of now it seems Arch is doing better. Gentoo's install and support is a bit of a mess IMO.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





gopanthersgo1 said:


> HDD is always full, but I'll try moving programs off it (I only have a couple 200MB ones though...


 
   
  Oh well, you can just buy another HDD if you want, they're cheap enough nowadays. I dual boot as well, for occasional gaming in Win 7, but I have the EFI, Root, Boot and Swap partitions on the SSD. My Windows and Linux Home partitions are on the HDD.
  Its never a great idea to fill up the SSD, it'll degrade the performance over time.
   
  And if you just want to try Linux, why not use a USB boot (from a usb drive)? It runs alright, and can be used to store data as well.


----------



## pierg75

I just saw this thread now!

Only Linux for me (and for my GF as well  ) since 13 years.


----------



## buttons252

I was so turned off from windows 8, i decided to get linux another try.  I put ubuntu 12.10 on my sons pc and everything works from a fresh install.  I only had to install an ATI legacy driver for his ATI 4850.  Installed steam client and played counter strike source and killing floor.  I might try world of warcraft or diablo 3 under wine later, if that works... ill be switching the rest of the computers over too.


----------



## joshkim12

Any hackers?


----------



## pierg75

It depends what you mean.
  These days the terms hacker and cracker are used in the same way.
  If you mean this http://www.jargondb.org/glossary/hacker then I would consider myself one of those. Not that I excel in programming but I love to explore the inner details of computing.
   
  If you mean http://www.jargondb.org/glossary/cracker instead, not definitely this.


----------



## proton007

Alright, I'm sort of adding a post here to keep this thread afloat.
   
  Although I like AMD's graphics performance, their release cycle is pretty slow. Xorg released v1.14, and Catalyst seems to complain, preventing me from upgrading anything (using Archlinux btw).
  Fortunately Arch has another repository for Xorg that keeps in sync with the Catalyst drivers.
   
  Also, any thoughts on the AMD Kaveri architecture? I think its pretty cool, but the issue is, how to get people to write apps that can make use of the GPU cores? I mean, we alrealy have multiple cores and apps don't even seem to use them.


----------



## anoobis

Glad to see the penguin army massing 
   
  For me, the draw is the power and flexibility of shell and command line utilities that work so well together.
   
  Anyone here have experience of writing gstreamer plug-ins? Specifically I want to write a plug-in for Rhythmbox. I've got as far as finding what's on my system and the source/sink options. What I've yet to find is any example that shows how I access audio data as separate (L-R) channels.
   
  I'm starting to think that the python version may not support this and I'll have to use C. Normally I would prefer C but it seems that python may be simpler in this case and won't require other source files or any compilation, plus the examples tend to be python.
   
  Any ideas?
   
  Thanks.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





anoobis said:


> Glad to see the penguin army massing
> 
> For me, the draw is the power and flexibility of shell and command line utilities that work so well together.
> 
> ...


 
   
  If you just want to know what to do, python is a good choice.
  Accessing audio data as R/L channels may not be possible, it depends on your soundcard I think, but mostly, the R/L channel is handled by the audio codec chip nowadays, i.e there may not be a software R/L channel.


----------



## TwinQY

Right, Linux...that thing.
   
  - Anyone mess around with KDrive. Really quite cool. 
  - Have also been trying to set up st.arch but the package mirrors seem to not be working - project dead? 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			




  - Nothing spectacular has borked yet - still keeping my fingers crossed though. 
  - Retroarch is simply amazing and has pretty much kept me gaming more than I ever would have (which isn't saying much).
  - A couple new beater machines to add to the queue - all under $50! Can finally allocate them for other tasks as I've got a killer efficient rtorrent setup on the main rig anyways, something I've been meaning to do but haven't gotten to until transmission-qt began to bork on me like no tomorrow.
  - New Debian - yay.
  - Replaced yet another antiX rig this time with an Exherbo rig - really loving this. Taken up 5 machines at home, with the other 3 being Arch, Gentoo, and FreeBSD on the main desktop.
  - Music server and NAS have been temporary MIA for various reasons - I'm doing quite well without though and might migrate to a Squeezebox Touch anyways.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

Yet you can't get Skype working on any of them...


----------



## TwinQY

?? 
  http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-linux/
  Works well enough, some hiccups from the previous beta to this one, some features aren't present, but overall it works better than most chat clients on *nix.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





gopanthersgo1 said:


> Yet you can't get Skype working on any of them...


 
   
  Hmmm...that might be a Skype issue...their linux support has always been s**t, I don't know how it is now.


----------



## Riku540

Anyone been playing the Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal Linux Betas? I feel like Valve deserves a huge pat on the back for making such huge progress in Linux gaming, and have hopes other developers will follow.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





riku540 said:


> I feel like Valve deserves a huge pat on the back for making such huge progress in Linux gaming, and have hopes other developers will follow.


 
   
  Yes they do.
  So far for me, programming on Linux has always been a pleasant experience.


----------



## HPuser9083

I use Xubuntu 13.04 on my HP dc5750, and it's great, aside from my iPod Shuffle 2nd gen, I'm almost completely switched over to it.  Also got it tweaked to look like 10.04 for the lols.


----------



## proton007

The more I work on software development, the more I feel Linux has better tools and capabilities that Windows either doesn't have, or are switched off by default for security reasons.
  The command line is awesome, it works on all kinds of platforms, slow and fast, and debugging is easier.
  On top of that its free to use.
   
  I'm still perplexed why Windows is still preferred, unless Microsoft pays for it.


----------



## Yeti tunes

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> The more I work on software development, the more I feel Linux has better tools and capabilities that Windows either doesn't have, or are switched off by default for security reasons.
> The command line is awesome, it works on all kinds of platforms, slow and fast, and debugging is easier.
> On top of that its free to use.
> 
> I'm still perplexed why Windows is still preferred, unless Microsoft pays for it.


 
  Better tools and capabilities in what way? Honestly curious.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





yeti tunes said:


> Better tools and capabilities in what way? Honestly curious.


 
   
  Stuff inside the system. For example, loopback network adapters that exist by default, pretty handy for testing.  An API that doesn't change with every release. Multiple Desktops. Command line tools like Grep, Perl, Sed/Awk, Find etc. A lot of toolchains which don't work on windows.
  SMP support out of the box.
  Especially if you're working on cross compiling or embedded architectures, Linux has a lot more support.
   
  Oh, and most people I see get stuck up about MS Office. It seems they get Windows because it runs Office, which is fine if you're doing a lot of document work. But for home? I don't think so.


----------



## Yeti tunes

Quote: 





proton007 said:


> Stuff inside the system. For example, loopback network adapters that exist by default, pretty handy for testing.  An API that doesn't change with every release. Multiple Desktops. Command line tools like Grep, Perl, Sed/Awk, Find etc. A lot of toolchains which don't work on windows.
> SMP support out of the box.
> Especially if you're working on cross compiling or embedded architectures, Linux has a lot more support.
> 
> Oh, and most people I see get stuck up about MS Office. It seems they get Windows because it runs Office, which is fine if you're doing a lot of document work. But for home? I don't think so.


 

 I think it's a matter of preference really. I programmed for 4 years solely in Visual Studio (c#) and found the entire .net framework extraordinarily convenient. Of course when I worked for that company, the target platform was other Windows boxes so that made sense. For past year however I've been doing much more networking and *nix development because well... that's now my target platform.
   
  I will agree that *nix out of the box offers more flexibility at the command line, however you must keep in mind that this is because the command line in Windows is so rarely used any more. The things that make this an advantage for *nix is this small things (can't tail a file in Windows right out of the box, I mean c'mon...). And yes Office is the best business productivity suite out there which is why Windows is (largely) still popular in the enterprise landscape. Personally I use Windows at home because I'm a gamer and until most Steam games get ported over to some Linux variant looks like I'm sticking with it for a while.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





yeti tunes said:


> I think it's a matter of preference really. I programmed for 4 years solely in Visual Studio (c#) and found the entire .net framework extraordinarily convenient. Of course when I worked for that company, the target platform was other Windows boxes so that made sense. For past year however I've been doing much more networking and *nix development because well... that's now my target platform.


 
   
  If you're working for developing on the Windows platform, then obviously it'll make sense to work on Windows.
  But, as I've mentioned some of my co workers have reported issues with supporting XP and Windows 7 because a program made for one wouldn't work on the other because the API calls were doing something else. But I may be wrong.
   
  Quote: 





yeti tunes said:


> I will agree that *nix out of the box offers more flexibility at the command line, however you must keep in mind that this is because the command line in Windows is so rarely used any more. The things that make this an advantage for *nix is this small things (can't tail a file in Windows right out of the box, I mean c'mon...). And yes Office is the best business productivity suite out there which is why Windows is (largely) still popular in the enterprise landscape. Personally I use Windows at home because I'm a gamer and until most Steam games get ported over to some Linux variant looks like I'm sticking with it for a while.


 
   
  There are a lot of times I've ended up installing Cygwin on Windows because I wanted to use some GNU tools (gcc, gdb etc) and ofcourse all the command line goodies.
  I have a Windows partition as well, with games, but depending on the time I have on hand, it doesn't see a lot of use. As of now, its Linux 99% of the time.


----------



## meat01

I think people really like the Microsoft IDE for all of its features or maybe they are just used to the IDE.
   
  What language do you program in Proton and what IDE do you use, or do you use any text editor?


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





meat01 said:


> I think people really like the Microsoft IDE for all of its features or maybe they are just used to the IDE.
> 
> What language do you program in Proton and what IDE do you use, or do you use any text editor?


 
   
  There's no choice if you're working for MS apps, you need to use the IDE because the compiler is bundled with it.
  My office still uses Windows, and most of us use some other editor like Sublime/Komodo/Notepad++/Emacs for coding and the IDE just for its IDE features.
   
  I use Emacs if working on simple files, and Eclipse if I need an IDE.
  I've programmed in Python and C mostly, a bit of C++ (I wasn't impressed. Its a mess to code in).  Trying assembly for learning.


----------



## TwinQY

Been fairly fun picking up Limbo and Go....using the time I normally waste during commutes to study up on that. 
   
  And in more recent news I've managed to horribly butcher my Sabotage install by forcefully implanting sbase into there. Broke faster than you could say M50s are the shizzle.
  Also patiently waiting for the Alpine move to musl.....
   
  On a personal note, my main laptop rig has been flying by with st + monsterwm the past few days. Sure Termite has pango and better rendering of my strange foreign people music title fonts, but st is just too svelte to pass up....And monsterwm hits a sweet spot since it's mostly how I would've set things up on dwm prior (attachaside, etc). It's amazing how I've haven't basically touched anything on my Arch install for a year up until recently...guess I must've been too productive  Did a cleanup too, and now we're sitting at 410 packages installed. There was a LOT of cruft. Like back from my FVWM days cruft.
   
  EDIT: Oh, and some screenies are always nice -


----------



## mosshorn

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Been fairly fun picking up Limbo and Go....using the time I normally waste during commutes to study up on that.
> 
> And in more recent news I've managed to horribly butcher my Sabotage install by forcefully implanting sbase into there. Broke faster than you could say M50s are the shizzle.
> Also patiently waiting for the Alpine move to musl.....
> ...


 
  Sweet looking layouts. I really love the look and feel of tiling managers, but I just can't get used to them. I need to just sit down and learn all the key commands.


----------



## TwinQY

You can dictate the keybindings yourself, so what I did when I first started using dwm was just made spawning terminals the only keybinding aside from changing layouts and resizing the stacks. That way I added on the various other bindings bit by bit, this way they'd all gradually accumulate to something more intuitive. Since a lot of my laptops are Thinkpads from the IBM era, a lot of them don't have MOD4 (the Windows key), so I always bind everything to MOD1 (most tilers already do that, but some like wmii don't). 
   
  And of course I keep the same keybindings whenever I change to another tiler, so the experience is usually universal - it's just the tiling logic that's changed. A really easy way to do this is to not actually use the default keybinder and just use xkeybind to spawn all the programs.
   
  When I finally get the time, I'd love to try and go a bit more in depth into experiencing other tilers. I think the fact that there's such a huge variety of different window placement logic is really enthralling when one gets into it. One of my pet projects from long ago was building one of my own nifty wms from the tinywm template. Ended up just being a really crippled dwm in the process so eventually stuck to that.
   
  Have these listed and pre-installed, waiting for me to give them a test run:
  - alopex
  - wingo (floating more or less with some tiling capabilities)
  - bspwm
  - 2bwm (see wingo)
  - herbstluftwm (actually using this quite a bit but still need to get more in depth about it)
  - evilwm 
  - xmonad (now that I can do a bit of Haskell I think it's high time I write my own config from scratch)
  - wmfs2 (tried it out last week, really nice, definitely want to try again)
  - goomwwm (the placement logic is pretty much semi-tilish)
  - velox
  There's a lot more but I haven't formally written them down for myself in the list, just bookmarked.


----------



## TwinQY

The more I try out bspwm the more I realize it's probably the way I should be going. Switching from monsterwm to herbstluftwm has just become a pain, when all I've been doing can be easily done on a hybrid system (dynamic/manual). sxhkd looks sane, there's a boatload of functionality that, if I look closely enough, _I'm probably going to end up using this time around._
   
  It's like the author just knew what I needed and implemented it all beforehand, something that's fun to encounter within the FOSS world where people mostly make things for themselves.
   
  Some of the client-based stuff is a little weird, and some of it's still new and rough around the edges. But xcb and the generally small binary size and SLOC is just icing on top (certainly not something to base your entire switch towards). 
   
  When I get the time, I'll definitely make an attempt at a full-on switch, along with geany/LyX -> pure vim/nerdtree/extraplugins for my document processing and large project handling. The two semi-serious things I have lined up for the summer.
   
  How could I have forgotten pictures? Here's a picture, there's a picture, they're not my pictures - credit goes to the guys on this thread https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=167531&p=3. But have a picture anyways!


----------



## manzana

Another linux user here. Since 2005. I have used many distros in the past, Debian, Mageia, Slackware, Arch, OpenSuse, Mint, etc. Now I'm very happy with kubuntu 13 (kde 4.11). It is stable and fast. I use it on my home desktop (i7 4770 + HD7990 + Xonar STX) and on my netbook (atom 1.5GHz with 2gb). On both it work very well.
   
  Deadbeef is the best music player for me. It can show flacs ripped on 1 big file splited into the track list.
   
  I really like to see headfiers using linux and sharing about it.
   
  good day,
  manzana


----------



## TwinQY

Quote:


> Deadbeef is the best music player for me. It can show flacs ripped on 1 big file splited into the track list.


 
  .cue support is on Audacious, mpd...well, pretty much most things these days. Deadbeef is a great player though. It doesn't butcher up pango rendering like some other gtk players so all of my characters look fine. You can't get fil-plugins or a bunch of ladspa stuff on, but one should be using jack if they really need to use the functionality. Also it pulls up barely any dependencies. Also it looks sleek as hell. Also the built-in GUI converter works great. Also the name is just great.
   
  Heck even moc has cuesheet support. If I could only get a decent theme working...


----------



## TwinQY

Also, stable for Elementary OS came out a week ago (or two weeks, I can't keep track). 
  Only thing I can say is that they finally changed their website. 
  I've grabbed the beta a couple of times to see what they've changed, and it's usually fairly positive. At least they're differentiating. Good grasp on design, great focus on aesthetics. Of course some one will come in and say that the interface is just a rip and that it's not for real work. Alright. I have no foot in the race. Say what you will.
   
  Also, have tried to get framebuffer on netsurf. It works. It works quite well. Actually I might just not use X on the B142 anymore. That's how well it works. This machine is finally the blazing beast that it was meant to be. I think I'm more content with getting rid of some extra stuff now. Still want a Libretto and a Sony and an EEE Pc. I'm just too greedy. 
   
  isync + notmuch + mutt + openmailbox. Great solution to mail. I'm also playing around with Evolution and Balsa since I have gtk3 installed for the moment. But I'll probably just keep with the current setup. 
   
  st has a wayland port. I'm using mostly st anyways. Actually, come to think of it, apart from mpv, Virtualbox, sxiv, and Chrome/dwb...I can't think of much else I'm using with X.
  Also bspwm considering Wayland port, monsterwm ported (dragonflywm), with some things I'm looking forward to. It's a great day to be stuck in *nix land. 
  Now I just need to figure out which HDD I backed up the other other Inferno VM to...
   
  Oh, and two cool projects I hadn't mentioned before - 
  Void Linux - http://www.voidlinux.eu/
  Bedrock Linux - http://bedrocklinux.org/


----------



## Parall3l

Never really found elementary OS appealing, I guess I'm one of those "this tries to hard to be like OSX" folks.
   
  Posted from my Macbook.


----------



## Silent One

Okay, TwinQY, you got me! My interest in learning Linux, Unix and/or any of the cousins have been rekindled. Nice to see proton007 over here as well! On my notebook, I still have Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Mint installed along side Win7. 
   
  I only used these installs to play around with music servers. But never really done anything else with Linux. Especially _compiling. _I did find many of the things I'd want to use in a normal desktop environment on a day-to-day basis already dolled-up. Just download, Copy, Paste or whatever. No screening lines and lines in Terminal. 
   
  Still.... I've some learning to do... a lot! 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 I need to rewipe the hdd anyway...


----------



## TwinQY

Quote: 





parall3l said:


> Never really found elementary OS appealing, I guess I'm one of those "this tries to hard to be like OSX" folks.
> 
> Posted from my Macbook.


 
  elementary takes obvious cues from OSX. Yes. But elementary is a theme. The Granite stuff, and the individual apps, are pretty nifty and I like that they've mixed them into some sort of glorious app orgy. I tried wingpanel with nothing but XFCE. It's cool. Still had to install GNOME underneath it so I guess the point's sort of lost.
   
  All I can say is thank god someone's doing some consistent design. The team's priorities might be a bit skewed though. Someone who tried to get into contact with them about stuff had some real horror stories coming out of it. But as long as they put out what I think is good stuff, I can't really judge them otherwise.
   
  Quote: 





silent one said:


> Okay, TwinQY, you got me! My interest in learning Linux, Unix and/or any of the cousins have been rekindled. Nice to see proton007 over here as well! On my notebook, I still have Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Mint installed along side Win7.
> 
> I only used these installs to play around with music servers. But never really done anything else with Linux. Especially _compiling. _I did find many of the things I'd want to use in a normal desktop environment on a day-to-day basis already dolled-up. Just download, Copy, Paste or whatever. No screening lines and lines in Terminal.
> 
> ...


 
  Why Ubuntu and Lubuntu? That's something I never got - why people had two of the same distros with different DEs installed side-by-side when they can just toggle during login. Yes the branding is different but really there's a Lubuntu-desktop metapackage. I never use it but it's there. Usually if you don't have gnome daemons starting up you'll hardly notice the fact that you have Unity underneath. And it if it did, it's not like Lubuntu's pure LXDE anyways - a ton of gnome stuff gets started underneath as well. And the stuff's fairly benign. But maybe I should just focus more on the fact that you're one of us...that's silently scary.
   
  Unless you have some strange package you need to install, or if you need to purposefully enable and disable some features during compile time, you can just depend on binary packages on a normal distro. So don't worry about the compiling beast 
   
  Well, as long as the usage fits, you won't need to use the terminal. You might find it to be a more preferable tool if you do get to use it, but there's always the choice not to, depending on what you typically do. There's not really a way to learn something until one narrows down what it is that they want to learn.
   
  If you just want to have fun and do wacky things, sure, grab a new distro. But the underlying things are pretty universal, and I mean that in a fairly broad sense,


----------



## Silent One

Have pure LXDE. Once I spent a few months (5?) evaluating the different installs from an audio angle, they all now continue to languish on the notebook. Spring Cleaning is in order... but in autumn. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



   
  Even if I have no current use or focus for Terminal, learning to use it would be a benefit. One day, it might be the only thing I don't get locked out of!


----------



## TwinQY

http://linux.voyage.hk/voyage-mpd has a real nice pre-configured setup, it seems. Will have to try it out sometime. Right now I have a real tiny musl-linked Exherbo running mpd. The funny thing is I'm avoiding moc because I can't get a nice visual theme...but I have a piece of hardware with a borked screen, but remote and spotless hardware otherwise. Doh! Headless.
   
  Are ya silently using jack, whispering about your ALSA love, or loudly proclaiming your pulseaudio allegiances?
   
  Well the first thing to do would be to install terminal. http://git.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-terminal/ Since this is the only thing aptly named Terminal 
  Honestly, people will link all sorts of guides to various Unix and bash commands. But I'm more for the school of hard knocks approach. Proactively try and set something up, and gradually you'll be forced to learn the syntax under duress. And of course you still have the guides available when you need them anyways. This works great for learning languages as well (it's how I learned Limbo this summer).


----------



## Silent One

I was exposed and tried all three. Especially when I'd read _"And you don't want to use this one for audio. Be sure to download (blank)!"_ 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 You know how it goes. I eventually parked my MPD server and went back to my sup'd up Mac mini. 
   
  Money is tight but I may get another (new) mini or explore another server. Already put a modified Squeezebox Touch behind me. Didn't care for the presentation; user experience. I've an open mind, though. And never fully write things off, as life is dynamic or should be. It could have simply been where I was in life emotionally. If funds were available, perhaps I'd bring one in again. Maybe I revisit one of the Linux music servers.


----------



## TwinQY

I just realized moc. As in K-mok. I think that's reason enough.
  Alright, it's only for local machines so it's less of a "server" unless you're ssh'ed. But the name...Asides from the name I've got no solution to your problem. Better apt-get/yum install/pacman -S/emerge/cave --superlongcomplicatedoptionwithcompletelyunintuitivename/apk install/tar -xvf && cd ./* && make install man-db. 
   
  Man-db. The answer to all of life's questions. And it ain't 42.


----------



## Silent One

Well, being my rig is still in storage, I got a lil' play time to muck something up!


----------



## TwinQY

Anyone see this yet?
   
  https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1319058#p1319058
  https://github.com/aaronlaursen/STUFFS
   
  Dantalian is cool, but this is rather different. More like how KDE does it, but not jumping the gun. I'd have to try it to know if it's sane or not, but the latter two dependencies look weird. Goodness knows I rip out akondai and nepomuk on any of my KDE installs (you can do this on Ubuntu quite easily, if I recall - on Arch you'd have to install a dummy package, and on the *toos it's a "-" something USE flag, I can't recall) so it wouldn't make much of a difference. I acknowledge that they have been slowly improving it but they should really separate that function and relegate it to a testbed or something. It just seems weird for day-to-day at it's current state.
   
  Speaking of which, you can get a really lightweight KDE install if you try hard enough. I'll show an example one day. A bit of a redundant stat, but ~350 base packages installed on Arch is not bad at all. Heck my full-on XFCE install barely knuckles under that. And heck my monsterwm install is slightly bigger than that.


----------



## proton007

Quote: 





twinqy said:


> Anyone see this yet?
> 
> https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1319058#p1319058
> https://github.com/aaronlaursen/STUFFS


 
   
  Interesting. This could potentially speed up the file search, considering how fast forum searches are.
   
  This reminds me. Stupid Catalyst drivers are holding back a system upgrade.


----------



## rolph

hello linux-fiers.
 using ubuntu for a couple years.
 love linux because of its architecture, but not so much the kernel concept. 
 but it is a great deal for free true os.


----------



## TwinQY

Trying out STUFFS and it is rather dependent on the user doing a lot of the organizing - so if you're lazy like me and the only reason you're using this is not to be lazy.... 
 Despite what the common anti-insurgents would have us think, I still think QNX rocks the house with their kernel.


----------



## rolph

lol, nice. I like that kind of microkernel architecture


----------



## proton007

I don't see anything wrong with any kernel. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, some like Windows have more weaknesses.
  
 The microkernel debate has become stale now, there aren't any universal advantages or disadvantages of either. Further it depends on the way the whole system is constructed.


----------



## TwinQY

We are still talking about corn, right?
  
 Anyone try out termbox? I remember half-finishing a calcuator with it, but can't find where I put the stuff for the life of me. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment projects where I immediately jumped in after finding out about it. 
  
 Still fairly actively maintained, although there's not a lot of adaptees...


----------



## gopanthersgo1

Anywho, I'm gonna run linux on my SSD and windows 8 on my 1tb HDD with all my files (downloads/photos/movies/music) on my 3tb hdd... I wanna use the GRUB bootloader and I don't know what form of linux I want to run (Distro)... What should I pick out as a beginner?


----------



## gopanthersgo1

I think I'm gonna run Arch, but I'm having trouble choosing a nice, minimal, sleek Desktop Environment... any recs?


----------



## proton007

gopanthersgo1 said:


> I think I'm gonna run Arch, but I'm having trouble choosing a nice, minimal, sleek Desktop Environment... any recs?


 
  
 I'm running it exactly as you mentioned in your previous post.
  
 However, if its a new PC with UEFI, you'll have to do some work.
  
 I'd say most Linux DEs (except Gnome 3) are sleek and not too intrusive. I'm using KDE, and while its its pretty good with eye candy, just gets out of the way when working.
  
 Other than that XFCE is also nice if you don't have a lot of RAM.
  
 The idea is, you'll have to choose depending on your usage patterns and needs. If you're working on the terminal most of the time, then you won't need too much GUI, you can do with Openbox and the likes.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

proton007 said:


> I'm running it exactly as you mentioned in your previous post.
> 
> However, if its a new PC with UEFI, you'll have to do some work.
> 
> ...


Yeah, uefi...  Also, I'm thinking of running kfce or whatever other DE I decide on, and probably use Burg as a bootloader.


----------



## eagleman11

gopanthersgo1 said:


> I think I'm gonna run Arch, but I'm having trouble choosing a nice, minimal, sleek Desktop Environment... any recs?


 
  
 Hi! if you want to use GNOME but hate using the normal DE, You can use GNOME Classic by putting "exec gnome-session --session=gnome-classic" in the .xinitrc
  
LXDE, and XFCE are good if you want to have a lightweight Desktop enviroment that is easy to use. 
  
Awesome is flexible, but you really need to know what you are doing, since you need to change LUA files and such. 
  
KDE, well, it's just mostly Eye candy to me like Windows vista and 7(and the Beats and skullcandy headphones).


----------



## gopanthersgo1

eagleman11 said:


> Hi! if you want to use GNOME but hate using the normal DE, You can use GNOME Classic by putting "[COLOR=222222]exec gnome-session --session=gnome-classic" in the .xinitrc[/COLOR]
> 
> [COLOR=222222]LXDE, and XFCE are good if you want to have a lightweight Desktop enviroment that is easy to use.[/COLOR][COLOR=222222] [/COLOR]
> 
> ...


GNome seens too bloaty... I think I'll stick with xfce.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

well I'm going to go linux only, no windows!  I'm gonna install Mint with xfce until I get used to linux, then go to arch, and then probably funtoo!


----------



## TwinQY

There's this notion of sleek and minimalism perpetuated by the teenagers of the internet world. We've all encountered them. The Arch users. And I'm directing that to a specific group - the old-guard and the distro are lovely. But this is a thing where a lot of things associated with youth - lack of experience, haughtiness,  a strict adherence to some pre-conceived dogmatism perpetuated by their peers - that leads to this divide between the people who like messing around with these things for the fun of it and the productivity of it, and the people who use these things to stroke their own egos.
  
 Forgive me for the elitist undertone but when in Rome...
  
 Contrary to popular belief, it's not very hard to "set-up" a "minimal" setup - the original intent and purpose though, is to be productive on it, to introduce a workflow  that flows well and configuration options that accompany this. That's what tools are, and that's why there's a never-ending endeavour to find and create better tools.
  
 But then comes these people, springing from the brain-child of modern vanity, a byproduct of the "ricing" gamers. They create their own approach on how setups should be (which is fine, software is what the individual make and use out of it). Then they spread their half-baked ideals to more and more of their like-minded kin, saturating the community, until the notion becomes adamant and absolute to a newcomer. 
  
 First you should ask yourself - why do you want a minimal setup? What purpose does it fulfill for you that cannot be done with some other approach. And that's not meant to be rhetorical, it something that you should really ask before already deciding. There are many untruths or half-truths to what the *nix world is about, perpetuated from the same means as I mentioned up there earlier. 
  
 And if you do decide that "minimal" is what you want, it then comes down to just this - their notion and approach to minimalism is not the only notion and approach to minimalism. You might discover that it's the right one for you, but until you've been exposed to all of the choices, you'll never know otherwise. Tiling managers are nice, but it shouldn't be used because someone tells you that it's sleek and lightweight and all the cool kids are using it - that's something you should be able to decide for yourself without getting caught in all of that pressure to conform to that mindset.
  
 The world "minimal" itself has also been butchered and mishandled in the software world for quite some time. Minimalism regarding featuresets? Regarding the writing style that the author used? SLOC? Approach? Logic? Until you decide for yourself what this means to you - that never-ending search for the ideal setup won't get any shorter. 
  
 And more importantly - is it practical? Once you've defined these things for yourself - you must realize whether or not this approach is sustainable towards productivity. Because ultimately that's what you'll be using a computer for. Having fun with experimental things has its pros, and can often lead to finding things that help with productivity as well, but it'd be wise if you can discern between one or the other.
  
 To end off the preaching section of this - when you've achieve a level of self-realization where you understand your needs, understand what you want, and more importantly understand why you might want it, and what influences you to do so, you become all the better for it. And it needn't be through experience that one achieves this - a fresh, critical, but open mindset can do the same.
 Let's line up the choices though. My own take.
  
 XFCE
 - very traditional layout. A panel with a menu (if you want)
  
 - a good level of componetal customization. No panel? Why not? Want to replace the default window manager (XFWM - which is rather nice) with something else? Don't see why not.  The components are more modular than one might expect. For example I was able to strip out all the power management (and upower along with it) quite easily. And they work quite well by themselves, although some parts were not intented to be. The base is composed of xfce-session (the bread and butter out of what you would want from a DE, otherwise it's no different from a WM), and the panel. If you're using Thunar the xfce-desktop stuff might be integral, but if you're using otherwise, you can strip that off and use some other utilities to substitute in the functionality. 
  
 - layout is customizable to an extent - i.e. you can add your applets and move things around.
  
 - the features are kept simple and to what you might expect from a DE. No overload of options if you have OCD and simply need to configure everything.
  
  
 LXDE
 - There's a divide between DEs and WMs. Essentially the former is what ties all of the desktop components - the panel, the application (i.e. xdg ongoings so that your menu knows what the heck's going on and where exactly your applications are, and so that programs can call and interact with one another with more ease), the look-and-feel integration, and things in between. WMs manage windows. It's quite a different paradigm when you realize that the basic ongoings of a desktop, and of a system in general, can be as sparse and cobbled together as one would like. So in that, one realizes that perhaps a graphical server and something to manage the windows on there is all they will ever need - let's not let some other people dictate how they should manage my environment!
  
 - Why is this relevant to LXDE (I knew you'd be anxious waiting for this)? It adhers to a very sparse notion of desktop integrations, environments. It is essentially Openbox, with a few apps to manage the desktop, plus lxde-session for some very basic means for integration. The look and feel is as integrated as the GTK theme you choose. So it's a bit pointless to point out the functionalities. Even the tools that come with it are so completely modular, any sense of them being mandatory is forgone. Expect that from LXDE. It becomes what you make of it. That middle road between those who don't quite feel comfortable without integration, and those who want to dictate how they want their desktops to be managed, because the other full-fledged tools don't do it the way they want (*not to say that they don't do it well enough, just not the way they want*) 
  
  
 KDE
 - Used to be the one. The de-facto. What one would simply expect from a DE. And then plasma came. But don't let the popularity-things (which is not as bad as people make it out to be anymore) influence your choice. With a project this large, the only qualm to a lack of popularity goes out through the window. 
  
 - It is a full-fledged DE, so it works well for those who don't feel comfortable without integration. But the customization aspect, brings users who are not really uncomfortable, but requires a workflow that only this level of integration can achieve.
  
 - The customization aspect. Tons of options you can change. And this extends beyond the basic System Settings app. Applications targeted and designed for KDE have this included as well. It's a philosophy, simple as that. If I want to adjust every movable pixel and behaviour...well it doesn't quite go to that extent.
  
 - Eye candy. Better yet, customizable eye-candy that can be turned off if you try hard enough (the difficulty in changing some "default" behaviours is what often leads to people going to more WM-pastures)
  
 - A lot of indexing of files. At some point in time the people there decided to implement a semantic desktop - a desktop that is aware of the state of function of everything within it. Which is admirable and definitely something that pushes advancement for new technologies. The bad thing is that they've made it into the default behaviour before it was fully-finished. The implementation, at its current state, works, but is not truly semantic. So now people have something not-fully-finished pushed down into their throats, and it can be unsavoury. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great thing to have around and play with, but it should really be something optional and seperate - I'm not keenly aware of the ongoings in the KDE project so my best guess would be something to do with manpower? It's quite a bit leap. I might be off-base about it as well. But the fact stands - it takes a bit of effort to get rid of the components supplementing the indexing - nepomuk and akondai. But it can be done. Problem is that some of the offical KDE programs like Kmail and the likes, bakes this stuff right into themselves as well, so you'd have to take some time in compiling it all out. Sometimes it simply can't be done. I'd recommend Gentoo-variants if you're being anal about this and need a standardized and sorted solution.
  
 - I'm not even going to talk about the look-and-feel. You can change it to however you'd like. Rather easily. Of course there might be some exaggeration but the core truth of the statement is there.
  
  
 GNOME
 - Minimalism through less feature sets on the surface. This is an approach that works well for some, and not for others. Don't be swayed from the hate or the hype. Decide for yourself. Unlike trying out headphones, it takes markedly less effort to do this with software.
  
 - This can be perceived as the standard for many things in *nix world right now. Whether people like it or not. Red Hat has chosen this as their main squeeze for distribution. Not because of any staunch beliefs, just because this is currently the biggest project and the corporate logic makes sense. I'm not riling on anything. But they've pushed a lot of development for and into integration with gnome. A lot of key applications require Gnome dependencies, and they have been for quite some time. So there is an inherent ease-of-adaptation when your core stuff has all the standard behaviours worked out just for this DE - although it doesn't always demonstrate itself practically, I get the feeling. GTK3 - that's pretty GNOME-y right now. VTE. Etc, etc, etc.
  
 - As mentioned in the first point, less features and options to change around. Of course you'll find an onslaught hidden in config files which can be accessed centrally through dconf. But on the surface, the developers have this vision and they don't really want you doing anything about it. But just like how they should probably take a less pragmatic approach to developing, so should the user when decide - it's the functions, not the people, that you should be judging when choosing. You can argue that what the developers are doing dictates the future, and that if you are choosing this, the experience might not be as sustainable and good in the future. They've taken a lot of backlash, and you see less bad directions, but then again they still exist. Playing a bit of devil's advocate here.
  
 Awesome/E17/Blah.
  
 - They exist. If you want I'll talk about them. Don't count them out of the running.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

twinqy said:


> There's this notion of sleek and minimalism perpetuated by the teenagers of the internet world. We've all encountered them. The Arch users. And I'm directing that to a specific group - the old-guard and the distro are lovely. But this is a thing where a lot of things associated with youth - lack of experience, haughtiness,  a strict adherence to some pre-conceived dogmatism perpetuated by their peers - that leads to this divide between the people who like messing around with these things for the fun of it and the productivity of it, and the people who use these things to stroke their own egos.
> 
> Forgive me for the elitist undertone but when in Rome...
> 
> ...


Um, I meant minimalist as looks sleek and stuff, not minimalist overall... :/ I'm running XFDE and find it to be nice... I might swap over to KDE though if XFDE doesn't have all the customization I want.


----------



## TwinQY

As I've mentioned -  visually minimal or functionally minimal - the pitfalls are there either way.


----------



## Parall3l

Well as someone who took web design in high school (not much exactly the equivalent of a PhD I know, but w/e), I'm a minimalist myself. The main benefit for me is the reduction in cognitive load. Nothing is worse than a flashing .gif of cats in the background with poorly matched colours like deep pink with lime green used on the interface. I want to use a computer, not to receive visual pain it.
  
 Tiling WMs seems like a pain to learn, but hey, at least now no one can look through my "video" collection because they can't figure out my UI.
  
  
  
  
Install Gentoo


----------



## proton007

gopanthersgo1 said:


> Um, I meant minimalist as looks sleek and stuff, not minimalist overall... :/ I'm running XFDE and find it to be nice... I might swap over to KDE though if XFDE doesn't have all the customization I want.


 
  
 Most DEs can be made to look sleek and minimal, there are tons of themes for all of them. Some offer more customization than others.
  
 The issue that I've experienced, is the 'bells and whistles' or 'features' that you'll be needing. For instance, full fledged DEs do most of the work for you...so you can stay away from the terminal most of the time, unless you need to perform an upgrade (this is in Arch, in other distros even this isn't an issue).
  
 For me, daily user who just wants to get work done, and has a reasonably good hardware --> KDE.
 Not that powerful, but still need good features --> XFCE/LXDE
 Don't need a lot of features, using the terminal most of the time --> *box.
  
 Point is, when you're going 'minimalist' by code and features, you have a nimble system, but you have to analyze the trade-offs.


----------



## TwinQY

parall3l said:


> Install Gentoo


 
 System-wide build flags for making life easier? NOOBSAUCE.
  
 Use Slack. Use Lunar. Avoid the brain-drain.
  


proton007 said:


> The issue that I've experienced, is the 'bells and whistles' or 'features' that you'll be needing. For instance, full fledged DEs do most of the work for you...so you can stay away from the terminal most of the time, unless you need to perform an upgrade (this is in Arch, in other distros even this isn't an issue).
> 
> For me, daily user who just wants to get work done, and has a reasonably good hardware --> KDE.
> 
> ...


 
 I do think it's a tad bit unfair to perpetuate the notion that size becomes proportional to functionality.  KDE and GNOME at their current states are roughly similar in terms of size, and the former not only does a heck of a lot more by default, it has a heck of a lot more up hidden up its sleeve.
  
 When you take out the MySQL and indexing from KDE, size gets thrown out the window. Take out the compositing effects (I've had great success with using KDE concurrent to i3 - although one can say that Kwin's part of the charm by default), and it zooms past like a tube of jiffy lube.
  
 By grouping userbases with the DEs as a stereotype, it can serve to make the stereotype more true.  Rather, it might be more beneficial when people take the time to analyze the individual functionality that they want rather than adhering to this hierarchy where one DE above the other is grouped in a way where they simply has more functionality and if you want functionality that's that. Do you want windows to be handled with the behaviour that KWin does by default, or by metacity? Do you want to use Colord for adjusting color management settings, or do you want to stick to the old tried-and-true way? These should be the factors from which we hold our decisions. Not through an oversimpifying hierarchy.


----------



## proton007

twinqy said:


> I do think it's a tad bit unfair to perpetuate the notion that size becomes proportional to functionality.  KDE and GNOME at their current states are roughly similar in terms of size, and the former not only does a heck of a lot more by default, it has a heck of a lot more up hidden up its sleeve.


 
  
 Well, I'm using a general idea. A system that has a lot of services running efficiently will definitely consume more space in RAM than one running a few efficient ones. The underlying assumption ofcourse is that they're both efficiently implemented.
  
 While I'm all for using the method of classifying the DEs as you mentioned, its precisely the thing I actively avoid.
 A DE needs to be looked at from the user perspective most of all, and not all users are comfortable with choice based on several technical factors. Obviously not everyone is a programmer, and not everyone cares about how things are implemented. All they care about is where does my USB drive show up when I plug it in? Or how do I change a setting, or connect to Wi-Fi?
 Users need stuff that works for them and gets out of the way to let them do what they really installed Linux for. Or vice versa, if they installed Linux to learn it.
  
 Therefore, over simplification is required at some level.


----------



## TwinQY

Well, choice, even at the simplist level, is still choice. When users get to choose the benign behaviours, it still makes the experience all the more pleasant. We can oversimplify the functionality being examined and the logic still stands. It's great to be able to choose, but choosing based on a flawed hierarchy isn't necessarily a sound idea.
  
 I do think I was addressing the more simplistic crowd before - after all, the spawning behaviours of windows are still a pretty basic function. In fact I remember back in school when OS X had just came out, the students were ecstatic about being able to change the hiding animation and behaviour of the windows. This is the bread and butter of functionality to them, and the breadth of variety is still available for them to enjoy.


----------



## proton007

twinqy said:


> Well, choice, even at the simplist level, is still choice. When users get to choose the benign behaviours, it still makes the experience all the more pleasant. We can oversimplify the functionality being examined and the logic still stands. It's great to be able to choose, but choosing based on a flawed hierarchy isn't necessarily a sound idea.
> 
> I do think I was addressing the more simplistic crowd before - after all, the spawning behaviours of windows are still a pretty basic function. In fact I remember back in school when OS X had just came out, the students were ecstatic about being able to change the hiding animation and behaviour of the windows. This is the bread and butter of functionality to them, and the breadth of variety is still available for them to enjoy.


 
  
 I'd say I don't see this discussion going anywhere. You've stated your way of chosing a DE, I've stated mine.
 People chose a DE that they like. Some go for eye candy, others for functionality, based on their own knowledge.
 I'll leave it at that.


----------



## TwinQY

Well that was sort of abrupt :/
  
 Half of this forum is based on spontaneous banter that ultimately goes nowhere. Which needn't be a bad thing. Banter is just banter, there's always a place for banter. I didn't realize that this was supposed to be different. Perhaps there's some animosity I'm not aware of? 
  
 Anyways, I'll end it, but just want to say that this was quite strange and abrupt.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

so um... sorry to interrupt the banter, but how do I set /home in fstab to be on a different drive?


----------



## TwinQY

/dev/sd[letter for the device to be mounted in accordance to order - so likely "b" although you should consult fdisk for that]   /home [type of filesystem]  [options]  [dump]  [pass]


----------



## gopanthersgo1

twinqy said:


> /dev/sd[letter for the device to be mounted in accordance to order - so likely "b" although you should consult fdisk for that]   /home [type of filesystem]  [options]  [dump]  [pass]


So:

```
/dev/sdb /home Ext4 ????? ????? ?????
```


----------



## TwinQY

I forgot to mention the partition number after the drive letter 
  
 I don't think it matters to capitalize the E in ext4 but maybe not do that just in case.
  
 Otherwise yes. The options are fun to customize if you aren't doing anything mission-critical.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

twinqy said:


> I forgot to mention the partition number after the drive letter
> 
> I don't think it matters to capitalize the E in ext4 but maybe not do that just in case.
> 
> Otherwise yes. The options are fun to customize if you aren't doing anything mission-critical.


Well I ended up messing something up that's easily fixable except I can't login due to it and mint doesn't allow you to access terminal with the root being writable unless you're logged in, so I said screw it and will just install funtoo tomorrow...


----------



## TwinQY

None of what you said made any sort of sense whatsoever.
  
 1) Live CD and chroot. Get used to it. Not writable? No furking way. 
 2) Some sort of hard on for funtoo or something? This is the second time you've mentioned it. Do you absolutely _need_ the latest git pulls or something? Which begs the question - what do you need?


----------



## gopanthersgo1

twinqy said:


> None of what you said made any sort of sense whatsoever.
> 
> 1) Live CD and chroot. Get used to it. Not writable? No furking way.
> 2) Some sort of hard on for funtoo or something? This is the second time you've mentioned it. Do you absolutely _need_ the latest git pulls or something? Which begs the question - what do you need?


1) can't set chuser with a live cd, chmod, and mint requires to be signed it to access any sort of terminal while mint safe mode restricts certain folders from being editable. :/ 

2)no, but I'd love to learn how to do all this and not have to redo my entire os to install funtoo later... With the guide on the site it's easy to install, and makes sense anyways. I also am doing this to help me learn Linux commands and such... Also, cmd is not daunting at all anymore...


----------



## TwinQY

1) Oh dear god. What's the problem?
 2) "Cmd is not daunting" - you're not doing it right. It's alway supposed to be daunting. Heck even Rob Pike finds it daunting.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

twinqy said:


> 1) Oh dear god. What's the problem?
> 2) "Cmd is not daunting" - you're not doing it right. It's alway supposed to be daunting. Heck even Rob Pike finds it daunting.


I just copy and paste my /home directory to the root of my other drive and set it is /home under fstab, I also deleted the original /home folder. :|


----------



## gopanthersgo1

Ohhh, um, after learning some of the commands it's so much faster and easier to do stuff...


----------



## TwinQY

gopanthersgo1 said:


> I just copy and paste my /home directory to the root of my other drive and set it is /home under fstab, I also deleted the original /home folder. :|


 
 LOL okay. Yeah you'll have to wipe it. Next time be more mindful of stuff like that.
  


gopanthersgo1 said:


> Ohhh, I'm, after knowing some commands it's so much faster and easier to do stuffs.... :/


 
 Please use complete sentences. Your shell in Mint has autocompletion so you can never have an excuse to do this again.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

twinqy said:


> LOL okay. Yeah you'll have to wipe it. Next time be more mindful of stuff like that.
> 
> Please use complete sentences. Your shell in Mint has autocompletion so you can never have an excuse to do this again.


1) Yeah... I dun goofed.  I wanna be able to access root though if this happens again, so no mint for me. 

2) Was on my phone.  I'm is supposed to be um.  I'll correct it.


----------



## TwinQY

Time to switch to FreeBSD - where chroot jails are but a thing of the past.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

twinqy said:


> Time to switch to FreeBSD - where chroot jails are but a thing of the past.


Really?


----------



## TwinQY

Well technically, it just adds on a different jail mechanism, more like virtualization. Like the next level up from what people use for chroots more often (other than rescuing things that is). It has nothing to do with your issue, it's just that I like rubbing our better stuff in your face


----------



## gopanthersgo1

twinqy said:


> Well technically, it just adds on a different jail mechanism, more like virtualization. Like the next level up from what people use for chroots more often (other than rescuing things that is). It has nothing to do with your issue, it's just that I like rubbing our better stuff in your face


:| Well, Funtoo seems pretty cool, also has stuff for x86_64 intel i seriesss and stuff, sub thingies... seems really cool!


----------



## TwinQY

The cflag presets for architectures are pretty pointless unless you're cross-compiling across machines, just use march=native - it's more optimized (not that it matters). 
  
 Not that it matters. The bigger benefits to compiling is for getting rid of or enabling features that usually don't get compiled into stock binaries. Optimizing things stopped mattering a long time ago. And you're more prone to break things with esoteric cflags.
  
 Or if you're referencing to something else, they use the stock kernel and stock gcc.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

:| I don't understand any of this... Anywho, what do you think of e17?


----------



## TwinQY

To put it simply - don't screw around with cflags too much.
  
 E17 is nice. Visually it's super customizable. Which is good because the default shape of the buttons is a bit weird for me. But you can change that. I've not played around with it much as every time I do I get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I can change. It can be as simple or as garish as you wish.
 The FiiO E17 is also nice.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

Funtoo didn't like all my uefi bios shizz, so I went with the triedp and true, arch!


----------



## duncan1

Due to problems with Microsoft I have installed a new version of Linux. This is the portable version VERY easy to install/use as you keep it on a memory stick.for those worried about 2 systems working on 1 PC. Its called -Linux Live usb Creator 2.8.23. Official site= www.linuxliveusb.com


----------



## TwinQY

To make it easy on the UEFI, GRUB2 has its problems, but is easier to update than rEFInd.
  
 Linux Live is great. Very easy to use. Unetbootin doesn't work as well on Windows anymore - even worse on Linux as it hasn't been updated for quite some time and hasn't kept up with polkit. So there's a lot of breakage there.


----------



## TwinQY

So I updated my kernel to 3.11 yesterday. Seemed fine at first, until...
  
 Kernel panic, apparently garbage within the initramfs (yes I still use an initrd). I wondered why. Then I realized that I enabled lz4 compression in the config as it had just come out in 3.11. Which was not the problem in this case - the problem was that I enabled lz4 in the mkinitcpio options as well. Went back to lzop and all is fine. No wonder it worked fine on the other distros!
  
 More good news - the LED hardware display for wifi is working fine for the default Broadcom driver now. Rfkill is working well with it apparently. Bad news, the proprietary 6.2 blob isn't working anymore - though that hardly matters as the default built-in driver is so much easier to work with.
  
 And just found this -  https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/plume-creator/ 
 Looks useful. Does Rich Text so you could do offline H-F posts/reviews with it as well. I might just stick to vim and bbcode but for the uninitated and preoccupied, this is great.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

my Linux is really screwy... I could originally get mint to work. then had a screwed up funtoo install UEFI error... installed arch but I couldn't get Haskell configured and drivers were screwy, so I gotr manjaro, but it'd only boot into the grub editor, even after 3 different installs... and now mint won't install right...


----------



## TwinQY

If you can't get UEFI than screw it I say. Just do legacy. It's a hassle on Windows as well, and heck that's what it was meant for in the first place.
  
 Drivers? I hope you mean the kernel drivers and you're not doing anything weird like ndsiwrapper + windoze wireless drivers. I've never seen anyone have trouble with modern hardware and the stock vanilla configured kernel. In fact just last week I set up a Haswell UEFI build on a custom rig for someone. Perhaps you need to dig in and compile the options in on your own. Since you were going on Funtoo you'd have to do it anyways.
  
 Sounds like you've been badly misguided by some unhelpfuls rather than anything else, really. Who's teaching you this crap? 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





 Let's blame it on them.
  
 Manjaro...I'm sure you've read this - http://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/yj2v5/a_new_guibased_version_of_arch_has_gone_live/


----------



## proton007

gopanthersgo1 said:


> my Linux is really screwy... I could originally get mint to work. then had a screwed up funtoo install UEFI error... installed arch but I couldn't get Haskell configured and drivers were screwy, so I gotr manjaro, but it'd only boot into the grub editor, even after 3 different installs... and now mint won't install right...


 
  
 UEFI is very tightly coupled with the booting process now (it recognizes the OSs), unlike the BIOS which only looked for a device to boot from. If you've made changes during those previous installs, its possible the entries in the UEFI-Bios have been changed. Remove any boot entries in the UEFI-BIOS, and try again.
  
 I remember once the entry is written to the 2MB UEFI Partition, my UEFI-BIOS couldn't remove them. So I ended up using a command line utility to manually enter the entries. However, its possible newer releases fix this issue.


----------



## HPuser9083

gopanthersgo1 said:


> my Linux is really screwy... I could originally get mint to work. then had a screwed up funtoo install UEFI error... installed arch but I couldn't get Haskell configured and drivers were screwy, so I gotr manjaro, but it'd only boot into the grub editor, even after 3 different installs... and now mint won't install right...


 
  
 I have Manjaro set up in VirtualBox, actually, it's pretty nice, however I prefer Archbang, which I use as my main OS, mainly for being a quick and painless way to an Arch install. May be easy to install and may already come set up with a GUI, but as far as repos are concerned, it's vanilla Arch.
  
 Tried Bridge in Vbox, no luck, kernel didn't get installed right. I also got Fedora 20 Alpha RC4 and Debian Sid VMs as well, both are really sweet, and I ran Fedora on my hardware for a few months before going to Archbang, and then Ubuntu for six months before that. Considered going to Sid a couple times while I was still in limbo as far as switching distros goes, and then I finally switched to Archbang a few weeks ago, and I'm definitely sticking with that.
  
 Of course I have a 7-yr-old HP that uses BIOS so -shrug-


----------



## gopanthersgo1

I've been running manjaro lately and I'm really liking it!


----------



## gikigill

Currently running Kubuntu 13.04 and moving to Debian tomorrow.


----------



## TwinQY

Sid or Stable?
 Anyone actually bother to use Plymouth on an install without Plymouth pre-installed?
 Textmate colors for Vim - https://github.com/tomasr/molokai
 Cool beans (there's also a Coolbeans colorscheme floating around)


----------



## TwinQY

st has spacings for UTF-8 characters done right now.
 This:

 As opposed to the mess that is this -


----------



## TwinQY

Three cool things I learned today.
 - dwb acclerates scrolling as time goes on. Very nifty.
 - ranger has pdf preview working, out of the blue, after hours in the past trying to find out why it_ didn't _work. w3m you are a female dog.
 - New Chromium (sort of) fixes the clipboard problems I had with loliclip.
  
 Also I've been playing around with Chromium Embedded, getting some vi-browser shindig going over that. It's a bit out of my scope and time though, due to the sheer size of the damned thing. It's promsing yet infuriating, all at the same time.


----------



## TwinQY

http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Build_LXDE-Qt_From_Source
  
 Guess what I'm spending my weekend doing.
  
 At liblxqt stage, I keep on redirecting ld to the proper libqtxdg but to no avail. Well 3 minutes in so I'm not exactly complaining.


----------



## TwinQY

To make people's lives easier - PKGBUILDs for lxqt - 
  
- https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/liblxqt-git/
 - etc


----------



## gikigill

Great job TwinQY


----------



## TwinQY

Oh, I didn't write those PKGBUILDs. I had to build it all from scratch like a sucker before I could even think of writing PKGBUILDs for them.
  
 Now that I'm done building I shall document my procedure with some of my own PKGBUILDs, as per usual.


----------



## suicidal_orange

I don't know why but I can't seem to keep a Linux install running for any length of time lately.  I had a Gentoo install for a couple of years at uni but since then I can't get it to compile far enough to attempt a boot.  Instead I'm lucky to get six months out of a standard distro - this year I've tried Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora and am currently getting frustrated at Mint Debian, which has crippled Cinnamon with it's latest update, and doesn't even have a working terminal under E17 while gnome-legacy tries to open folders using Audacious (a music player...)
  
 It's the weekend so time for a reinstall - I effective have a blank system that can run anything (i7, 240gb SSD and 16gb RAM), what should I try that might actually work for a while?  I'm traditionally a Gnome user so GTK+ based would be nice.


----------



## proton007

suicidal_orange said:


> I don't know why but I can't seem to keep a Linux install running for any length of time lately.  I had a Gentoo install for a couple of years at uni but since then I can't get it to compile far enough to attempt a boot.  Instead I'm lucky to get six months out of a standard distro - this year I've tried Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora and am currently getting frustrated at Mint Debian, which has crippled Cinnamon with it's latest update, and doesn't even have a working terminal under E17 while gnome-legacy tries to open folders using Audacious (a music player...)
> 
> It's the weekend so time for a reinstall - I effective have a blank system that can run anything (i7, 240gb SSD and 16gb RAM), what should I try that might actually work for a while?  I'm traditionally a Gnome user so GTK+ based would be nice.




It happens. Distro hopping is fairly common when you're searching for that perfect desktop. I tried different distros for varying length of time before settling on Archlinux.


----------



## suicidal_orange

proton007 said:


> It happens. Distro hopping is fairly common when you're searching for that perfect desktop. I tried different distros for varying length of time before settling on Archlinux.


 

 Thing is they're all the same at the core - I have a home partition that I've kept throughout my hopping so I don't even see the default desktop config and theme as chosen by the distro once I get Cinnamon installed.  The only other issue I've come across is my USB3 memory card reader which I had resigned to never working in Linux, but in Mint Debian it does so I don't want to go backwards on that one.  That's why I've suffered a couple of weeks of virtual unusability...  Instead I've used my netbook more (lubuntu) but I just updated that to 13.10 and now that card reader has stopped working too!  It's sad really, I could use Linux more reliably 12 years ago when it wasn't friendly; I was running Slackware before Gentoo.
  
 I'll give Arch a go, it has cinnamon in the community repository so should be easy enough to get that installed.  Hopefully it has a live cd so I can test the card reader


----------



## TwinQY

suicidal_orange said:


> I don't know why but I can't seem to keep a Linux install running for any length of time lately.  I had a Gentoo install for a couple of years at uni but since then I can't get it to compile far enough to attempt a boot.  Instead I'm lucky to get six months out of a standard distro - this year I've tried Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora and am currently getting frustrated at Mint Debian, which has crippled Cinnamon with it's latest update, and doesn't even have a working terminal under E17 while gnome-legacy tries to open folders using Audacious (a music player...)
> 
> It's the weekend so time for a reinstall - I effective have a blank system that can run anything (i7, 240gb SSD and 16gb RAM), what should I try that might actually work for a while?  I'm traditionally a Gnome user so GTK+ based would be nice.


 
 Seems like it's not the hardware. Sometimes it's just luck - you're at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong slough of updates. Sometimes it's bad user habits...it's not bad user habits right? You're not enabling strange things, repos, updating infrequently? Probably not, you seem to know what you're doing.
  
 That being said, something like CentOS can be a last resort. Hiccups to set up from scratch sometimes, but. from anecdotal experience, only VM I have on me that has not required troubleshooting or extra maintenance the whole year, updates and all. Using frozen stuff might can seem out of place on a daily desktop, and you might come across some software that requires newer libs, but take for example FF24 - using it with no problems on that front, so it varies from case to case.
  
 If you're not privy to something that extreme, a solution would be to simply not play around with the rig. That might mean diligence, and not updating until the very last minute if it's a major component, until you've read some user experiences on the matter.
  
 And something that doesn't exactly fit your situation because you seem to be facing a major issue, but might be still relevant otherwise. That maintaining a system in this day and age might seem annoying, but think of it this way; it is only because we pay a given amount of attention to the system, that we notice the bugs. That attention usually stems from fiddling with things you care about. And if you care about it, perhaps you _should_ be maintaining it after all. Because otherwise you wouldn't notice at all, really. I cared little about the Arch install on this laptop for a whole year. There was no glaring issues, until I finally got an itch to try out different things. Then I uncovered a huge load of cruft underneath. But it had _worked_ fine from a daily usage perspective. Who can imagine what grows underneath my W7 install that managed to blow up on itself not so long ago? Well, I've never paid enough attention, nor would I be able to. _W__e,_ as OC users, only notice because we care.


----------



## TwinQY

suicidal_orange said:


> Thing is they're all the same at the core - I have a home partition that I've kept throughout my hopping so I don't even see the default desktop config and theme as chosen by the distro once I get Cinnamon installed.  The only other issue I've come across is my USB3 memory card reader which I had resigned to never working in Linux, but in Mint Debian it does so I don't want to go backwards on that one.  That's why I've suffered a couple of weeks of virtual unusability...  Instead I've used my netbook more (lubuntu) but I just updated that to 13.10 and now that card reader has stopped working too!  It's sad really, I could use Linux more reliably 12 years ago when it wasn't friendly; I was running Slackware before Gentoo.
> 
> I'll give Arch a go, it has cinnamon in the community repository so should be easy enough to get that installed.  Hopefully it has a live cd so I can test the card reader


 
 If you're having troubles with DEs, and you're using the same /home, there's bound to be messups when you're making them use the same user configs.
  
 What's wrong specifically with the card reader?


----------



## suicidal_orange

Thanks for your thoughts TwinQY.  I only enable third party sources (by whatever name) when needed - Fedora doesn't have Cinnamon at all, for example, and E17 is often missing too.  If I've chosen to use a distro I avoid compiling anything that's important and that goes for the kernel too.
  
 Quote:


twinqy said:


> If you're having troubles with DEs, and you're using the same /home, there's bound to be messups when you're making them use the same user configs.
> 
> What's wrong specifically with the card reader?


 
  
 That's the whole point of having a separate home partition, it's the best thing about Linux!  You can keep bookmarks in firefox and nemo/nautilus, .abcde.conf so ripping a CD is effortless, toolbox arrangements and tablet setting in gimp... As long as you're not trying to use the config from an older or newer major version (2.x config on 3.x software) it should work, if you keep everything reasonably up to date and are aware of major updates.  Anyway my config worked fine all year (through Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora and on to Mint), then Mint updated and now it doesn't - it's a Mint problem.
  
 The card readers both either work or don't even show up in lsusb; in the case of my desktop the USB3 ports built in to the same unit work but the card slots next to them are dead.  I tried building a custom kernel enabling everything that looks remotely relevant, but no joy - it must need some obscure module.  If Mint didn't use so many modules (a necessary evil to get it to work with everything) I might be able to pinpoint which but it's working so I haven't needed to work it out.  The netbook will need some investigating...
  
 I am pleased to report that the card reader works on the arch install CD, which has not greeted me with an installer - guess I'll have to read some instructions!
  
*EDIT: *Arch is installed and boots, I have the static IP address I requested and it knows that it's supposed to use my router as the gateway, but it wont even ping the router 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




  And yes, I've checked the cable 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 
  
*EDIT 2: *Got a new router not long ago, it uses a weird IP...


----------



## gopanthersgo1

suicidal_orange said:


> That's the whole point of having a separate home partition, it's the best thing about Linux!  You can keep bookmarks in firefox and nemo/nautilus, .abcde.conf so ripping a CD is effortless, toolbox arrangements and tablet setting in gimp... As long as you're not trying to use the config from an older or newer major version (2.x config on 3.x software) it should work, if you keep everything reasonably up to date and are aware of major updates.  Anyway my config worked fine all year (through Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora and on to Mint), then Mint updated and now it doesn't - it's a Mint problem.
> 
> The card readers both either work or don't even show up in lsusb; in the case of my desktop the USB3 ports built in to the same unit work but the card slots next to them are dead.  I tried building a custom kernel enabling everything that looks remotely relevant, but no joy - it must need some obscure module.  If Mint didn't use so many modules (a necessary evil to get it to work with everything) I might be able to pinpoint which but it's working so I haven't needed to work it out.  The netbook will need some investigating...
> 
> ...


Um, wouldn't it be easiest to just buy a new card reader? I can see how it's frustrating and stuff though... Also +1 to the Arch suggestion, I've been using an Arch based distro called Manjaro for a while now, and it's been great!


----------



## proton007

suicidal_orange said:


> That's the whole point of having a separate home partition, it's the best thing about Linux!  You can keep bookmarks in firefox and nemo/nautilus, .abcde.conf so ripping a CD is effortless, toolbox arrangements and tablet setting in gimp... As long as you're not trying to use the config from an older or newer major version (2.x config on 3.x software) it should work, if you keep everything reasonably up to date and are aware of major updates.  Anyway my config worked fine all year (through Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora and on to Mint), then Mint updated and now it doesn't - it's a Mint problem.
> 
> The card readers both either work or don't even show up in lsusb; in the case of my desktop the USB3 ports built in to the same unit work but the card slots next to them are dead.  I tried building a custom kernel enabling everything that looks remotely relevant, but no joy - it must need some obscure module.  If Mint didn't use so many modules (a necessary evil to get it to work with everything) I might be able to pinpoint which but it's working so I haven't needed to work it out.  The netbook will need some investigating...
> 
> ...


 
  
 I don't see why you'd need static ip. As long as you're physically connected to the router, just using DHCP should acquire an address automatically.


----------



## TwinQY

suicidal_orange said:


> That's the whole point of having a separate home partition, it's the best thing about Linux!  You can keep bookmarks in firefox and nemo/nautilus, .abcde.conf so ripping a CD is effortless, toolbox arrangements and tablet setting in gimp... As long as you're not trying to use the config from an older or newer major version (2.x config on 3.x software) it should work, if you keep everything reasonably up to date and are aware of major updates.  Anyway my config worked fine all year (through Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora and on to Mint), then Mint updated and now it doesn't - it's a Mint problem.
> 
> The card readers both either work or don't even show up in lsusb; in the case of my desktop the USB3 ports built in to the same unit work but the card slots next to them are dead.  I tried building a custom kernel enabling everything that looks remotely relevant, but no joy - it must need some obscure module.  If Mint didn't use so many modules (a necessary evil to get it to work with everything) I might be able to pinpoint which but it's working so I haven't needed to work it out.  The netbook will need some investigating...
> 
> ...


 
 I have had awful hiccups with things like the .mpd configs jumping from rolling to frozen distros, most .config things, because say, the Debian packages is vastly different. rtorrent is a huge culprit when it comes to this, no configs will remain consistent because they're all. It's just an administrative nightmare that works when you have luck on your side, and git works much better for this because it can be selective. 
  
 What's the make of the reader? I get where you're coming from, they removed a lot of laptop extras a few kernel releases back, can't get this Panasonic's volume control working like it used to.
  
 Arch has gone chroot + bootstrap, with systemd it's a simple system-nspawn once you have the partitions set up and mounted, plus pacstrap, what have you. It's great because I can just do one big ugly command and have everything done in 5-10 minutes and worry about locales, arbitary configuring, later - with the menus I feel obligated to check everything off. 
  
 Well there you go


----------



## joketamili

i think so,I was very impressed. It even had the snap to side screen window thingy that 7 has!  thank you


----------



## suicidal_orange

proton007 said:


> I don't see why you'd need static ip. As long as you're physically connected to the router, just using DHCP should acquire an address automatically.


 
 It's easier to do file sharing with windows without having to set it up properly (type in IP); haven't actually done this for years but it's not something that causes any problems so I've stuck with it.  Arch had no problem with it, I just don't know my own setup 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



  


twinqy said:


> I have had awful hiccups with things like the .mpd configs jumping from rolling to frozen distros, most .config things, because say, the Debian packages is vastly different. rtorrent is a huge culprit when it comes to this, no configs will remain consistent because they're all. It's just an administrative nightmare that works when you have luck on your side, and git works much better for this because it can be selective.
> 
> What's the make of the reader? I get where you're coming from, they removed a lot of laptop extras a few kernel releases back, can't get this Panasonic's volume control working like it used to.
> 
> ...


 
 I'll remember that, mpd has many compile time options so it makes sense.  Surely it's config would be held in /etc not /home though as it's a deamon? 
  
 The card reader is made ba Akasa, it's a nice one that fits in a 3.5" bay and does pretty much everything memory card wise. Searching for the USB ID (I doubt they made the controller) got me nowhere.  I could understand if it showed up in lsusb but didn't work, but it somehow completely disappears!
  
 Arch is certainly different - I've never used system-nspawn before, seems simple enough although have to remember new commands.  My only issue now is Cinnamon - it starts but as soon as I do anything (click the menu, right click or hover over something and get a tooltip) it freezes.  Maybe I shouldn't have added it to the bootstrap command...


----------



## TwinQY

suicidal_orange said:


> I'll remember that, mpd has many compile time options so it makes sense.  Surely it's config would be held in /etc not /home though as it's a deamon?
> 
> The card reader is made ba Akasa, it's a nice one that fits in a 3.5" bay and does pretty much everything memory card wise. Searching for the USB ID (I doubt they made the controller) got me nowhere.  I could understand if it showed up in lsusb but didn't work, but it somehow completely disappears!
> 
> Arch is certainly different - I've never used system-nspawn before, seems simple enough although have to remember new commands.  My only issue now is Cinnamon - it starts but as soon as I do anything (click the menu, right click or hover over something and get a tooltip) it freezes.  Maybe I shouldn't have added it to the bootstrap command...


 
 It can also be a user daemon (systemd), but nonetheless, yes it can have user-by-user configs. People usually use it that way.
  
 Fair enough. Akasa stuff shows up as Atico, usually. Is it the AK-ICR-17? I dug around the usb.ids for anything that might have looked similar, didn't help.
  
 I had never heard of it either until it had been updated onto the installer guide a while back. Using 2D (software rendering) or hardware rendering (in which case, hope you have acceleration enabled properly)? How did you set it up specifically, I'll try and replicate it in a VM.


----------



## suicidal_orange

twinqy said:


> It can also be a user daemon (systemd), but nonetheless, yes it can have user-by-user configs. People usually use it that way.
> 
> Fair enough. Akasa stuff shows up as Atico, usually. Is it the AK-ICR-17? I dug around the usb.ids for anything that might have looked similar, didn't help.
> 
> I had never heard of it either until it had been updated onto the installer guide a while back. Using 2D (software rendering) or hardware rendering (in which case, hope you have acceleration enabled properly)? How did you set it up specifically, I'll try and replicate it in a VM.


 

 Oh right.  Mine is a single user system so it doesn't make much difference, but I guess it would suck to have someone else's library merged with yours on a shared computer.  I used mpd at uni to stream the same playlist round our shared house but that was many years ago, no need for it now.
  
 I think that's the right card reader, the pic on Amazon looks the same.  It shows up as either Alcor Micro Corp USB hub 058f:6254 or Genesys Logic, Inc 05e3:0732 (it has USB 2 and 3 connections so not sure which is failing)  It probably just got added to a recent kernel as I had Mint for the last three months and the Arch CD is even newer so hopefully my problems are a thing of the past.
  
 I'm using integrated Intel graphics and glxinfo says "direct rendering: yes", is that still enough to say 3D works?  I haven't tried to do anything 3D lately to know, but everything runs smoothly and Enlightenment is happy to do compositing.  Oh and the Cinnamon2d session does the same as the regular one so that rules that out. The only X config I added was the dimensions of my monitor to ensure the DPI is calculated correctly, so that won't have broken anything. 
  
 To install I did the standard base install then repeated the command to install cinnamon, audacious and audacity before thinking it would be better to check it actually booted before installing everything.  Perhaps when it said "you can add apps to the command" it really meant it and the command should only be ran once?  It didn't complain...  Not sure a VM will use the intel driver but other than that it should be easy enough to replicate - thanks for the offer.
  
 I should also add that I've tried it without my old config and it does exactly the same, so that's definitely not the issue either.  At this point a reinstall is looking like a good option, but I might get the hang of aur and try some of the experimental desktops first, then I can start again knowing which I want to actually use.


----------



## TwinQY

suicidal_orange said:


> Oh right.  Mine is a single user system so it doesn't make much difference, but I guess it would suck to have someone else's library merged with yours on a shared computer.  I used mpd at uni to stream the same playlist round our shared house but that was many years ago, no need for it now.
> 
> I think that's the right card reader, the pic on Amazon looks the same.  It shows up as either Alcor Micro Corp USB hub 058f:6254 or Genesys Logic, Inc 05e3:0732 (it has USB 2 and 3 connections so not sure which is failing)  It probably just got added to a recent kernel as I had Mint for the last three months and the Arch CD is even newer so hopefully my problems are a thing of the past.
> 
> ...


 
 It's also heck of a lot easier to edit since no root write privileges needed.
  
 I think 3.10 or 11 had some significant xhci (USB 3.0) stuff added, that would explain that.
  
 It's not the intel driver methinks - I'm getting something similar on VirtualBox. Will try to debug and get back to you.


----------



## suicidal_orange

twinqy said:


> It's also heck of a lot easier to edit since no root write privileges needed.
> 
> I think 3.10 or 11 had some significant xhci (USB 3.0) stuff added, that would explain that.
> 
> It's not the intel driver methinks - I'm getting something similar on VirtualBox. Will try to debug and get back to you.


 

 Great (because it's not me) but not so great (because I'd like it to just work!)  I really should get back into Linux and learn to debug rather than being a "user" and running away...


----------



## proton007

suicidal_orange said:


> Great (because it's not me) but not so great (because I'd like it to just work!)  I really should get back into Linux and learn to debug rather than being a "user" and running away...


 
  
 Does the module show up under dmesg?


----------



## TwinQY

I just saw that Cinnamon got package upgrades - not sure if anything's changed on the freezing part (still think it's graphics-related, not the driver but perhaps mesa - I used a package with most if not everything apart from the swrast there disabled to get rid of the Wayland and llvm dependency, I'll try going back to stock), but I'll leave it to update overnight, probably won't do much.


----------



## Silent One

Prediction:
  
 On 31 October, there will appear a BIG Fat Moon, and in the darkest hour 'Silent One' will become the world's most proficient
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 Linux user... _ever._ Lasting a mere 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 30 minutes. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



  
 With reality looming, 'SO' is prepared to start from scratch 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




under the guidance of this thread.


----------



## TwinQY

Would you be using Lunar Linux then?
  
 If so, then you'd definitely rank in the world's top five...


----------



## Silent One

twinqy said:


> Would you be using Lunar Linux then?
> 
> If so, then you'd definitely rank in the world's top five...


 
  






 I only learned of it with your mention. So, what is this group claiming... 33% more what, exactly? Have you checked 'em out? Like 'em?


----------



## TwinQY

So it's an offshoot of Sorcerer Linux, back in the day that was a really novel source-based distro, think they're still around. 
  
 In Lunar, modules are "ebuilds" in a sense, and the moonbase is similar to the portage tree. It's just a different approach to source distros, so rather than political differences, it all has to do with implementation.
  
 It's alright. I still use Exherbo because it walks that fine line between the holistic approach like Gentoo, and the granular, but down-to-earth simpleness of Crux/Lunar.


----------



## Silent One

I am green, lacking all kinds of keyboard wizardry. Have no idea which one to jump in to for general computing. Previously, I only played around with a half dozen distros to check out music players/servers.
  
 A lot that stuff was pre-packaged and had almost a Win7 feel to it. So, I didn't worry about what I didn't know. 
  
 Well...
  
 ...until I met my supercharged linux using members here. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 Now I wanna be startin' somethin' and learnin'!


----------



## TwinQY

When in doubt - something like a Debian/CentOS base would be a nice start. Lots of support, transparent enough that you can get down and dirty if you wish, but you can choose to avoid the complexity as well. Of course YMMV, this is just what I've noticed from other people's experiences with their first serious-usage distros.
  
 Of course, nothing wrong with a little Xubuntu. I'd start from scratch and do a minimal network install myself, a fantastic setup.


----------



## Silent One

I still have Xubuntu and a few others cluttering up my HDD along side Win7. Thinking about a clean re-install of Win7 and Linux...


----------



## TwinQY

Forgive my particularly short memory span - what had been the turning point with Xubuntu again? It's Gnome-y but it's not _that _bad.


----------



## proton007

silent one said:


> I still have Xubuntu and a few others cluttering up my HDD along side Win7. Thinking about a clean re-install of Win7 and Linux...



For a relatively painless system an Ubuntu-flavor or Mint would do great.
Others have a learning curve.


----------



## Silent One

proton007 said:


> For a relatively painless system an Ubuntu-flavor or Mint would do great.
> Others have a learning curve.


 
  
 I have Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu and another one (can't remember the name) on the HDD and Mint installed on a SDCard. All the installing, un-installing, re-installing kinda mucked things up a bit. Have not used any of 'em in about 18 months.
  
_A new start in November..._


----------



## suicidal_orange

Yeah you definitely need a fresh start - you'd have to upgrade to every new version since you used it (around every April and October) which would take longer than downloading and installing the latest version.
  
 If you've tried all the *ubuntu-s why not try another distro for a change?  Fedora and Suse also have very friendly installers so should install without issue.  Though if you really want to understand Linux Arch would be a good option as it forces you to manually run commands to enable things and edit config files, but doesn't take hours to install like Gentoo or Lunar.  Just don't install the Cinnamon desktop!


----------



## TwinQY

I've subscribed to the belief that most network minimal installs for any distro will force you onto manual configuration, although I realize that there's a mythos attached to Arch and it's why people argue for the appeal.
  
 Hey, I've got stage3 installs down under 40 minutes as a habit, usually. Just mess around with the kernel after the install, meanwhile enable everything under the sun, cuts down on config time.
 Actually for whatever reason, file transfer while boostrapping with Arch took longer on the Lifebook than a full-on install of Exherbo (since it DLs the system tarball), now those are sad USB transfer speeds o.o Would have network installed with Arch but the Atheros wireless card (and I do mean actual _card_ that's how old this thing is) would not start while it worked aces on Exherbo hmm.


----------



## Silent One

Interesting... will have a look!


----------



## suicidal_orange

twinqy said:


> I've subscribed to the belief that most network minimal installs for any distro will force you onto manual configuration, although I realize that there's a mythos attached to Arch and it's why people argue for the appeal.
> 
> Hey, I've got stage3 installs down under 40 minutes as a habit, usually. Just mess around with the kernel after the install, meanwhile enable everything under the sun, cuts down on config time.
> Actually for whatever reason, file transfer while boostrapping with Arch took longer on the Lifebook than a full-on install of Exherbo (since it DLs the system tarball), now those are sad USB transfer speeds o.o Would have network installed with Arch but the Atheros wireless card (and I do mean actual _card_ that's how old this thing is) would not start while it worked aces on Exherbo hmm.


 
 I'm not attached to Arch at all but damn near all the other package based distros (Slackware excluded) seem to be aiming for "user friendliness" these days, so the Arch install was refreshing.
  
 Exherbo is a strange one - it's not even on distrowatch!  Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places which is why I'm not finding what I want.  Will have to give it a go over the weekend


----------



## TwinQY

Debian just gave me a "noob" slap in the face for doing something too noob-like - I think the underlyings are alive and well, minimal network installs usually get rid of the gaudy trappings.
 At least those usual bootstrap-installers are simple to get the hang of - stuff like FreeBSD, or ultra-convoluted bootstraps like Bedrock and Aboriginal, those got on my nerves last week, and all I wanted to do was install the former to ZFS...
  
 They're against propagating their existence, it made a huge stink a while back, as well as them leaving Gentoo land in bad taste. Not to mention they're in a constant state of development. If you do decide to install, keep in mind that there's little to no documentation (they're working on that, but the original intent was against documentation because they wanted you to talk it out with them and help develop). So why go Exherbo? Paludis and its build system is nicely integrated, a lot of the base system started from a blank plate, their ebuilds are...well...Anyways, it's there, it's fun to try, I kept to it, you might not, who knows.
  
 Right now, I'm waiting for Alpine to fully move onto musl, playing around with Bedrock since Sabotage insists on not working.


----------



## proton007

Arch *used to* be easier for beginners to pick up. But the recent changes have pushed it into the harder category.  Still, its not very difficult. The most confusing part was UEFI. A successful install doesn't guarantee the system will boot, because there are boot settings to change in UEFI.
  
 The best I've found so far in terms of learning is LFS, but it needs a lot of time and reading. A faster machine helps A LOT. You'll get some gray hair but lots of knowledge.
  
 For a completely different experience, Elementary OS is also one of the options. Looks very clean and minimalist.
  
 Maybe some day I'll give FreeBSD a try.


----------



## suicidal_orange

twinqy said:


> Debian just gave me a "noob" slap in the face for doing something too noob-like - I think the underlyings are alive and well, minimal network installs usually get rid of the gaudy trappings.
> At least those usual bootstrap-installers are simple to get the hang of - stuff like FreeBSD, or ultra-convoluted bootstraps like Bedrock and Aboriginal, those got on my nerves last week, and all I wanted to do was install the former to ZFS...
> 
> They're against propagating their existence, it made a huge stink a while back, as well as them leaving Gentoo land in bad taste. Not to mention they're in a constant state of development. If you do decide to install, keep in mind that there's little to no documentation (they're working on that, but the original intent was against documentation because they wanted you to talk it out with them and help develop). So why go Exherbo? Paludis and its build system is nicely integrated, a lot of the base system started from a blank plate, their ebuilds are...well...Anyways, it's there, it's fun to try, I kept to it, you might not, who knows.
> ...


 

 There are so many things in this post that I have no idea what they are... I feel like a newbie despite using Linux almost exclusively at home for 10 years 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





 
  
 I have nothing against "guady trappings" or "user friendliness" but when you have to create a config file to add a working Windows boot entry because the real config file gets regenerated everytime you update the kernel, and the friendly autoprober generates an invalid entry, I can't help thinking something's gone wrong.  What's wrong with "kernel" and "kernel.old" symlinks and a static boot config?  At the same time you get an ever growing collection of kernels on the system - are the newbies supposed to know they have to manually remove them?  Then again maybe it's in the instructions, which I skipped... To me that seems like one of the more obvious things to automate, maybe keeping the newest 3 to ensure one will boot.
  
 So are you going to get ostracised for advertising Exherbo or do they want more user/developers?  It's an interesting marketing strategy - everyone wants what they aren't allowed! Their installation instructions are strange though.  "We won't tell you how to do it, but please use this live CD with the alternate kernel else it wont work" - my first suggestion to them is to say what feature specifically is needed in the kernel - you can theoretically chroot from any system but does *this one* have a suitable kernel?
  
 Having worked out that Arch didn't want to boot because I unplugged a USB stick (damn you UEFI!) I just updated everything, but cinnamon still crashes.  I'm going to play with aur and see if that will yield a better desktop, if not I'll probably give Exherbo a try over the weekend.
  
 Edit: cinnamon now works.  Last thing I installed was gnome-menus2 from aur - do you still have your VM to test if it's all that's needed ?  Makes sense that it would crash trying to open the menu at least...


----------



## DefQon

FreeBSD is the best unix around.


----------



## Silent One

What you like about it?


----------



## TwinQY

Plan 9 is the best Unix around, because it's not Unix.
  


suicidal_orange said:


> There are so many things in this post that I have no idea what they are... I feel like a newbie despite using Linux almost exclusively at home for 10 years
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
 Ah, making fun of me for not bothering to organize my stream-of-conscience...
  
 If it's at all possible - I'd simply not go with GRUB. Having said that, I'm using GRUB on the desktop because rEFInd is not working as well as I'd want.
 I thought there was a metapackage that purges it all automatically, not the default one, perhaps I have it confused with something else.
  
 It's fallen out of sight to the point where I don't think people would care anymore. I mean it's not like they withheld the source or anything, it's just one of those extremely-tightknit-focused projects that doesn't anticipate much userbase expansion like plenty of other projects so they don't really bother setting that end up. I think part of it was just that when it hit the media, people couldn't grasp the change in paradigm because they've never been exposed to the little projects like this, they never realized how commonplace it had been.
  
 Yeah, like I said, a lot of it is just talking to themselves and expecting nothing else beyond that, despite having a public website. I ended up working through most things by bumping in the dark, by myself.
  
 Don't expect much polish or stability, it's just...well, it's just a thing to experiment with. Sometimes it's viable, but I'd never recommend it for serious long-term usage off the bat, unless you've gotten yourself into it already.
  
 I'll try, it's all snapshoted, so...


----------



## TwinQY

silent one said:


> What you like about it?


 
 I've been primarily a FreeBSD user for years now (the Linux stuff is just side-stuff, believe it or not), and even I wouldn't be confident enough to make that statement.


----------



## DefQon

silent one said:


> What you like about it?


 
 Best unix platform for networking (which Linux is based off Unix and Unix has always been a network oriented environment platform since the 60's from AT&T). Difficult learning curve for some, but once you untap it's power there are lot more things to do than what Linux distro's offer. I'd rate RedHat a close second. I'm a network oriented person so your views can vary with mine.


----------



## TwinQY

I'd get if one would like the distribution methods, the sanier userland - but the kernel is just not as flexible and that's where it matters more to me when I do embedded stuff. Then again, I replace the utils with OpenBSD/stools, so that says something....
  
 That being said, again, Plan 9 outdoes the network part conceptually, handily. It's just never going to be practical.
  
 That being said, the BSDs are really meant to be an OS, from top to bottom. Silent, if you're interested, PC-BSD is like the Ubuntu to that Debian, very easy to start off with, and you'll still get to play with the things I think you had wanted to on a conceptual level.


----------



## DefQon

If you can get an OpenLDAP server side with client authentication setup on FreeBSD with automated batch process of creating Home directories for each new user linking it to Samba and cross-multiplatform the access to other OS's, then anything else in FreeBSD will be a simple task.


----------



## Silent One




----------



## Silent One

I just search "FreeBSD" and the results came back with a fellow looking to poke someone in the behind.


----------



## nick n

I use the exact same decal on my Koss Red Devil ortho mod custom badges. Excellent find, _that is a sign_ it is top notch, I mean the OS not the headphones, I already know they kick everythings butt..


----------



## Silent One

Great! November is the perfect time to harvest food, football and more knowledge. Will start skimming reading up on FreeBSD this month. The perfect complement to Egg Nog & Sweet Potato Pie!


----------



## DefQon

silent one said:


> I just search "FreeBSD" and the results came back with a fellow looking to poke someone in the behind.


 
 I prefer this one


----------



## DefQon

silent one said:


> Great! November is the perfect time to harvest food, football and more knowledge. Will start skimming reading up on FreeBSD this month. The perfect complement to Egg Nog & Sweet Potato Pie!


 
 Start with the man <function> command for whatever you want to look up on. No need for books, every command that outlines a particular functions has it's own manual.


----------



## DefQon

silent one said:


>


 
 Can't tell if serious.


----------



## DefQon

nick n said:


> I use the exact same decal on my Koss Red Devil ortho mod custom badges. Excellent find, _that is a sign_ it is top notch, I mean the OS not the headphones, I already know they kick everythings butt..


 
 Go FreeBSD or go home. Someone should consolidate my posts into one thing, I can't edit posts.


----------



## Silent One

defqon said:


> silent one said:
> 
> 
> >
> ...


 
 It was more of an acknowledgement... _"Okay, if you say so"_ since I wasn't at all familiar.


----------



## DefQon

silent one said:


> It was more of an acknowledgement... _"Okay, if you say so"_ since I wasn't at all familiar.


 
 Yeah as much AS I hate FreeBSD I can't agree or disagree to myself of liking it for it's versatile usability from a networking approach or a general consumer approach.


----------



## Silent One

What do you hate about it?


----------



## DefQon

silent one said:


> What do you hate about it?


 
  
 1. Obviously Berkeley University and the other arse hats that were involved in the development of Unix have no idea what usability is, I mean imagine using Mac OS X or MS Windows completely relied and based on commands, not a single GUI application to be seen. This includes the web browser.
  
 2. It's a make or break type of OS, if you enter a command especially with port installations and something breaks, be sure to have a snapshot of the virtual machine or backup of the OS to revert to an earlier state, hence either commands make the particular functions work or break the whole thing together.
  
 3. No add/remove program to be seen such as simple uninstallers and delete function in Mac OS X and Windows should a program installation stuff up. If you install a port with a given option to choose extra settings, make config extension sometimes doesn't even work, if you install a port that installs into the same directory as another port particularly a deprecated program or plugin, deinstalling it doesn't work and it will tell you to go erase those installation files one by one, this leads to another problem as you need to change directories for each files location that you want to modify. 
  
 4. Obviously not user friendly, which is why most companies use the GUI version of Red Hat linux.


----------



## Silent One

Doesn't sound very _Disney..._ 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 
  





 I need GUIs, pictures and stories!


----------



## DefQon

silent one said:


> Doesn't sound very _Disney..._
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
 And women too.
  
 Unfortunately FreeBSD ain't no Disney stuff.


----------



## suicidal_orange

silent one said:


> Great! November is the perfect time to harvest food, football and more knowledge. Will start skimming reading up on FreeBSD this month. The perfect complement to Egg Nog & Sweet Potato Pie!


 

 I got as far as "BSD and Linux devs get on so badly neither is willing to write drivers for the other's filesystems" and stopped - all my data is on ext4, there is no way to read it let alone save anything under BSD (or at least this was the case a couple of months back).  They have fuse-ntfs to read/write to NTFS though, so if you're coming from Windows this might not be a deal breaker.
  
 DefQon outlines plenty of things that it doesn't do well too - really doesn't sound a good choice for a newbie.  Interesting "sales pitch" though, I have to respect the honesty!
  
 Anyway I prefer the cold, like this guy


----------



## proton007

When in doubt, do the Penguin.


----------



## DefQon

Yeah Linux ftw, but I like using all OS's, all have there weakness and advantages.


----------



## proton007

Oh no.
 A catalyst update broke my system. Can only login in Failsafe mode.


----------



## DavidJ1973

defqon said:


> Yeah Linux ftw, but I like using all OS's, all have there weakness and advantages.




I feel the same way. This spring I'm also going to make an Ubuntu phone with my aging Motorola RAZR HD. Should be fun.


----------



## suicidal_orange

proton007 said:


> Oh no.
> A catalyst update broke my system. Can only login in Failsafe mode.


 

 Can't you just revert to the old one, whether through package management or manually?


----------



## proton007

suicidal_orange said:


> Can't you just revert to the old one, whether through package management or manually?


 
  
 I'd done a full system upgrade, so dependencies can be an issue. If I try to downgrade catalyst, I'll have to downgrade Xorg, and the Linux kernel as well.
  
 So its a bit of a long process, I'll do it if there's no other option left, but I've posted on the Archlinux forum, maybe there's some solution.
  
 Its working somewhat alright in Failsafe, just that there are no fancy window effects in KDE.


----------



## proton007

UPDATE:
 Great Success!
  
 I saw that I had enabled the wrong repository by mistake. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



 It had installed a beta driver, which obviously wasn't ready yet. A change in the repo name, a few package downgrades and finally the problem is solved.


----------



## frakturfreak

suicidal_orange said:


> So are you going to get ostracised for advertising Exherbo or do they want more user/developers?  It's an interesting marketing strategy - everyone wants what they aren't allowed! Their installation instructions are strange though.  "We won't tell you how to do it, but please use this live CD with the alternate kernel else it wont work" - my first suggestion to them is to say what feature specifically is needed in the kernel - you can theoretically chroot from any system but does *this one* have a suitable kernel?


 
  
  
  
 You can install it with any live CD you want. The install guide is only an example as said at the beginning. The kernel of the live CD’s Linux has to have seccomp support, more especially CONFIG_SECCOMP_FILTER, which is disabled in SystemRescueCD’s standard kernel, or else you’ll hit this error with the current stage.
  
  
 Users/developers (in Exherbo’s philosophy there are no users only developers) are expected to join and help.


----------



## suicidal_orange

frakturfreak said:


> You can install it with any live CD you want. The install guide is only an example as said at the beginning. The kernel of the live CD’s Linux has to have seccomp support, more especially CONFIG_SECCOMP_FILTER, which is disabled in SystemRescueCD’s standard kernel, or else you’ll hit this error with the current stage.
> 
> 
> Users/developers (in Exherbo’s philosophy there are no users only developers) are expected to join and help.


 
 A live CD is the first and easiest thing to change from the install guide - all you need is a running instance of Linux with a suitable kernel...
  


Spoiler: Config check



gunzip /proc/config.gz -c | grep SECCOMP

 CONFIG_HAVE_ARCH_SECCOMP_FILTER=y
 CONFIG_SECCOMP_FILTER=y
 CONFIG_SECCOMP=y


  
 Seems this Arch install will do - thanks for the info 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			




  
 I still have much to read before installing.  It's not my favourite activity but if I can't get through everything before I start I'm clearly not what they're looking for, so I will have to continue my search elsewhere.  That would be my loss from where I'm sitting but without knowing how much needs improving (which is impossible to know without trying it) I can't know if I have enough spare time or ability to dedicate to the cause, if that makes sense.


----------



## frakturfreak

suicidal_orange said:


> I still have much to read before installing.  It's not my favourite activity but if I can't get through everything before I start I'm clearly not what they're looking for, so I will have to continue my search elsewhere.


 
  
  
 You don’t really have to read everything on the site, some information are only relevant if you want to write your own packages and get your repository included in the unofficial repositories.
  
 Make sure to read the latest entries on the mailing lists and the blog posts on planet.

 If you really can’t find a solution to your problems on the site, just go to their IRC channel, as long as you provide a full build log.


----------



## GL1TCH3D

Could anyone here help me setup my centos vps? =D


----------



## Hutnicks

defqon said:


> 1. Obviously Berkeley University and the other arse hats that were involved in the development of Unix have no idea what usability is, I mean imagine using Mac OS X or MS Windows completely relied and based on commands, not a single GUI application to be seen. This includes the web browser.
> 
> 2. It's a make or break type of OS, if you enter a command especially with port installations and something breaks, be sure to have a snapshot of the virtual machine or backup of the OS to revert to an earlier state, hence either commands make the particular functions work or break the whole thing together.
> 
> ...


 

 You need to really have a better grasp of the gestation of UNIX itself before going off on a bent against it's present shortcomings. At the time of inception there was nothing but command line OS's. The concept of a GUI was barely a scientists wet dream at that time. Every operating system relied on the operation having intimate knowledge of both the hardware and software to be used on the system. It was an environment almost inconceivably harsh by today's standards and I can well appreciate any current IT persons frustration with the lack of this or that feature. Add into that initial impetus endless licencing wars and ownership changes BSD, Xenix, Novell, et al. (then repeat it all over again with X Windows as a UI and more ownership and copyright litigations)and you have an operating system that went through the IT equivalent of gang wars to get where it is today. It is true comp science persons OS in the same manner that the P-51 was a true pilots aircraft, it rewards expertise and finesse greatly and punishes ignorance and sloppy implementations ruthlessly.
  
  To compare it to a current gen OS developed under radically different circumstances is misleading at the very least. Most of those "convenience features" you desire exist due to the development of UNIX and other OS's of it's generation.


----------



## DefQon

Well I can't really disagree with most of what you said but I think it's about damn time they implement an optional GUI interface for easier interactions, it's like all those years where people use to use VI for config file and text editing it was a nightmare before EE came along which made things seemingly easier. There is no reason why they shouldn't do a major interface overhaul to the OS like you said all OS's were CMD line based OS's at a point, but they have all evolved since.


----------



## Hutnicks

defqon said:


> Well I can't really disagree with most of what you said but I think it's about damn time they implement an optional GUI interface for easier interactions, it's like all those years where people use to use VI for config file and text editing it was a nightmare before EE came along which made things seemingly easier. There is no reason why they shouldn't do a major interface overhaul to the OS like you said all OS's were CMD line based OS's at a point, but they have all evolved since.


 

 Most havent actually evolved (worked on any main or midrange business systems lately, some of the industry standard apps make 80's apps written in Clipper look sophisticated.
  
 Much like microsloth had to kill dos to get windows into realistic shape, most older systems don't take well to GUI for deep internal works. There are pluses and minus's to this. Hotshots who have worked in that environment are akin to DaVinci in their work ethics and standards compared to current gen grads of newer systems who are crayon drawers by compare. Faster better easier has it's own price and we are losing artisans by the drove to fast food IT.
  
 Preachy mode off now.


----------



## DefQon

I meant the OS's man, you got me lost on the rest of the dabble.


----------



## proton007

hutnicks said:


> Most havent actually evolved (worked on any main or midrange business systems lately, some of the industry standard apps make 80's apps written in Clipper look sophisticated.
> 
> Much like microsloth had to kill dos to get windows into realistic shape, most older systems don't take well to GUI for deep internal works. There are pluses and minus's to this. Hotshots who have worked in that environment are akin to DaVinci in their work ethics and standards compared to current gen grads of newer systems who are crayon drawers by compare. Faster better easier has it's own price and we are losing artisans by the drove to fast food IT.
> 
> Preachy mode off now.


 
  
 Two parts of a problem.
  
 One is to view it as a problem solving tool, created by scientists for themselves. Thats how OSes started out.
  
 Two is to view it as a product, for selling to others. Thats what it is today.
  
 Personally I find no one way to go about this, but I do value the freedom to choose between the two, to have something that suits my needs and doesn't force the 'my way or highway' mindset.


----------



## TwinQY

hutnicks said:


> You need to really have a better grasp of the gestation of UNIX itself before going off on a bent against it's present shortcomings.
> 
> To compare it to a current gen OS developed under radically different circumstances is misleading at the very least. Most of those "convenience features" you desire exist due to the development of UNIX and other OS's of it's generation.


----------



## DefQon

proton007 said:


> Two parts of a problem.
> 
> One is to view it as a problem solving tool, created by scientists for themselves. Thats how OSes started out.
> 
> ...


 
 Yeah everything started out like that either research or for military purposes same thing goes for the internet when it used to be ARPANET. But Hutnick is missing one important aspect and that is in this age we live in, if simplicity isn't included in the package your product ain't going to garner any sort of attention especially with the variety of options and varieties available today, back then users and researchers were forced to use the old stuff because there was nothing else. Besides very few companies and corporations that still use some variant of Unix for server side processing, a large majority either don't know it or don't use it because it is too old fashioned and time consuming to invest cost, effort and training to get people use to Unix.


----------



## proton007

defqon said:


> Yeah everything started out like that either research or for military purposes same thing goes for the internet when it used to be ARPANET. But Hutnick is missing one important aspect and that is in this age we live in, if simplicity isn't included in the package your product ain't going to garner any sort of attention especially with the variety of options and varieties available today, back then users and researchers were forced to use the old stuff because there was nothing else. Besides very few companies and corporations that still use some variant of Unix for server side processing, a large majority either don't know it or don't use it because it is too old fashioned and time consuming to invest cost, effort and training to get people use to Unix.



I guess that would be true for any OS.

In the world of GUIs its very easy to see the OS as something of a living entity, but most users don't know or care that beneath that glam its just a resource manager.

Honestly I don't believe the hype about modern OSs.

There hasn't been anything new in this field since the mid 80s, most if not all technologies existed decades before on mainframes. 
In a way, all tech companies have done is miniaturised them and taken advantage of this technological amnesia.
Infact some of them have even made things worse. I hate my PC at work with vengeance. 

So, good tools existed -> decades passed -> people forgot -> today they are sold less productive/useless 'solutions', essentially bad clones of the giants.


----------



## Hutnicks

proton007 said:


> I guess that would be true for any OS.
> 
> In the world of GUIs its very easy to see the OS as something of a living entity, but most users don't know or care that beneath that glam its just a resource manager.
> 
> ...


 

 It's a little worse than that. What we see now is the equivalent of (80's era no less) Reganomics "Trickle Down" theory. Android being the latest and most prime example. Take one powerhouse distributed computing OS and strip the guts and lowlevel utility out of it and you have Linux and family, Rape that a little more and you now have android where the user (for right or wrong) is so far removed from the platform that it becomes downright dangerous to let them work at the command line.
  
  It's all well and good to make a convenience OS , it just makes die hard system level tasks a much more monuments effort. Administrators and sysops pay a heavy price for the convenience of the end user.
  
  One of the true beauties of an old hardcore UNIX implementation was a well thought out X Window interface for end users, done properly it's surprising how many *legitimate* complaints there were.


----------



## DefQon

proton007 said:


> Honestly I don't believe the hype about modern OSs.
> 
> There hasn't been anything new in this field since the mid 80s, most if not all technologies existed decades before on mainframes.
> In a way, all tech companies have done is miniaturised them and taken advantage of this technological amnesia.
> ...


 
  
 This sort of approach will give you a mixed bag of feedback and response as it depends on what type of work group profession/association/business perspective you look and ask about it. If you asked an organisation focused on the roles of data processing/network/system administration, they are going flat out tell you that the newer stuff is better by far. If you asked an SMB that have been using the old stuff for quite some time which has fulfilled the roles required for the past 2 decades or so, they will simply tell you there is no need for the newer stuff although it is a welcome addition, it comes back to the old saying if it ain't broken, don't fix it, same with OS's and programs if it's working and doing it's appointed task in the working environment, why upgrade? This leads to other factors and that is software/OS support. Open source or things under the GNU license will almost always have continuous support and rolled out updates, a different approach compared to licensed wares.
  
 Apples and bananas comparison really imo.


----------



## proton007

defqon said:


> Apples and bananas comparison really imo.


 
  
 Exactly. Computing isn't as general purpose as its made out to be.


----------



## DefQon

Although some aspects can be compared with each other, comparisons on a broader sense is hard and sometimes impossible as it depends on what role exactly is that piece of software is intended for.


----------



## proton007

hutnicks said:


> It's a little worse than that. What we see now is the equivalent of (80's era no less) Reganomics "Trickle Down" theory. Android being the latest and most prime example. Take one powerhouse distributed computing OS and strip the guts and lowlevel utility out of it and you have Linux and family, Rape that a little more and you now have android where the user (for right or wrong) is so far removed from the platform that it becomes downright dangerous to let them work at the command line.
> 
> It's all well and good to make a convenience OS , it just makes die hard system level tasks a much more monuments effort. Administrators and sysops pay a heavy price for the convenience of the end user.
> 
> One of the true beauties of an old hardcore UNIX implementation was a well thought out X Window interface for end users, done properly it's surprising how many *legitimate* complaints there were.


 
  
 Well, I'm not sure where you got the idea that Linux is a stripped down version of a bigger OS.  In that respect all OSs are versions of each other. Some copied, some stole, some borrowed, some came up with alternatives.
  
 Unix was made a mess of when it tried to move into the commercial domain. We already know its not the best that always sells, its the best marketed one that sells.
  
 Thats why I say that today I find the freedom to choose and customize my OS the way I want to more important than anything else.
 Unix lost that battle some time ago. Linux offers that, its free and scalable.


----------



## adevriesc

Any of you guys build a Gentoo kernel? I tried... And it *almost* let me log in. -laughs-


----------



## HPuser9083

Nope. Did set up vanilla Arch successfully in Vbox though. Desktop in use in this screenshot is Xfce with the dual-panel config and the Ambiance Crunchy Blue theme with Malys-Uniblue icons.


----------



## adevriesc

Nice. I think my next foray into Linux will be Pear OS. The release may be a bit buggy, but it seems to be worth a shot. (http://pearlinux.fr/) I'm a Windows guy for my gaming machines, but Linux and Mac have unparalleled system resource management.


----------



## suicidal_orange

adevriesc said:


> Any of you guys build a Gentoo kernel? I tried... And it *almost* let me log in. -laughs-


 

 Not for years, and I've tried every six months or so!  Had a good .config I kept copying into new releases but I had an accident with dd...
  
 If you've got as far as a login prompt you've got the kernel right though - did you by any chance forget to set a password before rebooting?


----------



## adevriesc

Username: "root". Password: "toor". Classic, eh? I tried to build that kernel several years ago, yet I remember it like it was yesterday. So much compiling for a P4 @ 2.8 Ghz.
  
 Pardon the vague nature of my previous statement - it would crash immediately when the login screen would have switched to the desktop. I think I had all the dependencies right too!


----------



## suicidal_orange

adevriesc said:


> Username: "root". Password: "toor". Classic, eh? I tried to build that kernel several years ago, yet I remember it like it was yesterday. So much compiling for a P4 @ 2.8 Ghz.
> 
> Pardon the vague nature of my previous statement - it would crash immediately when the login screen would have switched to the desktop. I think I had all the dependencies right too!


 

 What graphics card are you using?  When you login (depending on your desktop) it might be trying to use 3D so crashing due to drivers - try a fallback, failsafe or similar session if you can. 
  
 Also I hope you aren't planning on using root as your daily user, or you might have a dd accident too!


----------



## proton007

adevriesc said:


> Any of you guys build a Gentoo kernel? I tried... And it *almost* let me log in. -laughs-


 
  
 Gentoo is easy. LFS if you really want to see the magic.


----------



## suicidal_orange

proton007 said:


> Gentoo is easy. LFS if you really want to see the magic.


 
 In theory, but the kernel is where I've been struggling with gentoo in recent years and that's exactly the same. 
  
 I would love to do a LFS install just to say I'd done it but while it would be a fun weekend project updates would be a lot of hassle.  Do you use it as your daily OS?


----------



## frakturfreak

adevriesc said:


> Any of you guys build a Gentoo kernel? I tried... And it *almost* let me log in. -laughs-



 


Since Exherbo doesn’t a provide kernel-package as gentoo does I had to at first install. 
The .config of the livecd didn’t work because it assumed some paths for an initrd and that was to much work for me to set this all up. So I ended up with make defaultconfig and enabling the stuff I needed. I did cost me about 2 hours.

But now it’s simply updating the config file via make oldconfig.


----------



## adevriesc

Goodness... Yes, I planned on changing the password. I was using a 3D capable graphics card at the time. But I don't even have the PC I was installing it on!
  
 It's a pleasant surprise to see so much conversation happening on a Linux thread.


----------



## proton007

suicidal_orange said:


> In theory, but the kernel is where I've been struggling with gentoo in recent years and that's exactly the same.
> 
> I would love to do a LFS install just to say I'd done it but while it would be a fun weekend project updates would be a lot of hassle.  Do you use it as your daily OS?




Well, it started as a weekend project but extended into the week.
In the end I was able to get openbox running. So yes it was in a usable state. But package management is hard to do yourself.
It was an awesome learning experience though. 
I just use Arch for daily use.


----------



## suicidal_orange

adevriesc said:


> Goodness... Yes, I planned on changing the password. I was using a 3D capable graphics card at the time. But I don't even have the PC I was installing it on!
> 
> It's a pleasant surprise to see so much conversation happening on a Linux thread.


 


 I guess the mention of a P4 should have given that away 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





  That long ago you didn't need 3D for a desktop though, so my advice is invalid.  Maybe it was trying to run a desktop you didn't have installed, but that shouldn't have crashed...  Maybe you should try again now?
  


proton007 said:


> Well, it started as a weekend project but extended into the week.
> In the end I was able to get openbox running. So yes it was in a usable state. But package management is hard to do yourself.
> It was an awesome learning experience though.
> I just use Arch for daily use.


 
 As most projects tend to 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




  I wonder if there's any benefit to be had from replacing all the boot scripts on another distro with custom ones, rather than having to check how to hack things in when updates change how things need to be done.  Congrats on getting as far as a usable desktop anyway, some real dedication there I'm sure.  Now, how much do you remember?


----------



## proton007

suicidal_orange said:


> As most projects tend to
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
  
 The real benefit was not the process, I'm sure its pretty standard and the steps are always available if needed. In that respect, whether I remember the steps or not is inconsequential (I do remember the basics though).
 The real takeaway was to understand how the system is put together, what all components are present in a distro, how they're built in layers, using make files and config scripts, patching source code, and real use of the command line. Other distros like Arch and Gentoo will maybe give you the information, but not the experience.


----------



## TwinQY

adevriesc said:


> Any of you guys build a Gentoo kernel? I tried... And it *almost* let me log in. -laughs-


 
 Everyday.
  
 It gets better.
  
 LFS is bog easy. CLFS-embedded or TinyCore would be an actual challenge - you'd have to actually tinker instead of mindlessly plug and maintain packages.


----------



## TwinQY

I found two nifty little apps while rummaging through the AUR today.
Cherrytree (note-taking app)
AirDC++ nano (chat/sharing client)
 The former would have been great if I hadn't spent forever learning hnb.


----------



## TwinQY

I was pondering why bspwm stopped adding padding space at the top while I hadn't touched that part of the install in months - I _might_ have sat on my keyboard sometime during this week, and I _might _have accidentally gotten into xinitrc and smashed a glob of gibberish after the bspwm line. 
 Whoops.
 Surprising that everything else worked just fine though.


----------



## TwinQY

Some window managers that I've been playing/planning to play with:
 - Wind
 - nullWM
 - 2wm
 - amiwm
 - tritium
 - wmx
 - swm
 - yawn
 - Sawfish
 - mantis-wm
 - splitwm
 - pwm
 - DSWM
 - mdtwm
- WeeWM
 - foo-wm
 - larswm
 - Wumwum
 - CLFSWM
 - velox
 - CTWM
 - yeahwm
 - antiwm
  
 I have a crudload more of github-based project WMs stored in another text file somewhere that I've lost. I'll be sure to share that one as soon as I can.
 If anyone has any suggestions as to what else I might be missing, do chime in. 
 Although if it's anything generic/standard/classic/well-known-when-the-word-window-manager-comes-up, I've probably tried it before (blackbox, IceWM, JWM, all of the tilers, most legacy stuff). Really looking for obscure but interesting projects - you can see that a lot of the above are actually reimplementations of old, well-known projects.


----------



## Hutnicks

twinqy said:


> I found two nifty little apps while rummaging through the AUR today.
> Cherrytree (note-taking app)
> AirDC++ nano (chat/sharing client)
> The former would have been great if I hadn't spent forever learning hnb.


 

 Cherrytree looks interesting. If theres any way to compile that for the droid it could be the replacement for zotero everyones been looking for.


----------



## dndliohm

I'm excited to see what happens with SteamOS, it could be an epic flop, or take over PC gaming. Interesting times we're living in...that someone is even_ attempting_ something like this. Serious balls.


----------



## proton007

dndliohm said:


> I'm excited to see what happens with SteamOS, it could be an epic flop, or take over PC gaming. Interesting times we're living in...that someone is even _attempting_ something like this. Serious balls.




Well, the good thing is that Valve is also creating some new hardware to go along.
Other than that I think Linux's use is mostly as a task handler, but because of its openness it's possible to tweak it in ways not possible with any proprietary library/OS. The Valve team has achieved some incredible benchmarks in that regard.
Most of all, it means Linux has attained that mix of stability and openness; it exudes the confidence big firms can rely on to use in consumer applications.


----------



## TwinQY

hutnicks said:


> Cherrytree looks interesting. If theres any way to compile that for the droid it could be the replacement for zotero everyones been looking for.


 
 Can't imagine. It's very GTK heavy. 
 I know a couple of people who've been wanting Zim for Android as well.
 But, hey...you could still run hnb in the default console 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			




 ...
  
  
 Still haven't gotten through the WM list. Almost there.
 Starch Linux's coreutils (that is, sbase copulating with OpenBSD's stuff) - it's basically all the stuff I've been trying to get working on my Exherbo install done, just not updated very frequently. Loving it as it fits snug as a pocket. Between this, busybox's init....what would be great though, is llvm working better with musl. tcc when needed is....
  
 Also a lot of machines moved to DragonFlyBSD after years of FreeBSDing. At first it started off as wanting to try something new...
 killX looks nifty. 
 Found it out through a revisit of the LinuxBBQ forums, between that and #!'s forums I don't really visit all that often anymore. Which is a shame since the people there are good people. Just don't use it as much as I should. If I roll sid I roll my own.
  
 I suspect that some of them frequent audio forums though, as sometimes I hear a bit of audio-talk there....just a feeling.
 What would be nifty - Blink with fltk. Someone did WebKit with fltk, but never released anything source-wise as far as I could see. Browsers right now are abysmal in that sense. Dillo doesn't play well with my network config, and w3m's image preview started borking on me. Netsurf and Links, yes, but I do like dwb a tad bit more. Heck I like it more than Pentadactyl.
  
 Played around with vimb and don't know what to think of it.
 Contemplating on herbstluftwm or bspwm on a particular machine - might go with the former since it's 16:10 and manual splitting is just more of a thing for herb.
  
 Very excited about how Alopex will turn out in the future though.
 Moved from ranger to vifm, and in turn, purged my systems with any and all python libraries. That rPi needed the space....
  
 Though now - no powerline, will have to set up bash scripts for my tmux. Looking a little spartan ATM.

 Needs more orange somehow. Curiously my existing colors are already quite Christmas-y.
  
 One thing I miss from ranger is the sxiv-indexing-all-files-when-one-file-is-opened. I remember the solution to be simple so could probably set it back up on vifm, but haven't had the time to play around with that. Selecting multiple files - working on learning how to do that better. Yet to open up the man file after a whole week, it's all been intuition and old vi habits at this point. 

  
 Also realized that coloring wyrd was painfully easy, so.....

 (No my events aren't that empty - switched out everything for an old config for my own privacy. Sorry stalkers...)
 Caught the last episode of LAS on Sunday (well the livestream). They were surprisingly positive with their Fedora 20 review.
  
 The funny thing is that I had loaded up the beta iso and was updating it right after (must have been withing the hour since I updated it prior as well) the final came rushing out from the repos. 
 Back to surfraw because, despite how nice DDG!'s !bangs are, I just end up defaulting to google anyways since the DDG! results are still pretty irrelevant.
 Moved from ntpd, to chrony, back to ntpd, then to tlsdate. I had though that the only difference was that tlsdate was using tls instead of udp, but it must be doing something (or rather, it might be the only one not doing anything at all) funky with the hardware clock, because it's the only one that works fine for the work laptop.
 And I'm not sure if one can change the size of the OSD on mpv. It's a tad bit large. I'm not going to disable it since it is useful at times (jumping around seeking with videos streamed through quvi).
 sshguard keeps zombie-ing on me as well. Strange.
 While you crazy emacers are wackier than rum on rice, I must admit that I have been trying it out for the email client. I have to say that a lot of these default apps are quite nice. A complete novice at it though.
  
 On the note of editors, anyone know how to change the colors on acme? It sounds awful but whenever I'm plan9-ing I've stuck with the more familiar sam so I've not even touched acme. No three-button here either.
 I mentined DragonFlyBSD, and for those who've yet to try it - HAMMER is a thing, and it is nifty.
 And I'll end with this.
  
 (BTW, I think I mentioned on this thread that Wayland started to come in as a default dependency for Mesa a while back. I started disabling that part and googled to see if others were doing the same - the first result that came up was my own post o.o)


----------



## proton007

^^
 Since you've been trying all these WMs, I have a question.
  
 Is there any WM that allows a wallpaper background, and manual/assisted/hybrid tiling?


----------



## TwinQY

Bspwm (what I'm currently using) takes an hybrid approach, but an external program would be needed to set the background (imlibsetroot, xsetroot, feh, nitrogen). Awesome could probably be scripted to do more manual stuff and can set the background for you. Apart from Awesome there's really not a lot of WMs that take care of wallpapers (for good reason).
  
  
 Alopex handles windows in a 'hybrid' sense especially for version 3. A lot of changes since the makeover last month. Really loving this one and might find a place in between herb and bspwm.


----------



## phidesu (Dec 3, 2020)

-


----------



## Dillan

Signing in - Love linux.
  
 I'd say that I am an intermediate user, mostly been a hardcore Windows admin/user my whole life.
  
 Although I really enjoy using Ubuntu, Backtrack, Mint & Fedora!


----------



## TwinQY

i3 was one of the more elegantly written things for X when it had come out. I know some have switched off a few releases back due to some of the changes, but it's come into vogue again.
 Have been seeing more and more dwm/wayland mentions in my mailing lists, the teasers are enticing for a lack of a better word. Might need to get on the right mailing lists for more info though.
 So I've finally finished up the WMs in the lists, and some more. I think the official count is at 72 now. The rate of experimentation has dropped significantly due to real-life ongoings but I still manage to squeeze in 2-3 every weekend or so. But 72's not a pretty enough number so I'm aiming for 99. This is turning out to be much more expansive than I had thought, and I'm considering turning the notes into a nice wiki/manual on github or something. But only if time will allow. Who knows, it might sit forever untouched on my harddrive.
  
 The fact that I've thought of a title might mean that I'm too deep into things now to drop it - "99 Problems But a Window Manager Ain't One"


----------



## Dillan

twinqy said:


> The fact that I've thought of a title might mean that I'm too deep into things now to drop it - "99 Problems But a Window Manager Ain't One"


 
  
 lol.


----------



## TwinQY

https://github.com/xyl0n/iris
  
 Great openbox theme, trying to get that on Fluxbox. Begrudgingly stuck on gtk due to Firefox but at least it can look good while it's at it.


----------



## Shelvo

Hello there! Might as well join this thread as I'm a Linux user as well.
 I have Arch running on all computers that I use around my house. My sister complains, but I think she secretly likes it 
 She would complain of it being "slow" when I had the desktop she uses running Ubuntu (even though it was slower when running XP), but then again it's an old Athlon 64 machine. She can't complain anymore with it running Arch though. I have her set up with LXDE along with Compton and Docky. Considering that it's a graphical environment and there's compositing involved, it runs very smoothly and snappily. I had it using LXDM, but that's kind of ugly and I didn't want her complaining so I switched it over to LightDM, and while it's slower, it does look better.
  
 I also run Arch on my laptop which I use for web browsing, schoolwork, music listening (very close to ordering my first audiophile headphones), etc.
 I'm pretty content with the default Cinnamon setup, but I've been experiencing some bugs, so I'm not sure I'll stick with it. I might duplicate what I have set up for my sister, but I'm also interested in i3 as many, many people on the Arch forum seem to use it.
 It's a pretty old machine (I think from about 2006), but it performs very nicely for its age.
 I have upgraded the ram from 1 gig to 4 gigs, upgraded the HDD to an SSD, and also upgraded from a Core Duo to a Core 2 Duo from my mom's old laptop which finally died (motherboard problem, I think). She was using a new laptop with an i7 long before this happened though. My graphics chipset is atrocious though, it's an Intel GMA 450.
  
 I love Arch. It's flexible, customizable, but also super easy to use. I doubt I'll ever go back to a simpler distro. Once I get a new laptop (not likely for a couple more years), I would like to experiment with Linux from Scratch on my current one.
  
 I also recently did some work with Raspberry Pis for my dad. I have to confess, though, that I wasn't a fantastic help, as I didn't have any experience in what he wanted to do with them. He's involved in the video streaming business, but I've never done anything with the likes of Wowza or ffmpeg before. Oh well.


----------



## Dillan

Arch is very flexible indeed.
  
 I also love LXDE, because it is very clean, minimal, and quick quick quick..


----------



## TwinQY

Lxqt (I think I mentioned it before) ended up not building for me anymore a few weeks ago. And after installing one too many LXDEs and picking out a lot of the parts in the LXDE metapackage, realized that all I really ever used was the lxpanel and the openbox part, none of the more hackneyed tools. Which goes to show that maybe the merge with Razor will result in a more substantial product so I'm anxious to have it build again.
  
 And if 2006 machines are old then I might as well write an obituary for everything in-house.
  
 People make much adieu over LFS and just perceive it as "the final frontier" - perhaps they're missing the point completely. It's not some penultimate pseudo-distro that we all graduate to. It works as a great educational guide and a framework. And maybe that's what you plan to use it for. In which case I would recommend Tiny afterwards - not only do you actually have to write stuff, you work with completely different toolsets from what people are used to, and you go a bit deeper than just learning about libraries and what tools a system depend on (typically all that you'd need to lazily slap together a "distro" and call it even)- you learn about _how_ the tools literally work. It's also small enough that things don't become too daunting.


----------



## TwinQY

This is not why I typically use the framebuffer but it's simply amazing that he's managed to do this - http://penkia.blogspot.ca/2014/02/introducing-slatekit-base-technical.html
  
 Very, very, VERY cool. I'm eager to try this but for whatever reason the download link simply does not work for me.


----------



## TwinQY

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/
  
 Searching ebay for one of those nifty Sharp Netwalkers (have a broken Zaurus) means that I might have to expose myself to a lot of this in the near future. A nice price for an used OpenPandora opened locally as well.
  
 Also - https://github.com/np1/mps-youtube


----------



## brhfl

twinqy said:


> This is not why I typically use the framebuffer but it's simply amazing that he's managed to do this - http://penkia.blogspot.ca/2014/02/introducing-slatekit-base-technical.html
> 
> Very, very, VERY cool. I'm eager to try this but for whatever reason the download link simply does not work for me.


 
 That is very cool, and worth keeping an eye on. I'm a big fan of sticking to framebuffer when possible, but often end up with a minimal X/ratpoison solution instead. Glad to see work like this being done.


----------



## Makiah S

how well do Linux Distros handle USb Dacs?


----------



## proton007

mshenay said:


> how well do Linux Distros handle USb Dacs?


 
  
 Haven't had any issues with mine.


----------



## pkryan

> Originally Posted by *Mshenay*
> 
> 
> how well do Linux Distros handle USb Dacs?


 
  
 Schiit Modi was plug and play with Mint 16


----------



## alenfromcroatia

I have a Nokia N900, but I plan on getting Linux for my PC too. I use Win7 but I will probably create a dualboot because I need it for a lot of apps and games.


----------



## suicidal_orange

mshenay said:


> how well do Linux Distros handle USb Dacs?


 

 If the DAC needs special drivers to work in Windows it wont work in Linux - most don't and work without issue.


----------



## Makiah S

suicidal_orange said:


> If the DAC needs special drivers to work in Windows it wont work in Linux - most don't and work without issue.


 
 I wonder if my Audio GD dac will work q.q


----------



## Shelvo

Usually a quick google search can answer questions like these.
 http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Audio+GD+dac+linux
  
 Also, this page says that it should work (at least I think so, the wording is really weird):
 http://www.audio-gd.com/Pro/dac/USB32/USB32EN.htm
 "Mac OSX , Linux (MMX)  and SPDIF inputs without driver install necessary."


----------



## suicidal_orange

mshenay said:


> I wonder if my Audio GD dac will work q.q


 
 Did you install Windows drivers or did it just work?  It really is that easy, either a device is generic USB audio and will work or it isn't and wont 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			




  
 (unless the manufacturer has released drivers, and even then they may cause problems...)


----------



## proton007

suicidal_orange said:


> Did you install Windows drivers or did it just work?  It really is that easy, either a device is generic USB audio and will work or it isn't and wont
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
  
 Easiest way is to plug in the dac and check if the volume settings show it.
  
 Worst case just check the dmesg log.


----------



## suicidal_orange

proton007 said:


> Easiest way is to plug in the dac and check if the volume settings show it.
> 
> Worst case just check the dmesg log.


 

 Agreed, unlike Windows everything in Linux works just as well on the live CD/DVD used to install all the friendly distros as it does once it's installed.
  
 Not sure a newbie will know what dmesg is though (if he were a Linux user he'd surely have tried it) and the command line is scary


----------



## TwinQY

brhfl said:


> That is very cool, and worth keeping an eye on. I'm a big fan of sticking to framebuffer when possible, but often end up with a minimal X/ratpoison solution instead. Glad to see work like this being done.


 
 I had gotten Slatekit downloaded afterwards, but never went and played with it. I might do so soon, thanks for reminding me.
  
 Any thoughts on Ratpoison versus StumpWM? I  get that both serve their own purposes/niches at this point, but I'd love to know what an everyday Ratpoison user thinks of the Stump.


----------



## TwinQY

Has anyone built Chromium against QtWebEngine, or is using the dev channel with Aura compiled in?
  
 I'm particularly interested in the latter and if anyone has any first hand experiences to share, as I would not mind getting GTK2 and all of its crummy crum off some machines in particular where this is the only thing pulling GTK in. Sure I'd just be replacing a toolkit with another toolkit but I wouldn't mind too much when it comes to Aura, especially since it'd be bundled in the build.
  
 But of course a part of me just wants to try it out for the sake of having fun with it. I think that's the important bit.


----------



## TwinQY

https://github.com/jvvv/9wm-xcb
  
 Cool to try out. I can't say I'm too familiar with 9wm, but certainly have tried out the stuff that came after it like larswm and wm2.


----------



## alenfromcroatia

I' m really not that new to Linux on my Nokia N900 but I'm new to the desktop PC versions.
What Linux distros would be perfect for someone that wants a lightweight OS with a nice UI?
I can't really seem to find any useful info around the net and I've been using Win7 for a lot of time.
I'm bored with it TBH, I need something better than that. It will have to be a dualboot then when I need to run some apps or games that aren't supported in Linux. And that's the biggest issue, do Adobe's programs work in Linux? I use Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.
I also want to use Fruity Loops Studio, Virtual DJ, Cinema 4D and some other programs. And what about MS Office?
Are there any good but free programs? I mainly need programs like Office and Powerpoint.
That's mostly it, I'm sorry if I'm boring but you all know some of this stuff in the back of your head probably.


----------



## Demibeard

alenfromcroatia said:


> I' m really not that new to Linux on my Nokia N900 but I'm new to the desktop PC versions.
> What Linux distros would be perfect for someone that wants a lightweight OS with a nice UI?
> I can't really seem to find any useful info around the net and I've been using Win7 for a lot of time.
> I'm bored with it TBH, I need something better than that. It will have to be a dualboot then when I need to run some apps or games that aren't supported in Linux. And that's the biggest issue, do Adobe's programs work in Linux? I use Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.
> ...


 

 I think the best thing to do is get yourself a copy of unetbootin for windows (unetbootin.sourceforge.net) head on over to distrowatch.com download a few Livedisk ISOs, use unetbootin to make a bootable USB stick and have a play, see which distro likes your hardware.
  
 The easiest way to dualboot I've found is buy another HDD if you have the space / tower case.
  
 I'm a user of Kubuntu myself, and have been for 5 years or so, it's my primary OS.
  
 For office software, I use LibreOffice (libreoffice.org) it serves my purposes well.
  
 Image editing is handled by GIMP and darktable (darktable.org)
  
 Music production is not something I have got involved with, but linux-sound.org might have what you are after.
  
 Looking for an alternative to Cinema4D, blender (blender.org) has been suggested, the last rendering program I used was on my Amiga A1200 called LightWave 5.0 (God I'm old)


----------



## CADCAM

Does anyone have the ODAC and run Linux as an OS? I run PCLinuxOS 64 and want to verify that the ODAC works and is recognized with the OS before purchasing.
 thanks for any help


----------



## kizzard

cadcam said:


> Does anyone have the ODAC and run Linux as an OS? I run PCLinuxOS 64 and want to verify that the ODAC works and is recognized with the OS before purchasing.
> thanks for any help


 

 Yes - it uses USB Audio Class 1 which is supported natively by Windows/OSX and any sane version of Linux


----------



## ninjapenguin120

I'm pretty mainstream. I use Ubuntu, and occasionally openSUSE and W7 (Win7 was acceptable, but Win8 is the Satan of all operating systems, it's almost as bad as W98) I also run a Debian server that doubles as my NAS drive. Either way though, I much prefer Linux now. Especially with Steam pushing Steam OS and Ubuntu, making Linux more game-able.
  
 I'm currently changing all of my hostnames from characters in Star Wars to cities in the Johto region of Pokemon. 2nd Gen all the way, boi.


----------



## CADCAM

kizzard said:


> Yes - it uses USB Audio Class 1 which is supported natively by Windows/OSX and any sane version of Linux


 

 I guess PCLinuxOS is an insane version cuz it ignores my Maverick external DAC


----------



## Sxooter

So how exactly does it ignore it? Are you running Pulse Audio or what? Does it not show up in your audio control panel or does it show up and not do anything when selected? Does it show up in dmesg when you plug it in?


----------



## CADCAM

It seems not to do anything when I plug it into my computer. It connects by USB and I've tried having the computer on and connecting it and also having the DAC on and booting the computer and still nothing. If I play music it comes out of the internal speakers of the computer. Maybe it's me...I am relatively new to Linux. I thought it would "see" the DAC and perhaps load a driver or at least acknowledge that I connected it. Is Pulse Audio what I should be using? I was using Mint as an OS but switched to PCLinuxOS 64 on the advise of a friend.


----------



## mamamia88

MTP suck for anyone else on xubuntu 14.04?  I gave up on music on my phone because of it and just put the sd card in one of my old clips. I refuse to use adb just to transfer music files


----------



## Sxooter

cadcam said:


> It seems not to do anything when I plug it into my computer. It connects by USB and I've tried having the computer on and connecting it and also having the DAC on and booting the computer and still nothing. If I play music it comes out of the internal speakers of the computer. Maybe it's me...I am relatively new to Linux. I thought it would "see" the DAC and perhaps load a driver or at least acknowledge that I connected it. Is Pulse Audio what I should be using? I was using Mint as an OS but switched to PCLinuxOS 64 on the advise of a friend.


 
 So is there an audio control panel somewhere you can get to? Often it's under the little speaker under Gnome but I have not clue where it is in PCLinuxOS.  The OS won't pop up some windows-like "now loading driver" dialog because in linux it's usually already in place and all it does is make the DAC one more audio device. In Ubuntu I have to go to the audio control panel and select my DAC as the output device and then it works.


----------



## CADCAM

OK you've given some good advise when I get home I am going to figure this out. Like I said it might be me, I am a Windows guy and just switched to Linux a couple months ago. I really like it BTW this is the first snag I've had and it is prob just me not knowing what I'm doing.


----------



## CADCAM

I'm good, just had to tell it to output to the external DAC. I guess most people don't connect a DAC so there was no indication that something happened when I connected the DAC but it was there. 
 Thanks for the advise. BTW I am using Clementine and Pulse Audio was on by default. 
  
 Thank you to Sxooter


----------



## Sxooter

Glad you got it working! Yeah, PCLinuxOS may look like windows, but it's still very much linux underneath. Takes some adaptation. But honestly the control panel type stuff in linux is so much simpler and more clean than windows. I can't find **** in windows control panel half the time. Now listen to that dac and tell us what you think!


----------



## CADCAM

Thanks again and yes I will report back on how the Maverick D2 sounds in this setup, I also am thinking of getting another DAC for another room...feel free to give opinions. I'd like a DAC/amp combo.


----------



## Shelvo

This is why I generally avoid using PulseAudio. I use just plain ALSA because it's simpler (in this case it would have been as easy as switching which sound card to use in alsamixer) and can also achieve higher audio quality than PulseAudio.
  
 When I'm using Linux, I don't like applications that take control of everything for you. Nice if you don't plan on customizing, but impossible to configure if you want to do something more personalized or advanced. That's why I switched away from PulseAudio and Cinnamon. Now I use vanilla ALSA and vanilla Openbox.
  
 I have to agree with the whole "Linux control panels are better," but that's mostly because the Linux community doesn't have stupid GUI designers (or even if there are their stuff doesn't get used). I edit most of my settings through text files (to which most Linux "control panels" are simply a frontend to) with a command-line editor, but that's just me. I'd just like to avoid installing software (especially large pieces of software) unnecessarily, as my budget when buying my computer only allowed for a 60 GB SSD, and with the kind of speed boost I was going to get from it I was willing to buy that. Then again, my laptop came with a 60 GB spinning hard drive because it's used and from 2006... but that's besides the point.
  
 Glad to hear you got your DAC working!


----------



## CADCAM

I am relatively new to Linux, been a PC guy for awhile now. I'm not a real geek but in the past have always built my own computers. I like the fact that you don't have to use anti virus or malware software with Linux and it seems not to be as bloated as Windows. Although PCLinuxOS 64 does update quite a bit, seems I can't turn the system on without an update being available. I have a desktop and an older laptop running Linux and a newer laptop running W7. I tried Mint and liked it a lot but a friend convinced me to switch to PCLinux. I'm just starting to get my music on my HD's and it is different. I usually listen straight from the CD and listening to the same material off a HD I feel there is a loss of quality. I also like the tactical feel of an inlay card or insert to look at and read as you listen. Back in the day they had massive inserts from the album sleeve and today you don't get much of anything by way of information on the band or the recording. I am moving all my music to my 1.5TB HD but I still like the feel of physical media. Guess I'm finally getting old...


----------



## mamamia88

Anyone know of a linux piece of software that will go through an entire harddrive worth of flacs and test for skips without having to listen to all of it?


----------



## TwinQY

If the skips are inherent in the source, you can't. If they came about through file corruption, flac with the -t flag will check the md5sum.


----------



## mamamia88

twinqy said:


> If the skips are inherent in the source, you can't. If they came about through file corruption, flac with the -t flag will check the md5sum.


but that assumes you knew the original md5sum first right?


----------



## TwinQY

The original md5sum signature is inside the metadata, under <STREAMINFO>. You check it with the checksum generated through the raw audio data through decoding.


> The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data *in the file header*, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing.


 
 It also does a CRC check during decoding.
  
 You can also use ffmpeg to get a more accurate output of where the CRC check goes wrong, since it tells you the specific timestamp.


----------



## Silent One

Been procrastinating on the switch to Linux or Unix with WinXP _down-the-street. _So many options lying in wait, still undecided. By default the time is right to get in there and salvage the old HP 17"er and learn something new to boot!
  
 I'm counting on your guidance, TwinQY!


----------



## TwinQY

While I usually stress that switching is akin to adapting an entirely new paradigm, sometimes it's more helpful to face a visual interface that retains some similarities from what XP people are typically more used to. XFCE tends to go towards this route. In which case Linux Mint 17 just had its XFCE version come out. I think a live CD of that would be a great place to start. Years ago I moved a lot of people to the XFCE edition of LMDE and I think they are all still running it.


----------



## Silent One

Always appreciate your assistance, TwinQY! Currently have MINT on a SD card on newest notebook. Just never used it for regular stuff outside of audio. Completely forgot about it. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



  
 Guess I'll start gutting after the Fourth!


----------



## gopanthersgo1

I've been using arch just fine but systemd was bothering me and I decided to install funtoo and its so different, hopefully I can pick up and learn it pretty soon, it took like 2 days to get tired of i3 and I went back to open box... Then immediately went back, tiling is so great. But yeah hopefully I can understand funtoo because atm use flags and different kernels and stuff are getting real confusing. :/ oh but I never have had to restart the install process and got it working with gummiboot which wasn't in the install guide so that's a plus, I'm also using btrfs and stuff b/c curiosity.


----------



## TwinQY

silent one said:


> Always appreciate your assistance, TwinQY! Currently have MINT on a SD card on newest notebook. Just never used it for regular stuff outside of audio. Completely forgot about it.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
 Ever start getting started?
  
 Have a moc (not Mok) daemon on to the rPi connected to the TV rig which is set with the ODAC + HR624, equalized with JAMin. Sounds great. Could go to a floorstanding (Image T6), or keep the bookshelf stands, go with a LS50. But really the living room is small enough that the Mackies sound _absolutely _fine_._ But what I could do that would be relatively reasonable is move the rPi to a NUC. Would definitely appreciate the horsepower.
  
 morpheus - a suckless distro
  
It recommends building on a Crux rootfs. That is convenient in that I've just been moving all of the Arch machines (3), apart from one, to Crux. That was a decision I made as I realized a majority of the things I used came from the -git packages on the AUR, or just tweaked PKGBUILDs from the ABS. These packages became very tiring to update manually all of the time. I've had my time with Gentoo/Exherbo, and while I could have moved these last couple of Linux machines to a flavor of BSD, I'd still prefer to have a Linux distro in house for the occasionally weird peripheral coming in. This having occurred a few weeks before the LAS folks did their review on Crux, just cemented my decision even more. It's like they have ESP. Probably found the esp-svn package on the AUR or something.
  
 Back to morpheus. Would have plenty of hosts to build it on. Have not played around with musl much, ever since all of the Alpine machines had been migrated to OpenBSD. If/when this gets usable enough I might be set for a while. musl, s/ubase, smdev, a very cool ports system; it's everything my self-made Exherbo setup was, and I don't have to mess with exhereses!
  
 In fact just taking a look at it, the way that they packaged the heirloom stuff into hbase so nicely, harkens back to my woes linking heirloom stuff with busybox stuff to make up for the functionality/missing utils. Already this shows more and more promise. I wonder how fast I can get a fbterm + tmux setup on there. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



  
 I'd still like to move a machine to Void in case I need something binary, fast, but still retaining a good level of flexibility. Perhaps the incoming workstation, but I'd sort of want to stay with Crux on that one as well.


----------



## Silent One

twinqy said:


> silent one said:
> 
> 
> > Always appreciate your assistance, TwinQY! Currently have MINT on a SD card on newest notebook. Just never used it for regular stuff outside of audio. Completely forgot about it.
> ...


 
 Just WOW. Over the years you've certainly been bangin' out fun AND experience! I have not yet started...any day now I suppose since the 17"er is just sittin' there. I guess I should get over gunking it up or brickin' it 'cause would it really matter? 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




 Still need to decide what to try first. And wondering if I shouldn't have a hack at a flav of Unix first or Linux...maybe the former gets me to play around with my Mac under the hood in the future as well.


----------



## TwinQY

silent one said:


> Just WOW. Over the years you've certainly been bangin' out fun AND experience! I have not yet started...any day now I suppose since the 17"er is just sittin' there. I guess I should get over gunking it up or brickin' it 'cause would it really matter?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
 That's actually not a bad idea at all. Set up iTerm2 + Homebrew, play with some open source software (like mpv). It makes working on OS X very pleasurable. I highly enjoyed that workflow whenever I was stuck in front of a Mac every blue moon, and really, there's a big realm of *nix-y stuff opened up to you as a result.


----------



## Silent One

twinqy said:


> That's actually not a bad idea at all. Set up iTerm2 + Homebrew, play with some open source software (like mpv). It makes working on OS X very pleasurable. I highly enjoyed that workflow whenever I was stuck in front of a Mac every blue moon, and really, there's a big realm of *nix-y stuff opened up to you as a result.


 
 Great! And always, thanks for looking in on me. Will have a look over the weekend while being domestic. Though, most of my weekend chores were completed by Friday night. Only laundry awaits which affords time to read up.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

Oh what do you guys use for movies and videos, I use mpd for music and have been using mpv for movies but I don't know if there's anything else to use for movies that has better upscaling and stuff like mcp-hc or maybe less resource intensive cause I have a netbook and it'd be cool to be able to run bluray rips on it as it struggles with mpv, probably just a hardware issue though.


----------



## Shelvo

I use a multithreaded version of mplayer for movies, and vlc for everything else. It all runs fine on my 2006-ish laptop.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

shelvo said:


> I use a multithreaded version of mplayer for movies, and vlc for everything else. It all runs fine on my 2006-ish laptop.


I'll look into that the laptop is actually 2006 lol


----------



## xsk3l3t0rx

10 year ubuntu user here. wouldnt use any other OS again. i use win 7 at work, former mac user, linux is just so flexible and does everything i need it to without bloat. very customizable. clementine player ftw!!!


----------



## Agahnim

Hello everyone. I just posted in the introduction threads, and this is only the second day of my account. I am an avid Linux user, and student at Georgia Tech (I am switching to CS next semester from CompE) I have a pretty slick laptop running Arch Linux. I have used arch for a few years now and I love it. I am a little curious about how to rectify any audio problems that may or may not exist on my system. I just use pulse audio and different media players depending on what environment I am in. If I am in a tiling window manager I just use mpd and a console front end, but I am trying Plasma 5 for awhile, and to give it an honest try I am using Tomahawk since it looks nice and matches my setup well. If I wanted to get work done I wouldn't be using GUI applications XD. If anyone wants to see a bunch of screenshots from setups I have made I have an album on imgur. (most of the early screenshots are ugly and not very good)
  
 http://igosduikana.imgur.com/all/
  
 The latest one is my current Plasma 5 setup and is drastically different from my usual minimal interfaces.


----------



## Agahnim

oops I meant to reply to someone on the first page, sorry about that.
  


> Originally Posted by *chickpea* /img/forum/go_quote.gif
> 
> I use W7 at work (unfortunately), but at home I have used Sabayon (derivative of Gentoo) since 2007.  God I love everything that is about linux and open source software.  It has really changed my life in terms of how I interact with computers.  There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING I can't fix on my computer.  I have done everything possible to break my linux installs over the years.  Needless to say, like most linux power users, the only application that is ALWAYS open is a terminal emulator.  Who knew how awesomely powerful they are?  *nix users that's who.  In fact, I am usually really pissed off if I need to do something in a GUI nowadays.  Scripting in the shell is just some much easier and faster.
> 
> ...


 
   

  
 You just expressed my sentiments exactly XD, I am enjoying plasma 5 for what it is and I like to play around with different environments every once in awhile, but normally give me a minimal tiling WM (BSPWM) and a browser and a bunch of urxvt instances.


----------



## Shelvo

Hey, Agahnim, and welcome to the community!
  
 If you want to improve audio quality on your Arch setup (I have done a bit of research into this myself in the past), my first piece of advice is this:
  
 Ditch PulseAudio.
  
 I'm serious. PulseAudio automatically downmixes everything to a lower-quality format. It is much harder to control. Back when I was a Linux n00b and used Ubuntu (thank goodness that only lasted a year before I switched to Arch) PulseAudio caused some major electronic noise during any sort of playback whatsoever. I thought something was wrong on the hardware side of things, but nope. It was PulseAudio. On top of all of that, I have found that it can be obnoxiously difficult to remove PulseAudio from a system.
  
 The easiest and most practical option is probably to look into using plain ALSA. It just massively simplifies things. There used to be a page for "Audiophile Playback" on the wiki which gave some pretty good settings, but now it just redirects to the page for ALSA.
  
 If you want to step things up to a professional level, look into using Jack.
 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/JACK_Audio_Connection_Kit
  
 At the end of the day, chances are that if you switch to plain ALSA you probably won't ever run into any (software-related) issues and you probably don't even need to do much configuration... but oh boy, some of the ALSA configs I have seen are _fancy _if you want to get into that sort of thing.


----------



## Shelvo

Also, if you want to see my setup, I made a post on the Arch Linux Google+ community about it a while ago. I've since fixed some issues though, so I'll do another post and link it here.
  
 https://plus.google.com/107315390005978931013/posts/Mn6n2cLbbmd
  
 Personally, I've never understood the allure of a tiling window manager. Maybe it's just because I don't have much screen real estate to work with, but who knows. Maybe someday I'll try it and I'll like it.


----------



## Agahnim

shelvo said:


> Hey, Agahnim, and welcome to the community!
> 
> If you want to improve audio quality on your Arch setup (I have done a bit of research into this myself in the past), my first piece of advice is this:
> 
> ...


 

 Thanks a lot, I was actually using a pure alsa system for a long while. I can easily remove it. I have gone back and forth, due to trying applications that require it and such. I installed pulse for a reason a couple of months ago that I do not remember, I can never get my hdmi to output audio with alsa, which was one reason. I can go back to pure alsa easily though. Once of my good friends thought it was weird that I only used alsa, and kept badgering me to install pulse lol.


----------



## Shelvo

Glad I could help 
 I've found that most of the applications that require Pulse aren't really the type that an Arch user finds worthwhile anyway, so there's probably not much loss to you (especially if you can't remember why you installed it ).
  
 As far as the HDMI sound not working, have you tried looking at this?
 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture/Troubleshooting#HDMI_Output_does_not_work
  
 I will admit that Pulse is useful for some things, like controlling the audio input/output of each program individually, so I can see where your friend was coming from. Usually though, I find that I don't use those sorts of features anyway.


----------



## Agahnim

shelvo said:


> Glad I could help
> I've found that most of the applications that require Pulse aren't really the type that an Arch user finds worthwhile anyway, so there's probably not much loss to you (especially if you can't remember why you installed it ).
> 
> As far as the HDMI sound not working, have you tried looking at this?
> ...


 

 Unfortunately, it seems that the reason I installed pulse is because my dac (ODAC/O2 amp) does not function without pulse installed. I can set it as the default device, and setting it as default control device works for alsamixer, but I cannot play audio to the device. There is probably a way to fix it, but I cannot figure it out from the wiki. I have tried using the card number and the card name as default pcm to no avail


----------



## gopanthersgo1

Yeah the thing that pissed me off the most was Skype needs pulse to run, not sure if it still does, but that's around the time I switched to windows for games. :| I have arch on a RPi2 model B right now, I love it lol.


----------



## Agahnim

gopanthersgo1 said:


> Yeah the thing that pissed me off the most was Skype needs pulse to run, not sure if it still does, but that's around the time I switched to windows for games. :| I have arch on a RPi2 model B right now, I love it lol.


 

 There is a little utility called apulse that tricks applications into thinking that they have access to pulseaudio when they do not. That was how I used skype with a pure alsa system. You simply run apulse skype for example, instead of just skype. The utility was actually written specifically for the skype issue.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

Holy crumps thanks dude, yeah it wasn't out when Skype first went pulse only, that's a lifesaver!


----------



## Agahnim

Is there anyone that could possibly help me set up the Objective DAC/O2 Amp combo with ALSA. I cannot figure out how to configure it to play audio through the device without installing PulseAudio. I am an arch user, and I obviously tried using the wiki, but I cannot seem to get the device to actually play audio, despite being able to set it as the default device.


----------



## gopanthersgo1

agahnim said:


> Is there anyone that could possibly help me set up the Objective DAC/O2 Amp combo with ALSA. I cannot figure out how to configure it to play audio through the device without installing PulseAudio. I am an arch user, and I obviously tried using the wiki, but I cannot seem to get the device to actually play audio, despite being able to set it as the default device.


What's your distro, some do weird things to not let you set USB audio devices as default.


----------



## Agahnim

gopanthersgo1 said:


> What's your distro, some do weird things to not let you set USB audio devices as default.


 

 I am using Arch, so that would not be an issue. I am not exactly a new to configuring things, but I just cannot figure this out, and I have finals this week, so I don't have time to tinker with it.


----------



## Agahnim

Well, I finally managed to figure out how to get my DAC to work with just Alsa. I also got my new Grados in the mail on Monday!!


----------



## Shelvo

1) Good to hear you got it working. Just out of curiosity, what was the problem?
  
 2) Congrats on your new 'phones!
  
 3) Good luck on finals (I'll be taking mine as well)!


----------



## Agahnim

shelvo said:


> 1) Good to hear you got it working. Just out of curiosity, what was the problem?
> 
> 2) Congrats on your new 'phones!
> 
> 3) Good luck on finals (I'll be taking mine as well)!


 

 It was a lack of understanding of the Alsa config syntax on my part. I ended up finding some example configs, and just adapted the settings for myself and it worked.
 Thanks for the good luck, I wish you the same.
 The Grados are magical!


----------



## HPuser9083

twinqy said:


> Some window managers that I've been playing/planning to play with:
> - Wind
> - nullWM
> - 2wm
> ...


 

 I'm currently using a tweaked MATE. The tweaks are listed below:
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Compositor: Compton.
 Menus: MATE Main Menu and TopMenu global menus.
 Task management: Plank dock.
 Terminal: Guake.
 Theme: A little grayish-schemed homebrew theme centered around a Clearlooks base with eOS window borders and Faenza-Cupertino icons.
 Wallpaper: A charcoal played-in winter scene drawing I made a few months ago.
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 And here's a few screencaps of that DE in action.
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


----------



## Agahnim

Hello everyone, Its been awhile. Anyone know of any Alsa tweeks or configs that would benefit some decent equipment?
  
 Scrot time!!
  
 http://i.imgur.com/3Y90gwf.png


----------



## TwinQY

Slime scrot.

  
 (For privacy's sake, the Lisp example was a random one found off the Interwebs)


----------



## HPuser9083

Recently ditched my MATE config for E, and got its configuration finalized. Theme in use is the default Dark ETK theme + the matching e-gtk-theme for GTK apps + Azenis icons. Ditched Guake for Terminology and I'm also trying Midori out for a browser for a while in place of FF. Wallpaper is a Mustang SVO photo I found on image search.


----------



## Agahnim

hpuser9083 said:


> Recently ditched my MATE config for E, and got its configuration finalized. Theme in use is the default Dark ETK theme + the matching e-gtk-theme for GTK apps + Azenis icons. Ditched Guake for Terminology and I'm also trying Midori out for a browser for a while in place of FF. Wallpaper is a Mustang SVO photo I found on image search.


 

 I do not intend offense or anything, but its completely possible that you may or may not already know, so just to be sure,  the 'E' you refer to is for Enlightenment, so what you are using would be Enlightenment 19. Nice desktop, by the way. Enlightenment 17 was actually the first interface that I ever used under Linux when I first tried it on failing hardware, and then later it was my "gateway drug" into minimalist  wm's like openbox which then led to a short bout with i3 and then to sweet sweet BSPWM, although at the moment I am playing with Gnome 3.16 for trying a new gtk 3 theme with some effects that only work with Gnome. I also tend to try and play with major releases of DEs that I care about or new interfaces that seem interesting. I did a ton of desktop hopping before I realized that I didn't really want the desktop XD. As an Arch user, you may find that true for yourself XD.


----------



## sabrehagen

Hello all, I'll weigh in with my setup. I'm running Archlinux with MPD as my server and NCMCPP as my client. All music stored on a NAS in FLAC format. Digital out to my Beresford Bushmaster Mk I DAC and Headphones amp to my Beyer DT 880s. Audio on Linux is pretty simple, not much to experiment with!


----------



## TwinQY

The name is unfortunate, but pms is a nice mpd client, vim keybindings, filter by search string, etc. Nausea can provide visualization if one is into that sort of thing. Of course ncmpcpp can do all of that (and can be patched for vim keybindings) but pms keeps things a bit simpler. Segfaulting on my Arch box at the moment, so no screenshots, but runs well elsewhere.
  
 Having said that, it's strictly cmus for me these days.

 The one instance where I do run mpd I only use it to play by random album, so no client other than this script and mpc for playback control and track info.


----------



## TwinQY

Some other Linux things of interest:
  
 - A great series on kernel internals, very informative.
  
 - Rofi, which is a really slick-looking dmenu alternative. Can pipe xcmenu to it, and there are nice scripts for pass and surfraw.


  
 - True Color support on terminal emulators like st, which when combined with a patched tmux, supported programs like Neovim, and a proper colorscheme, results in some nice looking colors.


----------



## NiHaoMike

Started using Red Hat and Mandrake back in middle school, then switched to Debian 64 bit in high school when I built my first 64 bit PC. Right before going to college, I switched to using Gentoo. To this day, my main PC still runs Gentoo, but the other machines run Arch since I didn't want to "micro maintain" all of my machines.


----------



## WayneWoondirts

just found this thread, yeay!! I'm thrilled to join in.
  
 I've been a Linux user since 2007, all started out with Ubuntu and after some distro hopping (who doesn't, right?) I finally landed at the OpenSUSE part of the galxy. working with it for two years now, and thinking about going over to tumbleweed...

 already have a question:
 anyone here using streaming to an A&K DAP? got the AK240 next to me, and I don't want to use WINE to get the MQS streaming... maybe with mpd? but then I'd have to use pulseaudio...


----------



## GioF71

me too, @WayneWoondirts just told me about this thread.
  
 Ubuntu Server here with mpd and upmpdcli for playing music, on an old Atom D510 with a linear power supply.
 I appreciate freedom from USB Audio proprietary drivers.
  
 All my servers are debian/ubuntu.
 My two htpcs are Kodi Linux (again, an ubuntu derivative).
  
 Cheers!


----------



## casso

I am a recent convert - running OpenSUSE leap beta at the moment. On both my deskop and laptop. Might make the jump to Fedora when 23 is released in a few weeks time. I enjoy gnome.
  
 What music players are you all using? I really like Quodlibet. It isn't quite Foobar but it's ability to handle big libraries, custom tags and the panel display make it a good fit. The only thing I truly miss from Foobar is ability to browse by cover and discogs tagger but to be honest the panel lay out is probably more functional.


----------



## WayneWoondirts

casso said:


> I am a recent convert - running OpenSUSE leap beta at the moment. On both my deskop and laptop. Might make the jump to Fedora when 23 is released in a few weeks time. I enjoy gnome.
> 
> What music players are you all using? I really like Quodlibet. It isn't quite Foobar but it's ability to handle big libraries, custom tags and the panel display make it a good fit. The only thing I truly miss from Foobar is ability to browse by cover and discogs tagger but to be honest the panel lay out is probably more functional.


 
 Leap, nice. I expect great things from it, why do you want to jump to fedora?

 I'm using mpd with cantata as client. lightweight and flexible. also has DSD support


----------



## RRod

Of possible amusement to the folks on here:
 http://www.twitch.tv/twitchinstallsarchlinux


----------



## TwinQY

Cowsay quotes from the Great Turtle, through vim-startify.
  
 Sometimes Futurama quotes come out.




  
 And then sometimes, Koans come out.

  
 Files with fortune cookies for Futurama can be found here. I'm also using fortune cookies with Dhammapada quotes. The koans are from a Perl module on CPAN, and contains (most of?) everything from the Shaseki-shu, the Gateless Gate, and the Blue Cliff. You can find all of them together, bundled with a wrapper script, zen, that helps with printing to the terminal, over here. This is separate from fortune. I shuffle between zen and a separate script, fort, which shuffles between futurama and dhammapada quotes for fortune:


> $(shuf -n 1 -e zen fort) | cowsay -W 80 -f turtle


 
  
 One can then set it as a custom header for startify.


> let g:startify_custom_header = map(split(system('$(shuf -n 1 -e zen fort) | cowsay -W 80 -f turtle), '\n'), '"   ". v:val') + ['']


 
  
 If you want to work on koans, for whatever reason, but find yourself struggling to make a habit of it, this is a novel approach.


----------



## laurentplop

I don't know if there's an appropriate software subforum, however if you want to convert your FLAC files to Ogg Vorbis with certain audiophile needs, you might want to check out brutha.


----------



## TwinQY

Tried out OpenRC on the main laptop running Arch (s6 as the supervisor). Great fun. Haven't played with Linux (as in configuring and distro-hopping) in a good long time. For the most part, things just "work", but having found that things "work" rather well _off_ of systemd as well, well, that makes me more confident in migrating to Void and playing with runit. And I've seen the musl stuff come a long way as well, so I think it's time. Just waiting for a drive to come in so I can back some stuff up.
  
  
 I also had the time to spruce up my desktop and panel.

  
 I moved to the offset branch of the xft fork for lemonbar, in order to replace what had previously been the Termsyn font, to Source Code Pro. Smoothed, antialiased fonts! Looks spiffy. Eats up a couple of MiBs more but c'est la vie.
 I had removed the desktop indicates off of the left side during what must have been a year or two back, but I made the left icon clickable this time around. The time/date on the right side is also clickable, and spawns a "Scratchpad"-y terminal running Wyrd (ever since I moved to a paper planner, Wyrd and Remind have been getting less and less use, so I might just replace that with weather via Wego).
  
 In terms of the window manager, I finally finished cleaning up some bspwm keybindings that had been left unfunctional from the 0.9.1 changes. Now equalize and circulate keybindings are working again! I've also started changing the opacity of preselections with compton, and found a neat way to cancel presels by reapplying the same keybinding (credit to whoever it was on GH). I've also adopted a script I found on GH for double borders on windows. Looks great! I have a 2bwm desktop set up on a rPi somewhere, and I've always liked the look of double borders. I could probably extend the script and have the inner/outer panel change color during urgent, or when a window is marked sticky/private. Right now I have a seperate script that changes the entire border colour momentarily.
  
 I've also moved to xst, a fork of st. Generally, I do not mind the config.h way of compiling options in, so the main reason for moving had been the bundled patches. And for whatever reason, hintslight finally seems to be applied on xst. Most like it is an issue with X specific to this machine, from some leftover configuration.
  
 Not very Linux-specific, but I've started using multirust for managing my Rust install. I've been building and installing from git manually all this time. I had considered trying out Nix to manage all of my local installs of language libs, but halfway through, I figured it wasn't worth the effort.
  
 I've had rofi-pass installed for the longest time but never set up autotype options. What a timesaver! Now I don't have to type in my usernames (which have gotten increasingly longer...)
  
 There are a couple of machines downstairs - the only one with Arch installed being a big honking desktop plugged into the TV, meant for watching movies, Youtube, and general entertainment. Yes, it's a waste of resources, but there's not much else I need it for. Although, sometimes guests come by and this is typically the machine they use when they ask for a computer (this has been getting less and less frequent what with smartphones being more common, but it used to happen all the time), so I've had a habit of setting up a traditional-looking desktop, with the panel at the bottom, etc, etc. Previously I had been using a stripped XFCE install, but recently I've moved it (and other installs with XFCE) with a lookalike setup running JWM. All I have to do is match the colours with the Arc-Darker GTK theme, and I'm set. Initially I had switched for an Openbox + lxpanel-gtk3 setup, but JWM comes with a panel out of the box and runs with the same amount of memory with that panel (8MiB, most of it due to Xft being enabled; Openbox ran ~8MiB and LXpanel ran ~13-20MiB). Sure, 8MiB is a mere pittance these days, but I guess old habits die hard. I've also moved from using inox-bin from the AUR, to a prebuilt inox using GTK3, to Firefox (Aurora, GTK3 build). And the circle is complete. I've really been enjoying JWM. We use it on Puppy all of the time without much thought, but perhaps sometimes we forget how comparable it is to the popular *boxes.


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## pixelwitch

I started using stumpwm as my WM, with the intention of getting familiar with common lisp, beyond the exercises of my textbook. As it happens the default configuration of stumpwm is pretty much perfect for my needs (excluding some minor mode-line configuration); thus crushing my aspirations of doing *useful* things with the language.
  
 Having some audio-related issues at the moment though. For some reason I can't get mpv to disable its software volume filter (which is utterly redundant considering I'm using my Fiio X3 for audio output, due to my laptop's inbuilt audio being compromised by hiss); as it claims not to have hardware volume control regardless as to whether the device being use possesses that capability. Plus for some reason the X3 only seems to be accepting s32 format samples, which I struggle to understand.
  
 The software volume matter only seems to be an issue on my debian install; I don't recall ever facing this with ubuntu (incompatible with stumpwm) or fedora (installer functions terribly with chromebook touchpads).
  
 Thoughts?


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## TwinQY

The option to turn off softvol was removed in 0.18.1.


> --softvol=<no|yes|auto>
> Deprecated/unfunctional. Before mpv 0.18.1, this used to control whether to use the volume controls of the audio output driver or the internal mpv volume filter.
> 
> The current behavior is as if this option was set to yes. The other behaviors are not available anymore, although auto almost matches current behavior in most cases.
> ...


 
  


> Plus for some reason the X3 only seems to be accepting s32 format samples, which I struggle to understand.


 
 If you've haven't seen this thread yet, might be worth a look. This had also been linked in that thread.


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## pixelwitch

Thanks for the response.
  
 I appear to be using a much older version (0.8.1) despite using the deb multimedia repositories, in which the feature has yet to be deprecated. So that doesn't explain its misbehavior beyond that it may have been deprecated for that reason. 
  
 The arch forums thread was useful, but unfortunately offered no solution beyond the assumption (that I'd already made) that the data was being padded, and that besides forcing s32 output there's little I can do.
  
 I'm considering getting a Topping NX2 soon anyway, which I imagine will remedy my newfound issues of the (incorrect) assignment of a 192 KHz sample rate to the output when using mopidy, which produces garbled nonsense, from when playback is initialised until I pause and unpause it. As well as the issue of permanent USB charging making the device unnervingly hot.


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## Ruben123

Hi guys, fedora 24 (25 in few days) user! Also use Debian, but it doesn't seem to like me at all, the longer I use it, the more error messages I get. Time to upgrade I think.


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## akg fanboy

Just a casual linux user coming through


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## Ulises

A Linux user since 2012 here


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## Ulises

So, anyone knows if there's a way (preferably "easy") to stream Tidal bit-perfectly?


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## GioF71

Hello @Ulises,
there are different ways, including the following which I have tried

1) Use Google Chrome and PulseAudio. Just check on the console that the sample rate is not changed (44100 Hz). For example, if your DAC is named "DAC", type the following:

cat /proc/asound/DAC/pcm0p/sub0/hw_params

As long as you can set Chrome's output to your dac (using PulseAudio Volume Control) and set the default/fallback device to another sound card (maybe the internal audio card). This way no system sound like, e.g., a new email notification, should arrive to your chosen DAC. 

The quality is very good IMHO.

2) MPD + Upmpdcli + (if necessary, depending on versions of mpd and upmpdcli) BubbleUpnpServer + BubbleUpnpPlayer (as a controller, on an Android Phone)

The best results come from this setup, IMO. It is better if mpd runs on a dedicated fanless pc, preferably equipped with a linear power supply.

Let me know if you intend to try something and if you need further information.

Other solutions are appreciated, of course!


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## Ulises

giof71 said:


> Hello @Ulises,
> there are different ways, including the following which I have tried
> 
> 1) Use Google Chrome and PulseAudio. Just check on the console that the sample rate is not changed (44100 Hz). For example, if your DAC is named "DAC", type the following:
> ...


 
 Thanks! Option b seems to be a bit complicated. I found a different way by connecting my nexus 9 tablet to my dac using UAPP, but this isn't idea since I lose the ability to scroble


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## eteina

ruben123 said:


> Hi guys, fedora 24 (25 in few days) user! Also use Debian, but it doesn't seem to like me at all, the longer I use it, the more error messages I get. Time to upgrade I think.


 
 On some multi-boot systems I am using Fedora and like the polish feel of it, with Debian I have been back and forth through out the years... for simple and pain-free linux experience i have other machines with Linux Mint and Ubuntu.


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## TwinQY

​Ubuntu gives up on Unity, transitioning to GNOME: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/
 ​(No, not an April Fool's)


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## ranfan

twinqy said:


> ​Ubuntu gives up on Unity, transitioning to GNOME: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/
> ​(No, not an April Fool's)


 

 Good, GNOME for me. I've been using the flashback for more than 4 years now. Very light, and simple. Looking forward to 18.04 LTS
  
 I'd like to see more support from Ubuntu for WINE and integration of Nvidia. Video games in Ubuntu is lacking..


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## GioF71

twinqy said:


> ​Ubuntu gives up on Unity, transitioning to GNOME: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/
> ​(No, not an April Fool's)




Not the place where I was also expecting to see this news reported... 
Anyway, that's great news for the Linux community.
Maybe that would mean that Canonical will contribute more actively with Gnome from now on.

Now IMO Unity is not bad at all. It's just not necessary. Gnome can be configured to look and behave like unity, same goes for kde now. XFCE, even if it seems more minimalistic, also beats unity for flexibility.

TLDR
IMO this is great news. And also a wise decision from Canonical. If only they had taken this decision earlier...


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## ranfan

Quote:


giof71 said:


> Not the place where I was also expecting to see this news reported...
> Anyway, that's great news for the Linux community.
> Maybe that would mean that Canonical will contribute more actively with Gnome from now on.
> 
> ...


 

 I agree, it is unnecessary to have two after installing. GNOME is enough, and if Canonical would spend more time focusing on it, I think it can be great. Unity tried to simplify things, but by adding many features it became more complicated and heavier than GNOME.
  
 It would be better for Ubuntu to keep it simple and minimalistic, so that users using low-end hardware can use. OS for everyone.


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## TwinQY

​I was reading discussions concerning Ubuntu GNOME, and how regular Ubuntu might possible diverge from the stock GNOME layout in Ubuntu GNOME to match Unity (with extensions, etc), but then Shuttleworth posted this on G+:
 ​
 ​https://plus.google.com/+MarkShuttleworthCanonical/posts/7LYubpaHUHH (Sorry about the full URL, link embedding seems to be broken on Head-Fi's CK Editor)


> > We will invest in Ubuntu GNOME with the intent of delivering a fantastic all-GNOME desktop. We're helping the Ubuntu GNOME team, not creating something different or competitive with that effort. While I am passionate about the design ideas in Unity, and hope GNOME may be more open to them now, I think we should respect the GNOME design leadership by delivering GNOME the way GNOME wants it delivered.
> > Our role in that, as usual, will be to make sure that upgrades, integration, security, performance and the full experience are fantastic.


 
  
 ​For those using GNOME 3, is there an existing Ambiance theme for GNOME Shell? I think as long as Ambiance is implemented well, the Ubuntu "aesthetic" is kept mostly intact. I found this (https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1118405/) but I'm not sure if it's kept up with whatever changes Canonical has added to Ambiance during the Unity period. I suppose there are no shortage of existing GNOME Shell themes out there, but it would probably be better to ship something distinctively Ubuntu-looking out of the box. Plus, I find Ambiance more pleasing than Adwaita.
 ​
 ​As for performance, Unity has definitely been a hog. I tried loading up the 17.04 beta on a VM for fun recently, to see how things have changed, and it was unusably slow (KVM using virtio drivers, 4G of memory and 2 cores allocated even). I didn't even think to try and put it on what I would call low-end hardware. To be fair though, GNOME 3 has not been that much better, so I don't think anything is going to change regarding the accessibility of low-end hardware with these desktops.
  
 However, I've noticed that MATE has been doing pretty well - even on 512MB. In some configurations, it even matches the memory usage of stock XFCE, up until you start ripping out everything but xfce-panel and xfsession. But at that point, you might as well just use LXPanel/FBPanel + [Insert floating WM here]. I couldn't find any discernable difference between Marco and Xfwm either. It's been interesting to see how the landscape has changed - a lot more midweight DEs after the wake of Gnome 3 and Unity.


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## GioF71

twinqy said:


> ​I was reading discussions concerning Ubuntu GNOME, and how regular Ubuntu might possible diverge from the stock GNOME layout in Ubuntu GNOME to match Unity (with extensions, etc), but then Shuttleworth posted this on G+:
> ​
> ​https://plus.google.com/+MarkShuttleworthCanonical/posts/7LYubpaHUHH (Sorry about the full URL, link embedding seems to be broken on Head-Fi's CK Editor)
> 
> ...


 
  
 I'd like to mention I really appreciate a lot ubuntu, in all its flavours. I have especially multiple installations of ubuntu server as well as a pair debian.
 For the desktop, I am now using Linux Mint Cinnamon after trying ubuntu 16.04 with unity, trying Gnome on it from the PPA.
 That does not diminish at all ubuntu's value for the Linux community. As you may know, Mint is based on Ubuntu 16.04, with some default packages removed, a different desktop environment, different themes.
 Today on my mom's PC, which I am using right now, I just installed Mate (from the PPA), and it feels faster and very polished. It's quite old hardware (a celeron dual core) so I am encouraging here to keep this desktop as default. She seems quite happy with the change.
  
 Choices are difficult. After Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu introduced Unity instead of migrating to Gnome 3. At the time, could we really blame Canonical for not jumping on that ship? I surely cannot, although it might seem easy now to think that it would have been a lot better to stick to gnome 2 for some more time. Mate, at the time, didn't even exist.
 But Canonical has a focus on innovation, the vision for 'convergence', so Unity started. History now says it was not the wisest choice, but still I am wondering what could have been the best choice to do at that time.
  
 And, about the huge number of distros.
 IMO, very few are really innovative. A lot are ubuntu derivatives. Some are really interesting and really give a contribution to the community, like Linux Mint. Lots of distros on the other hand are not worth the effort of installing.
  
 Long live Ubuntu


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## TwinQY

​https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/grsecurity-patches-going-private.393068/
 ​
 ​This is not about the patches for stable LTS kernels going commercial, that's a separate issue from way back that had a fair bit of discussion on the usual venues (HN, etc). This is about the patches for the test kernels not going beyond 4.9.
 ​Disappointing if true. Daniel Micay (the OP's source) is the maintainer for Arch's grsec kernels, and heads up CopperheadOS (Android + PaX and other goodies). The thread mentions that Alpine maintains their own version, so I wonder if others will follow that route. Will note that the grsecurity patches got bumped to 4.9.21 yesterday. No official announcements, so nothing really confirmed, but I'd look out for any news regarding this. Grsecurity is a big reason that is keeping me from going BSD at this point.


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## TwinQY

Unfortunately the speculation has come to an end. The announcement is here: https://grsecurity.net/passing_the_baton.php

HN and Reddit discussion (the former has input from the PaX team):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202421
https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/67sqbk/linuxgrsec_and_pax_dropped/

Discussion on the Arch and Gentoo-Hardened mailing lists:
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2017-April/043604.html
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-hardened/message/a06145056b167f52c079bffd9c9a51ac

The Alpine team is still maintaining their own grsec fork, but otherwise, it seems like there is no more chance of getting support. I am saddened by this news, and am considering migrating some machines to OpenBSD.


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## Topodomain

Long, long time user here. First contact was... i don't even remember when it was. I think kernel version was 0.97. Now, most of my time is spent in clusters with thousands of cpu's, terabytes of RAM and petabytes of disk space. Amazing progress...


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## jerico

Arch + i3 here, dual booted with OSX.


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## san14 (Jun 15, 2017)

Been using Linux for around 10 years and is currently on Debian Jessie + Gnome with a Asus DGX sound card on my Desktop and Ubuntu Mate on my laptop.


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## hqssui

Unity is the reason I moved away from Ubuntu. Have used openbox+debian for a while and then moved to Mint KDE. KDE is an awesome environment if you are a fan of keyboard shortcuts.  KDE  + Emacs turned me into a Keyboard Ninja.


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## uoods

i3wm + [Arch, Centos, RHEL] depending on home/work.


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## davidland

complicated...


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## Ech0

Moved from Arch a couple years ago to Linux Mint. I had ran the same Arch install for years & the install lasted longer than the original hard drive it was running on.  That's a large part as to why I like rolling release distros. But, I didn't have the time or maybe desire to continue to maintain Arch. That's why I moved to Mint w/LTS. In the last week or so I got the itch to try some distros and landed on Manjaro w/KDE install. It's perfect for me and my needs right now. Uses pacman which I'm used to using and the devs have done a very nice job offering a stable rolling release distro. The packages aren't updated as frequently as on Arch so this may be a pro or con depending on your needs. For me it's perfect.


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## Trihexagonal

I moved from Linux and have been using FreeBSD for the past 12 years or so.

I have 5 laptops running it and 1 running OpenBSD, with a tutorial a how to set up a FreeBSD desktop from scratch on my site as the vanilla installation only includes the base system and terminal with no X or 3rd party programs.


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## hqssui

Trihexagonal said:


> I moved from Linux and have been using FreeBSD for the past 12 years or so.
> 
> I have 5 laptops running it and 1 running OpenBSD, with a tutorial a how to set up a FreeBSD desktop from scratch on my site as the vanilla installation only includes the base system and terminal with no X or 3rd party programs.



Can you please share the link to the tutorial.


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## Trihexagonal (Dec 17, 2017)

hqssui said:


> Can you please share the link to the tutorial.



Sure, I just didn't want to spam my site:

http://trihexagonal.org

It's written with a target audience of someone who has never used UNIX or the commandline in mind and I attempt to explain the procedure from beginning to end so that a person who has only used Windows should be able to set up a fully functional FreeBSD desktop from scratch complete with all the security and system settings.


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## hqssui

Trihexagonal said:


> Sure, I just didn't want to spam my site:
> 
> http://trihexagonal.org
> 
> It's written with a target audience of someone who has never used UNIX or the commandline in mind and I attempt to explain the procedure from beginning to end so that a person who has only used Windows should be able to set up a fully functional FreeBSD desktop from scratch complete with all the security and system settings.



This is great. Thanks a mil for the tutorial.


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## Trihexagonal (Dec 17, 2017)

hqssui said:


> This is great. Thanks a mil for the tutorial.



 My pleasure. I learned to set it up years ago from a tutorial someone else wrote and it's my way of giving back to the community.

FreeBSD News has an article that links to the tutorial where I've posted a copy at the FreeBSD forums and more people are likely to see it.


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## gohminghui88

I used to install both windows and linux on my laptop and switch between. I like ubuntu, gnome instead of kde. 

After the latest windows version, i have problem installing both. Not sure dual boot issues have been solved or not.


----------



## LukeVivolo

I switched to arch after my windows install broke, and I discovered that installing arch is easier than installing windows on an NVME ssd.


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## Silent One

TwinQY said:


> Unfortunately the speculation has come to an end. The announcement is here: https://grsecurity.net/passing_the_baton.php
> 
> HN and Reddit discussion (the former has input from the PaX team):
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202421
> ...



Greetings

Checking-in to see where your Linux adventures have taken you what discoveries you've made...


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## fianbarr

I run Debian (squeeze?) on a 2009 Mac Mini at home as my main music source. It runs Spotify (headless via xvfb) that outputs via pulse to optical spdif to the DAC, and MPD for local file playback (from the NAS) via alsa to USB to DAC. This because Pulse is locked in resolution (currently set to 16/44.1) and via alsa I can play HD tracks in full resolution. I could try to strip out pulse and run Spotify via alsa, but I am quite certain I will break the entire setup in the process.

Only drawback of this setup is I have to switch the DAC from optical to USB when I switch from Spotify to MPD.

This Mac Mini replaced a BeagleBone Black running debian + MPD after I signed up to Spotify. (Volumio on the BBB supports Spotify Connect, but does not support that with gapless playback, a deal breaker for me, similar to the Chromecast Audio which also supports Spotify Connect, but not gapless).

Oh yeah, I also run Ubuntu 16.1 LTS on my main machine (a laptop).


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## fianbarr

My BBB was called Bonzo (after John Bonham), I had a second BBB to experiment with called Ziggy, my CCA was called Jimi and my current Debian Mac Mini is called Miles.


----------



## duo8

I run Manjaro (was on arch before)
Suspend doesn't work and gnome never hit 60fps.
But everything else mostly works.


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## Trihexagonal

I had settled on, and had been using, Debian quite a while before switching to PC-BSD as a Beta Tester in 2005 at v0.73.

In the Summer of 2021 I revived a Thinkipaf T61 with a 100GB Lenovo HDD on it and thought Kali GNU/Linux, a Debian derivative, would be perfect for it since I wouldn't be doing a lot of work with files.  Having had used Backtrack since version 5.

I was pleasantly surprised how much I liked using apt and the Kali rolling-update system and have used Linux more than FreeBSD the last year.


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## bagwell359

Ubuntu and SUSE.  Had the pleasure of using UNIX full time from 1985 thru 2012 on every workstation that there was.  Linux starting in the early 90's.  PC's with M$ suck and Linux is the only thing that makes them usable.  

Every now and then I write some regexps for my son in Python, better in Perl....


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