#arch linux is bad

[greekie-via-linux]

@arch-official, im installing arch in a vm to learn how to install it, but i am still gonna use @debian-official based distros

[arch-official]

Hot take: Arch Linux isn't inherently unstable, YOUR install of Arch is unstable because you installed it at 1:00 and didn't understand what you were doing when you installed it.

If you take the time to Read The Fucking Friendly Manuel (scary concept I know) and understand what you are doing Arch is just as stable as other Oses such as Debian or Fedora.

If you build a house by yourself and it collapses, it's not because houses are inherently unstable, it's because you built it and didn't check to see if you built it correctly.

[subway-dove]

some people might question me. but i am operating under the three tenants of judo: friendship, perfection of the self, and maximum efficiency minimum effort. which is why i am using arch with cinnamon made to look like windows 95 and for backup am currently copying my whole / into an ssd. safety? its not the jigoro kano way. i did censor my system names n stuff for this beautiful image at least

[horsescary]

people will do anything but read the fucking manual

[slimegirlslugwife]

Ok so like I get why a lot of people want to use Ubuntu or mint over Debian, as a more like “user friendly” option or whatever but like

I do not understand manjaro. Like… just use archinstall with kde and it’s the same! AND you get to say you use arch!! Am I stupid or like……. That’s the only difference right, is manjaro has a worse logo and gui installer?? If I was gonna install Linux for someone that didn’t want to learn Linux it’d probably be like popos or kubuntu (or suse if they had good opinions) because they absolutely will not care that pacman is the best package manager and will give 0 fucks about the AUR and just want to use an App Store or double click an installer on top of “what do you mean I should update my software every day that sounds terrible”

[gay-ellis-thats-all]

School Administrator: oh first day at a new school, huh? Ok, sweetie, can you spell your name for me please?

Oh, just a second… The school board is trying to save money by keeping these old computers running so they moved us over to Linux…

Alright, g’ahead, darlin’.

Student: R…M… Space… Dash…R…F…Space…Tilde. All lower case.

Administrator: Tilde? How do you spell that?

Student: oh that’s like the little squiggle.

Administrator: ohhhhhhhhh! I love learning all these interesting names! What’s your last name?

Student: Musk

Administrator: Ahhh, should’ve guessed! I think we’ve had a few of your siblings matriculate here over the years

Student: So… can I go to class now?

Administrator: Yup, just as soon as I log this registration document with Adrianna, our IT administrator…

Administrator: Oh… well, that’s odd… she said, “Her father named her, I take it? He would be the one to get even the most basic script-kiddy command wrong.”

Student: Yeah… I know… the closest he’s ever come to using Linux is when he watched one of the programmers at X, formerly Twitter, use the terminal.

Administrator: I’m sorry, dear… do you have a name you’d prefer we use?

Student: Oh, thanks… um… Miriam?

Administrator: that’s lovely, dear.

if I meet u at a party I will often hand you my phone and say something like "this is a list of names for girls. please read through and then add one." the list is special because you can only add to it in person; I won't add something that you tell me about over text. however, I think it's okay for me to share it here. without further ado, I present: girl names (names for girls)

[violentkeysmashing]

My emotional support switches

Story below

So, i'm working in IT at the moment.

The boss just came over and went, "you want some network switches?"

My only reasonable response of course was "how many?"

Needless to say there were 6 switches, i have a motorbike so like, not gonna be able to bring them all home. Sad sad

So yay, i now have £150 in switches for completely free!! :D

[watercolormagicalgirl]

truly, it never ends

two types of linux user ...

[greekie-via-linux]

written on my new drawing tablet btw

[monsterqueers]

So ive been using linux for a good while now, and its now officially my daily driver. Windows is now permabenched in a removed hhd in a drawer unless something awful happens. (Good riddance, havent truly enjoyed windows since xp)

And from this I think that people urging others to move to linux are not doing so in the correct way.

Instead of trying to push a friendly distro and insisting it will work for everything and everyone, instead check if the hardware they are using specifically is good for linux and if so what families.

One computer will be a breeze with any distro, another could have a few quirks but be basically fine, however another of the same year and manufacturer could be an uphill battle thats straight up unusable even for someone who knows how to do the kernel edit workarounds for all but specific distros, if that.

My desktop took linux mint like a dream, 100% painless with no fucking about to make it work and even no need for an ethernet cable to get things started. My dinosaur laptop (may it rest in peace after other components died) had a few issues but also worked very well with little effort with mint. My current junk laptop is an uphill battle that will require arch AND edits to the kernel paremeters to work without being filled with screen flashing and full system freezes at random and im still gearing up the gumption to give it another few attempts to actually pull it off.

Each of these computers is a VERY different experience, and if your prospective switcher is using a computer that doesnt play well, its NOT going to work, they will get frustrated, and they will give up. They have to work with what they have.

Instead of going right to telling them to switch and that anything is good, Encourage people to search up their pc+linux compatibility if they are looking to switch to determine if its viable for a newbie who doesnt want to struggle, then offer a distro that has a live usb/dvd version if possible for them to test without install, and a big enough userbase that troubleshooting is as painless as possible.

If its a laptop, archwiki has lists of those by maker (linked in the page given) with notes on what has been tested in that family of linux.

This, I think, above all, is the most important thing when trying to get people to switch:

MAKE SURE THEIR HARDWARE IS GOOD FOR IT

Not just the pc, but the peripherals too; their mouse, their mic, their webcam, their keyboard- these things are not always supported well.

Linux can be fast, easy, and really comfortable and painless with little to no troubleshooting or tedious workarounds to get your stuff to work; but you have to be using the right hardware.

Yes, make sure you have alternative programs lined up that are actually good (stop reccing gimp when krita is a way better P$ alternative for people trying to draw digitally), and maybe consider talking about how to run wine in a newbie friendly way for things they might need for work reasons that dont work on linux normally(and accept that it might not work even with wine), but above all, make sure that its not just being phrased as 'a you problem' when it might be their system that is the issue there.

For prospective switchers that tried but gave up because of glitches or freezes or things otherwise not working: It wasnt you being bad at computers. Sometimes it just doesnt work with that hardware well and there is nothing you can do. People dont warn you about this, but its a very real issue.

If you still want to try linux, when you eventually get a new computer in the future, look for one that seems to be supported by linux well- some pcs even come with linux preinstalled for you even (dell does this with ubuntu and ubuntu has skins that looks windows esque). Asking specifically for linux compatible or linux preinstalled computers signals to developers to make more computers that work with linux, and makes it easier to get linux friendly stuff.

If not, there are windows 11 neutering tools out there in the wild that are very useful and are a plenty fine alternative to switching. You should only switch if you want to switch.

[artisticmedley]

Re: Wine games - have a look here https://appdb.winehq.org/

Re: running a VM - it's not super recommended for games (particularly newer / heavier / harder-on-the-computer games) because it's a fair bit of extra effort for the computer, so your computer may or may not be able to run it, depending on both the game and the computer. But like, it can absolutely work. I had no problems on my 12+year old desktop computer running Debian host with Win XP virtual machine & playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (the origial 1999 version) so i don't wanna put people off too hard. But also i'm not sure that same computer (again, old) could handle a Win10 VM and like, Sims 4 or whatever.

Also in terms of distros, idk shit about Mint except that it's often recommended for new folk, but if you prefer to just work with whatever simple desktop environment you get (called GNOME), ubuntu can be fine. If you love customisation (caution: this means many settings / options) then you might prefer Kubuntu (with the K) which comes with a desktop environment called KDE Plasma.

the underlying how-it-works is the same between both ubuntu & kubuntu, just lots of stuff about what the desktop looks like in terms of layout and settings is quite different. (there are also other Desktop Environment options, like uhhh Mate and i think Cinnamon? Almost certainly others too. But idk shit about them.)

Oh I'm sorry C: you've only got 6GB free? Only six fucking gig? We used to boot the OS off fucking floppy drives but I'm so so sorry that six entire gigabytes of free space isn't enough for you you poor starving thing. You've been experiencing worse and worse memory issues for months and now you're freezing and crashing every few minutes because why, you just can't make 6 gig work? Grow the fuck up.

[uwubuwuntuwu-owofficial]

Ayo Mr. White, I use arch, bitch.

Breaking bad if Jessie was a Linux user.

[irbcallmefynn]

There's a lot stopping me from wanting to switch to Linux to the point where it's kinda funny. sure Linux gaming is in many ways better than windows and everything runs better and you have more control and it won't spy on you and you can do basically everything I'd want to do.

But! I don't like compatibility layers the concept itself is annoying to me i should be able to just run the thing and it works. Also I've heard Linux has issues with VR which is important to me. Also the mental image i have of Linux is that it's very technical and fickle and you have to do a lot of things manually and i don't like that. Also i think there being so many types of Linux is actually a bad thing for me cause i don't know the difference between them and i don't know which would work for what i want so I'm just confused and frozen by choice paralysis.

Linux scary and confusing I'm literally just a wolfdog you can't expect me to use commandline or tell the difference between an Ubuntu and an Arch and a ShitBalls

[koolcatzblog]

I just realized like yesterday that because I've lost this fedora install (long story) I no longer have this dwm config file. I have decided to deal with this by spending my Tuesday night spinning up an arch vm and creating a new dwm config file from scratch.

I would've done dwl instead but last I checked it did not play nice with VMs and even on bare metal it was a bit of a mess (even for linux standards). I probably will not use this on production again though because x11 sux.

finally trying out dwm, the final boss of linux.

[kde-plasma-official]

whats the status of like. using linux on a phone. it feels like there are two parallel universes, one that kde lives in where people use linux on phones, and one where if you google linux phones you discover theyre almost usable but they can barely make phone calls or send texts and they only run on like 4 models of phone

don't have much experience with linux on phone so anyone please correct me if i'm wrong but

one of the problems with phones is that every vendor and manufacturer adds their own proprietary driver blob to it and these have to be extracted and integrated into the kernel in order for the hardware to function.

as companies don't like to share their magic of "how does plastic slab make light", reverse engineering all your hardware is quite a difficult task. Sometimes there just isn't a driver for the camera of a phone model yet because no one was able to make it work.

So naturally, this takes a lot of time and tech is evolving fast so by the time a phone is completely compatible, next generations are already out and your new model obsolete.

Also important to note: most of this work is made by volunteers, people with a love for programming who put a lot of their own time into these things, most of them after their daytime jobs as a hobby.

Of course, there are companies and associations out there who build linux phones for a living. But the consumer hardware providers, like Pinephone, Fairphone and others out there aren't as big and don't have this much of a lobby behind them so they can't get their prices cheap. Also the manufacturers are actively working against our right to repair so we need more activism.

To make the phones still affordable (and because of said above driver issues) they have to use older hardware, sometimes even used phones from other manufacturers that they have to fix up, so you can't really expect a modern experience. At least you can revive some older phones. As everything Linux.

Then there's the software providers who many of are non-profits. KDE has Plasma Mobile, Canonical works on Ubuntu Touch, Debian has the Mobian Project and among some others there's also the Arch Linux ARM Project.

That's right baby, ARM. We're not talking about your fancy PC or ThinkPad with their sometimes even up to 64-bit processors. No no no, this is the future, fucking chrome jellyfishes and everything.

This is the stuff Apple just started building their fancy line of over-priced and over-engineered Fisher-Price laptop-desktops on and Microsoft started (Windows 10X), discontinued and beat into the smush of ChatGPT Nano Bing Open AI chips in all your new surface hp dell asus laptops.

What I was trying to say is, that program support even for the market dominating monopoles out there is still limited and.... (from my own experience from the workplace) buggy. Which, in these times of enshittification is a bad news. And the good projects you gotta emulate afterwards anyways so yay extra steps!

Speaking of extra steps: In order to turn their phone into a true freedom phone, users need to free themselves off their phones warranty, lose their shackles of not gaining root access, installing a custom recovery onto their phone (like TWRP for example), and also have more technical know-how as the typical user, which doesn't quite sounds commercial-ready to me.

So is there no hope at all?

Fret not, my friend!

If we can't put the Linux into the phone, why don't we put the phone around the Linux? You know... Like a container?

Thanks to EU regulations-

(US consumers, please buy the European versions of your phones! They are sometimes a bit more expensive, but used models of the same generation or one below usually still have warranty, are around the same price as over there in Freedom Valley, and (another side tangent incoming - because of better European consumer protection laws) sometimes have other advantages, such as faster charging and data transfer (USB-C vs lightning ports) or less bloated systems)

- it is made easier now to virtualize Linux on your phone.

You can download a terminal emulator, create a headless Linux VM and get A VNC client running. This comes with a performance limit though, as a app with standard user permissions is containerized inside of Android itself so it can't use the whole hardware.

If you have root access on your phone, you can assign more RAM and CPU to your VM.

Also things like SDL just released a new version so emulation is getting better.

And didn't you hear the news? You can run other things inside a VM on an iPhone now! Yup, and I got Debian with Xfce running on my Xiaomi phone. Didn't do much with it tho. Also Windows XP and playing Sims 1 on mobile. Was fun, but battery draining. Maybe something more for tablets for now.

Things will get interesting now that Google officially is a monopoly. It funds a lot of that stuff.

I really want a Steam Deck.

Steam phones would be cool.

[possibly-j]

Linux and BSD

More specifically: Linux and Choice, and What an Operating System Should Be

Choice brings the opportunity for error. A perhaps profound statement on life, but we're talking about operating systems here. When the user is given the opportunity to make choices, they are given the opportunity to make mistakes. What choices the user wants to make, and what choices they do make, will define their experience with an operating system.

This is the crux of many operating system debates in my opinion. What is an operating system to you? Much of the online Linux space is populated by those who see their operating system as a hobby, something to be played with. I think this is why we see distros such as Arch, NixOS, and Gentoo so often. They are the perfect vessels for this sort of use. But you also will encounter those who simply want an operating system that works. They don't want to constantly dig through their config files, fix broken packages, or add pretty animations to their WM, they just want to use their operating system as a means to an end. This is where you'll find Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and as the title suggests, BSD.

BSD users in my experience value consistency above all else. When they encounter an install of a BSD system, they expect it to work exactly like any other install would. They expect the same commands, same software, and same experience. This is Unix after all, not Linux. When BSD users talk about Linux, this is the most common pain point I see. X11 or Wayland? PulseAudio or PipeWire? SystemD or alternatives? Each Linux install, even of the same distro, has the potential to be wildly different. And this can lead to frustration.

I think there's a tendency for us as Linux users to assume this is how an operating system should be. Millions of choices allowing for personalizing your experience. After all we associate the opposite with Windows. But I think monolithic operating system designs should not be dragged down by this association. Customization is just one reason to not like Windows. A well designed monolithic system, as we see with the BSD's, can provide a seamless experience out of the box that is difficult to recreate with component based designs.

This is not to say that either is bad. In fact, both I'd say both are good. I am a Linux user primarily. I know Linux quite well and at this point in my life I'm not willing to put in the effort to learn anything else. This also means that I know what I like to customize, how I like my Linux to work. But I see the appeal of BSD's and their consistent design.

To end this post I would like to ask a hypothetical. If one of the BSD's were currently in the position of Linux, an upcoming competitor to Windows, would we see easier adoption from Windows users who are used to monolithic designs?