this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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A continuation rant of

https://lemmy.world/post/18158630

Oh my. The games I usually play work fine under Linux, and now they work equally or worse. The few Unreal games that caused me to break my Linux streak work way better under Windows, but the experience is so much worse. Spectacle screenshots always work, windows one just somehow manages to break itself, there is no fix. Every second boot it advertises Windows 11, even though I'm "ineligble", since I have TPM disabled. No middle click paste. Applications keep going off bounds. PowerTools managed to reset twice now. Which C++ redistributable do I need to run this program? It's not the newest one or the year before that. It's not the one provided by the installer. It's 2013 (in this case only)! WSL mounting is a nightmare if I want it to be read only. AMD drivers refuse to install because windows update is stuck at a "failed" security update. Tried to make a folder? Explorer.exe just crashed! Update went through finally? Just kidding, xbox app was just installed! Do you like to change individual application volume? I knew you didn't! Install EarTrumpet! Oh, Windows store is broken by design! Then the settings. Why are they there if they just redirect to control panel?

What is this shit? I'm actually just going straight back to Linux, Fedora this time because of recommendations. If Wayland on fedora still does weird glitches, I will use x11 and suffer what happens on a 3-monitor setup with one monitor having a higher refresh rate and resolution. Windows is now only for games that won't run under it.

Now... Extra question; Why does every distro need yet another package manager? Yay/pacman I get because it seems to build it. Though I don't understand why, other than AUR. APT is so nice and easy... I hope DNF is the same.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I'm all for more people switching to linux, but a lot of your windows issues sound less like windows issues and more like your specific installation is messed up somehow issues.

One thing I will mention though is that Windows does have native per-application volume control, you don't need to install EarTrumpet. You can right-click the system tray volume icon and open the mixer, or just search for "volume mixer" in the start menu.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I've had several machines that refuse to update because of error 0x.

In fact, one of my kids has that happening right now.

At least that part is not isolated to OP. It doesn't happen to me anymore since I switched to Linux about a year ago

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Right. But OP was talking about Windows.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Dear god can we please stop it with the “My Linux Journey” posts. Create a new community or post to instagram or something.

EDIT:

Be the Change You Wish To See in the World

[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Different folks are at different stages of their journey. People are allowed to post about their thoughts and experiences.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I agree. Somewhere else though please.

[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

Yeah, this comes off as just another blog entry that they haaaaad to show us but should've stayed as a blog entry.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I guess you could bring it up to the mods. As long as they are allowed, they will be posted.

I'm just posting a rant after my first rant, which pretty much means this is the last one I'm doing. I liked the reading what others had to say about the first one, so how about another meltdown ;)

It's not meaningful, but at least I'm having fun. Otherwise I probably wouldn't be posting this. And it also cools my head writing how dumb the issues are, even if they are my fault.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You just ranted about how bad you are at using and understanding Windows, in a Linux community.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)

To be fair his prior rant was about how bad he was at using and understanding Linux.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I have an impression that no OS is gonna save OP.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

Dear diary,

Today I ate a burger. For real this time.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago

I'm surprised nobody said it yet. Welcome back!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Sounds like you should get a Mac.

Be that as it may, I would like to be constructive for a change:

Why does every distro need yet another package manager? Yay/pacman I get because it seems to build it. Though I don’t understand why, other than AUR. APT is so nice and easy… I hope DNF is the same.

RPM - which DNF uses - is the standard package format for Linux ;-) The problem seems to me to be that every distribution does not attach any importance to something like common standards.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

for the package manager remark, you can get by with the GUI on most popular distros now.

I like using the cli but every now and then I challenge myself to only use GUI and I feel like it works fine on fedora, ubuntu etc.

I particularly like that fedora workstation keeps the system updates/upgrades in the GNOME app store, it feels cohesive and intuitive.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If you need games, use the OS that gives you these games. And if that OS gives you headaches, you need to decide if you want games, or a working OS. Maybe you can't have both always. Or maybe an XBox or PS5 is a better option for you.

I'm an artist and I need photoshop. Adobe is evil, but Photoshop just works. But I still stayed with Linux. Now I use a combination of Gimp and Photopea. While Photopea is 90% there to what I need, Gimp is a disaster in terms of usability (I've been using Linux since 1999 btw, off and on, so I'm not new on Gimp). But I still stay with Linux, because it aligns with my beliefs that software should be open. I want nothing to do with corporations injecting tracking or ads on my OS.

I go as far as using a Macbook Air because I like the how its trackpad feels, but I don't always run MacOS. Most of my actual work happens on Debian on my other computers.

As for Fedora, for games you might want to try Nobara, which is based on Fedora. The default Fedora might, or might not have everything setup for you to run games at higher speeds or compatibility. Running Windows games is not Linux distros's first priority you see, but Nobara's is.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I'm probably going juat Fedora, since I want the most stable one I can get, which is pretty much an issue with Wayland. I can try Nobara too since I have an extra empty disk.

VS code works fine and I've grown to like it more than Visual Studio, since it also has reference jumps now. But still, writing ASM doesn't really need a crazy editor. I had the pleasure of all tools that I need for work working under Linux.

The two things that didn't are paint.net and fusion 360. Krita is quite similar to paint.net and more powerful so I'm good on that front and 3d printing is just a hobby, so booting up Windows to do one model isn't a big deal either. Though I haven't really modeled after I made the switch initially. I did try to learn FreeCAD, bur it's too complicated to make simple models and usually someone has already made what I need :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Try the free version of OndSel instead of freecad. It's freecad, but sensible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Will check this out thank you for the tip!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

On another note, Pinta is a clone of Paint.net that you can get via Flatpak.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Fyi, if you have an Nvidia card, KDE plasma on Wayland is gonna be a better experience.

As for why every distro needs it's open package manager... Nobody knows, that's why flatpak exists.

And if you're using fedora... Just use the graphical app store.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

That's actually been hit or miss for me.

On my laptop with a 3060, absolutely. On my desktop with a 2070, omg no. It's a buggy mess.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

My friend has a 3060 ti. Nouveau resulted in random freezes, and the proprietary drivers made it so GPU accel didn't work in flatpaks under kde wayland. Had to switch to xorg to fix it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Which C++ redistributable do I need to run this program? It's not the newest one or the year before that. It's not the one provided by the installer. It's 2013 (in this case only)!

Luckily, glibc is mostly backwards compatible. You can still hit issues if you have a binary blob that's been compiled against a newer version of glibc than what comes with your distro, or if it's compiled against an extremely old version of glibc, but that's not too common.

Why does every distro need yet another package manager

A lot of them have been around for a very long time - dpkg (then apt) since 1994, RPM (then yum then dnf) since 1997 - and there's no one package manager that's clearly better than the others.

APT is so nice and easy... I hope DNF is the same.

dnf is just as easy, and in my experience, Fedora's repos are pretty comprehensive and have a lot of things that Debian's and Ubuntu's don't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Fedora has packages that Debian does not? I have not used Fedora in a long time but is this true? Debian is reported to have twice as many packages as Fedora.

https://repology.org/

Or is this statement the result of things like COPR?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I can't remember examples off the top of my head, but there's been some GUI programs I've wanted to install that are in Fedora's repos but not in Debian's. I'll have to check my installed packages at home and see.

Debian's packages can also be very old, even in unstable. That's to be expected - Debian focuses on stability rather than going for the cutting edge - but it can cause issues when using it in a desktop environment (as opposed to a server environment). I've got a Framework 16 laptop and AMD contributed a bunch of bugfixes in the 6.9 kernel, which took a while to make it to bookworm-backports.

Debian is fantastic as a server OS and I've been using it for over 20 years, but on the desktop I ended up liking Fedora more.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I'm not sure, but they're the only distro I've used that properly packages openrgb. It automatically does the udev rules and everything.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

DNF is as easy as APT. Now many distros start to use wayland by default Thanks to great Improvement with stability.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I always like these posts. Comments are usually useful despite snide remarks and it's nice hearing from other people that struggle(d). Glhf I say. Worth it in the end.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Why does every distro need yet another package manager?

I think most package managers - the ones actually part of a distro - are old. It's not a question of why they all use different package managers, it's a matter of them having developed them long ago before any single one matured.

That said, there are other considerations, which is also where new ones come from - different distros will have different approaches to package formats, dependency management, tracking of installed packages and system files, some might be implemented in a specific language due to the distro's ideology, some might work in a different way (like NixOS), and there's probably a whole bunch that just want a different interface.

You wouldn't ask why Linux has a different way of viewing installed programs from Windows, and in the same vein packages are not a universal aspect of Linux, so each distro has to make its own choices.

Also I like pacman, some people complain about the commands being obscure, but I feel like they're structured in a much more logical way. Don't confuse it with yay though, pacman doesn't build packages, and yay is specifically a wrapper around pacman that has different commands, while adding the ability to interact with the AUR.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Why does every distro need yet another package manager?

  1. Some are improvements
  2. People hang onto the one they designed

There are some formats with excellent features like segregation of build and use, consistency of product and signed manifests. BUT, if you don't get why that's important you'll take a deb-based distro or one that builds continually in-situ and never realize it's a risk.

Having said that, apt4rpm was great, yum was bad, dnf is featureless shit, and redhat is quickly broadcomming under IBM because #ibm. So go get PCLinuxOS and ask where the box templates are. And that's my 25-year summary of package management.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The package manager manages the system. You should have more than one unless you are talking about Flatpak

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I think you meant “should NOT” have more than one.

An alternative to Flatpak is Distrobox in which case you can have a different package manager inside Distrobox than you have on the host.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No middle click paste

My understanding of this is that it's actually from X11, it's been a feature of the X window system since Christ rode a T-Rex. It's not KDE or Gnome or Cinnamon or whatever doing that, it's X itself. And being a Mint Cinnamon user I don't have enough hands-on with Wayland to know if they're keeping that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah, but it was so commonly used that it was also added to Wayland

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I think part of different distros having their own package managers is that they have their own packages. Different distros may have different preferences as to where to install things, and obviously in terms of the actual software distributed, on eg a systemd distro you want software with systemd support/that doesn't depend on another init system. On a musl distro you want musl software. Etc. It's just easier if you have your own package format and discourages people from installing packages meant for a different distro.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I mean, APT is able to do exactly the same as yay with the apt build command. I don't know of any, but I'm sure there are images/distros out there that will build the whole OS with apt in a similar way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I have a tinkering laptop set up with Fedora, DNF is as simple as APT and friendlier imo. I've switched to Nala (an APT wrapper that enables concurrent downloads) on my Debian PCs. YMMV.

Simply put: every distro needs its own package manager because the distros handle packages differently, from the way software is bundled and distributed, to where files reside in the filesystem.

E.g. APT is so friendly because of how rigid Debian is about the structure and info that is bundled within the .deb archive, which Pacman users tend to consider as unnecessarily restrictive bloat that impairs download/installation times. Meanwhile, yay (and other AUR helper programs) compiles the packages from source.

Although there are some that work across distros, like Nix or Homebrew. Plus there's always flatpak or AppImages or (shudder) Snaps.

And of course, if you want people to think you're basically a programmer, there's always

$ git clone <git repository>
$ cd <git repository>
$ sudo make install

(for software that is packaged with a Makefile)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I guess I could ask since even in the previous post many pointed that I use Linux wrong. And here too. Maybe I'm second guessing myself, but I use terminal to update everything except flatpaks. The most things alien to me are DE configs and if I were to use X11, those too. The first issues were when I installed xwaylandbridge which made kwin spam journalctl and the other "fixes" to screen share breaking debian. After the switch to Endeavour, all of the same issues persisted, except screen share worked because of a newer c++ package (to my understanding). The only difference being that Debian had less problems overall, which is understandable since the things not working properly were from AUR.

The thing I've followed to the best of my knowledge was DontBreakDebian. Is there just something else that I'm not supposed to do? The issues even on Linux don't go away by themselves, so vim and hope was required.

Now I'm too accustomed to Linux, that Windows is alien to me. While the most issues are more of a montage, each fixed one by one, I did do a "hit piece" and being smug about it.

Either way, maybe the forest caveman route is the one for me, since technology is too much for me:'D

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Hey me! The bane of my existence was kwin. I have no idea why, but all of the previous issues have gone away. That is not to say I won't have issues, though for whatever reason xfce x11 "just works", as if VRR was enabled. What the hell...

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Oh extra fucking rant, I though the drag and drop was bad on Linux, probably because Ark just was 50/50 if it let me.

Oh boy, I now realized how much better Linux had it... Sure, there are a few cases, but dragging files from application to application just works unless it's not developed. Right now on Windows, it actually just doesn't work like I remembered it. It's actually refusing randomly. This is a clean install, properly installed with their installer on another windows machine. No disable scripts or whatever used, real windows key and all...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Something is incredibly borked on your machine, hardware or software wise. Yeah Windows sucks, but it's not THAT flaky. Most people aren't having these issues. Linux may just be hiding a hardware issue or something and working around it better than Windows can.

I've noticed that before with stuff like bad RAM, where Windows will blue screen immediately on boot but Linux will make it all the way to the desktop but slowly degrade with use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

It reads very "if it ain't broke, take it apart and fix it"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Most of the issues I have worked through. The few that are there, still don't work how they did before. It could be a botched install or my CPU, which I kind of doubt. I did have a segfault issue ages ago, which was patched by a bios update. Before switching to Linux, W10 worked better than it did now. On Linux, it was consistent issues with Debian and Endeavour.

This is the first time installing W10 on top of an existing one, so it should work. Maybe it's my hardware that caused it, maybe my router just blocked the update. Either way, that was the experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

or my CPU, which kind of doubt

Not a 13-14 gen Intel, per chance?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago
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