The real joy of desktop linux is doing basic computer things, doing things fast on less hardware with no spyware or corporate nagging.
However I still don’t use it as a desktop for media. Linux is for accomplishing tasks that maybe require talking to the computer.
I really think command lines can be a lot of fun. Its computing as a text adventure where you can write your own spells to do common tasks for you like a fantasia wizard.
I keep saying I should learn how to use gifsicle
bursts in out of breath are we evangelizing the terminal??
thank the heavens, I’m always the lone weirdo in the group, yall get me. group hug. seriously hugely underrated way of interacting with a computer (so long as we’re talking about unix environments, command prompt and powershell can fall into the earth and stay there)
TOTALLY understand why there’s so much hate for them, they’re very rarely introduced in any capacity beyond “copy paste this into your terminal and if it doesnt work wait several days for condescending responses” but the reality of the situation is that if you know a few basics, using a terminal is far more exploratory and expressive and fun than any gui. guis in my opinion are a bad solution to many (not all, nor even most! don’t look at me like that) user interactions they’re shoehorned into, not to mention requiring far more dev effort to maintain often for no real reason.
this philosophy does not apply to beginning users - I’m not asking my mother to manage her system in bash, here, or even most of my friends - but the sorts of intermediate computing users who will say linux is just for pure nerds, then go on to jump through some unbelievably arcane hoops in an exact memorized order between their device manager and registry editor and maybe the computer management applet for good measure just to get an old driver loaded just baffles me
these are all just different flavors of stockholm’s syndrome. linux just doesn’t have the audacity to lie to you about it, keep whispering in your ear “no you’re the problem baby”. there are some normal person things that are trickier to do in linux, beyond any shadow of a doubt, but some things are simpler too. I have 3 linux machines in the house under heavy use currently - one of which is a repurposed VPS host I got off ebay, running a 4-disk raidz NAS array, with a 1050TI for 4k media playback that I also play video games on heavily - which also boots from a thumbdrive because it doesnt have bios support for booting from its PCIe 1x riser nvme drive - and still the most problematic computer in the house is my partner’s modern lenovo laptop running win10. aforementioned NAS/media center/gaming rig has been bulletproof for 3 years since I put it all together.
like, sure, it all seems simple when you know what you’re doing - and yes, there’s a learning curve - but we’ve all just kind of forgotten the initial learning curves we overcame as our younger selves in more mainstream OSes.
try it out, my loves, you might like it more than you think
edit: I imply but don’t outright say here that using linux requires terminal, and yes that is absolutely the case, it’s designed unlike any other OSes in that it’s designed terminal up instead of GUI down, don’t listen to nerds who say you don’t need the terminal anymore, you always have and always will it’s just how linux works. well actually I guess macos is kinda like this too huh
edit2: realizing i have more i lot more thoughts on this i want to write down publically, will do that soon, apologies in advance
yeah if/when windows has dick pill ads in explorer i’ll be fine running linux for vscode and the rest of the electron shite i run everywhere else anyway, i just hope proton gets Legit Good
i told my mother in law today that “the worst part of modern living is that random people are asked to use computers at all. it should have stayed a hobby” and i stand by it
there is a part of me that fetishizes a future cyberpunk neon billboard covered windows, maybe they could pull it off if they leaned completely into it
jk its microsoft itll be a beigescape of focus tested wholesome advertising content
also proton aint bad, i rarely run into shit that gives it any trouble, i get the fears about it being too bespoke per-game and brittle (i mean the DXVK guy outright said this at some point) but like, r-type final 2 runs beautifully in proton on my framework laptop with no gpu, doubt that was accounted for. totally anecdotal and potentially very situational but it does well by me for the weirdo shit i play
biggest issue i run into is lower power middleware games (your game makers and such) interestingly enough. still cannot for the life of me wiggle panzer paladin into running no matter how i manually configure wine. the time i have spent trying to make that game run i could probably have beaten it by now.
(also i played it in windows and decided i hated it oops)
i mean in all seriousness this captive audience shit is likely why so many people (very justifiably) hate computers, same as cars or, like, dating apps in areas where its weird to meet someone romantically without the pretense of a dating app meetup (basically just sf)
the purest distillation of dystopia is being made complicit in niche beliefs/behaviors because Society Demands It Damnit
I used wine-staging for years from like 2013-2019 (community optimization that predated proton) and my biggest problem with it was never low-end GPU performance, it’s that a) it basically needs a whole extra CPU thread to translate DX instructions into OpenGL/Vulkan in realtime, which adds latency at a minimum and also fucks with CPU requirements more than GPU, and b) a lot of middleware breaks, especially if it needs to ship its own executables alongside the game itself, which makes a lot of exotic compatibility and mods less fun to think about, which begs the question of why you’re on a PC at that point. it’s been basically those 2 problems for 25 years
Microsoft is getting a DX12 code path actually merged into Mesa as part of WSL2 which I have high hopes for, after all this time, because the other problems are kind of unfixable otherwise (though I guess Valve now has a team on permanent shim duty)
Linux - where watching a movie is as simple as…
mplayer dvd://1 -vf $(mplayer dvd://1 -vf cropdetect -ss 600 -frames 25 -vf cropdetect -vo null 2>&1 | sed -e ‘/^[CROP]/!d;s/.* (-vf ([^)]+).*/\1/’ | tail -1),dsize=16/10
Just kidding I also love to do pervert stuff in the terminal any time I can!
I used to be a screen guy, but I’ve been teaching myself tmux lately. It’s good stuff!
tmux rules as soon as you bind the main keystroke to control-a, control-b is a crime
My sentiments exactly.
I think one problem intermediate users have with Linux is that the diversity of Linux distros out there can make it harder to google solutions. This seemed to trip up the Linus Tech Tips guys a lot when they tried out Linux for a month. But again, their parameters for switching to Linux were as a drop-in replacement for their current tech.
Also, I admit that the Linux desktop has regressed slightly over the last few years in some distros while they gradually shift to Wayland. Eventually that will settle down. Linux Mint has always been rock solid for me though.
Oh, and I want to rant about MiSTer for a minute. MiSTer is built around Linux and watching all these tutorials of people dragging files around and downloading various bits of software just to format the SD card correctly is so painful! Unfortunately, the MiSTer devs and community members’ lack of general Linux knowledge makes some of this a lot more painful than it needs to be on Linux as well.
And finally, symlinks people, symlinks. These ROM archives with duplicate copies of files in various directories grouped by genre, etc. just kill me.
Yeah. Once you get it connected to your network there’s really no need to ever remove your sd card again. rsync and scp are your friends!
I use backtick in tmux and it’s great since what I’m doing is switching windows 90% of the time so I’m already up in the number row
The problem is that everything is distributed as zip files, which don’t support symlinks
call me a pervert but ctrl+b just feels like a nice hand stretch to me, keeps me feeling limber and physically engaged yknow?
the modding thing weighs on me heavily, as a person new to the scene (I’ve been linuxing since 2014 or so but only recently started caring about games again) yeah the mental gymnastics to figure out how wine options bind to basic windows actions for the sake of mod workflows are actual torture. either way yeah my knee jerk proton reaction is usually to people saying it doesnt work at all, your explanation is a much better one than I’ve seen til now, thanks for focusing my thoughts on this!!!
was so relieved at the headline about wd 22tb drives on the way, because one I don’t want to break up my 1080p movies organized by decade drive that’s currently filling up a 18tb drive, not for the first 100 years of it at least, or the “autereum” 18tb drive organized by directors, and two I’ve been dying for a 20tb usable space drive forever. it’s just a good round number. I’m thinking I might just get one of those thousand dollar nas things just to have the drives attached to the router and out of my way too.
