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The EADD Linux Technical Gibberings Thread
- Thread starter felix
- Start date
TheGyattDamnRizzler
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2024
- Messages
- 392
Oh word i have a 1998 ford festiva that actually turns on occasionally. Ablnd i put a turbo engine in ir and a e
Oh crickey m8 I didn't realize that's what it meant lmao!
OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
So that's what it means...
On topic: I just installed retropie on a raspberry pi to make a retro gaming box. It's Debian buster under the hood. I'll post screenshots later.
Last edited:
TheGyattDamnRizzler
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2024
- Messages
- 392
Sorry i was like not conscious on this day.
That's cool did you manually install debion onto it. I have minimal experience with raspberry pi's I want to like add onto one and use it as server. Did you get yours on ebay?
/me runs a ryzen 7900x, radeon 6800xt, and uses EndeavorOS
don't need nVidia for common ML workloads anymore.
i just posted some SD images generated on a 7900 XT in this thread - https://www.bluelight.org/community/threads/a-i-image-and-video-editing.945472/
LLMs are even easier to get up and running with something like Ollama
that said, for ML applications, it's still best to use an officially supported distro like Ubuntu.
HeadphonesandLSD
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2011
- Messages
- 1,768
Best OS on the planet is quickly moving towards next stable release sometime this month: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20250330230026
If you haven't given it a try before I highly suggest giving it a chance on real hardware. OpenBSD is by far the best experience I've ever had with stuff working out of the box. Xorg just worked. Suspend and hibernate worked with no configuration. Encrypted disks worked with a simple answer to a prompt+supplying password at install time. I've been through multiple updates now and those have never failed. It downloads the updated kernel+base system, reboots, applies them and then comes right up like nothing happened. I'm getting spoiled. The man pages are very good and everything is documented. The commands have sane names and haven't changed in decades. No more running random web searches and referencing the archwiki to see what changed this week. When I very rarely do need to ask questions someone always replies within a few minutes. Most of the time pointing me towards a page in the manual I should have read before asking the question. At least they're nice about it.
OpenBSD is probably the only OS left where the developers are actually running it on their own machines for their desktop day-to-day. You can tell it's really thought out and people are testing it.
Really happy running it on my laptop right now. I follow the "unstable"/-current/-beta branch so I always get new stuff the moment it hits the CVS repo. I've built some things from source but I'm mostly following the "snapshots" that the build servers make every couple of days. The updates have never crashed the system or failed. I've even submitted and had some patches accepted now in both the ports tree and base system. An OS where every user is a contributor is a refreshing change of pace. It's the only OS where stuff is actually removed instead of being left to rot half working. I can accept not having bluetooth as long as everything else works as intended (and out of the box). Not that I own any bluetooth stuff anyway outside of a couple of video game controllers. Perhaps in the future I may port over FreeBSD's bluetooth drivers. The reason they were removed from OpenBSD is because they were rotting away and no one was interested in supporting them. That's the only downside. If there isn't a developer interested in doing the work stuff eventually gets removed. Same reason you can't have wine on this OS anymore for the time being.
The trade off if it's really secure. Really really secure. For example, on this OS firefox can't access anything outside of my ~/Downloads/ directory. I can manually give it access to other things if I want. But I just move anything I want to upload to that directory instead. If it or any other application attempts to access things it isn't supposed to the kernel kills them and gives you a core dump. It has rarely happened to me. Some rouge website attempted to access some no-no stuff one day and firefox crashed. I checked the javascript on said website and discovered it's doing a lot of naughty stuff on most people's computers. It's a popular website too. I wonder how many it has infected. The OpenBSD devs have pretty much added this ability to most everything in the ports tree now. They're called unveil and pledge. I wish other OSs cared about this enough to make it a hard requirement. Most everything else attempts to solve the same problem with some type of container or jail/chroot. Which are always very easy to escape. It's tiring to hear people drone on and on about security when doing nothing of value to ensure it. Their solutions are always a huge pain in the ass too. Like modern Linux distros that don't allow you to take screenshots of your applications or share input between them.
I'm thinking about giving Guix a try again on a spare machine but the last time I messed around with it it ended up being a huge pain in the ass. The GNU guys are zealots and they won't support anything that matters. Anyone willing to deal with modern linux should probably give Gentoo another look. They have basically become Debian 2.0 over the last year. They're shipping pre-built binaries for most everything now so you can run everything with it being ultra stable for a rolling release distro. I expect to see more distros based on Gentoo over the coming years. They're even talking about making an installer now which was unheard of just a few years ago.
I ran Gentoo happily for several decades until I eventually left the project about 2 years ago over disagreements with where it was heading and the fact that Google guys have subverted the foundation to push the distro in the direction they wanted (they use it as a base for ChromeOS). It's still the most stable Linux distro I've ever used (as long as you don't manage to break your python). The USE flags are really nice for excluding things you might dislike. Although you have to keep a close eye on them now because a lot of stuff is getting snuck in these days under another name. The "no systemd" profile pulls in half of systemd under different names to function.
I have seriously been considering starting yet-another Linux distro for the past few years. But the ecosystem is moving so fast now I ended up spending more time hacking around bullshit than actually creating anything new. No matter which distro you use now you might as well be on fedora and you're basically beta testing software for the US DoD. Even Slackware fell to the cabal. It's really sad but the majority of them are just fedora under a different name with a different package manager now. Even the package managers are going away soon with the push for things like Flatpak and appimage. I see a lot of software now that doesn't even bother shipping anything but a Flatpak.
I did manage to get a good start a few years ago before all my hardware was stolen from me. I used Gentoo/Portage as a base and the s6 init/services system. I had a really fine base system going. I even managed to replace dbus with a shim to IPC socket and skabus. It mostly worked as long as you avoided some of the more horrible software that insists on having systemd installed. Even that stuff mostly worked and I could have gotten what didn't going with a shim to translate the systemd stuff over to s6 or another service. My ultimate goal was making a distro where old Windows software/games could run out of the box and along with standard UNIX software. The issue I ran into is the fact that it was really hard to get anyone to help test it or donate resources for things like build servers. I wanted something that could build itself from source on a variety of platforms but be easy enough for the average user to install from binaries. Basically, OpenBSD but with support for multimedia software and running on the Linux kernel. It's doable and we really need someone to step up and do it soon. But I couldn't get any momentum behind my project. Most people now seem occupied with re-writing standard tools like grep for no reason just because the re-write is in the fad language of the week. I'm pretty sure most of these people are very young. If they'd been around as long as I have they would have lived through this language fad happening 3 or 4 times by now. Outside of developers most people just plain don't care as long as their video games and web browser works. Which is how we ended up in this mess in the first place.
Speaking of the cancer language one of the main issues I had with building up a new base system was dealing with it creeping into everything. Once you let it in it becomes impossible to build the system from source on all but two platforms. Both of which are platforms released in the last 10-15 years. So that language basically makes everything obsolete for no real return. They claim it's more secure. But half the shit written for it is "unsafe" anyway and nothing can fix dumb programmer mistakes. I don't know why they're pushing it so hard. I have theories but nothing worth ranting about right now. If we lived in a sane world we'd be moving over to something like HolyC. Which is fucking amazing. But no one will give it a chance because the man that invented it said the word nigger on live stream. There are several other interesting languages coming out right now too like Zig. But they don't get much attention because they don't have the support of the Government and all these big tech companies behind them.
At any rate I fear in the near future we won't be able to build our own software at all. At least not in a timely fashion. All this new stuff is designed to be very locked down and the software basically requires a server farm to build in a timely fashion. The web browser engines are garbage. If it weren't for the browser problem I could have gotten a new distro finished very quickly. But I have to support the web which requires having a browser which requires pulling in cancer to make it work. Even the "minimal" browsers like surf need that shit if you want to render any modern web page. I curse google for buying off the W3C everyday. They're so much worse than Microsoft back in the day.
Once I find some time again and life gets more stable I'm probably going to attempt releasing an OS and hope that enough people get interested in it to help me test it on different hardware (and help with packaging software for it). Since the Linux kernel is so far gone now with no signs of a decent fork happening I'm most likely going to fork one of the BSDs. Probably FreeBSD because it has the best file system out of all modern OSs and can support all major Windows/Linux software. I have a couple of systems for testing right now that are already running my own config of FreeBSD. I'm forking the kernel to add some stuff from OpenBSD like pledge/unveil. Although it'll be a long time before I can get the entire base system re-written to use it (stuff that doesn't use it will continue to work just fine in the meantime). I'm going to throw out a bunch of the legacy cruft from the FreeBSD base system and re-name or alias a lot of commands. There is no one running concentrating on making a well designed UNIX for desktop use that can also run most old Windows software like games. I think whoever pops up to do that first will get a lot of support behind them. A new OS without all the legacy cruft is sorely needed. As it stands most everything in UNIX/Linux-land is developed as a server first and a desktop as an after thought. OpenBSD is probably as close to a UNIX designed for desktop use that you can get at the moment. But you have to give up a lot of stuff in return. FreeBSD can be configured to do what I'd like it to do. But the manual isn't good and if you follow it word-for-word you'll end up with a system that doesn't boot. It has a ton of stuff bundled in that is either not needed for a desktop or very very old and insecure software. The community is sort of helpful until you say the wrong thing. Then you get banned for no reason. Like the guy that offered a virtual hug to someone without their consent. They're all-in on the political shit flinging.
Linux itself suffers from similar problems and all its problems have been imported into the BSDs because that's what you have to do if you want to support most modern hardware and desktop software. There are more than 5 frameworks for making GUI applications. The two main ones do not integrate together well and require a lot of fiddling with config files to make work together. The kernel has bloated and now they're adding a hard requirement to it that will make it impossible to build on anything but modern hardware. Even on it this change will quadruple compile times at the very least. Your only other option is trusting a binary built by someone else (who should not be trusted). The audio sub-system situation is pure madness. If there is one thing the BSDs do right it's audio. It just works out of the box and all the applications use the same sub-system by default instead of requiring you to set-up a bunch of bridges and shims. systemd is a horrible virus required to run in userspace now to get a working desktop for no reason. Even if it wasn't a virus it's horribly designed software by ignorant people that refuse to play well with others. That a lone should be justification for starting something new. They've pretty much taken all of the problems of Windows and imported them into Linux-land. All because some large tech companies didn't want to train and paying a living wage to their employees.
Obviously I could rant about this all day. I need to post a thread in the tech forum detailing which Linux distros and other OSs are good and how to properly set them up to be both secure and usable for day-to-day tasks. It's crazy to me that we're two decades into the 2000s and there still isn't a decent FOSS OS that can support all the legacy Win32 games, support audio/video well enough to make content, not spy on the end user and not break when you update it. We're dealing with this because all effort in the FOSS communities have been sabotage over the last several decades and the larger "FOSS Foundations" are just fronts for the same companies we tried to escape out from under. All the icons like Stallman and Linus have fallen in line because they're getting paid millions a year to go along with it. I don't really blame them. A lot of people that refused got straight murdered for their efforts. People like Ian Murdock. Even this wikipedia page openly admits he was murdered but we're just expect to believe he was "paranoid" and suddenly decided to kill himself after telling everyone he'd never commit suicide and that the local police were stalking him. Lots of software people have suffered the same fate over the years. It's one of the best true crime stories you can read about if you take the time to do it.
I for one and happy in my new cult. If you need a decent OS that doesn't spy on you, just works and gets out of your way give OpenBSD a try sometime. People shit talk it claiming it's too slow and that the leader of the project is an asshole. I'm running it without hyperthreading enabled (which is the default, you can turn it on if you want) and it's just as fast as my custom compiled Gentoo install was on the same machine. It took all of 10 minutes to get going. Everything worked out of the box other than the two things I was warned wouldn't (fingerprint reader and bluetooth). I've spent the last week or so cuactomizing it to my liking and it was far less painless than anything else I've ever used. I submitted a patch for something minor and it was accepted by the community within a couple of days instead of sitting unused for years like most everything I submitted to Gentoo since 2015 or so. There is no agenda behind it that I can see. The leader of the project is very outspoken and opinionated. He's no longer allowed to sit in private meetings with the big tech companies because he won't compromise on security or let something major sit unfixed for a long time because the tech companies don't want to push a patch and risk bad PR. He hasn't been an asshole to me when I've interacted with him. Although he's quick to call you stupid if you do stupid things. I understand why he got the reputation he did. People don't like being called out of their bullshit.
What's amazing to me is we've had several better kernels and systems come along over the decades since the 60s yet we're all still running UNIX or a clone of some sort. Even Windows imported a lot of UNIX. I blame Microsoft the most for the situation we're in. Back in the mid-1980s the Japanese were releasing an Operating system called TRON that could have changed our lives for the better. Sakamura-sama is a genuis and he had the right idea way back in the 1970s. TRON is a microkernel that was designed in such a way that all of society would use the same kernel. It was supposed to run everything from the desktop to the large machines used in manufacturing to the trains and our cars and our TVs to our cell phones. All devices would run on the same kernel and commuicate using a common protocol. It would have revolutionlized both comuting and society. We're decades behind where we're supposed to be because it wasn't adopted. The reason we're all not using it right now is because Microsoft used their pull with the US Government to start a trade war with Japan.
The Japanese passed a law in the mid-80s to introduce BTRON systems to their public schools. This was supposed to be the start of the roll out and would have ensured all Japanese children were trained on the new system so by the 90s-2000s they'd have a workforce that knew how to program and use the system. Microsoft was obviously not a fan of this and claimed it would hurt the US economy. So the US Government stepped in and put a stop to it. They imposed sanctions on Japan which led to the Lost Decades a "recession" (read: depression) that plunged Japan into an economic crisis they still have not recovered from. Once Microsoft got their way they basically got a monopoly inside of Japan when it came to PCs. All Japanese PCs have run some form of DOS or Windows since the 1980s right up until today. Later on in the mid-2000s the Japanese tried to introduce TRON again this time on mobile devices/cell phones. They were years ahead of us in the so-called "smart phone" market. The Japanese had "smart phones" by the late 90s/early 2000s but there were seveal different OSs being used by four or five major companies. This was becoming a problem so they decided to unify their cell network and introduce a common OS to run on all the different phones. Then history repeated itself. Only this time Microsoft and Apple teamed up with the US Government to put a stop to Japan developing their own OS and selling it outside of Japan. They crushed them in the courts and all the work was for nothing. It was only a few short years later that all the Japanese companies went under and Apple introduce the iPhone. Which holds a near monopoly in Japan now.
The US Government and their friends in the valley robbed us of not one but four new operating systems over the years. Two of which came directly from Japan. The other two were developed stateside by companies that are no longer around because they were legally crushed just like the Japanese. All the while they've been re-selling us the same 1960s/1970s garbage OSs (DOS, Windows and UNIX forks) that get a little worse with each passing year. All of which spy on the end user and corrupt on purpose because they want to sell you a new device every 2-3 years. The technology sector is dirty. Really really dirty.
Amazingly despite all of this TRON is still the most widely used OS/kernel in the world that you've probably never heard of. It's everywhere running really important machines and robots. It runs public transport in many countries. It is used for a lot of sensitive hardware. It's an amazing system.
Just imagine how much more advanced we could have been without these companies illegally crushing new comers using the legal system. Ken Sakamura had a kernel ready to bring the public "edge computing" decades ago. Imagine how much better life would be if everything from your toaster to your cities local public transport was running the same kernel and spoke the same language. We could be living in a near-utopia by now where most everything was automated and the control wasn't in the hands of a few people that abuse the power of running the system. At the very least we wouldn't be dealing with the same bugs we've been dealing with since the 1960s (beware: PDF file). I'm personally sick and tired of having to wrangle UNIX/Linux into working half right or dealing with Window's ability to eat itself or Apple's "pay me so we can spy on you" nonsense. I don't even like Apple devices I've been given for free due to their bullshit policy about running your own software on them (it's like $120 yearly for the right to compile and sign your own software). I have an Apple TV that I got as part of a bundle with my ISP installation. I left it plugged in for a few weeks and watched the traffic over my LAN. It not only records and stores everyhting it hears being said in my house (the remot has two microphones) it talks to Apple's servers every night around 2-3am and sends them a copy of it. Most of this "smart" bullshit they're selling to clueless people is the same way. None of it is safe to keep around. It's amazing to me that we've gone so far off the deep end that people that ask me for computer support also call me a luddite. They don't listen to anything you tell them but when they manage to break their shit (or it breaks itself by design) they come begging for me to fix it.
I do apologize for the nerd rant. This is the only tech thread on BL that's active. Here is another picture of my desktop. I finally got around to styling firefox so it plays nice with the rest of my set-up. This is a really nice OS. Probably the nicest OS I've used since I had to give up using Amiga. RIP my video toaster. I'm sorry someone thought you were garbage and threw you away when I wasn't around to keep an eye on you.
If you haven't given it a try before I highly suggest giving it a chance on real hardware. OpenBSD is by far the best experience I've ever had with stuff working out of the box. Xorg just worked. Suspend and hibernate worked with no configuration. Encrypted disks worked with a simple answer to a prompt+supplying password at install time. I've been through multiple updates now and those have never failed. It downloads the updated kernel+base system, reboots, applies them and then comes right up like nothing happened. I'm getting spoiled. The man pages are very good and everything is documented. The commands have sane names and haven't changed in decades. No more running random web searches and referencing the archwiki to see what changed this week. When I very rarely do need to ask questions someone always replies within a few minutes. Most of the time pointing me towards a page in the manual I should have read before asking the question. At least they're nice about it.
OpenBSD is probably the only OS left where the developers are actually running it on their own machines for their desktop day-to-day. You can tell it's really thought out and people are testing it.
Really happy running it on my laptop right now. I follow the "unstable"/-current/-beta branch so I always get new stuff the moment it hits the CVS repo. I've built some things from source but I'm mostly following the "snapshots" that the build servers make every couple of days. The updates have never crashed the system or failed. I've even submitted and had some patches accepted now in both the ports tree and base system. An OS where every user is a contributor is a refreshing change of pace. It's the only OS where stuff is actually removed instead of being left to rot half working. I can accept not having bluetooth as long as everything else works as intended (and out of the box). Not that I own any bluetooth stuff anyway outside of a couple of video game controllers. Perhaps in the future I may port over FreeBSD's bluetooth drivers. The reason they were removed from OpenBSD is because they were rotting away and no one was interested in supporting them. That's the only downside. If there isn't a developer interested in doing the work stuff eventually gets removed. Same reason you can't have wine on this OS anymore for the time being.
The trade off if it's really secure. Really really secure. For example, on this OS firefox can't access anything outside of my ~/Downloads/ directory. I can manually give it access to other things if I want. But I just move anything I want to upload to that directory instead. If it or any other application attempts to access things it isn't supposed to the kernel kills them and gives you a core dump. It has rarely happened to me. Some rouge website attempted to access some no-no stuff one day and firefox crashed. I checked the javascript on said website and discovered it's doing a lot of naughty stuff on most people's computers. It's a popular website too. I wonder how many it has infected. The OpenBSD devs have pretty much added this ability to most everything in the ports tree now. They're called unveil and pledge. I wish other OSs cared about this enough to make it a hard requirement. Most everything else attempts to solve the same problem with some type of container or jail/chroot. Which are always very easy to escape. It's tiring to hear people drone on and on about security when doing nothing of value to ensure it. Their solutions are always a huge pain in the ass too. Like modern Linux distros that don't allow you to take screenshots of your applications or share input between them.
I'm thinking about giving Guix a try again on a spare machine but the last time I messed around with it it ended up being a huge pain in the ass. The GNU guys are zealots and they won't support anything that matters. Anyone willing to deal with modern linux should probably give Gentoo another look. They have basically become Debian 2.0 over the last year. They're shipping pre-built binaries for most everything now so you can run everything with it being ultra stable for a rolling release distro. I expect to see more distros based on Gentoo over the coming years. They're even talking about making an installer now which was unheard of just a few years ago.
I ran Gentoo happily for several decades until I eventually left the project about 2 years ago over disagreements with where it was heading and the fact that Google guys have subverted the foundation to push the distro in the direction they wanted (they use it as a base for ChromeOS). It's still the most stable Linux distro I've ever used (as long as you don't manage to break your python). The USE flags are really nice for excluding things you might dislike. Although you have to keep a close eye on them now because a lot of stuff is getting snuck in these days under another name. The "no systemd" profile pulls in half of systemd under different names to function.
I have seriously been considering starting yet-another Linux distro for the past few years. But the ecosystem is moving so fast now I ended up spending more time hacking around bullshit than actually creating anything new. No matter which distro you use now you might as well be on fedora and you're basically beta testing software for the US DoD. Even Slackware fell to the cabal. It's really sad but the majority of them are just fedora under a different name with a different package manager now. Even the package managers are going away soon with the push for things like Flatpak and appimage. I see a lot of software now that doesn't even bother shipping anything but a Flatpak.
I did manage to get a good start a few years ago before all my hardware was stolen from me. I used Gentoo/Portage as a base and the s6 init/services system. I had a really fine base system going. I even managed to replace dbus with a shim to IPC socket and skabus. It mostly worked as long as you avoided some of the more horrible software that insists on having systemd installed. Even that stuff mostly worked and I could have gotten what didn't going with a shim to translate the systemd stuff over to s6 or another service. My ultimate goal was making a distro where old Windows software/games could run out of the box and along with standard UNIX software. The issue I ran into is the fact that it was really hard to get anyone to help test it or donate resources for things like build servers. I wanted something that could build itself from source on a variety of platforms but be easy enough for the average user to install from binaries. Basically, OpenBSD but with support for multimedia software and running on the Linux kernel. It's doable and we really need someone to step up and do it soon. But I couldn't get any momentum behind my project. Most people now seem occupied with re-writing standard tools like grep for no reason just because the re-write is in the fad language of the week. I'm pretty sure most of these people are very young. If they'd been around as long as I have they would have lived through this language fad happening 3 or 4 times by now. Outside of developers most people just plain don't care as long as their video games and web browser works. Which is how we ended up in this mess in the first place.
Speaking of the cancer language one of the main issues I had with building up a new base system was dealing with it creeping into everything. Once you let it in it becomes impossible to build the system from source on all but two platforms. Both of which are platforms released in the last 10-15 years. So that language basically makes everything obsolete for no real return. They claim it's more secure. But half the shit written for it is "unsafe" anyway and nothing can fix dumb programmer mistakes. I don't know why they're pushing it so hard. I have theories but nothing worth ranting about right now. If we lived in a sane world we'd be moving over to something like HolyC. Which is fucking amazing. But no one will give it a chance because the man that invented it said the word nigger on live stream. There are several other interesting languages coming out right now too like Zig. But they don't get much attention because they don't have the support of the Government and all these big tech companies behind them.
At any rate I fear in the near future we won't be able to build our own software at all. At least not in a timely fashion. All this new stuff is designed to be very locked down and the software basically requires a server farm to build in a timely fashion. The web browser engines are garbage. If it weren't for the browser problem I could have gotten a new distro finished very quickly. But I have to support the web which requires having a browser which requires pulling in cancer to make it work. Even the "minimal" browsers like surf need that shit if you want to render any modern web page. I curse google for buying off the W3C everyday. They're so much worse than Microsoft back in the day.
Once I find some time again and life gets more stable I'm probably going to attempt releasing an OS and hope that enough people get interested in it to help me test it on different hardware (and help with packaging software for it). Since the Linux kernel is so far gone now with no signs of a decent fork happening I'm most likely going to fork one of the BSDs. Probably FreeBSD because it has the best file system out of all modern OSs and can support all major Windows/Linux software. I have a couple of systems for testing right now that are already running my own config of FreeBSD. I'm forking the kernel to add some stuff from OpenBSD like pledge/unveil. Although it'll be a long time before I can get the entire base system re-written to use it (stuff that doesn't use it will continue to work just fine in the meantime). I'm going to throw out a bunch of the legacy cruft from the FreeBSD base system and re-name or alias a lot of commands. There is no one running concentrating on making a well designed UNIX for desktop use that can also run most old Windows software like games. I think whoever pops up to do that first will get a lot of support behind them. A new OS without all the legacy cruft is sorely needed. As it stands most everything in UNIX/Linux-land is developed as a server first and a desktop as an after thought. OpenBSD is probably as close to a UNIX designed for desktop use that you can get at the moment. But you have to give up a lot of stuff in return. FreeBSD can be configured to do what I'd like it to do. But the manual isn't good and if you follow it word-for-word you'll end up with a system that doesn't boot. It has a ton of stuff bundled in that is either not needed for a desktop or very very old and insecure software. The community is sort of helpful until you say the wrong thing. Then you get banned for no reason. Like the guy that offered a virtual hug to someone without their consent. They're all-in on the political shit flinging.
Linux itself suffers from similar problems and all its problems have been imported into the BSDs because that's what you have to do if you want to support most modern hardware and desktop software. There are more than 5 frameworks for making GUI applications. The two main ones do not integrate together well and require a lot of fiddling with config files to make work together. The kernel has bloated and now they're adding a hard requirement to it that will make it impossible to build on anything but modern hardware. Even on it this change will quadruple compile times at the very least. Your only other option is trusting a binary built by someone else (who should not be trusted). The audio sub-system situation is pure madness. If there is one thing the BSDs do right it's audio. It just works out of the box and all the applications use the same sub-system by default instead of requiring you to set-up a bunch of bridges and shims. systemd is a horrible virus required to run in userspace now to get a working desktop for no reason. Even if it wasn't a virus it's horribly designed software by ignorant people that refuse to play well with others. That a lone should be justification for starting something new. They've pretty much taken all of the problems of Windows and imported them into Linux-land. All because some large tech companies didn't want to train and paying a living wage to their employees.
Obviously I could rant about this all day. I need to post a thread in the tech forum detailing which Linux distros and other OSs are good and how to properly set them up to be both secure and usable for day-to-day tasks. It's crazy to me that we're two decades into the 2000s and there still isn't a decent FOSS OS that can support all the legacy Win32 games, support audio/video well enough to make content, not spy on the end user and not break when you update it. We're dealing with this because all effort in the FOSS communities have been sabotage over the last several decades and the larger "FOSS Foundations" are just fronts for the same companies we tried to escape out from under. All the icons like Stallman and Linus have fallen in line because they're getting paid millions a year to go along with it. I don't really blame them. A lot of people that refused got straight murdered for their efforts. People like Ian Murdock. Even this wikipedia page openly admits he was murdered but we're just expect to believe he was "paranoid" and suddenly decided to kill himself after telling everyone he'd never commit suicide and that the local police were stalking him. Lots of software people have suffered the same fate over the years. It's one of the best true crime stories you can read about if you take the time to do it.
I for one and happy in my new cult. If you need a decent OS that doesn't spy on you, just works and gets out of your way give OpenBSD a try sometime. People shit talk it claiming it's too slow and that the leader of the project is an asshole. I'm running it without hyperthreading enabled (which is the default, you can turn it on if you want) and it's just as fast as my custom compiled Gentoo install was on the same machine. It took all of 10 minutes to get going. Everything worked out of the box other than the two things I was warned wouldn't (fingerprint reader and bluetooth). I've spent the last week or so cuactomizing it to my liking and it was far less painless than anything else I've ever used. I submitted a patch for something minor and it was accepted by the community within a couple of days instead of sitting unused for years like most everything I submitted to Gentoo since 2015 or so. There is no agenda behind it that I can see. The leader of the project is very outspoken and opinionated. He's no longer allowed to sit in private meetings with the big tech companies because he won't compromise on security or let something major sit unfixed for a long time because the tech companies don't want to push a patch and risk bad PR. He hasn't been an asshole to me when I've interacted with him. Although he's quick to call you stupid if you do stupid things. I understand why he got the reputation he did. People don't like being called out of their bullshit.
What's amazing to me is we've had several better kernels and systems come along over the decades since the 60s yet we're all still running UNIX or a clone of some sort. Even Windows imported a lot of UNIX. I blame Microsoft the most for the situation we're in. Back in the mid-1980s the Japanese were releasing an Operating system called TRON that could have changed our lives for the better. Sakamura-sama is a genuis and he had the right idea way back in the 1970s. TRON is a microkernel that was designed in such a way that all of society would use the same kernel. It was supposed to run everything from the desktop to the large machines used in manufacturing to the trains and our cars and our TVs to our cell phones. All devices would run on the same kernel and commuicate using a common protocol. It would have revolutionlized both comuting and society. We're decades behind where we're supposed to be because it wasn't adopted. The reason we're all not using it right now is because Microsoft used their pull with the US Government to start a trade war with Japan.
The Japanese passed a law in the mid-80s to introduce BTRON systems to their public schools. This was supposed to be the start of the roll out and would have ensured all Japanese children were trained on the new system so by the 90s-2000s they'd have a workforce that knew how to program and use the system. Microsoft was obviously not a fan of this and claimed it would hurt the US economy. So the US Government stepped in and put a stop to it. They imposed sanctions on Japan which led to the Lost Decades a "recession" (read: depression) that plunged Japan into an economic crisis they still have not recovered from. Once Microsoft got their way they basically got a monopoly inside of Japan when it came to PCs. All Japanese PCs have run some form of DOS or Windows since the 1980s right up until today. Later on in the mid-2000s the Japanese tried to introduce TRON again this time on mobile devices/cell phones. They were years ahead of us in the so-called "smart phone" market. The Japanese had "smart phones" by the late 90s/early 2000s but there were seveal different OSs being used by four or five major companies. This was becoming a problem so they decided to unify their cell network and introduce a common OS to run on all the different phones. Then history repeated itself. Only this time Microsoft and Apple teamed up with the US Government to put a stop to Japan developing their own OS and selling it outside of Japan. They crushed them in the courts and all the work was for nothing. It was only a few short years later that all the Japanese companies went under and Apple introduce the iPhone. Which holds a near monopoly in Japan now.
The US Government and their friends in the valley robbed us of not one but four new operating systems over the years. Two of which came directly from Japan. The other two were developed stateside by companies that are no longer around because they were legally crushed just like the Japanese. All the while they've been re-selling us the same 1960s/1970s garbage OSs (DOS, Windows and UNIX forks) that get a little worse with each passing year. All of which spy on the end user and corrupt on purpose because they want to sell you a new device every 2-3 years. The technology sector is dirty. Really really dirty.
Amazingly despite all of this TRON is still the most widely used OS/kernel in the world that you've probably never heard of. It's everywhere running really important machines and robots. It runs public transport in many countries. It is used for a lot of sensitive hardware. It's an amazing system.
Just imagine how much more advanced we could have been without these companies illegally crushing new comers using the legal system. Ken Sakamura had a kernel ready to bring the public "edge computing" decades ago. Imagine how much better life would be if everything from your toaster to your cities local public transport was running the same kernel and spoke the same language. We could be living in a near-utopia by now where most everything was automated and the control wasn't in the hands of a few people that abuse the power of running the system. At the very least we wouldn't be dealing with the same bugs we've been dealing with since the 1960s (beware: PDF file). I'm personally sick and tired of having to wrangle UNIX/Linux into working half right or dealing with Window's ability to eat itself or Apple's "pay me so we can spy on you" nonsense. I don't even like Apple devices I've been given for free due to their bullshit policy about running your own software on them (it's like $120 yearly for the right to compile and sign your own software). I have an Apple TV that I got as part of a bundle with my ISP installation. I left it plugged in for a few weeks and watched the traffic over my LAN. It not only records and stores everyhting it hears being said in my house (the remot has two microphones) it talks to Apple's servers every night around 2-3am and sends them a copy of it. Most of this "smart" bullshit they're selling to clueless people is the same way. None of it is safe to keep around. It's amazing to me that we've gone so far off the deep end that people that ask me for computer support also call me a luddite. They don't listen to anything you tell them but when they manage to break their shit (or it breaks itself by design) they come begging for me to fix it.
I do apologize for the nerd rant. This is the only tech thread on BL that's active. Here is another picture of my desktop. I finally got around to styling firefox so it plays nice with the rest of my set-up. This is a really nice OS. Probably the nicest OS I've used since I had to give up using Amiga. RIP my video toaster. I'm sorry someone thought you were garbage and threw you away when I wasn't around to keep an eye on you.
I believe that thing with the not being able to share inputs is a Wayland quirk rather than a Linux thing... I still use Xorg but Wayland has been improving a fair bit.
I hate that shit but it does provide some security, like in Ubuntu the default Firefox ships as a snap package with a sandbox.
Sounds like Lutris
GNU is probably still the best group when it comes to bucking all the fad and politics BS.
Hmmm what a coincidence that it's strongly anti-commercial and freedom focused...
Have you heard of Gemini? Pretty cool concept, reinventing the web without all the browser cruft.
It's difficult to avoid the browser bloat now that even some desktop applications are embedding a Node server.
I don't see why you couldn't start with Linux, add a basic init system, throw some BSD utils in and call it done.
That way you'd get the hardware support of Linux, which you probably want in a desktop OS, and also the clean BSD-like userland experience.
Audio on Linux doesn't have to be complicated, I haven't run into any issues using just ALSA.
Actually, Firefox depends on PulseAudio for some reason, so I have to use a shim for that one program to play nice.
Systemd stuff is also optional. I just run it as init and replaced the other binaries with the programs I was already happy using.
cool. i'm a big tiling wm fan, have been using it for years but no longer i3 because i don't like the rigid design decisions. try i3-gaps with a compositor if you haven't yet, the eye candy is worth it.
actually, it's been a while since i've used i3-gaps, that fork might have been upstreamed by now