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carry on then
Jul 10, 2010

by VideoGames

(and can't post for 10 years!)

ratbert90 posted:

I'm the chipset, sata controller, filing system, hard drive, USB, graphics card, HDMI, keyboard, and mouse drivers for Linux.

you need drivers to be this much of a mad nerd or do those come with the distro?

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FlapYoJacks
Feb 12, 2009

carry on then posted:

you need drivers to be this much of a mad nerd or do those come with the distro?

I had to make them all myself because apparently Linux doesn't have drivers.

Toady
Jan 12, 2009

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost

this but unironically

Lysidas
Jul 26, 2002

John Diefenbaker is a madman who thinks he's John Diefenbaker.
Pillbug

pls post in 1920x1200 tia

e: not just scaled up i can do that myself

let i hug
Dec 25, 2011

hi, it is me, I am The rear end in a top hat that wants to run Linux on my desktop. I mostly deal with lovely programmer software made by developers who hate their own kind so the only thing I really need to work smoothly is Chrome and then the rest will be pretty easy to figure out with any distro. what do I go with? Fedora I guess? I can do Arch or something if there are compelling reasons but I don't really want to fiddle with things too much if I can help it.

"a real working operating system" is not something I am interested in because I am The rear end in a top hat. help would be appreciated.

atomicthumbs
Dec 26, 2010


We're in the business of extending man's senses.

let i hug posted:

hi, it is me, I am The rear end in a top hat that wants to run Linux on my desktop. I mostly deal with lovely programmer software made by developers who hate their own kind so the only thing I really need to work smoothly is Chrome and then the rest will be pretty easy to figure out with any distro. what do I go with? Fedora I guess? I can do Arch or something if there are compelling reasons but I don't really want to fiddle with things too much if I can help it.

opensuse

let i hug posted:

"a real working operating system" is not something I am interested in

oh, fedora then

cinci zoo sniper
Mar 15, 2013




Lysidas posted:

1920x1200

of course it's this thread lol

sb hermit
Dec 13, 2016





let i hug posted:

hi, it is me, I am The rear end in a top hat that wants to run Linux on my desktop. I mostly deal with lovely programmer software made by developers who hate their own kind so the only thing I really need to work smoothly is Chrome and then the rest will be pretty easy to figure out with any distro. what do I go with? Fedora I guess? I can do Arch or something if there are compelling reasons but I don't really want to fiddle with things too much if I can help it.

"a real working operating system" is not something I am interested in because I am The rear end in a top hat. help would be appreciated.

fedora is fine

keep in mind that you have to upgrade every 9 months or so

if you don't like that then try centos or an ubuntu lts version (like 16.04)

sb hermit
Dec 13, 2016





Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost
fedora is fine

the installer is spectacularly user-hostile, other than that though no major complaints.

Rooney McNibnug
Sep 2, 2008

"Life always hopes. When a definite object cannot be outlined, the indomitable spirit of hope still impels the living mass to move toward something--something that shall somehow be better."
fedora suits my needs, unironically.

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

yeah, get fedora, it is the one made by professionals, and mostly works

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
god drat am i happy i never have to deal with linux again

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
so here's my lovely unfinished views on linux i promised people when i said i was going away entirely

--

GNOME is full of a ton of smart, but ultimately misguided people. The community is extremely insular and does not take criticism or outside opinions well. It's being held together basically by "extensions", which are bizarre ways to work around its shortcomings. The GNOME team really never cared at all or even thought about GNOME extensions, while the community made them out to be the saving grace of GNOME 3. This disconnect always bothered me but really was one of the major rifts that made me decide to step away from GNOME 3 or 4 years ago.

The GNOME stack has a lot of huge technical achievements that make the *right* choice like focusing on one stack rather than building countless bullshit layers like KDE's Phonon. I will say that certain projects have a... forcefulness or lack of tact that cause them not to be treated seriously and cause rifts. Why do we still have more than one audio stack in TYOOL 2017? Or system management service and API?

--

Flatpak is a really cool idea and approach to a hard social problem: distributions are bad, and not good. Distributions basically come down to "Linus doesn't want to properly release and test his poo poo". Tons of tiny differences in "package managers" (which are just fancy zip files that have shell scripts that run as root) and build systems and random other poo poo like this grown under the libertarian "free market competition" principle lead an endless waste of volunteer time and effort. 90% of what any distribution is doing can and should be automated by robots, but because one of the four "F" words of Fedora is "friends", an impressive amount of time is instead spent building manual tooling to be run by individuals who think that Linux is cool because they know how to write cool obfuscated shell scripts that nobody else can debug.

The distribution model is ultimately unscalable, and the only proper way to distribute apps is what Windows has done for 30 years: get the author of the software to ship a goddamned binary they can verify and trust.

The same words are also true for Debian but even more true in a perverse way: Debian does not see itself as a collection of random apps and packages, but a cohesive unit. Your software isn't in there because Debian cares about you or your software, your software is in there because Debian thinks it can use it in its universal operating system. Debian does not give two shits about upstreams and will constantly patch (and break) software to hopelessly conform to bizarre obsolete policies.

--

The community of Linux is a mix of "slashdot tryhards that hate Microsoft" and "computer nerds that won't try to engage in conversation but try to impress you with how many words they know".

At some point when working on Wayland, the words "network transparent protocol" became a buzzword without a clear definition at all, and it's hard to explain why we made different -- but perhaps still valid -- choices, because our new tech focuses on how computers work in 2017. What does "network transparent" mean, and why does X11 qualify for it and Wayland not?

I think the answer comes down to "it has a byte-serializable wire protocol that doesn't use fd passing". Which isn't true for X11 since every app under the sun uses MIT-SHM because your system would be horrendously slow without it. There's no talk about how local rendering and remote streaming are vastly different use cases and environments, and how they would indeed be served by completely independent systems. Remote desktop should be a video streaming protocol, just like every other remote desktop protocol since 2010 (Google Remote Desktop, Steam Streaming, modern RDP, VMware remoting, SPICE are all variants on video streaming, but optimized for 2D graphics instead of live-action).

They talk about how wonderful NoMachine NX is, not realizing that NX is fast just because it made its own protocol which was designed to be network-streamed.

I bring this up as a quintessential example of the frustration I have with Linux people. They hear some religious vague buzzwords, whether they be "network transparent" or "UNIX philosophy" and they are unwilling to hear other points of view. Clearly, we can't have GUIDs, since GUIDs were invented by the evil Micro$oft and as we all know, Micro$oft is not composed of smart engineers but instead people with monkey brains that can't code their way out of a paper bag. I mean, gosh, using the backslash for a path separator, what are they... lunatics?

... Oh, you mean the backslash for a path separator came because of fairly reasonable constraints having to deal with backwards compatibility for an operating system from before UNIX's time, ultimately for familiarity and user-friendliness with IBM staff? Nah, it's clearly because they hate sense and reason.

The inability of the community to consider new ideas will end up hurting Linux in the long run.

--

There are also a lot of big egos in Linux development. Some subsystem maintainers, and especially Linus, have a habit of getting unnecessarily angry at people and oversimplifying problems.

Alan Cox stepped down from the TTY layer because Linus said "this poo poo is really easy", and, well, no it wasn't. Turns out mostly undocumented UNIX ioctls as used by the termcap database abstraction layer are underspecified and Linus broke it two releases later in a very similar way.

Kay Sievers stepped down from maintaining /proc/ because it broke under really strange conditions (like the extremely silly "dd bs=1" as used by some Debian shell script) and Linus yelled at him with fixes that didn't actually work under other edge cases that they were required to support.

When entire systems are rewritten to get around subsystem maintainers that refuse to collaborate, that's not cool.

--

My new job isn't rainbows and unicorn farts either -- my first task there was there was a project my boss thought was really stupid and unnecessary -- and a lot of people are unhappy at the quality of our codebase, and our customer base is quite possibly the one customer base more angry and vitriolic than Linux nerds, but I'm actually happier here.

Suspicious Dish fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Apr 12, 2017

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost
Thank you for writing up that post, and best of luck in your new life

Suspicious Dish posted:

My new job isn't rainbows and unicorn farts either -- my first task there was there was a project my boss thought was really stupid and unnecessary -- and a lot of people are unhappy at the quality of our codebase, and our customer base is quite possibly the one customer base more angry and vitriolic than Linux nerds, but I'm actually happier here.

You moved into video games?

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
Actually, yes, I did.

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost
:rip:

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
i went into it knowing i would be sick of it in three years

figured i'd get it out of the way, i'm young and reckless and would probably regret it if i didn't do it

hifi
Jul 25, 2012

i dont understand blaming linux for the bad distributions but i guess you know your poo poo .

hifi
Jul 25, 2012

packaging is stupid though and i hate how being the maintainer of like a thousand packages is seen as a point of pride instead of pain. i guess you like doing stupid poo poo with your life

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

hifi posted:

i dont understand blaming linux for the bad distributions but i guess you know your poo poo .

Imagine if there was an official Linux that you could download and install. Like, it was ran as a product and Linus was behind it. Why doesn't that happen?

This is part of what GNOME wanted to do with its GNOME OS project, but such innovative ideas as "hey, maybe GNOME should be ran as a product rather than a community and we should support what we release" was too, uh, radical for Linux I guess.

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

hifi posted:

i dont understand blaming linux for the bad distributions but i guess you know your poo poo .

it is hard to debate a lot of linux stuff because any debate tends to very rapidly shift between considering the whole and considering individual parts

not to mention shifting between *which* whole one considers (e.g. x has been broken for ages -> works in y! -> z has been broken for ages in y -> works in w!)

here specifically: it is not like linux (in this context) in any way exists outside of distributions

sb hermit
Dec 13, 2016





here's another reason for distributions, although it is very specific to enterprises

having rhel and the ability to closely control your source code and binaries for a specific set of software is very important for companies like Red Hat that want to provide point releases with bugfixes and binary compatibility and service guarantees slash support contracts

I don't mind the distribution wars myself, to be honest. But I'm happy that canonical failed miserably with mir and unity.
Now if they'll just add an option to remove that idiotic startup sound...

sb hermit
Dec 13, 2016





I guess, to kind of augment the above, it's good to have competition for support contracts instead of just having a single entity for everything and risking another debian swamp

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

realistically only rhel/centos exists as a competitor in the server market though. sure there is a bunch of rolling-their-own and some remaining hangers on, but the fact that it is all out there in the open actually seems to make competition *less* likely in the future, simply because the threat of competition remains real without actual competition existing, since anyone can fork rhel at the drop of a hat if the need came to be (which is entirely a good thing; actual competition creates waste, the threat of competition creates good incentives)

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

Imagine if there was an official Linux that you could download and install. Like, it was ran as a product and Linus was behind it. Why doesn't that happen?

because linus doesn't want to work for red hat

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

GNOME is full of a ton of smart, but ultimately misguided people. The community is extremely insular and does not take criticism or outside opinions well. It's being held together basically by "extensions", which are bizarre ways to work around its shortcomings. The GNOME team really never cared at all or even thought about GNOME extensions, while the community made them out to be the saving grace of GNOME 3. This disconnect always bothered me but really was one of the major rifts that made me decide to step away from GNOME 3 or 4 years ago.

The GNOME stack has a lot of huge technical achievements that make the *right* choice like focusing on one stack rather than building countless bullshit layers like KDE's Phonon. I will say that certain projects have a... forcefulness or lack of tact that cause them not to be treated seriously and cause rifts. Why do we still have more than one audio stack in TYOOL 2017? Or system management service and API?

endless trying to build on gnome was lol from minute one

gnome is actively hostile to outsiders

Suspicious Dish posted:

Flatpak is a really cool idea and approach to a hard social problem: distributions are bad, and not good. Distributions basically come down to "Linus doesn't want to properly release and test his poo poo". Tons of tiny differences in "package managers" (which are just fancy zip files that have shell scripts that run as root) and build systems and random other poo poo like this grown under the libertarian "free market competition" principle lead an endless waste of volunteer time and effort. 90% of what any distribution is doing can and should be automated by robots, but because one of the four "F" words of Fedora is "friends", an impressive amount of time is instead spent building manual tooling to be run by individuals who think that Linux is cool because they know how to write cool obfuscated shell scripts that nobody else can debug.

distributions are bad and not good but if you try to disintermediate the distributor you are the distribution

Ator
Oct 1, 2005

Suspicious Dish posted:

so here's my lovely unfinished views on linux i promised people when i said i was going away entirely

i love readin ur linux posts

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

distributions are bad and not good but if you try to disintermediate the distributor you are the distribution

there is no distributor under flatpak. freedesktop.org ships the october 2016 version of the freedesktop.org runtime (here are the freetype, wayland and pulseaudio client libraries also uh a bind mount for the user's fonts i guess, have fun). google inc would in theory ship the chrome application flatpak. nowhere in this picture is any opportunity for debian to drag their dick&balls across everything and trash the cryptographic random number generator.

gnome.org ships a gnome flatpak runtime for each version of gnome too (and they are co-installable) but lol at the suggestion that anybody is ever going to ship third-party gnome apps

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Sapozhnik posted:

there is no distributor under flatpak. freedesktop.org ships the october 2016 version of the freedesktop.org runtime (here are the freetype, wayland and pulseaudio client libraries also uh a bind mount for the user's fonts i guess, have fun). google inc would in theory ship the chrome application flatpak. nowhere in this picture is any opportunity for debian to drag their dick&balls across everything and trash the cryptographic random number generator.

now you are the one responsible for security issues in upstream libraries, and i have to trust everyone not to drag their dick and balls across the rng, instead of just debian

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost
well, afaik openssl is part of the fd.o runtime. it's hard to assemble any nontrivial software library stack these days without pulling in openssl, it's practically as ubiquitous as zlib. so fd.o would be responsible for keeping that image up to date. as far as i know they build their runtime by just supplying a config file to openembedded, so really it's the openembedded project responsible for keeping this up to date (i've used openembedded. ask me about openembedded).

also this way of doing things has won. i mean, it's more accurate to say that distros never succeeded and this is just a reversion to the status quo. win32, macos, mobile, every successful software platform out there makes isvs vendor every library they depend on that isn't part of the base operating system (which usually includes an ssl implementation btw because those applications need to integrate with the system trust store. and even then they'll sometimes vendor openssl anyway). flatpak just represents a clever loosening and very constrained amount of interchangeability when it comes to this "base operating system" part. but it's basically a choose-your-own-app-store system.

and the debian openssh fuckup is just a spectacular dunning-kruger event that could only have occured within debian. how incredibly broken do you have to be to be the sort of person who likes to participate in a role-play ossified bureaucracy for fun? i mean, a bureaucracy is a construct that focuses large bodies of administrative manpower towards a useful goal, venting titanic amounts of waste heat by design to try and constrain the natural tendencies of those administrators to abuse that power, then hoping that there's enough leftover steam at the end of the pipeline to actually turn the crank that the bureaucracy is supposed to turn. but there is no meaningful power to abuse within a 100% volunteer linux development effort for gently caress's sake. nobody's going to get rich from subverting the debian project. nobody is going to get a lavish apartment in moscow reserved for senior party apparatchiks by subverting the debian project. it just makes no loving sense beyond a bureaucracy fetish for its own sake.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Sapozhnik posted:

flatpak just represents a clever loosening and very constrained amount of interchangeability when it comes to this "base operating system" part. but it's basically a choose-your-own-app-store system.

this is an apt summation of flatpak. it also is the dumbest loving idea i've ever heard. thank you for summing up the stupid so i don't gotta

(there's a reason ssl is typically a system library!)

Sapozhnik posted:

and the debian openssh fuckup is just a spectacular dunning-kruger event that could only have occured within debian. how incredibly broken do you have to be to be the sort of person who likes to participate in a role-play ossified bureaucracy for fun? i mean, a bureaucracy is a construct that focuses large bodies of administrative manpower towards a useful goal, venting titanic amounts of waste heat by design to try and constrain the natural tendencies of those administrators to abuse that power, then hoping that there's enough leftover steam at the end of the pipeline to actually turn the crank that the bureaucracy is supposed to turn. but there is no meaningful power to abuse within a 100% volunteer linux development effort for gently caress's sake. nobody's going to get rich from subverting the debian project. nobody is going to get a lavish apartment in moscow reserved for senior party apparatchiks by subverting the debian project. it just makes no loving sense beyond a bureaucracy fetish for its own sake.

there exists a (large) fraction of nerds who consider petty victories over technical matters to be every inch as important and valuable as a lavish apartment in moscow

debian's ossified bureaucracy exists to harvest volunteer effort without being a total poo poo-throwing fuckfest

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
I think flatpak is the only reasonable way to vendor a system given that distributions will never change their behavior, asking every app author to vendor up to everything including glibc is not acceptable.

What flatpak does is reframe distributions. It says: "hey, do you want your distribution to be the base for a Flatpak runtime? OK, then here's your promise to us: don't break ABI stability, and keep it up to date".

Nobody's arguing that flatpak runtimes aren't distributions -- the fd.o one should maybe just be called the "Yocto runtime" since that's really what it is. What we are arguing for is that distributions publish static, tested trees that have some basic ABI stability promises. We know they can't and won't do that in their current system, so we're inventing a new mechanism to force them to do that.

It's a social solution, much like Windows Sticker licenses or whatever.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

distributions are bad and not good but if you try to disintermediate the distributor you are the distribution

I want application authors to be responsible for what they ship. So, yes, they become the distributor. This is good for users.

First, it means that they get to ensure that what ends up on the user's computer is exactly what they tested. Multiple times in multiple pieces of software I have written, users complain to me about gripes that happen because I was using a different version of a library, or a distribution patch, or whatever. Meanwhile, the credit, bug reporting systems, etc., all imply that I was the author that made this, and they report the bug to me.

I'm not saying flatpak is a foolproof solution for this. I'm sure that runtimes will eventually break some poo poo with minor version bumps in their libraries. That's OK, that even happens on Windows tbh. The computers we've built are complex and have a lot of moving parts. I'm just hoping that developers are more motivated to fix it when they have a much more stable repro environment in front of them.

Second, it means that authors are responsible for lovely or broken software. Too often, I've seen upstream software get released that isn't tested. It's broken. It's buggy. It's poo poo. But because they release a source tarball that gets built and shipped to users 2 months later, after they've already started working on the new version, they do not care. Adding a middleman increases the length of the development pipeline.

If they had to take responsibility for the binary and the software they shipped, I'm sure they would care more.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

Nobody's arguing that flatpak runtimes aren't distributions -- the fd.o one should maybe just be called the "Yocto runtime" since that's really what it is. What we are arguing for is that distributions publish static, tested trees that have some basic ABI stability promises. We know they can't and won't do that in their current system, so we're inventing a new mechanism to force them to do that.

It's a social solution, much like Windows Sticker licenses or whatever.

the only stable ABI is what is offered by red hat enterprise linux

moving the problem to a new layer of unreliable middlemen isn't going to make your life better. i guarantee it.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

Second, it means that authors are responsible for lovely or broken software. Too often, I've seen upstream software get released that isn't tested. It's broken. It's buggy. It's poo poo. But because they release a source tarball that gets built and shipped to users 2 months later, after they've already started working on the new version, they do not care. Adding a middleman increases the length of the development pipeline.

If they had to take responsibility for the binary and the software they shipped, I'm sure they would care more.

authors mostly don't ship products. they ship source code. and for desktop software, they are often volunteers, who don't use any of this crap -- they're building it themselves on their desktops.

you can't expect a new set of middlemen to resolve the social problems implicit in open source

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

authors mostly don't ship products.

A lot of them want to ship products though. That's why every Linux app under the sun has a PPA and the developers always ask you to use that instead of the official packages, because the official packages are unreliable and they have no clue what's in them.

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

this thread took a turn towards the unironically interesting. sort of with nbsd on rhel as a sprawling abi being the value proposition really, but it is not that clear that one can't have the best of both worlds with better packaging

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Truga
May 4, 2014
Lipstick Apathy
since people were mentioning debian earlier, debian 7 was released in 2013 and is supported and security gets backported until 2018, 5 years is pretty long for a community distro imo. it's not the best but it works for many people and apt works great for me, i miss some of the things it can do since i moved to mostly centos.

centos/rhel and suse/sles have even longer support cycles. if you need a stable box probably use a stable distro. i don't run a rolling release of windows on dekstop either. as someone earlier said, poo poo constantly changing is what's keeping linux ahead of the curve, but there's absolutely zero reason to not use centos if you need stability over bleeding edge bullshit.

Suspicious Dish posted:

A lot of them want to ship products though. That's why every Linux app under the sun has a PPA and the developers always ask you to use that instead of the official packages, because the official packages are unreliable and they have no clue what's in them.

so package your rpms+debs for all the distros, it's super simple in 2017 and repackaging on any changes automatic, and you don't even need your own build servers: https://build.opensuse.org/

ppa is good too, though it only does ubuntu packages iirc.

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