Considering the current state of affairs where America started using their technology, including Windows and Android, as weapons of economic warfare (read: sanctions), I’ve been looking into Linux again and let me share my findings. The current state of Linux is this:
void fork(void v) {
return fork(v);
}
Essentially, Ubuntu forks Debian, everybody else forks Ubuntu by adding their skin and a few configurations, and they are all pretending there’s variety and choice, and if you’re trying to get anything to boot on an old Macbook with Nvidia graphics, the same thing breaks almost everywhere in the same way, and when it doesn’t break immediately, you don’t know why, you only know it breaks on suspend and not on startx. Sure, I’ll give it the benefit of a doubt and assume it works better on modern hardware (they all actually work on my 15″ Macbook Pro with Intel graphics), but one of the often recommended usage cases for Linux is installing it on old hardware, thus giving it new utility. There’s even a website recommending what distros to install on an old Intel Mac, and they are obviously pulling it out of their collective butts because I tried top two of the distros on their list and none of them managed to boot into GUI. The important thing is that they are all so incredibly certain that Linux is better than Windows and Mac. Also, there’s so much variety, almost as much as in today’s politics. Tons of political parties and they all amount to shit.
Did you have any luck with Arch or Mint?
Also, doesn’t this “stack overflow forking” makes Debian the best choice?
Or is Debian just bones without any meet and running it today would be like buying a car from seventies?
I tried Debian and gave up when I realized I’d have to spend a day configuring every single tiny thing that’s missing. Canonical should be given more credit for writing a lot of GUI stuff that’s actually useful. Mint is an Ubuntu fork, uses same repos, and Arch is good if you’re the kind of person that buys a hamburger by first planting salad and wheat, then raising a cow, … 🙂 If I were that crazy I’d start with a BSD kernel source and build the entire OS from there, but nobody is paying me money for it, so just no.
“Car from the seventies” would be a good analogy for Debian, if you had to assemble the car first in order to drive it. 🙂
A friend is running Arch, but he did write his own operating system as graduation work, so he does not count 🙂
Completed seventies car analogy pushed me into serious laugh.
Not sure if it was joke kind of laugh though or pain kind of laugh when you laugh out loud so you don’t scream in pain 🙂
I’m currently at the point where I have everything set up so I could load linux and simply get on with my work within minutes if Mac OS and Windows blacklist me, but I’m also at the point where I don’t have the time to fuck with it now, because as good as it is, keepass2 is still crap compared to msecure, I have no patience for video drivers that manifest screen tearing on a nvidia 1080ti, and being satisfied that I have a continuity path is good enough for now. But honestly, after two days of Linux, both Win10 and Mojave look super awesomely polished and suddenly giving more money for a Mac doesn’t sound like a bad idea. But sure, I need to geek out with Linux occasionally to keep my skills sharp. 🙂
OK, I have an update. I got tired of trying out Gnome distros and installed Kubuntu on a spare SSD and put it in my desktop machine, to give it a best shot. I must say I’m impressed, KDE Plasma is quite polished. OK, there is screen tearing during video play and scrolling, which shouldn’t happen since my graphics card is a 1080ti. Also, I didn’t find a way of turning off the sound effects, there is no way of configuring additional mouse buttons and tiny things of that sort, but overall, this is quite close to the experience on Mac and Windows, and quite possibly prettier. Sure, all the aforementioned restrictions apply: it doesn’t run GUI on my old Macbook Air, and it’s probably the nvidia driver, or something very close to it. I have Dropbox, keepass2, slack, libreoffice and other stuff you’d expect, and honestly, it looks wonderful on my monitor. Scaling was easy to configure, but it required a reboot. All in all, this is probably the smoothest, nicest, least fucked up experience I had with Linux on desktop, if not ever than at least since Ubuntu Jaunty.
And yeah, I keep getting notifications that this or that service killed itself and had to be restarted. Linux, I guess.
And it’s dead. I tried installing the newest nvidia driver, because the others (both nouveau and nvidia) exhibited screen tearing during video play and ultra bad video and audio glitches plus overheating during valley benchmark. So at first it didn’t want to install with GUI on, so I booted it in root CLI mode. Then it installed and ran in 640×480 res or something. Then I manually edited xorg.conf to add res modes. Then it didn’t boot into GUI at all, so I ran the live USB stick in hope to get a “existing installation recovery” option. Instead, it fried the MBR on the drive, and after that point it refused to boot at all. To add insult to injury, I experimentally installed the whole thing as LVM, and I don’t know how to manually fix that shit if it doesn’t boot. So I gave up and decided KDE is no better than Gnome in the most important aspect, that it works as well or better than Ubuntu Jaunty. The whole thing is so incredibly unreliable, in the sense that when things break, there are no failsafes and easy recovery options, I would not use this shit at the point where it is now, unless I had no other choice. It’s actually significantly worse than it was before, because Jaunty *had* good recovery options in case of a boot or driver failure, and they removed it now so it’s unrecoverable, unless you waste an incredible amount of time trying to fix it.
Apparently this screen tearing thing is a common issue, and it’s not KDE specific, although KDE and Nvidia don’t get along well.
https://www.maketecheasier.com/get-rid-screen-tearing-linux/
How the hell can something be a common problem across all varieties of Linux desktop, there are supposedly tons of developers working on it, and the main asset of the open source OS is that things can be fixed if they are broken? It’s a rhetorical question, I know the answer. The money is not there so nobody gives a fuck.
So, after all that fuss you went trough, is there a version of Linux that you could recommend for installation to someone who has zero experience with it? I have a spare SSD and probably enough time to play with it.
Definitely Kubuntu, with this applied: https://www.maketecheasier.com/get-rid-screen-tearing-linux/
I reconstructed it after the failure, and used it today all day on the desktop, and it was just fine. Nothing out of the ordinary, I did nothing but work normally all day without interruptions. However, if something does go wrong, as it did before, there are no failsafes. There’s no “do you want me to restore the system to the last known working state?”. It’s bend over and we’re all out of vaseline baby, fun times! 🙂
🙂 so basically there’s no way of restoring all the work you did with it other than format c: ?
Great, how did anyone manage to get any work done like that?
I mean, a friend of mine who is a Captain of a very large LNG carrier installed Linux on his work laptop, with slow as fuck internet on board. If something breaks, it means he’s basically fucked.
Actually sudo gparted, but yeah, sort of. 🙂 I’m sure there’s an awesome backup/restore utility for Linux somewhere that automates it all and makes it perfectly safe, but it’s not part of any default installation that I know of.
Well, it’s actually not that bad; installing Windows 10 updates all the time over Iridium would be much worse, and you can’t really disable those, so Linux and Mac are probably his best options. Also, once you put everything together and don’t fuck with it the way I do, a Linux installation can be super reliable. But I do things that push those fragile distros over their limits to test how well they are designed, for instance I don’t use their own safe driver update methods, I go to Nvidia’s site, download the drivers manually, boot into root shell and then install them, and see what happens. Or I install mate desktop environment on a raspberry pi and see how it clashes with lxde. That kind of stuff. So basically Linux is the exact opposite from what it’s advertised as: if you make a stable configuration and don’t fuck with anything, it’s great, and Windows and Mac are great for trying all kinds of stuff and being able to recover the system afterwards. Linux distros are quite fragile, because you can easily break something and if you do, there’s no simple way to undo the damage. But if you “observe the blinkenlights and don’t touch anything” you’re fine. 🙂
It’s actually interesting how incredibly robust my win10 installation is. I had it copied several times when upgrading SSD drives, I changed graphics cards and driver sets, I tinkered with all kinds of Linux subsystems, virtual machines, networking, installed all kinds of crazy bullshit and it just doesn’t fucking die. And I installed the latest Nvidia driver on Kubuntu and it completely shat itself. And if you listen to the penguins, the Windows are supposed to be fragile and always breaking, and Linux is supposed to be rock solid and reliable. No, it’s actually the opposite. The Windows are usually incredibly hard to kill, and only Microsoft can realistically do it, if they distribute a faulty patch, which was known to happen. Linux, on the other hand, can sometimes just be left alone and it spews notifications of some shit breaking in the background. For the most part, Windows just works, and Linux desktop is very very far from that level of reliability and dependability. But if you have Linux on desktop it helps keep your Unix skills sharp, and that’s good if you maintain your own servers somewhere online like me.
Because I don’t know how to fry on the sun during vacation, I installed dozens of linux(es) instead with “desktop use” in mind on the MacBook Pro (2014) 🙂
Kubuntu did not work for me, I managed to crash Plasma waay too many times doing just regular things. Plus, UI gets weird on high-dpi (not all UI elements are scaled properly) – not a deal breaker like Plasma crashing though.
Besides that, it looks nice and app support is best, obviously.
Clear Linux (Intel) and Manjaro did not want to install without internet connection, even though ISO is 2GB in size … weird … so I passed (and they did not recognise Broadcom chip MBP uses, so no)
Mint was actually pretty good. Everything went smoothly, it offered installation of Broadcom drivers, but required update first – which kinds of defeat the purpose because I had to enable internet connection with Bluetooth to download updated and then Broadcom drivers which enabled WiFi. Not ideal, but manageable.
Cinnamon is great (for me), HiDpi support is really good.
It also offers BTRFS file system which supports transactional snapshots through TimeShift backup program. I did not manage to test it, but internet says TimeShift works really well – and Internet never lies, right? 🙂
Seriously though, it seems TimeShift is copy of macOS TimeMachine and it works in the same manner.
Default installation is rather complete for “office work” and package support is good as well.
I had to install custom font in Grub because default was way too small on HiDpi screen.
And finally, total surprise – Solus.
I never heard about it before, it is not a fork of anything, it was build “from scratch” with custom package manager as well.
Also, it is rolling release, so no fuss with big updates, but it is not “bleeding edge”, it is stability focused rolling release.
This also applies to their package manager – idea is that people choose from good stuff instead of having gozzilion options for simple tool – which is a real time eater.
Most common stuff are already in there, but some are not – for instance, I had to install .NET Core manually, but Visual Studio Code is in repository.
UI is also new, called Budgie which is based on gnome and built for Solus. It is clean, simple and scales perfectly on HiDpi.
Solus was easiest to start with, it seems to be designed for people moving from other OSes, so they can start working quickly instead of diving deep into linux nightmares first.
Solus does not use Grub in EFI mode, and relies on BIOS EFI boot selection screen – which can only be an issue if you have it side-by-side with more linux OSes – and assumption is that people going to Solus will not have that situation.
It looks like some serious work is being done on Solus.
I had constant issue on all distros – screen brightness can’t be adjusted. Tried lots of possible fixes, but none worked. Not a being deal, but really annoying in evening hours.
It was kinda fun, I even remember some of endless commands I typed in terminal 🙂
Right now I had KDE partition manager repeatedly segfault when trying to import a partition table. Then I found out that the only developer recently died. 🙂 That, I guess, is the current state of Linux.
Yea, I would describe the current state as “annoying”, which is basically eternal state of linux in my world 🙂
First of all, you have tons of distros – all of them much alike but not quite – how the hell should someone decide which distro to take?
And then – always this small annoying things like you can’t set the brightness. Or you need to wield magic to setup wireless.
Or, just a moment ago BOTH linux distros started spinning one process at 100% … kacpi_notifier or something. Quick ducking (is this a word? I do not google any more :-)) reveals it is common bug that comes and goes between kernels.
And there is no way to stop it – can’t even kill the process.
Solus is the least annoying right now – but still annoying enough that everyday work might become unbearable.
You know what – I have two very healthy kidneys (certified :-)) – one should cover for next-gen apple hardware which should last long enough 🙂
And if US blocks Europe through tech, I will have bigger problems anyway. Which they won’t, it’s mostly dick waving and scaremongering since it hurts them more at the end.
Huawei ban is already lifted and trial period barely started.
Linux just isn’t worth it. Though, it still beats frying on the sun … 🙂
We’ll see how things play out, but yeah, if you ever needed a good motivation to spend money on Apple hardware, just try Linux for a week or two. 🙂
Also, if you ever thought a NUC is overpriced, try running Raspberry Pi as a desktop PC. 🙂
Since I wasted a lot of times on trying out various distros, I decided I am going to keep one and try to create and maintain alternate working environment just in case I need to move away from Apple for any reason.
The “winner” turned out to be Mint Cinnamon, not Solus.
It had few more quirks than Solus, but they were trivial to fix while in Solus I still can’t get dotnet functional which is a deal breaker.
I even found a workaround for brightness control in Mint with panel applet (which is stupid that applet can do something OS can not, but fine, at least it works), while I had no such luck in Solus.
Also, BTRFS and TimeShift support in Mint are a nice plus.
I still find Solus very solid, fast and nice distro aimed at “average” people moving from Windows or macOS since it is highly possible they won’t hit all the quirks I did while trying to install everything I need for work.
Because I don’t know how to fry on the sun during vacation, I installed dozens of linux(es) instead with “desktop use” in mind on the MacBook Pro (2014) 🙂
Kubuntu did not work for me, I managed to crash Plasma waay too many times doing just regular things. Plus, UI gets weird on high-dpi (not all UI elements are scaled properly) – not a deal breaker like Plasma crashing though.
Besides that, it looks nice and app support is best, obviously.
Clear Linux (Intel) and Manjaro did not want to install without internet connection, even though ISO is 2GB in size … weird … so I passed (and they did not recognise Broadcom chip MBP uses, so no)
Mint was actually pretty good. Everything went smoothly, it offered installation of Broadcom drivers, but required update first – which kinds of defeat the purpose because I had to enable internet connection with Bluetooth to download updated and then Broadcom drivers which enabled WiFi. Not ideal, but manageable.
Cinnamon is great (for me), HiDpi support is really good.
It also offers BTRFS file system which supports transactional snapshots through TimeShift backup program. I did not manage to test it, but internet says TimeShift works really well – and Internet never lies, right? 🙂
Seriously though, it seems TimeShift is copy of macOS TimeMachine and it works in the same manner.
Default installation is rather complete for “office work” and package support is good as well.
I had to install custom font in Grub because default was way too small on HiDpi screen.
And finally, total surprise – Solus.
I never heard about it before, it is not a fork of anything, it was build “from scratch” with custom package manager as well.
Also, it is rolling release, so no fuss with big updates, but it is not “bleeding edge”, it is stability focused rolling release.
This also applies to their package manager – idea is that people choose from good stuff instead of having gozzilion options for simple tool – which is a real time eater.
Most common stuff are already in there, but some are not – for instance, I had to install .NET Core manually, but Visual Studio Code is in repository.
UI is also new, called Budgie which is based on gnome and built for Solus. It is clean, simple and scales perfectly on HiDpi.
Solus was easiest to start with, it seems to be designed for people moving from other OSes, so they can start working quickly instead of diving deep into linux nightmares first.
Solus does not use Grub in EFI mode, and relies on BIOS EFI boot selection screen – which can only be an issue if you have it side-by-side with more linux OSes – and assumption is that people going to Solus will not have that situation.
It looks like some serious work is being done on Solus.
I had constant issue on all distros – screen brightness can’t be adjusted. Tried lots of possible fixes, but none worked. Not a being deal, but really annoying in evening hours.
It was kinda fun, I even remember some of endless commands I typed in terminal 🙂