deadcatbounce

Having grown up with Acorn Atoms. BBC Micro, MS and DRDOS, Gem, Xerox something, Windows 1, don’t remember 2, 3.0 to 3.11, NT. I didn’t realise how nice early (2004) Linux was until I used it in a Windows server hosted VM to handle my phone calls (VoIP@home or something it was called).

I did everything I could to ditch Windows after that. The webification of QuickBooks was the final release.

You should go see Gentoo or something if ArchLinux causes you problems.

It’s my go-to rescue cum doing-backups cum new-install distribution because it’s clean (meaning low cruft), minimalist, and most importantly, rolling. I run it as a console OS. I adore it.

Have I run it as my Workstation OS? Yes. Would I again? No. It was too fragile then.

Pacman is too strange to use with the options reduced to letters and having to include the double dash every time you remember the long form. Gimme dnf, Aptitude or flatpak.

My daily driver is Fedora. Is my heart in my mouth every six months when 4,000 packages all need reinstalling? Yes.

Have I tried Debian Testing&Sid as semi-rolling? Yes, fantastic, until they did something weird with systemd instead of just doing the conf locations as intended like everyone else. And the weak-dependencies lists were unfunny. Did I mention I loved aptitude?!

Have I tried, source distros (exherbo, Gentoo, funtoo)? Yes, never got any work done. I was always compiling something for that 1% corner-case performance gain.

Don’t think I’ll try anything else save maybe openSUSE or that NixOS. The first seriously, the second for fun - NixOS smells a tiny bit like Gentoo or ArchLinux to me (sorry, not sorry).

Personally, I think bro needs an immutable Linux OS. Fedora SilverBlue, openSUSE MicroOS, the ArchLinux one.

Then someone needs to write a timer such that when he’s really concentrating hard at 2am, it stops and puts some graphical meme on the screen for three hours. Then he’ll feel at home.

One always minimises attack surfaces and the possibility of fat fingered mistakes. The lower privileges that you grant yourself the better.

You’d think that Dave Cutler who, I believe, designed Windows NT coming from a Unix style background would have followed these principles but no. I discovered *nix late sadly.

😁

Good on you.

No. No-one has ever tried installing Linux on a powerful computer. All the supercomputers run Windows - the attempt at Hackintosh didn’t take - and are having a tough time meeting the TPM criteria for Win11.

You will be the very first. The world is counting on you.

For many years I installed Fedora from scratch (almost as if my PC was a Linux container and then added a kernel setup) to be exactly as I wanted it no cruft, no bloat. I did that with other distros as well, Debian didn’t recommend SELinux.

Last year I installed it from scratch using the installer and that included SELinux. With changes in SELinux policy, I found an installed flatpak which successive iterations didn’t like SELinux or tried to operate outside it. Fixing it was easy but I didn’t do so until I understood why it was violating.

I had unknowingly subscribed to the FUD about SELinux, I doesn’t get in my way. Maybe I’m not as elite as I thought I was!

😁

Please don’t desecrate my Linux with (what I assume is) Windows talk.

Bleugh! I need a shower!

[The worst Linux users are ex Windows users; 2004 vintage here]

Yes; the command prefix that you’re looking for is

shutdown now ; (followed by your sudo command if you wish)

It will provide the appropriate delay before using the root command via sudo or having logged again as root (sigh)!

Upvoted with caveats

I choose clean OSs with minimal additional code and settings added by distro maintainers. Fedora is fairly good. ArchLinux is excellent.

ArchLinux actually makes quite a good first distro if you’re willing to learn GNU/Linux. If you grew up with the early non-NT (DOS) Windows then you’re more than used to trying to squeeze the most out of Windows by learning how it works. That was a long time ago now.

I moved from Windows to Linux just after the turn of the century because Microsoft were making it more difficult to use your own OS on your own machine.

After Fedora Core 4+ I ended up using ArchLinux for the longest time. It’s early adoption of systemd was a factor, as was the rolling nature.

Fedora seems favourite as you’ve used it. There’s a new version due toward the end of March so you may want to hang on, to avoid legacy stuff being upgraded. Maybe they’ll remove the x11 drivers. Fedora has changed a lot but you’ll want to install the other repos first thing and there’s also a large move towards flatpak (which works very well).

There’s also the inst.sdboot install flag to avoid the legacy grub install.

I don’t find the install very easy to understand, compared to things like Debian but it’s worth the fiddle.

ArchLinux is the other alternative.

Do it as two separate commands to learn which is causing you the issues.

Is debootstrap the latest and greatest? It’s on Fedora so you can’t always guarantee it’s up-to-date wrt Debian.

Curiously enough I tried to use the rpm/dnf packages on ArchLinux, to create a new Fedora with Ansible, with less than stellar results. It happens that way sometimes.

X11.

How quaint.

Doesn’t really matter to be honest, you won’t stick with it. You’ll try others. We all do.

Pick a distro in the top part of distrowatch.com and install it.

I’ll wait.

Fedora. It just works. I use it for work and it doesn’t let me down. Semi annual upgrading it is easy and it seems to be moving slowly, because gnome/LibreOffice is, to flatpaks. It’s slow to change and stable because of it, they still include Grub when it became a relic since systemd included gummyboot (systemd-boot) many years ago.

Contrast that with ArchLinux which is ‘cleaner’ and a rolling distro which I prefer; Fedora isn’t. I use it for a Rescue USB. I used to use it for work but, and this is long ago, I managed to break it quite easily by ‘fixing it’ too much! ArchLinux doesn’t let me down but I don’t have a gui or Window manager on it, console only, and I know my way around Linux reasonably well.

Debian is still confused about systemd. Run a combination of testing and unstable branches on the desktop and you’ve got a great system but this is before the systemd days where they moved all the systemd defaults to the old/odd places that make no sense. As you say, snap appears to be another mad experiment by Ubuntu, like mir when everyone went to wayland.

If you’re going to use your PC for games, I think there may be better distros than these. I’m not a gamer so I can’t advise.

I’m not a huge fan of derivative distros, like Ubuntu (based on Debian decreasingly) or so on. I’m not one to mess about with screen savers etc and aesthetics though. To me derivatives add bloat and unexpected changes.

Source distros are a rabbit hole I’ve been down. They were fun but I couldn’t get myself to do any work when I had them.

I’ve never tried SUSE, it’s alternative rpm style distro which can be stable as a rolling.

Distrowatch.com is always worth a visit. Find a/several forum that is your intended use and find out which district they use there; if you have issues they’ll know how to fix it.

Microsoft own half of OpenAI. (Corrections?)

They don’t need you. They own 50% of your 20 (currency unit) monthly sub to ChatGPT.

deleted by creator

Do you use Netflix or other services/products with DRM?

That’s your answer.