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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2937 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 27, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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In honor of @WhiningCoil's epic rant about Microsoft products, can we talk about "personal stacks"?

I'm about ready to jump multiple ships. Right now, we have one Windows 10 desktop chugging along, some chromebooks for just hanging out and browsing (or bringing up recipes for cooking or whatever), and android phones.1 I'm still okay with the phones. Like WhiningCoil said, Windows has gotten worse and worse, and our current desktop hardware is in the "will they, won't they?" land of whether Microsoft will even allow it to upgrade to Win11, not to mention whether I even want it. It seems like every week, I'm learning about yet another "feature" they've added that I just have to go turn off (and then put on my long list of stuff to turn off for the next time I have to bring to life a new windows machine... or reset this one (yes, I just had to reset it not long ago, because it went utterly bonkers with forgetting to let me have proper privileges)). Sunsetting of security updates (as insane as they've become) might push me over the edge.

As for the chromebooks, anyone else looking to jump ship because of Manifest V3? Maybe I need to suck it up and just try out uBlock Origin Lite for a while, see how it goes. But we've been having other issues, too. Since getting the chromebooks, we've done a lot of simple coordination stuff with google sheets, but they've been really glitchy lately; about half the time, when I navigate to an open sheets tab, the entire display is all scrambled. I have to switch tabs and switch back, and then most of the time it'll work. I don't recall seeing this behavior when I go to sheets in Chrome on my non-ChromeOS devices. On top of that, there's an issue with internet connectivity randomly dropping (still can't figure out if it's fundamentally a hardware limitation/problem or something going on in ChromeOS). For several years, these have been amazing, cheap devices that just worked for a lot of our poking around day to day, but the annoyances are building up.

I have been seriously considering just tossing both Windows and ChromeOS. Apple is too expensive; I genuinely like having super cheap chromebooks that are small (even the smallest MacBook Air is pretty big for just throwing around), have real keyboards, can be abused, and just thrown away and cheaply replaced if I break one (I could blow through at least five cheap chromebooks for the cost of one MacBook Air). Soooo... I'm thinking maybe just Linux everywhere?! Probably the biggest barrier I have to that is the Wife Approval Factor. I'm definitely her "Tech Department", and it would basically be on me to retrain her and work through her annoyance at having to learn new tech things.

Any thoughts? Has anyone else taken a similar plunge, especially with a less-techy wife involved? What are y'all currently running?

1 - Of course, we also have work computers, which will always be Windows for the rest of time. Nothing we can do about it, but there's not really any problem with the extremely small number of things that we need to have cross the work/personal barrier.

I took the plunge for The Year Of Linux On The Desktop, starting with a few tiptoes in 2016 and moving my personal computer default boot in 2021. I had long experience with server Linux, and that used to be important, but it's gotten a lot better today. For use cases:

  • ChromeBook replacements / web browser machines: 110%. You can just run Chrome/FireFox/Brave on a local machine, and be happy, or you can install LibreOffice/various calendars/whatever and also have good local offline functionality, if sometimes with a dated UI. The only real downside here is that new laptops running on their Linux compatibility will usually start at four or five times the price. If you're comfortable buying used equipment and swapping out batteries, you can get <150 USD pricing on three-year-old mid-range hardware, but this is extra work and has limited availability.
  • Desktop futzing around: 99.9%. Since 2021, I've had maybe three document files I couldn't open fine with LibreOffice, and about a dozen websites that didn't just accept FireFox-on-Linux-with-working-uBlock as equivalent to Chrome-on-Windows. Video streaming is fine, audio streaming is fine, Discord's updates are a little more annoying but mostly work out of the box.
  • Gaming: 90%, but highly variable. If you're playing mainstream games from Steam that don't use an anti-cheat, and run on an Xorg-based desktop, 99% of games will run with little more than checking a 'run in proton' box. GOG-based games can be a little more annoying (install Lutris to install GOG Galaxy to install No Man's Sky with online support), and I have run into games that didn't work without a lot of extra work, but it's a lot better than I expected. Other games can range from 'one extra step over Windows that's well-documented' (Vintage Story) to a lot of annoyances (Star Citizen, tbf not a Linux-specific thing) to "you have my sympathy" to 'will work, but Bungie will ban you for it' (Destiny 2). Anti-cheat updates can break perfectly-functioning games, and most anti-cheat-focused games simply won't work in Linux. Mods can sometimes break a perfectly-functioning game (which raises some very serious questions about ARK: Survival Evolved's sandboxing). There's been times where I've gone literally years without having to boot to Windows to game (FFXIV, Factorio, and Vintage Story have been pretty great out of the box), and other times where it was once a week.
  • Laptop Use: 95%. I have had some laptops where driver support, especially for things like lid-close hibernate/sleep, either didn't work or wasn't reliable. Fingerprint readers tend to be flaky as well. Battery life can range from better-than-Windows to much-worse as a result. But the core functionality has almost always been there.
  • Server functionality: 99%. Hosting your own file share and calendar setup is pretty trivial with NextCloud, collaborative document editing is a little more tedious but absolutely doable (I used to recommend Collabora, they still work but are a little naggy), Jellyfin is great for local video or media streaming, LLDAP for authentication for serious home server users, so on. My only big complaints are that Calendar sync protocols are a clusterfuck, where each calendar works fine individually but syncing to something like an iPhone's CalDAV support is basically playing Russian roulette, and that setting up your own VPN is still little too hard for nontechnical users.
  • Software- or Hardware-specific use cases: 50% coin flip. Sometimes the Linux-friendly version of a software merely has a learning curve, like compared Blender to Z-Brush; sometimes it's a cliff, like trying to go from Fusion360 to FreeCAD. Some hardware will work out of the gate, some like VR headsets might be a couple hours of fucking with text files and the command line, some is 'just build your own driver' level bad. Software built specifically to interface with hardware can be especially frustrating: Carbide Create works surprisingly well, LycheeSlicer was a crashomatic for the better part of a year, and sometimes even stuff that should work sometimes breaks in weird ways (how did Prussia fuck up their slicer?). Audio decks are notoriously hit or miss; drawing tablets (especially w/ pressure sensitivity) can be annoying.
  • Phone replacement: 1%. The ZeroPhone project hasn't updated since 2019, and a variety of competitors have simply crashed and burned. The PinePhone and Librem are probably the best options out there, but they're still pretty awful as phones. You can technically throw something together with a pocket computer and some VOIP software, and I've done it, so it's technically possible, but even as a pretty high-use techie I can't really make the argument for doing so no matter how much I want to.

However, there are some caveats, sometimes serious ones:

  • The Linux file management system is difficult for normal users to adjust around, especially for desktop environments where data horders might have three or four drives. There's ways to make it more understandable, but virtually no distro will do so by default, and a lot of tools will actively get in your way -- even the otherwise excellent Lutris and Steam launchers are prone to spreading config files across a million weird directories.
  • Trying to convert existing Chromebooks to Linux can be doable, but is seldom worth it, and it's not always even possible.
  • Xorg (most linux distros) is still more reliable than Wayland (hypr, COSMIC, Enlightenment), especially on nVidia hardware. I'd expect that this changes in the next 6 months to two years, but if you have extremely low tolerance for rare (two-three times per hour) flicker in some games, this can be a serious thing to consider early. I have no idea why or how Minecraft is one of the games most prone to it, though. When this does get better, most Xorg-based distros will probably just switch over for you or at the next distro-upgrade.
  • You will generally have to opt-in for 'proprietary drivers', both for dedicated graphic cards and for certain web browser codecs. The open-source ones are actually getting a lot better (uh, more so for AMD than nVidia), but at best expect performance loss, and sometimes stuff won't work. The web browser ones will give you a header notification and handle the install on their own when you actually need it, but the gpu drivers can require you to touch the driver manager tool -- Linux Mints is very easy, but Arch and OpenSUSE can involve some command line work.
  • Prepare an automated backup option, ideally more than one. Windows and Chrome do a lot to protect naive users, at the cost of OneDrive breaking a ton of shit, but most Linux distros at best will do some on-system backups or version rollbacks. You're very unlikely to need them -- I've had only one break across three machines in four years, and that was because of a Microsoft fuckup I was able to work around without absolutely needing the backup -- but when you need them it's often too late to hope. Windows users should do this too, but it's more essential for Linux.
  • Some normal users have zero tolerance for change or frustration, especially on their main desktop computer. I would strongly recommend starting with Chromebook replacements and your own machine well before giving a non-technical user the same thing on their main system.
  • I like tiling window managers, and hyprland looks really nice, but if you're not the sorta techie that likes learning new conventions it's a big lift. Would definitely not recommend for normal users.
  • If you dual boot (which I recommend!) or have nvidia graphics, the default Windows EFI partition at 100 MB is wayyyyyyy too small, and will result in weird and hard-to-diagnose bugs. Resizing (or even modifying it) from within Windows is an absolute nightmare, so look for guides on how to do it in your linux distro, and do it early. 600 MB is overkill, but will save you a lot of frustration down the road. This matters a lot less for machines without dual boot, and with just integrated graphics cards.
  • Most distros will be 'regular release', meaning that while they provide reliable normal updates, certain big changes in feature or function set will only occur with once-a-year-or-less version updates. Upgrading from one version to another (usually called a distro upgrade) can range from 'a single command and five minutes' to 'cross your fingers and hope' to 'nope', and most fall in the middle. Old distro versions can sometimes keep getting security updates for years, but even the long-term support versions will eventually run dry. The alternative is called rolling release, where you just get whatever package version is newest and passed whatever stability checks your distro's maintainers run. This keeps you closer to the power curve, but means you can get a lot of often-pointless upgrades (no, VSCode, I don't need a twice-weekly version update for a glorified json linter) and can rarely find problems because of weird cross-library or cross-program compatibility issues.
  • "Stable is late, experimental is broken", at the risk of quoting someone I can't find quickly. Especially for web browsers, it's important to make sure that you're keeping up to date: while Linux desktop is much less of a target for various computer crud than Windows (or even Mac), stuff that attacks just your browser or just a single service can absolutely wreck that service if it gets months or years out of date. Worse, because of the above, regular release distros will eventually just stop providing any updates at all for nearly everything, and this can be in a much shorter timeframe than in Windows environments (eg, Linux Mint usually gives 5 years for all LTS versions, Ubuntu technically goes to ten if you subscribe, some distros will just shrug and say about three).
  • While distros sell themselves based on UI and various concept specializations, for the most part they're really defined by their package manager, default package repositories, and (where present) app store. Even these things can eventually be swapped out, though it's usually painful enough that it's easier to do a reinstall instead.

For distros:

  • Linux Mint (Cinnamon edition) is kinda the default option: debian-based, robust, very well-supported, lots of good functionality out of the box outside of the Ubuntu or Debian packages, obviously not-Windows enough that it doesn't feel like you're tricking people, but very similar in design assumptions.
  • Ubuntu used to be a good choice, but they've increasingly thrown the mandate of heaven in the trash, and their app store and desktop environment has become a mess as a result, and the telemetry situation is, while nowhere near as bad as Windows, still rough. They still work, just wouldn't be my first selection anymore. If you're considering it, instead I'd point to kubuntu; it's avoided a lot of the worst bloatware, if only by accident. Just be careful with the app store.
  • You can just install Debian. It's nowhere as difficult as Arch, and while it will not have a lot of the useful packages installed by default, most mainstream stuff is in their package repository without any serious problems.
  • Gaming-focused distros exist, but they're mostly some nice UI on top of a normal distro, rather than some serious change in functionality or design. Batocera or RetroBat can be useful despite that, but I wouldn't recommend them for anything but a dedicated gaming machine, and usually only where you're basically making a console replacement -- for a normal desktop, you can just install EmulationStation on almost every mainstream distro. I've heard Nobara falls here, but I haven't tried it.
  • I don't recommend Arch for your first linux install. It's a good exercise to understand how operating systems actually work, but you can (and your first time, probably will!) install the distro without a dhcp client, git client, or text editor. That said, while it's not the only rolling-release distro, it is one of the best-known and, imo, best-supported.
  • Manjaro is in a similar boat to Arch, with the added downside that the easy installer will absolutely get too far up an Arch creek without a paddle. About the only benefit is that Manjaro vets updates a little bit more, but imo not really enough to make a big difference.
  • Alpine/AntiX aren't really great for desktop usages because their distro upgrade situation is generally pretty bad, but they do work great for lightweight Chromebook replacements -- fast boot, good security updates, very lightweight.
  • ElementaryOS is a great Mac-like environment, and Zorin as a very Windows-meets-Chromebook-like. I've got...mixed feelings about these: trying to trick someone into not knowing that they're on Linux is an awful idea, and Zorin has a bad purchase schema on top of that. But if you just really like the more traditional UIs, they're not bad options. Caveat: you can just install Elementary as a desktop environment on top of other distros.
  • Gentoo is great for every usecase you don't need. If I had three hundred identical laptops that I wanted to set up exactly to a limited set of specifications, Gentoo is a great tool. If I just want to run a local machine and I don't know what I need, it's a lot of extra work for very little benefit. Wonderful toolset that I'll literally never recommend, because if you need it you know.
  • Kali/Parrot/whatever security-focused linux, mostly these are just convenience options, usually just extra stuff strapped onto Debian. If you're not trying to do security research, you don't need these; if you are, you're mostly only going to use them so you don't have a thirty-page install list.

Don't go too deep into the What Distro questions. There's a million one-offs or specialized distros that do a lot, or have a prebuilt user interface that's just that little bit better, or has a slightly nicer support forum, or comes with a lot of tools that exactly match your use case. These can often be great things! But finding support can be much harder, and they can be behind the power curve, and it ultimately isn't that big of a deal, and you don't need to get overwhelmed by your choices. For a shorter version of Just Your First Linux Distro:

  • If you just want a Linux setup that Just Works, go with Mint (Cinnamon for a desktop or newer laptop, XCFE for an 5+year-old laptop). The UI will have a learning curve, but there's decent UI for nearly everything, the start search menu will redirect a lot of common windows tools to their linux counterpart, and it's just generally a good to a great experience.
  • For very light-weight uses (such as reviving a 7+ year-old laptop), probably AntiX. For very old systems (>10 years), Puppy Linux.
  • To minimize retraining, consider and try out on a non-critical machine Zorin (for Windows) or ElementaryOS (for Mac). These may still flunk the Wife Test, or may only pass it for some but not all use cases, and you should be crystal-clear that they are a new different thing and not just a Windows skin, but they'll have the least friction.

So Linux Mint runs on most normal hardware (Intel/nVidia/normal SSDs/screens)?

Yes. The Mint installer also acts as a pretty good liveCD/liveUSB, so you can test out basic functionality without having to do an install at all, if you want to verify this for your specific hardware.

Most Linux distros fall into this behavior now -- even Arch has pretty good hardware support just with the absolute minimal install -- so I'm really recommending Mint more for its interface and new user experience.

The only gotchas I'll caution about for normal hardware:

  • For nVidia GPUs specifically, Mint will default to the fully open source ('noveau') drivers. These work well enough for casual use, but they are less performant than the 'nVidia Open' or proprietary drivers (or even the community-clone NVK). Mint has a specific driver manager tool that it will wave at you in the New User Experience screen, but you do have to click the button and reboot. AMD doesn't have this problem.
  • You may want to disable SecureBoot in your BIOS. Linux Mint can handle it fine, but Microsoft Updates have broken Linux installs using it in ways that made getting the data out hard before, and I wouldn't be surprised if they do it again.
  • If you want to dual-boot (which is good way to work!), installing Windows then installing Linux will result in an EFI partition that is 100 MB. This is probably too small. Easiest way to fix this is to use GParted from the liveUSB environment; it's available from either apt-get or from the package manager. You'd want this tool anyway if you're trying to migrate an existing full-drive Windows install so that the disk has two partitions, but it's a lot easier to modify EFI from Linux than from Windows. Won't always be an issue, but it's a lot easier to fix early rather than after you're comfortable with your system install.
  • WiFi and Bluetooth drivers can give rare problems. It's now more at the 'check if anyone has had a problem' rather than 'check if someone's gotten it to work' stage, but especially very old (>5 years) Realtek USB wifi is prone to annoying. Printers used to fall into this category, but in the last couple years I've found it better at handling printer drivers than Windows (uh, sometimes to an aggressive degree; one Mint laptop autoinstalled a business printer at a commercial airport I visited). Audio can sometimes require rare pipewire (audio service) restarts to unfuck it after a big config modification, though I haven't had that problem in around six months now.
  • Mint (for now) runs using X11, which doesn't handle different refresh rates on multiple monitors well, or HDR at all -- you can make it work, but it won't be pretty. You can switch to Wayland in Mint, but without the >550 nvidia drivers there's a serious flicking problem in some games. If you're running a 240hz HDR monitor for gaming and a 60hz monitor for reference material, it might be worth looking at something like Pop!_OS or KDE Plasma, both of which prioritize Wayland support a little higher. This will probably get fixed enough in the next year or so that Wayland becomes either default or an easy swap option in Mint, though.

The big problems tend to be about more specialized stuff: VR headsets (especially WMR headsets), sound mixer boards, drawing tablets. Or about specific software, especially commercial software that phones home regularly, like DaVinci Resolve, Photoshop, so on.

You may want to disable SecureBoot in your BIOS. Linux Mint can handle it fine, but Microsoft Updates have broken Linux installs using it in ways that made getting the data out hard before, and I wouldn't be surprised if they do it again.

This is a non-issue for a computer that doesn't have Windows, right? Because then you aren't getting any updates from Microsoft?

(I'm specifically boycotting Microsoft, because Win10/11 are evil and Microsoft is bankrolling OpenAI which is also evil, so I didn't buy Windows for my new computer.)

Yes, if you aren’t also running Windows on the same computer, SecureBoot is a lot safer. There are some distros that won’t have SecureBoot shims, but they’ll just give you a load error when trying to boot from USB.

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