“Mostly perfectly unless they’ve got anti-cheat, and you’ll be limited to 30 fps for most of the fancy-graphics titles.”
Actually pretty damn good. Considering the difficulty I had getting frames out of E33 on desktop, having it play reasonably on the go is impressive. 60 fps @ 4K made my PC sound like a vacuum cleaner and was warming up the whole house; really needs some of the upscaling trickery to be comfortable to play.
systemd-networkd gets installed by default by Arch, integrates a bit better with the rest of SystemD, doesn’t have so many VPN surprises, and the configuration is a bit more obvious to me - a few config files rather than NetworkManager’s “loads of scripts” approach. Small niggles rather than big issues.
Really, I just don’t want duplication of services - more stuff to keep up-to-date. And if I’ve got SystemD anyway, might as well use it…
NetworkManager dependencies can now be disabled at build time…
Nice. It was a damned nuisance that Cinnamon brought its own network stack with it. All my headless servers and my Plasma gaming desktop use systemd-networkd, which meant that my Cinnamon laptop needed different configuration. Now they can all be the same.
Hopefully the new release will bash a few of the remaining Wayland bugs; Plasma is great but I prefer Cinnamon for work, and it’s just too buggy for gaming on a multi-monitor setup at the moment.
Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.
Yeah. You know the first time you install Arch (btw), and you realise you’ve not installed a working network stack, so you need to reboot from the install media, remount your drives, and pacstrap the stuff you forgot on again? Takes, like, three minutes every time? Imagine that, but you’ve got a kernel compile as well, so it takes about half an hour.
Getting Gentoo so that it’ll boot to a useful command line took me a few hours. Worthwhile learning experience, understand how boot / the initramfs / init and the core utilities all work together. Compiling the kernel is actually quite easy; understanding all the options is probably a lifetime’s work, but the defaults are okay. Setting some build flags and building ‘Linux core’ is just a matter of watching it rattle by, doesn’t take long.
Compiling a desktop environment, especially a web browser, takes hours, and at the end, you end up with a system with no noticeable performance improvements over just installing prebuilt binaries from elsewhere.
Unless you’re preparing Linux for eg. embedded, and you need to account for basically every byte, or perhaps you’re just super-paranoid and don’t want any pre-built binaries at all, then the benefits of Gentoo aren’t all that compelling.
Only has the functionality that you need, everything is obviously in its place. Runs incredibly quickly without using a lot of resources, and then gets out your way when you’re trying to do stuff. No settings hidden away because they might confuse novice users. No bullshit shoehorned in by managers.
Apart from the ugly font rendering, this might be as good as the Windows UI ever got. WinNT looks the same and has almost incomparable stability improvements, but only if you’ve the right hardware to run it. WinXP starts the downhill slide with ‘appearance over functionality’ and the hot mess of the control panel.
I could live with how OP has things set up here; my own copy of Plasma doesn’t look a million miles from this.
It’s not a million miles away, but it’s still got some problems. The ‘extract archive’ functionality seems to do it for me; think it must be wanting to pop up a (nested?) file chooser, but causes a session crash.
Cinnamon legacy for getting work done, and KDE wayland for playing games, for me. Nice to go 100% cinnamon though, for sure.
I understand that things have changed a bit since I first moved over to Linux - moving from Red Hat Linux to Ubuntu ‘Warty Warthog’ was such a revelation in overall user-friendliness and usability, back in the day. But upgrading my graphics card from an NVidia one to an AMD was a similar change. I might have only just installed the base operating system and a desktop environment and haven’t got around to a web browser yet, but I’ve already got full hardware accelerated graphics - that’s crazy.
Most distros now make the NVidia drivers a complete non-issue, I think? My 6600XT is requiring just a few too many compromises on new games, so I’ll need something new too, sooner or later. I used to hold off on graphics cards updates until I could get something twice as good so that it was a noticeable upgrade, but I could buy a pretty decent second-hand car for all the ones which are ‘twice as good’ now.
An upgrade from a 1050 Ti shouldn’t be such a problem. Well done on keeping it alive so long - I had a GeForce GTX 970 that would have been a similar age, but it let out its magic smoke years ago.
Moved my father-in-law from Windows 10 to Mint.
Biggest problem was all his ‘documents’, which were office365 web links rather than ‘actual documents’. Linux presents them as the urls that they really are. They open just fine, though, and can be exported as real local docs for libreoffice etc.
Security and privacy were the main selling points for him. He’d done some reading and thought that Mint was among the best choices for a newstart that just want everything to work; no interests in playing games or anything. I agreed that was the most solid choice. I use Arch btw myself, but wouldn’t recommend that for beginners.
Aww, man alive. Most perfect desktop environment I’ve seen in years, and then it’s a full OS rather than just a DE. Had been looking in the ArchWiki for how to install it and everything.
SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!
Centrally managed repositories help a lot, here. Linux users tend not to download random software off of sketchy websites; it’s all installed and kept up to date via the package manager.
Yes, Linux malware and viruses exist, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. The usual reason for installing Linux virus scanners is because you’re hosting a file/email server, and you want to keep infected files away from Windows users, tho.
Isn’t the default installation of Ubuntu to BTRFS? In which case, you should have an subvolume with Ubuntu that’s mounted to /, and an @home subvolume that’s mounted to /home.
Make a new subvolume, install a new operating system into it, and choose that subvolume in the bootloader, should be able to have Ubuntu and ‘your favourite OS’ (I use Arch btw) living side-by-side with the same home directory.
I had one of the Macintosh iBook G4s with the notoriously shitty graphics card soldering. Early days of lead-free soldering. Mine started to fail just outside of warranty. The ‘fix’ was to put a lot of pressure on the chip so that all the connections were held in place, but that was quite difficult to do while it was still a laptop.
Dismantled the damn thing, yeeted the plastic shell, and screwed the remains onto a sheet of plywood. Looked a lot like pizza-box PC in the corner there. Got another couple of years out of it. Made it a lot more convenient for watching videos, since you could just prop the whole thing against a wall or whatever. Couple of USB extension leads meant that you could still use a mouse and keyboard in comfort.
From the couple of games where I’ve been able to compare; frames per second are exactly the same, but the CPU runs a great deal less hot. No concern on desktop, but that would make a difference on the Steam deck.
(Mark Of The Ninja has a deadlocking issue on native that it doesn’t have on proton, got quite a few of Frictional’s games - Penumbra, Amnesia - that just won’t open on my main monitor when native, and most recently Silksong has been really funny about my 8bitdo controller when native. Works great with my fightstick, though.)
Building Vim from source is pretty damn easy. cd vim && make && sudo make install. Just need to be careful not to run it by accident, or you’ll be restarting Linux From Scratch from scratch.
To be fair, their installation page is excellent, but it does require close reading. Where I’d messed up was the “install essential packages” section, where it just says to “consider installing” stuff which is essential really - firmware, network stack, a text editor. If you’re able to access the internet and adjust configuration files, then you can install everything else you need.
Their suggested disk partitioning has a gigabyte for efi, which is twice what I’d recommend, and includes a swap partition, which I would not create. A swap file is just as good, and more flexible. Otherwise yeah, if you can install Arch, you can probably do all the Linux maintenance you’ll ever need to do, and it’s not that difficult - practise in a VM if you want - and will make you much more skilled and confident.
I actually find that starting a ‘raw disk partition’ virtual machine for Windows is one of the best ways to run it. Stops it from fucking up your BIOS and EFI when it does an update. You can restart into it when you want the ‘native GPU’ for games.
Of course, the even better way to stop Windows from fucking up your hardware is to not allow it anywhere near your hardware in the first place…
The Centos “eight pointed star”?