Linux

[Josh]

That sounds really awesome. I kind of want one of those now, but I have way too many hobbies already.

Personally I tend to just stick to arch and cook my own soup of drivers and libraries for the largest chance of success. It even has a wiki page about this topic specifically: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/RTL-SDR But that's assuming you're at least a bit comfortable with the terminal. Installing arch isn't the PITA it used to be with archinstall, but its not as easy as simple as booting DragonOS from a thumbdrive.



Apropos switching back to tiling wms, I switched to hyprland. Its pretty fancy...maybe a little too fancy.

Yeah, you're definitely way more advanced than I am. I can do easy stuff on the command line, but usually have to look stuff up and copy/paste/pray. I don't think I'll be going to Arch anytime soon. It doesn't sound like I need the latest kernel and newest this or that, just something that works and requires minimal tweaking.

I just want to get the laptop set up with DragonOS, plug in an antenna and see what happens. That should be happening any day now...

[747Music]

I was considering making the switch to replace Windows with CachyOS. The big advantage for why I keep Windows has been gaming. Cachy feels like an easy setup for getting games up and running. It's Arch-based, so there is a lot of room for fine-tuning and tampering down the road if I feel like complicating my life more.
I have a half-decent knowledge of Linux systems through college courses, but I don't want to have to arm-wrestle my PC just to run a game. It's a convenience worry. If I really just want to relax and play a game I don't want to have to browse forums for a while trying to find a solution to an error message when my game crashed. Surely I'm overreacting at this point? Has Wine/Proton come along far enough that it's just not much of an issue anymore?
As an Nvidia user, it made me happy to hear Nvidia hired the guy who was making Nvidia drivers for Linux. Now we'll hopefully start seeing some real improvements to Nvidia gpu performance. All it took was Linus Torvald to broadcast a literal "F-U" to Nvidia for not playing nice with their hardware architecture layout, lol.

Perhaps, I'll just bite the bullet and try it out with a simple dualboot.

[Cupz]

Wine/Proton has seen incredible development after Valve went all-in on linux with the steamdeck/steamos, and I haven't had to fudge around with logs and whatever for some time now (except for exotic abandonware, but that is actually easier on wine as well). There have even been cases where performance on linux over proton outshines windows in terms of performance. Sure, some games won't work when they depend on anti-cheat malware, but not playing those is a price I'm willing to pay (there are plenty of great games to play instead). Find a linux distro that fits your tastes and give it a shot. You can always go back to rimming microsoft later.

Also great to see you're still kicking it, 747. I love you!

[747Music]

Wine/Proton has seen incredible development after Valve went all-in on linux with the steamdeck/steamos, and I haven't had to fudge around with logs and whatever for some time now (except for exotic abandonware, but that is actually easier on wine as well). There have even been cases where performance on linux over proton outshines windows in terms of performance. Sure, some games won't work when they depend on anti-cheat malware, but not playing those is a price I'm willing to pay (there are plenty of great games to play instead). Find a linux distro that fits your tastes and give it a shot. You can always go back to rimming microsoft later.

Also great to see you're still kicking it, 747. I love you!

Cupz, the feeling is mutual old friend. Great to see you!

I just found this resource: https://www.protondb.com/
A well-kept database on the progress of gaming with proton. Will be really helpful, I'm sure.

Linux distros should be getting better performance due to having far more control over daemons alone, eh. Can run things pretty bare-bones so you get more use out of each cpu cycle. Windows is pretty far from bare-bones, even after tweaking settings in powershell.

I think I will give cachyOS a try very soon. I'll dual boot on an old SSD I'll have to plug in. For some reason I have very poorly placed system read-only files on the SSD I have plugged in. I'm not sure if that was because of a crappy Windows update or because I created a custom system restore point at an inconvenient time, but I'm pretty convinced it's Windows' poor sense in file management systems. It's limiting the amount of space I have to format. I gotta say, Linux is calling my name louder than ever lately. It's like it's telling me that I shouldn't have to deal with file system handling problems. Rather, file handling problems should be: your own fault, and solvable/avoidable.
I'm coming, Linus!

[Cupz]

Fo sho, just add a harddisk and install linux on it. Doesn't even need to be a very big one because theres a whooooole lot less bloat. If you need any help I am here for you.

[Cupz]

file handling problems should be: your own fault, and solvable/avoidable

Or already solved by some clever person. I notice some windows users tend to get annoyed when something isn't working on a linux system, but I think that is because they are used to blaming an entity like microsoft when they inevitably break something important (its what microsoft is best at). With libre software you are blaming the collective hours of volunteer work by some of the worlds brightest minds. Skill issue on the user part, perhaps, but also, you kind of want to make due because it means you have the honor of working with this incredible collaborative artwork.

[747Music]

Fo sho, just add a harddisk and install linux on it. Doesn't even need to be a very big one because theres a whooooole lot less bloat. If you need any help I am here for you.

Cool. It should go well. I'll pick your brain every once in a while. I'll be setting up a development station again soon for my next semester. Choosing a distro for coding/web dev/database work felt a bit daunting, but a friend told me don't overthink it, just use Ubuntu. He said its such a well looked after and frequently updated distro that it's easy to keep a stable environment.

file handling problems should be: your own fault, and solvable/avoidable

Or already solved by some clever person. I notice some windows users tend to get annoyed when something isn't working on a linux system, but I think that is because they are used to blaming an entity like microsoft when they inevitably break something important (its what microsoft is best at). With libre software you are blaming the collective hours of volunteer work by some of the worlds brightest minds. Skill issue on the user part, perhaps, but also, you kind of want to make due because it means you have the honor of working with this incredible collaborative artwork.

That is quite nice, actually. People who love the work and don't have finance and marketing teams who think in terms of user = $.

[Cupz]

Choosing a distro for coding/web dev/database work felt a bit daunting, but a friend told me don't overthink it, just use Ubuntu. He said its such a well looked after and frequently updated distro that it's easy to keep a stable environment.

For a windows user I tend to recommend Linux Mint (based on ubuntu), because it works very similarly. For apple users I recommend Fedora.

[Cupz]

I went for Antix btw, not sure if I mentioned yet. Debian-based, no systemd (meaning it boots in seconds!), anti-fascist.

Debian is really awesome for music I found, I could even get the ancient 32-bit wineasio stuff going and run older fruity loops with very low latency over pipewire-jack. Super fun.