"It's called a shovel," said the Senior Wrangler. "I've seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical."
—Terry Pratchett: Reaper Man
Personally I'm just going to ramp up being annoying to my friends until they switch because they'll thank me in a couple years and also because they deserve it
Well. ACTUALLY, it's very simple you see every time you spin up a new linux box a little piece of Linus Torvold's soul get's imprinted in the CPU registers and then that fragment handles everything from there.
I creating my Meshtastic network and was having trouble setting a node with the right settings and wanted to plug in the unit into my Lenovo laptop running Fedora installed from the factory.
I click serial connection. The web app recognized the connection. Click connect. Failed. Tried different plugs and ports. Failed. Searched online and I need to do a bunch of things in terminal to get it to work properly.
Normally I would spend a few hours figuring it out. Instead....
Pulled out my 15 year old PC running win10. Plugged in, instantly worked.
I reeeeally want this to be my primary laptop, but man. I am just struggling on some basic things.
Ah, permissions chicanery. Had to deal with that with connecting a Switch 2 controller with a WebUSB enabler. To be fair, once you add the right udev rules (it is a bit of a pain, yes), it should work for any other devices of the same type (I think it's any with the same USB ID so like same manufacturer and model? Don't quote me on that though). Still, I wish Chromium (since Firefox as far as I know still doesn't support WebUSB) could sort it out by itself (like just have an "allow" button rather than writing udev config files yourself) or at least be a bit more helpful in pointing you the right way with a helpful error message.
You do have to get used to weird edge cases like these throwing a spanner in the works, just like you have weird stuff on Windows (trying to get some older Android devices to communicate in fastboot mode in Windows makes me feel like Odysseus).
Asking around and screwing around usually gets you places though. Eventually you find something.
My PC just programmed all the units in my mesh in around 5 minutes. It would have likely taken longer trying to fix the USB connector. I should figure out how to fix this edge case so I don't have to take my old PC out again.
What they are talking about is an open source piece of software (Meshtastic) that's using a well-known (if specific to Chromium) standard, WebUSB. It's a genuine pain point, and stuff like this needs to work out of the box, no manually written udev rules required.
It's more like the Sphere of Knowledge. The more you know about Linux (or pretty much any subject) that more you become aware of subjects you don't understand. Whereas when you don't know that much, there are fewer categories for which you are aware of your lack of understanding. Know unknowns vs unknown unknowns.
Using this plot as a statistical argument against the idea of Dunning Kruger is pretty Dunning Kruger.
It’s a scatter plot with hella dense overlap and no density indicator, and a best-fit line that doesn’t match the visual skew. Different ranges and scales on the axes are wonky as hell and make it hard to follow a 1:1 reference line. Try tracing a mental line from (75,75) to (150,150) and it looks much cleaner.
It seems to show subjective vs. evaluated IQ results, which mostly shows people generally think they’re far above average. There’s clearly a statistically significant positive correlation in the trend of modest magnitude.
More importantly though, it’s a bit of a weird thing to tie to Dunning Kruger: The plot tells us something about how well people can guess how “cognitively gifted” they are relative to peers, but that’s not a reasonable proxy for how people might self-evaluate on a skill-based or knowledge-based domain.
I'll correct myself, the data is simulated and I skipped the word. You are completely right to remind me of this. But there are a few important considerations here.
The original DK study used a IQ like score based on general cognitive faculties for its argument, subjective vs. measured.
Wiki quote: "The initial study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger examined the performance and self-assessment of undergraduate students in inductive, deductive, and abductive logical reasoning; English grammar; and appreciation of humor."
Second of all, for this I have consulted the study itself, according to my cursory read the sample size of the study seems to be below 100. I'll let that speak for itself.
A new study working with more data, that doesn't just present generalised skill shows that, just like in the simulated data, it is still a blob following a normal distribution in terms of density. The simulated data was meant to show how misleading inferences can be made with noisy results.
It tends to explain why entry level programmers act the way they do. Like when I graduated I was definitely on the peak of mount stupid but as I learned more I realized how little I knew. I did not externalize this as I was just trying to make iy through my days, however I have seen some entry levels absolutely fuck things up because they thought they were geniuses. It was exactly like that bell curve where idiots and experts do the same simple thing but mediocre people do the most complicated thing possible with 5 layers of abstraction.
Just because it explains an experience, doesn't mean it's statistically true in a deep way. I would tend to agree that the Dunning Kruger effect is a nice logical story, a shorthand if you will. I would really be careful about placing undue confidence in neat little explanations of a stupefyingly complex word, especially when it concerns yet incomprehensible structures like the brain.
Being explained in experience is the worst proof, it's all bias. I should have been more clear, I want it to be true because it makes sense, but it is incorrect.
On a client-server model turned single-user desktop, running on seven layers of abstraction. And the interface of choice is full of bugs and limitations. But we've got nothing better currently, that also works on the next computer, due to compatibility issues caused by misplaced secretivity of the vendors.
Compooter take symbol, compooter fuck symbol, symbol reincarnarnates as a stick, which is what is currently in my ass. Sideways, even. Symbols don't fuck around here for longer than it takes to be forthsworn, but this just a warning to warm you up, and this is how we know these compooters work.
That's the thing, his pronounciation there is eerlie similar to what I'm used to spanish (where it is pronounced just as it is spelt) that my ol brain kind of does a short-circuit and can't assimilate the fact that it's just kind of the same thing in both languages and if it's in the middle of a sentence I have to go back to speaking my crappy non-native english
Not sure if this helps, but in English (my native language), I would pronounce it with a short “i”, like in “sit”. You could also pronounce it with a Spanish “i” (same as Finnish “i” to my ears). I would not pronounce it with a long English “i” because the vowel length is too long and doesn’t sound right.
Long answer: a stressful full week trying to get everything right, followed by a long, blissful period forgetting how hard it was to get it up and running like magic.
The number of packages installed, the use of externally unsupported repos, the distro you use, reliability of their packaging system, how much you deviated from the baseline customization, and probably more.
Keeping track of everything off what and how much you changed may prove difficult. But it helps taking notes of how you solved the more complicated issues.
With time you learn to live with the inevitability of something breaking. You update less often, and only when you really have to. Repairing stuff becomes less overwhelmeming with time.
Those weeks were a lot more stressful, and longer than a week, when I used Slackware and started installing stuff that wasn't packaged for Slackware. I would dread new software. It was the Unifi controller that finally put me over the edge: I wasn't even willing to give it a shot. I ran the controller on my Kubuntu desktop for a few weeks until I switched the server to Debian.
It felt like a house of cards. Nudge one of those cards by, say, updating a library, and you could easily break something else.
"If you want to know how Linux works, ask a Slackware user," is the old saying. It's true...we had to know, because we didn't have a choice not to know.
except that thing. ...and the other thing. that thing used to be a file but it's not anymore. that's only a file if you use this specific shell. that one is a file system, but there's no files in it. oh don't touch that file, that's deprecated. oh that's only a partial file, you need to open this one too otherwise it breaks.
But seriously - if you do want to see the inner workings, perform a Gentoo stage 2 to dip your toes in. LFS after if you’re feeling dangerous. Then things will start to come together. But maybe do it on a spare machine… You can/will break things and you will need a fallback to do research. Don’t bother if you don’t care to read manuals, it’s not easy and can be frustrating.
If you are happy with the distributions you use, there is no need to try Gentoo.
In my opinion, as a Gentoo user for the last 20 years, Gentoo is the most flexible distribution there is. Gentoo can be as stable as Debian or it can be as (or even more) cutting edge as Arch. Or it can be anything in between and you can even mix and match as you like.
The cost you pay for that flexibility is the compile time it takes to build the packages. And Gentoo is even providing you with prebuilt binaries for a very large amount of packages.
Not sure if you’d gain all that much with your level of experience. LFS might be a better starting point. However, after suggesting doing a stage 2 to a few that were eager to learn more (even though they’d been using it for a very long time), it was generally a positive experience. If you go through the guide I’m sure you’d be able to tell quickly whether it would be useful.
Honestly as a not-used-Gentoo person recklessly throwing around my opinion on the internet...
It sounds like either it can be "Really optimized and crazy performant if you know what you're doing."
Or "It's a fun hobby because you think operating systems are fun."
Personally it seems cool except I think I'd start to burn out fast if every package install means having to read compilation instructions and edit configs.
Maybe because my experience compiling stuff is always like "What's your problem this time?! Okay where do I find that package version?!"
EDIT: I love all the educational, reassuring, and enthusiastic responses. This is what makes Linux cool. :D I should give Gentoo a try...
Package install doesn't mean you have to read compilation instructions and edit configs. Usually you just install like in any other distro. (Except it takes a bit longer to finish.)
That's actually pretty reassuring! I was under the impression it was a huge flex haha. I'm curious how much practical speed you gain from compiling everything to your specific architecture. 🤔
It depends. You also have to decide if you want to use LTO or PGO or similar techniques to further boost performance (but massively impacting compile time).
Generally Gentoo 'feels' smoother than other distributions. And I had an old netbook that used to be unable to play HD content on Ubuntu and the like, but HD content worked smoothly on Gentoo.
Nah, it's not that bad. You don't need to optimize the living hell out of it and they also have some ready-made binary packages. Plus you can also use flatpak for instance to make your life easier.
Sounds pretty rad actually if one is packing a halfway decent processor! :) Thanks for enlightening us!
You're right, I've learned to love flatpaks for certain things. The sandboxing can be a little reassuring and I'll definitely reach for it if I'm getting dependency-hell from a core package and just "Need it to work without spending a weekend on it." :p
@MonkeMischief@corsicanguppy portage tree already conains all instructions and follows automaticly. You optionally may override options with use flags unlike binary distros where you only can use default configuration
Ah that's really cool! Sounds a lot more approachable than I thought. I've always heard it talked about like a flex distro for after somebody graduates from "installed Arch, no-installer" academy. :p
(Another thing I need to try again. First time failed hahaha.)
I have somewhat similar experience (with far more recent kernels tho, 2.6 and newer) gentoo has some gentoo specific things, it won't really teach you a lot when you have a certain level of knowledge, and how most parts interface with each other. It's a fun exercise if you have time.
Hahah. At least you learned some things. Took me a few goes after thinking I was slick having stage 2 down pat. Then tried some BSDs and was humbled again.
Heh, there was a guy on our local forums who daily drived FreeBSD 20 years ago. They probably still using it. 20 years later, I still don't know any other people who daily drive a BSD.
I’ve been running OpenBSD since 2.8. I’ve only met one other BSD user in real life and they were baffled to why I’d run it as a workstation OS. Sometimes I am too.
Comparing to Linux BSD is quite niche, and I even met a guy who uses Linux other than me in real life was like in 2011 for the first time. No one knew what BSD was.
Personally I only meddled with NetBSD for really old PCs.
I guess I can count you as the first person I know who uses OpenBSD now.
I daily drive OpenBSD. I found it easier to set up than NetBSD which apparently is ass backwards as open is supposed to be harder. for the life of me I just couldn't wrap my head around getting the amdgpu drivers working on NetBSD.
I also found OpenBSD slightly better supported for various hardware than FreeBSD. Wifi works better on it, these old ass logitech headphones I have work flawlessly on OpenBSD when on FreeBSD they just didn't work at all and gave off horrible feedback or I couldn't turn the mic off. Also found setting up a Debian VM much easier on OpenBSD than FreeBSD (still a chore though)
Also OpenBSD for whatever reason probably has the most solid and decently sized gaming community than the other ones.
It's a great OS that just stays out of your way. really fun to tinker with. Just don't expect to do EVERYTHING on it. for surfing, certain dev work, etc it's great.
I see, I thought FreeBSD has the most users so I would guess a better hardware support but apparently not. I was only interested in NetBSD because of backwards hardware compatibility and that's pretty much it, because some stuff has problems even with small Linux distros.
It's quite interesting to see people who also game on BSD by the way. Rock on!
I assumed the same as you when I tried out the BSDs. I went with FreeBSD first because I assumed that was the better supported one. Wifi was absolutely horrible on it. connection would constantly drop, or was slow, etc. on OpenBSD i haven't had those issues. Also had a lot of issues setting up a VM on FreeBSD and getting certain USB devices to work correctly. neither of those issues on OpenBSD.
By the way, I watched a video about OpenBSD and kinda intrigued to put it on my old Thinkpad. Well, at least I'll consider if I can make it without a headache. I have a plan to make a really minimal (and maybe secure) writing machine. :)
I heard BSD is solid as a server. The person I know had to compile everything but that was many years ago. I would assume you have binary packages as well nowadays?
I never really used BSD and I only know NetBSD a little. I'm actually curious about a NetBSD server but I'm lazy even for my desktop. And I was considering switching my Debian server to Alpine but I haven't touched that server since 2019 aside from occasional updates, so even that's a big step for me. I guess the more realistic standpoint is I will install Alpine when my netbook finally dies and have to replace it with another hardware. :)
yes there are binary packages available, so i just use 'pkg install ...' like 'apt-get install'. NetBSD also has binary packages and is pretty good. it's all fun to use, but tbh i don't think there's many reasons to move away from a linux system because there's not many clear advantages
honestly just installing Gentoo is a great way to learn various aspects of linux. It's a process, a lengthy one, but if you manage to install it successfully you can pretty much install any distro or BSD with absolute ease and not even think about it.
Totally agree. I installed Gentoo a couple times before (last time maybe 10 years ago though, all were stage3). I tried stage1 once and my Linux knowledge was not even good that time, so there is that. :)
Even installing it will teach you a lot of things.
Proud Gentoo user for the past 12ish years and this is the first I've heard of "stage 1" and "stage 2". This explains the number for stage 3 I guess lol. Even with stage 3, and having dealt with gentoo (still my daily driver to date), I think I've learned more than I would have with many other distros.
Communist nerds decided that computer programs should be free, so they made free computer programs for you. It's better than corpo slop because all the most passionate nerds are sharing their code with each other, and judging every other nerd's code.
Also: people trying to make a point out of whatever motivation.
Need a POC for a research paper? Do it in Linux.
Need an implementation to get investor funding? Do it in Linux.
Need to pressure a large commercial operating system to implement a security model as a state security agency? Do it in Linux! It'll only take a decade for them to start to trust it, but the company will be pressured by a free alternative have an implicitly endorsed security system!
First you get a file(kernel source), then use another file to change the file, then you have a kernel, but the kernel(file) in the the file system, then use a magic boot file to run the file. That's basically it?
I've installed Debian on a 16 year old iomega nas drive single board arm system. Special drive format, with blanking the first 32 bytes with zeros for a weird boot process.
Installed OpenMediaVault on top of that.
I don't know how any of it works, I just search the web and cobble stuff together.
So are you immediately trying to pull the conversation away from ethics, because you know Microsoft has no leg to stand on in this regard? Who cares that the founder of MS is heavily implicated in the Epstein files if you (supposedly) save a little time, right? Or I guess it doesn't matter that that same company is actively providing surveillance tech support to Israel in their genocide of Palestine? That they censor their employees emails from speaking about the very atrocity they're complicit in? Or that the same surveillance infrastructure is being used at home in service of an authoritarian regime?
That's not even getting into all the gritty details of all the little annoyances and rights abuses - which have been accurately predicted by free software advocates for decades now - that inevitably stem from proprietary tech companies like Microslop, which collectively we are now calling enshittification.
But even ignoring the massive pile of shits about Microsoft and Windows to address your argument in a vacuum, does Windows respect your time? Really? Does Windows respect your time when it forces you to go online and sign up for an online account, and login to that account to enable their at-home spyware, just to install their operating system? Does it respect your time when you have to go through a potentially hours-long painful update procedure on a fresh install? How about when the OS runs awfully sluggish even on great hardware? Does MS respect your time when you have to go out of your way to research and install multiple tools and scripts to try in vain to gut all the spyware, AI garbage, adware, and bloat, and run 3rd party system tools to suppress other elements of the OS just to make the damn thing halfway usable and have the illusion of being something that can be trusted?
Even on your own little point, where is this superior documentation you speak of? Because every time I've run into a problem on Windows, their support pages have only ever given me the most generic troubleshooting answers that have been completely unhelpful. Please show me documentation that comes even close to the thoroughness and quality of the Arch Wiki.
Assuming any of what you said is even in good faith, and that you're not just a shill or simp, here's what you need to consider: Windows is something that most people have been using all their lives. When you've been operating something that long, it feels easier. You're more able to ignore the pain points because habits are already deeply settled, and you know your way around. That's the biggest reason Linux feels like such a hassle at first - learning new things takes time, and is always frustrating. I know this experientially because at one time I struggled to use Linux systems too, but now I have the reverse problem. I've been using Linux long enough, and Windows has devolved and changed enough, that on the rare occasion I try to use that piece of shitware, it is the most frustrating thing in the world. Windows 7 was something I was used to. But Windows 10 and 11 are new and unfamiliar to me, and consequently feel damn near unusably bad.
Does Linux have things it needs to improve? Of course, but at least it's something worth improving. You're trying to compare imperfect, yet a remarkable collection of software, to something that is literally just malware at this point. If anything, virus scanners should be adding Windows to their definitions lists.
Statistically yes, but also you're noticing a lot more because Lemmy creates those guys. Source: random guy. (Although I'm actually the low end "who the fuck knows" on the IQ chart version of this meme.)
Under the hood there is this thing in there called "systemd" that does a pretty good job making Linux work, and has made some people happy and some other people unhappy.
Before systemd there was something called "init" or maybe "system v" that wasn't as good at systemd, especially not at restarting things if there was a problem, but it was real fast and less complicated.
This is not part of the Linux kernel though, i have no idea how that works.
Also I believe the whole "violates unix principles" thing. the one in question:
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".
systemd just acquires more and more features. But then that was written in the 1970s. Things have changed, we have so much more going on in our computers, it's easier to delegate a bunch of housekeeping work to a single, more centralized tool.
Using OpenRC or another init system instead means you get more fine grained control, but it also means you need to choose a bunch of utilities, whereas systemd just has a lot of them out of the box. And at the end of the day that's just for power users to worry about, I suspect many end users will never be able to tell the difference between an OpenRC distro and a systemd distro given that both configure everything they need to use it.
Most of the hate came from people that don't even read logs nor know what they talk about. You can read journal with strings from binutils, you can forward to syslog server and store it in whatever format you prefer, you can do a lot of things with journal tbh. (Journalctl is horribly slow, that's true)
It's like asking "How does toilet paper work?" Meaning to say you don't have to know all the details about how it comes to be but can just use it and appreciate it does work. And you also know it would be really messy and with poor hygiene without.
Has it been a while since you used it? I know the nonfree firmware thing used to trip people up if they weren't already aware of it, but that's a nonissue now. Debian isn't any harder to install than any other graphical distro.
Nah, the installer is much more tame than it used to be. I just like to poke fun at ye olden times.
I did make a huge recent mistake by using an NVIDIA GPU on Debian. Every time it updated was playing Russian roulette with "is this gonna break my system and send me into six hours of troubleshooting?" Til I finally said fuck it and swapped it with my brother for his AMD card. And I haven't had a single issue since.
I like Debian, but NVIDIA drivers just refused to play nice for any extended period of time.
I'm having my own issues with an old laptop with an nvidia card, but on Fedora. Upgraded from 43 to 44 recently. I love how relatively pain-free Fedora updates and upgrades are, especially for being a somewhat bleeding edge distro.
But after the last upgrade I'm having an issue now where closing the lid to put it into sleep mode causes it to wake to a black screen. I've just been having to shut down every time I step away.
If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. Plenty of other distros are fine too, and some more appropriate for certain use cases than others.
But the short answer is. Linux provides the kernel that includes a lot of functionality out of the box. Drivers so all hardware can be abstracted away, scheduling of tasks, a filesystem with privileges, processmanagement etc.
This lives in the kernel.
In userland, there is more or less the GUI stuff (not entirely true). You can interact with higher privileges if you have the rights / sudo.
Linux makes you hardware run and abstracts it away in Operating System.
I don't really understand how software translates to hardware.
Like, I do... I understand that a driver takes a software value of {0,1} and converts it into a concrete voltage for that device... I just don't understand how a voltage rail can just be fiddled with like that without someone mechanically restricting the flow.
Like, I do... I understand how a transistor can regulate the flow of electricity to another circuit, by using a base to restrict the emitter to collector flow.... I just don't understand how that "switch" mechanism isn't pre-determined from some beginning sequence. A timing sequence instead of an event-driven one.
Like, I do... I understand how a simple ratchet / flip flop works in terms of constructing chaotic or aperiodic cyclic flows.... I just don't see how they were initialised in the first place to force them into specific branches of computation.
Like, I do... I understand how a CPU is made up millions/billions of such devices, reacting off external device voltages to drive software paths, all initialised in such a way to allow for any number of configurations.... I just don't understand how we can do it in such a formalized relatively error-free way that appears to defy entropy
Great comment, took me back to computer architecture. Not sure I can answer. Just a postulate, is it because the electric forces are a billion times stronger than gravity so they both neutralize quicker, but also can more reliably and precisely cause electricity to flow because when you do disturb that balance, it's much stronger than the interactions with massive systems we're used to visualizing?
That, as well as how computers will run the same computation multiple times and select output bits by majority rules to correct errors from say cosmic rays causing some bits to flip part way through one (but not all) of the fault tolerant circuits?
My last one was more of a joke, but my other statements hold. I think what I'm essentially asking is:
I understand how a pendulum works, I understand how a Newton's swing works, I understand how Newton's swing can start off another swing elsewhere... I'm just not clear on the nature of the finger that started off the first swing
"It just does the job on any machine and good luck if you use a shared drive on a dual-boot system." would be my answer. I settled for Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop after using Ubuntu and Cinnamon for 3 years. Windows and MacOS remain my primary OS because my main workflow only works on those two. Using Linux just for normal and shady stuff.
Shared drive is actually not a problem with Linux. Linux is multiboot by default. You can share any number of systems in a single drive as long as they all play by the same ground rules. It is Microsoft and apple who decided they won't play nice with nobody else and that their users belongs entirely to them. Instead of, you know, the user owning the computer and doing whatever they deem fit with their drive.
Shared drives are a massive pain in Linux actually. If you have three SSDs installed in your PC where one contains Windows, another contains Linux, and one is a shared drive for large files, Linux simply doesn't auto-mount that shared SSD. You have to work around that and even when you configure it to auto-mount, small things like lock screen wallpapers would reset to default on every startup if the image was placed in a different drive.
Linux does not play nice either. Windows, MacOS and Linux have different file systems. And you can do whatever you want on a Windows computer, MacOS is a bit restricted/limited but the sheer power, nicer interface and amazing capabilities make up for that. To be honest, Linux is useless in my workflow because Linux simply doesn't support my use case.
However, I love how lightweight Linux is, especially the Fedora KDE Plasma. I use it just for fun and to stay in touch with Linux because I had a spare SSD lying around and extra ports in my PC baseboard. From a personal usage and work usage standpoint, Linux is of no use for my use case.
There are Linux distributions that come with auto-mount configured by default. Wallpaper issue was desktop environment dependent but hasn't been an issue in like two decades. Linux can mount natively both Windows and Mac proprietary file systems. It has been able to for decades as well.
Everything you stated as a fact is false. You're either lying or are ignoring something obvious. If you don't like Linux and want to talk smack, go ahead. But at least use criticism from this decade.
What is that reply even supposed to mean? I'm telling you I do all those things you say Linux can't do. On a daily basis, I have for 15 years of continuous Linux use. Your facts are wrong, check yourself. The only one who doesn't seem to know how Linux works here is you.
It's my belief that one day a bunch of nerds way smarter than you or I will figure out how to run Linux on Apple Silicon. As many Macs as there are out in the wild, there has to be a market for this kind of thing once all these Macbooks start becoming e-waste.
I guess it's been about 16 years for me! Seeing as I first rolled up my sleeves to Linux as a Mac native around 2010. Though it's been my personal PC daily driver for only about 3. It was all work and projects stuff until then. I learned Linux nuts and bolts on the job in-person from a very good mentor.
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The more you know about computers the more you realize its just magic rocks, and that magic, rocks.
its all transistors man all transistors
I took an operating system class in college that involved basicly creating a baby OS. Lot of fun.
That's me, who started using Linux 5 months ago. I'm like, "I use Linux btw" to everyone.
Who cares, be loud and proud about it.
Personally I'm just going to ramp up being annoying to my friends until they switch because they'll thank me in a couple years and also because they deserve it
This is the way.
Well. ACTUALLY, it's very simple you see every time you spin up a new linux box a little piece of Linus Torvold's soul get's imprinted in the CPU registers and then that fragment handles everything from there.
It’s a series of files (tubes)!
And files that can be deleted while even in use just because.
Why would a file not be deletable while in use?
I creating my Meshtastic network and was having trouble setting a node with the right settings and wanted to plug in the unit into my Lenovo laptop running Fedora installed from the factory.
I click serial connection. The web app recognized the connection. Click connect. Failed. Tried different plugs and ports. Failed. Searched online and I need to do a bunch of things in terminal to get it to work properly.
Normally I would spend a few hours figuring it out. Instead....
Pulled out my 15 year old PC running win10. Plugged in, instantly worked.
I reeeeally want this to be my primary laptop, but man. I am just struggling on some basic things.
it will never be your main mschine of you don't use it as your main machine.
If it can't do everything your main machine needs to do, it can't possibly become your main machine.
But it CAN do it, it just needs a bit of work, be it by yourself oor by someone on the devs' side
Counter argument. What is the goal of owning a computer in the first place? Needing to do "a bit of work" with the OS or actual work.
I don't want to be a Linux developer. I want to do work. Sometimes I feel like I'm too much developer.
If you get Microsoft office to install and function, let me know how you did
Ah, permissions chicanery. Had to deal with that with connecting a Switch 2 controller with a WebUSB enabler. To be fair, once you add the right udev rules (it is a bit of a pain, yes), it should work for any other devices of the same type (I think it's any with the same USB ID so like same manufacturer and model? Don't quote me on that though). Still, I wish Chromium (since Firefox as far as I know still doesn't support WebUSB) could sort it out by itself (like just have an "allow" button rather than writing udev config files yourself) or at least be a bit more helpful in pointing you the right way with a helpful error message.
You do have to get used to weird edge cases like these throwing a spanner in the works, just like you have weird stuff on Windows (trying to get some older Android devices to communicate in fastboot mode in Windows makes me feel like Odysseus).
Asking around and screwing around usually gets you places though. Eventually you find something.
My PC just programmed all the units in my mesh in around 5 minutes. It would have likely taken longer trying to fix the USB connector. I should figure out how to fix this edge case so I don't have to take my old PC out again.
udev? WATCH -N 1 CHMOD A+RWX /DEV
What they are talking about is an open source piece of software (Meshtastic) that's using a well-known (if specific to Chromium) standard, WebUSB. It's a genuine pain point, and stuff like this needs to work out of the box, no manually written udev rules required.
Whoa man. You ok?
Fresh knowledge is not to be underestimated.
It's more like the Sphere of Knowledge. The more you know about Linux (or pretty much any subject) that more you become aware of subjects you don't understand. Whereas when you don't know that much, there are fewer categories for which you are aware of your lack of understanding. Know unknowns vs unknown unknowns.
The Dunning Kruger-effect is a shaky concept. Recent studies seem to have disproved it in some ways.
The people who reference Dunning-Kruger often vastly overestimate how competent they are at statistics.
Plot with green points is Dunning Kruger data. It's hardly correlated.
Using this plot as a statistical argument against the idea of Dunning Kruger is pretty Dunning Kruger.
It’s a scatter plot with hella dense overlap and no density indicator, and a best-fit line that doesn’t match the visual skew. Different ranges and scales on the axes are wonky as hell and make it hard to follow a 1:1 reference line. Try tracing a mental line from (75,75) to (150,150) and it looks much cleaner.
It seems to show subjective vs. evaluated IQ results, which mostly shows people generally think they’re far above average. There’s clearly a statistically significant positive correlation in the trend of modest magnitude.
More importantly though, it’s a bit of a weird thing to tie to Dunning Kruger: The plot tells us something about how well people can guess how “cognitively gifted” they are relative to peers, but that’s not a reasonable proxy for how people might self-evaluate on a skill-based or knowledge-based domain.
E: and I went looking for the source and that’s fake, simulated data you’re presenting as real there lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#Statistical_and_better-than-average_effect
I'll correct myself, the data is simulated and I skipped the word. You are completely right to remind me of this. But there are a few important considerations here.
Wiki quote: "The initial study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger examined the performance and self-assessment of undergraduate students in inductive, deductive, and abductive logical reasoning; English grammar; and appreciation of humor."
Second of all, for this I have consulted the study itself, according to my cursory read the sample size of the study seems to be below 100. I'll let that speak for itself.
A new study working with more data, that doesn't just present generalised skill shows that, just like in the simulated data, it is still a blob following a normal distribution in terms of density. The simulated data was meant to show how misleading inferences can be made with noisy results.
from https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000644
It tends to explain why entry level programmers act the way they do. Like when I graduated I was definitely on the peak of mount stupid but as I learned more I realized how little I knew. I did not externalize this as I was just trying to make iy through my days, however I have seen some entry levels absolutely fuck things up because they thought they were geniuses. It was exactly like that bell curve where idiots and experts do the same simple thing but mediocre people do the most complicated thing possible with 5 layers of abstraction.
Just because it explains an experience, doesn't mean it's statistically true in a deep way. I would tend to agree that the Dunning Kruger effect is a nice logical story, a shorthand if you will. I would really be careful about placing undue confidence in neat little explanations of a stupefyingly complex word, especially when it concerns yet incomprehensible structures like the brain.
Being explained in experience is the worst proof, it's all bias. I should have been more clear, I want it to be true because it makes sense, but it is incorrect.
Ahh, that clears it up. I misunderstood you.
On a client-server model turned single-user desktop, running on seven layers of abstraction. And the interface of choice is full of bugs and limitations. But we've got nothing better currently, that also works on the next computer, due to compatibility issues caused by misplaced secretivity of the vendors.
It's like owning a car for 20 years. Even if you don't want to, you'll eventually understand more and more.
Compooter take symbol, compooter fuck symbol, symbol reincarnarnates as a stick, which is what is currently in my ass. Sideways, even. Symbols don't fuck around here for longer than it takes to be forthsworn, but this just a warning to warm you up, and this is how we know these compooters work.
Me who started working on my own OS from scatch 2 months ago.
Now know more about what I don't know. For sure I have no clue how Linux works.
It’s just files, how hard could it be 🤷
"What's a file anyways, more than a bunch of bytes in a specific order?"
There is a kernel of truth to this.
I understood that reference!
I fucking wish
Check out dbus and notify.
And then unpack your dracut initrd.
That killed a Plan9 (and 9front) fan.
20 years this year and I still am not sure how it is supposed to be pronounced (in english)
it’s pronounced
gifguy over here trying to start a war
yiff*Now I just wanna know whether
GNUisGuh-nooorJuh-nooorGee-en-yooI haven't used Linux regularly since 2006, which either means I'm out of the loop or an ancient bearer of lost knowledge:
I think it's "G'noo" like "G'day" or "G'night."
The GNU project has a page on it:
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/pronunciation.html
It seems he got it correct without knowing.
G'noo be my distro of choice, m'lady
lmao
Gnu like the animal
Wildebeest
It's
Gee-nyoothe U is silent
a newt?
linux
The linux is silent
not for linux users!
source: I use linux.
Line-yoox.
Gah Nuu plus Line-ucks
"As I've taken to calling it"
except it's derived from Linus's name, which in finnish is pronounced as Lee-noos, so technically it should be Lee-noox.
In reality tho? Nobody cares
I just say liinus. Or liinuksi.
It’s pronounced like Liminiux. Lominoliux is also acceptable.
actually, it's lomi-lominux
Loon - icks
Loin-ughs
Lean-uggs
Lin-ix
So close the lunatic then.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uK0xXFZtJ8Q%5D
That's the thing, his pronounciation there is eerlie similar to what I'm used to spanish (where it is pronounced just as it is spelt) that my ol brain kind of does a short-circuit and can't assimilate the fact that it's just kind of the same thing in both languages and if it's in the middle of a sentence I have to go back to speaking my crappy non-native english
Not sure if this helps, but in English (my native language), I would pronounce it with a short “i”, like in “sit”. You could also pronounce it with a Spanish “i” (same as Finnish “i” to my ears). I would not pronounce it with a long English “i” because the vowel length is too long and doesn’t sound right.
It always surprises me how much the pronunciation of Finnish and Dutch resemble each other.
LIH-nucks (rhymes with "tin bucks").
It is pronounced like that but they don't rhyme at all
/ˈlɪnuks/
I think it's /ˈlɪn.əks/ It's horritic tho, tbh
This gon be another gif or gif situation.
le necks
24 years exclusively running it.
Short answer: magic.
Long answer: a stressful full week trying to get everything right, followed by a long, blissful period forgetting how hard it was to get it up and running like magic.
my experiece is just stuff getting fixed and breaking rsndomly tbh.
So many factors at play.
The number of packages installed, the use of externally unsupported repos, the distro you use, reliability of their packaging system, how much you deviated from the baseline customization, and probably more.
Keeping track of everything off what and how much you changed may prove difficult. But it helps taking notes of how you solved the more complicated issues.
With time you learn to live with the inevitability of something breaking. You update less often, and only when you really have to. Repairing stuff becomes less overwhelmeming with time.
Those weeks were a lot more stressful, and longer than a week, when I used Slackware and started installing stuff that wasn't packaged for Slackware. I would dread new software. It was the Unifi controller that finally put me over the edge: I wasn't even willing to give it a shot. I ran the controller on my Kubuntu desktop for a few weeks until I switched the server to Debian.
It felt like a house of cards. Nudge one of those cards by, say, updating a library, and you could easily break something else.
"If you want to know how Linux works, ask a Slackware user," is the old saying. It's true...we had to know, because we didn't have a choice not to know.
After a dozen of those stressful weeks I decided to write down everything new I learn if I can.
When Linux is working, one does not tempt fate by asking why.
One does not ask how the Linux is working, one only asks if.
The more you know, the more you know that you don't know a damn thing.
Everything's a file.
except that thing. ...and the other thing. that thing used to be a file but it's not anymore. that's only a file if you use this specific shell. that one is a file system, but there's no files in it. oh don't touch that file, that's deprecated. oh that's only a partial file, you need to open this one too otherwise it breaks.
Linux: You're a file.
Windows: No! You're a file!
*Linux smiles maliciously*
Lots of things are files. See Plan9.
I don't know shit about Linux. I just know it's fast and not Microsoft.
As someone who uses Linux every day for work, I don't know how to fix shit. I'm not paid to troubleshoot
🙋♂️: "How does Linux work?"
👨💻: "...does it?"
I just say "everything's a file" until they stop asking questions
https://youtu.be/lE4UXdJSJM4
But seriously - if you do want to see the inner workings, perform a Gentoo stage 2 to dip your toes in. LFS after if you’re feeling dangerous. Then things will start to come together. But maybe do it on a spare machine… You can/will break things and you will need a fallback to do research. Don’t bother if you don’t care to read manuals, it’s not easy and can be frustrating.
I've been working with Linux since 1.1.98, I think, 1.2.13 for sure. That's probably 32 years.
I've built kernels for enterprise distribution as part of a build group. I've worked to secure our distribution. I've led the security response team.
I've never run gentoo.
You think I should ?
If you are happy with the distributions you use, there is no need to try Gentoo.
In my opinion, as a Gentoo user for the last 20 years, Gentoo is the most flexible distribution there is. Gentoo can be as stable as Debian or it can be as (or even more) cutting edge as Arch. Or it can be anything in between and you can even mix and match as you like.
The cost you pay for that flexibility is the compile time it takes to build the packages. And Gentoo is even providing you with prebuilt binaries for a very large amount of packages.
Not sure if you’d gain all that much with your level of experience. LFS might be a better starting point. However, after suggesting doing a stage 2 to a few that were eager to learn more (even though they’d been using it for a very long time), it was generally a positive experience. If you go through the guide I’m sure you’d be able to tell quickly whether it would be useful.
Honestly as a not-used-Gentoo person recklessly throwing around my opinion on the internet...
It sounds like either it can be "Really optimized and crazy performant if you know what you're doing."
Or "It's a fun hobby because you think operating systems are fun."
Personally it seems cool except I think I'd start to burn out fast if every package install means having to read compilation instructions and edit configs.
Maybe because my experience compiling stuff is always like "What's your problem this time?! Okay where do I find that package version?!"
EDIT: I love all the educational, reassuring, and enthusiastic responses. This is what makes Linux cool. :D I should give Gentoo a try...
Package install doesn't mean you have to read compilation instructions and edit configs. Usually you just install like in any other distro. (Except it takes a bit longer to finish.)
That's actually pretty reassuring! I was under the impression it was a huge flex haha. I'm curious how much practical speed you gain from compiling everything to your specific architecture. 🤔
It depends. You also have to decide if you want to use LTO or PGO or similar techniques to further boost performance (but massively impacting compile time).
Generally Gentoo 'feels' smoother than other distributions. And I had an old netbook that used to be unable to play HD content on Ubuntu and the like, but HD content worked smoothly on Gentoo.
Nah, it's not that bad. You don't need to optimize the living hell out of it and they also have some ready-made binary packages. Plus you can also use flatpak for instance to make your life easier.
Sounds pretty rad actually if one is packing a halfway decent processor! :) Thanks for enlightening us!
You're right, I've learned to love flatpaks for certain things. The sandboxing can be a little reassuring and I'll definitely reach for it if I'm getting dependency-hell from a core package and just "Need it to work without spending a weekend on it." :p
Flatpak is toxic to iso27002 and SLSA, though.
@MonkeMischief @corsicanguppy portage tree already conains all instructions and follows automaticly. You optionally may override options with use flags unlike binary distros where you only can use default configuration
Ah that's really cool! Sounds a lot more approachable than I thought. I've always heard it talked about like a flex distro for after somebody graduates from "installed Arch, no-installer" academy. :p
(Another thing I need to try again. First time failed hahaha.)
I have somewhat similar experience (with far more recent kernels tho, 2.6 and newer) gentoo has some gentoo specific things, it won't really teach you a lot when you have a certain level of knowledge, and how most parts interface with each other. It's a fun exercise if you have time.
You should be at the point where you just want simply and easy. Because you have reached the point "I'm tired Boss. So tired." When it comes to an OS.
So maybe Mint or a Fedora Atomic spin.
I'd do Atomic but it's a bipolar source of truth, which violates iso27002.
Good with either enterprise or fedora, thanks!
I once tried Gentoo stage 1 because I felt bad ass and failed miserably. However that also taught me a lot.
Hahah. At least you learned some things. Took me a few goes after thinking I was slick having stage 2 down pat. Then tried some BSDs and was humbled again.
Heh, there was a guy on our local forums who daily drived FreeBSD 20 years ago. They probably still using it. 20 years later, I still don't know any other people who daily drive a BSD.
I’ve been running OpenBSD since 2.8. I’ve only met one other BSD user in real life and they were baffled to why I’d run it as a workstation OS. Sometimes I am too.
That's fair I think :)
Comparing to Linux BSD is quite niche, and I even met a guy who uses Linux other than me in real life was like in 2011 for the first time. No one knew what BSD was.
Personally I only meddled with NetBSD for really old PCs.
I guess I can count you as the first person I know who uses OpenBSD now.
Masochism?
probably
I daily drive OpenBSD. I found it easier to set up than NetBSD which apparently is ass backwards as open is supposed to be harder. for the life of me I just couldn't wrap my head around getting the amdgpu drivers working on NetBSD.
I also found OpenBSD slightly better supported for various hardware than FreeBSD. Wifi works better on it, these old ass logitech headphones I have work flawlessly on OpenBSD when on FreeBSD they just didn't work at all and gave off horrible feedback or I couldn't turn the mic off. Also found setting up a Debian VM much easier on OpenBSD than FreeBSD (still a chore though)
Also OpenBSD for whatever reason probably has the most solid and decently sized gaming community than the other ones.
It's a great OS that just stays out of your way. really fun to tinker with. Just don't expect to do EVERYTHING on it. for surfing, certain dev work, etc it's great.
I see, I thought FreeBSD has the most users so I would guess a better hardware support but apparently not. I was only interested in NetBSD because of backwards hardware compatibility and that's pretty much it, because some stuff has problems even with small Linux distros.
It's quite interesting to see people who also game on BSD by the way. Rock on!
I assumed the same as you when I tried out the BSDs. I went with FreeBSD first because I assumed that was the better supported one. Wifi was absolutely horrible on it. connection would constantly drop, or was slow, etc. on OpenBSD i haven't had those issues. Also had a lot of issues setting up a VM on FreeBSD and getting certain USB devices to work correctly. neither of those issues on OpenBSD.
By the way, I watched a video about OpenBSD and kinda intrigued to put it on my old Thinkpad. Well, at least I'll consider if I can make it without a headache. I have a plan to make a really minimal (and maybe secure) writing machine. :)
i use freebsd on my desktop and server. it's pretty good. linux emulation is also capable so everything just runs!
hardware compat isn't as great tho. my laptop randomly stutters with freebsd so i use linux instead
I heard BSD is solid as a server. The person I know had to compile everything but that was many years ago. I would assume you have binary packages as well nowadays?
I never really used BSD and I only know NetBSD a little. I'm actually curious about a NetBSD server but I'm lazy even for my desktop. And I was considering switching my Debian server to Alpine but I haven't touched that server since 2019 aside from occasional updates, so even that's a big step for me. I guess the more realistic standpoint is I will install Alpine when my netbook finally dies and have to replace it with another hardware. :)
yes there are binary packages available, so i just use 'pkg install ...' like 'apt-get install'. NetBSD also has binary packages and is pretty good. it's all fun to use, but tbh i don't think there's many reasons to move away from a linux system because there's not many clear advantages
Well, to be fair I don't really have time to learn whole another system, even though there are many similarities. I'm just interested, as a hobby. :)
It's good to know they have package managers like Linux though.
honestly just installing Gentoo is a great way to learn various aspects of linux. It's a process, a lengthy one, but if you manage to install it successfully you can pretty much install any distro or BSD with absolute ease and not even think about it.
Totally agree. I installed Gentoo a couple times before (last time maybe 10 years ago though, all were stage3). I tried stage1 once and my Linux knowledge was not even good that time, so there is that. :)
Even installing it will teach you a lot of things.
Proud Gentoo user for the past 12ish years and this is the first I've heard of "stage 1" and "stage 2". This explains the number for stage 3 I guess lol. Even with stage 3, and having dealt with gentoo (still my daily driver to date), I think I've learned more than I would have with many other distros.
Tried LFS first. Stayed with Gentoo after for the maintainability.
This and some certification guide for sles or rhel (their documentation in general is very good and thorough).
It takes the raw code, bakes it at 450°F for 90 minutes, then does some magic.
Communist nerds decided that computer programs should be free, so they made free computer programs for you. It's better than corpo slop because all the most passionate nerds are sharing their code with each other, and judging every other nerd's code.
There are also other socialist nerds who have decided they don't want to obligate the corpos to give them code because it sucks. Welcome to BSD.
Also: people trying to make a point out of whatever motivation.
Need a POC for a research paper? Do it in Linux.
Need an implementation to get investor funding? Do it in Linux.
Need to pressure a large commercial operating system to implement a security model as a state security agency? Do it in Linux! It'll only take a decade for them to start to trust it, but the company will be pressured by a free alternative have an implicitly endorsed security system!
I compiled Linux last week and I don’t even know how it works
First you get a file(kernel source), then use another file to change the file, then you have a kernel, but the kernel(file) in the the file system, then use a magic boot file to run the file. That's basically it?
I've installed Debian on a 16 year old iomega nas drive single board arm system. Special drive format, with blanking the first 32 bytes with zeros for a weird boot process. Installed OpenMediaVault on top of that.
I don't know how any of it works, I just search the web and cobble stuff together.
So when is the rest of this gif happening?
Still buffering, give it a minute. It's gotta squeeze through the tubes.
What I tell people: "When you get used to using an operating system that respects your rights, you don't wanna go back."
How about an operating system that respects your time?
Cause Linux aint that if I have to sift through dozens of badly documented online manuals just to get something small working the way it should.
Windows is much better in that regard.
So are you immediately trying to pull the conversation away from ethics, because you know Microsoft has no leg to stand on in this regard? Who cares that the founder of MS is heavily implicated in the Epstein files if you (supposedly) save a little time, right? Or I guess it doesn't matter that that same company is actively providing surveillance tech support to Israel in their genocide of Palestine? That they censor their employees emails from speaking about the very atrocity they're complicit in? Or that the same surveillance infrastructure is being used at home in service of an authoritarian regime?
That's not even getting into all the gritty details of all the little annoyances and rights abuses - which have been accurately predicted by free software advocates for decades now - that inevitably stem from proprietary tech companies like Microslop, which collectively we are now calling enshittification.
But even ignoring the massive pile of shits about Microsoft and Windows to address your argument in a vacuum, does Windows respect your time? Really? Does Windows respect your time when it forces you to go online and sign up for an online account, and login to that account to enable their at-home spyware, just to install their operating system? Does it respect your time when you have to go through a potentially hours-long painful update procedure on a fresh install? How about when the OS runs awfully sluggish even on great hardware? Does MS respect your time when you have to go out of your way to research and install multiple tools and scripts to try in vain to gut all the spyware, AI garbage, adware, and bloat, and run 3rd party system tools to suppress other elements of the OS just to make the damn thing halfway usable and have the illusion of being something that can be trusted?
Even on your own little point, where is this superior documentation you speak of? Because every time I've run into a problem on Windows, their support pages have only ever given me the most generic troubleshooting answers that have been completely unhelpful. Please show me documentation that comes even close to the thoroughness and quality of the Arch Wiki.
Assuming any of what you said is even in good faith, and that you're not just a shill or simp, here's what you need to consider: Windows is something that most people have been using all their lives. When you've been operating something that long, it feels easier. You're more able to ignore the pain points because habits are already deeply settled, and you know your way around. That's the biggest reason Linux feels like such a hassle at first - learning new things takes time, and is always frustrating. I know this experientially because at one time I struggled to use Linux systems too, but now I have the reverse problem. I've been using Linux long enough, and Windows has devolved and changed enough, that on the rare occasion I try to use that piece of shitware, it is the most frustrating thing in the world. Windows 7 was something I was used to. But Windows 10 and 11 are new and unfamiliar to me, and consequently feel damn near unusably bad.
Does Linux have things it needs to improve? Of course, but at least it's something worth improving. You're trying to compare imperfect, yet a remarkable collection of software, to something that is literally just malware at this point. If anything, virus scanners should be adding Windows to their definitions lists.
Good for you, stay where you are
I've been on Arch full time for 6 years, I still get frustrated, sometimes I get stumped, but I NEVER want to go back to windows
... And there are a lot more of those random guys around now.
Statistically yes, but also you're noticing a lot more because Lemmy creates those guys. Source: random guy. (Although I'm actually the low end "who the fuck knows" on the IQ chart version of this meme.)
I think M$ has had a lot to do with it recently, although lemmy certainly offers a helping hand
Microsoft makes you want to leave, Lemmy tells you it's not so bad and pushes you to do it.
I confess, I'm perhaps complicit in that.
Under the hood there is this thing in there called "systemd" that does a pretty good job making Linux work, and has made some people happy and some other people unhappy.
Before systemd there was something called "init" or maybe "system v" that wasn't as good at systemd, especially not at restarting things if there was a problem, but it was real fast and less complicated.
This is not part of the Linux kernel though, i have no idea how that works.
Can i be dewey, but with the glasses?
Close—a few other people use a different unit system to be extra niche. There are tens of us! Tens!
I think most of the hate came from logging and that it went binary instead of just another file
Also I believe the whole "violates unix principles" thing. the one in question:
systemd just acquires more and more features. But then that was written in the 1970s. Things have changed, we have so much more going on in our computers, it's easier to delegate a bunch of housekeeping work to a single, more centralized tool.
Using OpenRC or another init system instead means you get more fine grained control, but it also means you need to choose a bunch of utilities, whereas systemd just has a lot of them out of the box. And at the end of the day that's just for power users to worry about, I suspect many end users will never be able to tell the difference between an OpenRC distro and a systemd distro given that both configure everything they need to use it.
Most of the hate came from people that don't even read logs nor know what they talk about. You can read journal with
stringsfrom binutils, you can forward to syslog server and store it in whatever format you prefer, you can do a lot of things with journal tbh. (Journalctl is horribly slow, that's true)This is a very dewey answer. Yes, you can have the glasses.
I was unaware ifconfig was no longer a thing a little while back. boy oh boy did it take a long time to troubleshoot.
Say what? I used it last week to check on a secondary NIC. I am also extremely old... Almost as old as Linus.
it's still present on a few distros but 10-15 years ago, some existing ip and new /iproute2 came along made better the interaction.
We don't ask that question here
It's like asking "How does toilet paper work?" Meaning to say you don't have to know all the details about how it comes to be but can just use it and appreciate it does work. And you also know it would be really messy and with poor hygiene without.
OK but you can start a great argument by asking a group of people how many squares of toilet paper they use per wipe
Maybe not the best metaphor but I approve your message
It was a shitty, yes. I probably would have said "it's like asking how food works" if I had been eating when I wrote it
I'm at the point where I struggle to explain to newbies how to do things, so I'm always glad that other newbies do it. 🥴
All I know is I survived the Debian installer. But at what cost?
Has it been a while since you used it? I know the nonfree firmware thing used to trip people up if they weren't already aware of it, but that's a nonissue now. Debian isn't any harder to install than any other graphical distro.
Nah, the installer is much more tame than it used to be. I just like to poke fun at ye olden times.
I did make a huge recent mistake by using an NVIDIA GPU on Debian. Every time it updated was playing Russian roulette with "is this gonna break my system and send me into six hours of troubleshooting?" Til I finally said fuck it and swapped it with my brother for his AMD card. And I haven't had a single issue since.
I like Debian, but NVIDIA drivers just refused to play nice for any extended period of time.
I'm having my own issues with an old laptop with an nvidia card, but on Fedora. Upgraded from 43 to 44 recently. I love how relatively pain-free Fedora updates and upgrades are, especially for being a somewhat bleeding edge distro.
But after the last upgrade I'm having an issue now where closing the lid to put it into sleep mode causes it to wake to a black screen. I've just been having to shut down every time I step away.
Never getting Nvidia again.
Idk, I've tried throwing it on some machines and every time it's just not worked
If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. Plenty of other distros are fine too, and some more appropriate for certain use cases than others.
It's a moving target.
It translates what you tell it to the hardware.
We've cracked the code! Lol
The UX combines with various Lines.
Penguin thingies blah blah gay furry nerd shit blah blah hackers blah blah
You rang?
Ding ding ding! We have a winner, folks! 😁
The Linux kernel is a computer secretary. It turns organizes hardware into files and it handles scheduling.
I've been using Linux for over 2 years. When does that part when I think I know how it works kicks in? I didn't get it.
Read the meme: you already passed it long ago!
(Though there is a second stage that kicks in when you manage to grow a grey beard - which is particularly impressive if you are a woman!)
I dunno, I've been using it since like 2012 and I still have no idea sometimes when it breaks.
There is a book called how Linux works.
But the short answer is. Linux provides the kernel that includes a lot of functionality out of the box. Drivers so all hardware can be abstracted away, scheduling of tasks, a filesystem with privileges, processmanagement etc. This lives in the kernel.
In userland, there is more or less the GUI stuff (not entirely true). You can interact with higher privileges if you have the rights / sudo.
Linux makes you hardware run and abstracts it away in Operating System.
Long answer. Read the book. It is very good.
Let me save you a hundred hours, the book ends with "and that is why we don't understand how Linux works".
I don't really understand how software translates to hardware.
Like, I do... I understand that a driver takes a software value of {0,1} and converts it into a concrete voltage for that device... I just don't understand how a voltage rail can just be fiddled with like that without someone mechanically restricting the flow.
Like, I do... I understand how a transistor can regulate the flow of electricity to another circuit, by using a base to restrict the emitter to collector flow.... I just don't understand how that "switch" mechanism isn't pre-determined from some beginning sequence. A timing sequence instead of an event-driven one.
Like, I do... I understand how a simple ratchet / flip flop works in terms of constructing chaotic or aperiodic cyclic flows.... I just don't see how they were initialised in the first place to force them into specific branches of computation.
Like, I do... I understand how a CPU is made up millions/billions of such devices, reacting off external device voltages to drive software paths, all initialised in such a way to allow for any number of configurations.... I just don't understand how we can do it in such a formalized relatively error-free way that appears to defy entropy
Great comment, took me back to computer architecture. Not sure I can answer. Just a postulate, is it because the electric forces are a billion times stronger than gravity so they both neutralize quicker, but also can more reliably and precisely cause electricity to flow because when you do disturb that balance, it's much stronger than the interactions with massive systems we're used to visualizing?
That, as well as how computers will run the same computation multiple times and select output bits by majority rules to correct errors from say cosmic rays causing some bits to flip part way through one (but not all) of the fault tolerant circuits?
My last one was more of a joke, but my other statements hold. I think what I'm essentially asking is:
I understand how a pendulum works, I understand how a Newton's swing works, I understand how Newton's swing can start off another swing elsewhere... I'm just not clear on the nature of the finger that started off the first swing
It's magic
libmagic is just one tiny part of the linux ecosystem
Touche
It is something about all the files being wildebeests, right ?
Wtf. My files are dolphins. Did I do something wrong?
And the user is a hippo...
... Wait...
Two decades! Shit. Memes are meant to make me depressed.
Ironic typo?
Damn it. No
"It just does the job on any machine and good luck if you use a shared drive on a dual-boot system." would be my answer. I settled for Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop after using Ubuntu and Cinnamon for 3 years. Windows and MacOS remain my primary OS because my main workflow only works on those two. Using Linux just for normal and shady stuff.
Shared drive is actually not a problem with Linux. Linux is multiboot by default. You can share any number of systems in a single drive as long as they all play by the same ground rules. It is Microsoft and apple who decided they won't play nice with nobody else and that their users belongs entirely to them. Instead of, you know, the user owning the computer and doing whatever they deem fit with their drive.
Shared drives are a massive pain in Linux actually. If you have three SSDs installed in your PC where one contains Windows, another contains Linux, and one is a shared drive for large files, Linux simply doesn't auto-mount that shared SSD. You have to work around that and even when you configure it to auto-mount, small things like lock screen wallpapers would reset to default on every startup if the image was placed in a different drive.
Linux does not play nice either. Windows, MacOS and Linux have different file systems. And you can do whatever you want on a Windows computer, MacOS is a bit restricted/limited but the sheer power, nicer interface and amazing capabilities make up for that. To be honest, Linux is useless in my workflow because Linux simply doesn't support my use case.
However, I love how lightweight Linux is, especially the Fedora KDE Plasma. I use it just for fun and to stay in touch with Linux because I had a spare SSD lying around and extra ports in my PC baseboard. From a personal usage and work usage standpoint, Linux is of no use for my use case.
There are Linux distributions that come with auto-mount configured by default. Wallpaper issue was desktop environment dependent but hasn't been an issue in like two decades. Linux can mount natively both Windows and Mac proprietary file systems. It has been able to for decades as well.
Everything you stated as a fact is false. You're either lying or are ignoring something obvious. If you don't like Linux and want to talk smack, go ahead. But at least use criticism from this decade.
Just because you don't know how a thing works, doesn't mean that your lack of knowledge overshadows facts. Good luck!
What is that reply even supposed to mean? I'm telling you I do all those things you say Linux can't do. On a daily basis, I have for 15 years of continuous Linux use. Your facts are wrong, check yourself. The only one who doesn't seem to know how Linux works here is you.
Apple even went so far as to develop their own processors to try and stop people extending the life of their products using Linux.
It's my belief that one day a bunch of nerds way smarter than you or I will figure out how to run Linux on Apple Silicon. As many Macs as there are out in the wild, there has to be a market for this kind of thing once all these Macbooks start becoming e-waste.
Well, there's Asahi Linux but that's pretty much your only option for Apple silicon. I have no idea how good it is as I've never had Apple hardware.
I tried slackware when win 3.1 was hot. I would have went a lot further a lot sooner if I could have gotten my modem working
People are asking you to talk about linux
People are asking me to stop talking about linux
We are not the same
"It just works, so who tf cares?"
Real
It’s monkeys all the way down
True. It works more to my liking, and that's enough for me
I guess it's been about 16 years for me! Seeing as I first rolled up my sleeves to Linux as a Mac native around 2010. Though it's been my personal PC daily driver for only about 3. It was all work and projects stuff until then. I learned Linux nuts and bolts on the job in-person from a very good mentor.
The idea was that each component was supposed to do one thing really well and forward its output as text to the next component.
Me who started to use it few months ago: ¯\_( ´ _ `)_/¯
Two years and I'm still not completely sure how to correctly remove stuff from arch haha
That's the neat part, you're gonna end up distrohopping before it matters.
Lemme just fully quote the Arpaci-Dusseaus OSTEP real quick
Dewey you lil rascal, stop lookin at me like that!
And they just accept Windows?
Windows doesn't work!