LTT: 10 ways Linux is just better!

[WereCatf]

Wake me up when HW-accelerated video-decoding is working in Firefox...

[JCHelios]

Quote

Stigmata! Does that mean the so-called Tech-Jesus at Gamers Nexus is a false idol?? 

[Skyyblaze]

I tried Linux both on real hardware and in VMs before and I could use it as a daily driver if I wanted but I'm so used to Windows and OSX that I feel I wouldn't gain any benefit by doing so. My biggest annoyances were my Logitech hardware barely functioning although that's fully on Logitech and not Linux itself, V-Sync not working even in the UI with my GTX 1070 which gave me ugly tearing everywhere and finally customization being far more involved than I would like to spend time on.

 

For example in KDE I couldn't find a way to make a desktop panel be a few pixels away from the edges of the screen so it floats. I'm sure I could have done this by changing things in the source-code of KDE and then recompiling my own version but that's like said far more in-depth than I'm willing to go.

 

I'm a very visual person and like modding things so I could see me eventually running a full-screen Linux VM for daily-tasks and social media and then for gaming and the rest I would just ALT-TAB and let Windows do the job.

 

That said I enjoyed the video and thought it was well done

[Nayr438]

nvm

Edited February 25, 2020 by Nayr438
Learned something new about firefox.

[WereCatf]

21 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

It does work in Firefox

No, it does not. There has been an open ticket about it for almost a decade on Bugzilla.

[xnamkcor]

6 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

No, it does not. There has been an open ticket about it for almost a decade on Bugzilla.

In my experience with bug reporting, the way that gets solved is closing the ticket.

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, xnamkcor said:

In my experience with bug reporting, the way that gets solved is closing the ticket.

It's not a bug per se, it's a feature-request, and it's not even mine. HW-acceleration for video-decoding is missing under Linux and the ticket exists mostly as a reminder -- though, they don't seem to be in any hurry to do anything about their own reminder.

[xnamkcor]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

It's not a bug per se, it's a feature-request, and it's not even mine. HW-acceleration for video-decoding is missing under Linux and the ticket exists mostly as a reminder -- though, they don't seem to be in any hurry to do anything about their own reminder.

In my experience, feature requests are handled by bug reporting software/databases.

 

PS: A little bird told me linux has the best hardware support. Considering all the driver issues i keep hearing about, that must be some really fun wordplay.

[alextulu]

Using Linux for anything other than web browsing is only for enthusiasts with A LOT of spare time, people who already use Linux at work, and organisations who can afford to have IT departments.

[xnamkcor]

7 minutes ago, alextulu said:

Using Linux for anything other than web browsing is only for enthusiasts with A LOT of spare time, people who already use Linux at work, and organisations who can afford to have IT departments.

One time I used Linux to give my brother a working computer...for web browsing...

[kelvinhall05]

26 minutes ago, alextulu said:

Using Linux for anything other than web browsing is only for enthusiasts with A LOT of spare time, people who already use Linux at work, and organisations who can afford to have IT departments.

The only things I had to do to get my Linux distro working as well as Windows was to enable the correct GPU driver in the kernel. All it took was a single command, and now my system is faster and way, way more stable than it ever was on Windows.

 

 

People who have never used or installed any Linux distro completely overestimate how complicated it is to install and use. Everything can be done with a GUI (although doing it in a CLI is usually faster if you know exactly what you need to do), you don't have to deal with Microsoft breaking your computer when you need to update, I haven't restarted my laptop in almost fifteen days and it still runs completely fine, etc etc etc.

[xnamkcor]

26 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

The only things I had to do to get my Linux distro working as well as Windows was to enable the correct GPU driver in the kernel. All it took was a single command, and now my system is faster and way, way more stable than it ever was on Windows.

 

 

People who have never used or installed any Linux distro completely overestimate how complicated it is to install and use. Everything can be done with a GUI (although doing it in a CLI is usually faster if you know exactly what you need to do), you don't have to deal with Microsoft breaking your computer when you need to update, I haven't restarted my laptop in almost fifteen days and it still runs completely fine, etc etc etc.

"Everyone with less experience find it harder to do things".

Thanks for that.

[alextulu]

2 hours ago, kelvinhall05 said:

People who have never used or installed any Linux distro

I have used Linux. My main complaints are:

 

- Except for GPU and printer drivers, most drivers are not available as kernel modules, so you can't just install them like on Windows, you instead have to wait for kernel updates to add the latest drivers.

 

- Shitty backwards compatibility. The Steam runtime does help with running older applications, but drivers are a different story. If kernel modules are not updated, they'll just stop working, and no, DKMS is not good enough. Recompiling only helps with ABI changes, not API changes. Recompiling a kernel module helps for a while, until it doesn't.

 

- The directory hierarchy is unintuitive. (I know it's a minor nitpick, but I just can't get over how retarded it is, especially how partitions are mounted, or how all executables are are put in the bin directory, instead of each application having it's own directory with all its files like on Windows)

 

- Random configuration issues. One time I installed Ubuntu on a laptop, and whenever I shut it down, I couldn't power it back again, unless I unplugged the AC adapter and the battery, waited a while, and then plug them back in. I tried googling and didn't find anything. This never happened when shutting down from Windows.

 

2 hours ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Microsoft breaking your computer when you need to update

Open the Group Policy Editor go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update and search for Configure Automatic Updates. This one was on the first page on the google search.

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, kelvinhall05 said:

The only things I had to do to get my Linux distro working as well as Windows was to enable the correct GPU driver in the kernel. All it took was a single command, and now my system is faster and way, way more stable than it ever was on Windows.

 

 

People who have never used or installed any Linux distro completely overestimate how complicated it is to install and use. Everything can be done with a GUI (although doing it in a CLI is usually faster if you know exactly what you need to do), you don't have to deal with Microsoft breaking your computer when you need to update, I haven't restarted my laptop in almost fifteen days and it still runs completely fine, etc etc etc.

Two inductive fallacies in one sentence.

 

MS don't break computers with every update and very very very few people need to run more than 12 hours with a shut down (not that you can't go that long on windows without a shutdown).

 

3 hours ago, alextulu said:

Using Linux for anything other than web browsing is only for enthusiasts with A LOT of spare time, people who already use Linux at work, and organisations who can afford to have IT departments.

Whilst I agree, I find it a bit unfair to make it sound like that.  I use Linux to read exfat of my cameras cards when windows fails (which is kinda ironic given it requires Linux to use hardware and read MS proprietary file systems and sometimes does it better than a windows machine).

 

[Letgomyleghoe]

I don’t wanna see what’s below the cut

[YellowJersey]

Linus should make his own OS and call it LinOS

[LevitatingBusinessMan]

@Tristerin @mr moose @Leslieann @NZgamer

 

 

On 2/24/2020 at 10:46 PM, LevitatingBusinessMan said:

I'd just like to interject for a moment.  What you're referring to as Linux,
is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux.
Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component
of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell
utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day,
without realizing it.  Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU
which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are
not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a
part of the system they use.  Linux is the kernel: the program in the system
that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run.
The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself;
it can only function in the context of a complete operating system.  Linux is
normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system
is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux.  All the so-called "Linux"
distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

This is a copypasta. The myth goes that Richard Stallman founder of GNU once wrote this in an email.

It's a joke, not meant to be taken literally, I expected the tech savy people on this forum to understand this.
 

And have you guys even watched the video? The copypasta was qouted in the video itself...

It's at 8:18: 

 

 

https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Interjection

[Tristerin]

19 minutes ago, LevitatingBusinessMan said:

@Tristerin @mr moose @Leslieann @NZgamer

 

 

This is a copypasta.

On 2/24/2020 at 5:46 PM, Tristerin said:

The Copy Paste seems strong here.

 

 

 

Yup 

[Chunchunmaru_]

On 2/25/2020 at 7:36 AM, WereCatf said:

Wake me up when HW-accelerated video-decoding is working in Firefox...

It just wont, they are not even interested, probably they are unaware the fact va-api actually works and it's not the garbage it was in 2010

But I also think they prefer developing the OpenGL video decoding backend called glxsomething 

 

Some chromium beta builds actually have hardware decoding with va-api, I don't know if there are still PPA's around there with it

On 2/25/2020 at 4:42 PM, xnamkcor said:

 

PS: A little bird told me linux has the best hardware support. Considering all the driver issues i keep hearing about, that must be some really fun wordplay.

It actually is, but not for GPU's or anything media related that is supposed to work with Windows software (few exceptions with the playstation 4 controller driver for example)

 

On 2/25/2020 at 6:29 PM, kelvinhall05 said:

The only things I had to do to get my Linux distro working as well as Windows was to enable the correct GPU driver in the kernel. All it took was a single command, and now my system is faster and way, way more stable than it ever was on Windows.

Are you referring to the AMD Southern Island amdgpu driver?
That's because it's still an experimental support, using the terminal is mandatory as it's basically an hack, but not for installing classic proprietary nvidia drivers, you have the GUI for that

[mr moose]

14 hours ago, LevitatingBusinessMan said:

@Tristerin @mr moose @Leslieann @NZgamer

...

I expected the tech savy people on this forum to understand this.

 

...

Tech savvy doesn't = omniscient.    I would expect there are millions (not exaggerating) of things similar to this each of us have not seen before. 

[WereCatf]

14 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Tech savvy doesn't = omniscient.    I would expect there are millions (not exaggerating) of things similar to this each of us have not seen before. 

Quite, indeed. I, for one, don't care about Stallman and I have never heard of that email -- nothing to do with understanding.

[YellowJersey]

For anyone wanting to give Linux a try:

 

 It's not nearly as scary or complicated as Linus makes it out to be. You don't need to use the command line.  When I was researching distros, I was looking for something that was as Windows-like as possible and needed little to no knowledge of Linux to get going (I was coming from Windows 7 and was exploring Linux as I didn't like Windows 10's telemetry stuff). After a tonne of research, I settled on Linux Mint (I like the MATE desktop, but Cinnamon seems to be more popular). It's really well-suited for people coming from a Windows environment as it's all good to go "out of the box" (ie, after installation). It has GUIs for everything you need and if you're just browsing the internet, doing word processing, email, and so on, it's great. I did have to look up some command line commands to get my ancient printer working, but that's about it, and I think that was more a problem with my printer than with Linux itself because even Windows has trouble recognising it.

 

 If you need to regularly use proprietary software, then Linux may not be for you unless you're comfortable with diving deeper in. But if you're just looking for an OS that's good to go after installation without needing any tinkering, I do highly recommend giving Linux Mint a try.

Feel free to DM me.

(I'm not affiliated with Linux Mint at all, I just think it's a good distro for people like me who aren't super tech savvy but want to get into Linux) 

[Bramimond]

Yes, you don't need to use the command line in Linux. It's just that the command line is one of the main benefits Linux has over Windows, so not using it is a little silly. Using the command line is more efficient than using the GUI and consistent. For whatever reason GUIs change with seemingly every update in weird and unexpected ways.

 

Sure, there's a learning curve. But you only have to learn it once and not after every bloody update.

[Video Beagle]

On 2/26/2020 at 7:22 AM, LevitatingBusinessMan said:

And have you guys even watched the video? The copypasta was qouted in the video itself...

It's at 8:18: 

See, I saw the video and didn't know Anthony was referencing something, just tat he was adding some Anthony level info to a Linus video.

[iwantolearnlinux]

Hey guys, 

 

Could anyone be so kind to share the info or the link to the script that Anthony got from the System76 guy as referred in the video? Noticed I’m not the only one interested in this.

 

Thanks in advance