Why does everyone love Linux so much?

[Bramimond]

32 minutes ago, Dat Guy said:

You can do that on Windows as well.

What's a good terminal file manager for Windows?

[Dat Guy]

I'd suggest FAR.

[Kisai]

16 hours ago, wasab said:

Says the person who is scare of unix terminal and does not even realize the fact that macOS is itself an Unix operating system. 

 

I'm not gonna bother correcting your inaccuracies anymore, not worth it. You sound very much like an apple fanboy/fangirl by this point as well. 

Says the person who doesn't apparently read. Did you miss the part where I run Linux servers, or own Mac's? You simply don't want to admit you've been grasping at straws, and other people on the forum have pointed out wild inaccuracies in your posts and you've ignored them. Bow out now please.

[wasab]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Says the person who doesn't apparently read. Did you miss the part where I run Linux servers, or own Mac's? You simply don't want to admit you've been grasping at straws, and other people on the forum have pointed out wild inaccuracies in your posts and you've ignored them. Bow out now please.

Now I'm curious. Just what kind of sorry linux servers are you running that you need to install a gui on it? 

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, wasab said:

Now I'm curious. Just what kind of sorry linux servers are you running that you need to install a gui on it? 

I don't. See this is what I mean by you not reading the post. My shell configuration lists 2 mac's, 12 CentOS servers, 4 FreeBSD servers.

 

My point, which you keep missing is that a Linux DESKTOP has to function with the same user language as Mac OS X and Windows, because you otherwise will never get people to switch to it.

 

I'm old enough to have been doing all the command line junk in MS-DOS long before Windows was even a thing. Do you know how hard it was for someone like my Mom to just load Wordstar or Word Perfect? "Here's a disk". Do you remember the period between 1991 and 1999 where you needed boot disks to run DOS games because most games didn't work correctly under Windows? Do you remember how to program a boot menu? Do you remember when io.sys became a text file?

 

This is all old hat things to me. Linux in 1996 was also a horrible ugly mess, and STILL IS. I can't teach my mom how to use it. My mom doesn't even know how to plug the speakers in. My mom is the typical "office worker", you sit her down in front of MS Word or Excel and she knows how to use these programs. However if that icon disappears off the taskbar she doesn't know how to run it. My experience with people at the Fortune 500 company Engineering office is EXACTLY the same. People don't want to touch anything but the software they need for their jobs, because they're afraid the machine will break and their productivity will be destroyed. They do not want to call the helpdesk because they know that will sink their productivity.

 

Now imagine for 60 seconds how those calls would go if it were Linux.

 

"How do I make Word load?"

"The screen is too (small/big/fuzzy)"

"The mouse cursor moves too fast/slow"

 

These are actual questions asked, on Windows. If you can't fix it 60 seconds, good luck getting the user to fix it without explaining how to open a text editor, the paths the configuration files, and so forth.

 

 

[Dat Guy]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

My point, which you keep missing is that a Linux DESKTOP has to function with the same user language as Mac OS X and Windows, because you otherwise will never get people to switch to it.

The closest approach is KDE - and KDE can be messy.

[wasab]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

I don't. 

Says the person who yells out you need to install a gui and run imagemagick on a server. 

[Dat Guy]

1 minute ago, wasab said:

you need to (...) run imagemagick on a server. 

Why would that be bad?

[wasab]

8 minutes ago, Dat Guy said:

Why would that be bad?

Because how are you going to do that on a ssh connection?

[Dat Guy]

If I'm not mistaken, half of my servers run imagemagick - usually inside adequately complex PHP scripts.

[wasab]

2 minutes ago, Dat Guy said:

If I'm not mistaken, half of my servers run imagemagick - usually inside adequately complex PHP scripts.

But how do you run gui programs over a secure shell?

[Dat Guy]

Try X11 forwarding. But I deliberately left out the GUI from the quote...

[wasab]

11 minutes ago, Dat Guy said:

Try X11 forwarding. But I deliberately left out the GUI from the quote...

I can imagine how much bandwidth thats gonna eat up and why this is turn off by default. 

 

Anwyays, I was referring to her earlier quote that you needed to install an entire x11/wayland to run imagemagick. 

[Dat Guy]

Which is a false statement unless your operating system has a broken package system.

 

While it may make use of X11 libraries, they are not required for the core functionality at all.

FreeBSD, for example, has both a X11 and a no-X11 variant:

• https://www.freshports.org/graphics/ImageMagick7/
• https://www.freshports.org/graphics/ImageMagick7-nox11/

Gentoo lets you select a no-X11 variant as well:

• https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/media-gfx/imagemagick

Just like GNU Emacs does not require X11 but can have a GUI installed if you want to.

[Talon_3361]

Not sure if Wayland could run that. Though not toyed with Wayland in a while either.

[Kisai]

21 hours ago, wasab said:

I can imagine how much bandwidth thats gonna eat up and why this is turn off by default. 

 

Anwyays, I was referring to her earlier quote that you needed to install an entire x11/wayland to run imagemagick. 

RTFM.

http://imagemagick.sourceforge.net/http/www/install.html

Quote

-without-x

don't use the X Window System.

By default, ImageMagick uses the X11 delegate libraries if they are available. When --without-x is specified, use of X11 is disabled. The display, animate, and import sub-commands are not included. The remaining sub-commands have reduced functionality such as no access to X11 fonts (consider using Postscript or TrueType fonts instead).

The default, in all packages is to install X11 because the default ImageMagick depends on it.

 

If you build it from source, you can exclude it, but then you're maintaining this extra thing that is no longer updated by the package manager. Imagemagick is used to bulk convert gifs to png's, resize images for thumbnails, apply watermarks, etc.

 

This is a problem that is unique to Linux installs since Linux installs nearly all (but Gentoo) rely on binary packages, thus they do not build packages with any non-default configuration. FreeBSD's package manager likewise only has builds with the default build settings. If you want no-x11, you have to build it from source, and thus you have to go fiddle with the build system.

 

At no point do you actually run the xwindows system. It just installs a butt-load of window manager dependencies entirely because you want to use ImageMagick. This adds substantial amount of maintenance time, and leads to a lot of dependency creep.

 

Now imagine for a minute where someone sitting down at the Linux "desktop", not server, has something installed in a non-package manager way to work around some kind of dependency hell like this. It suddenly stops working because the package manager updated the shared libraries on the system. The user has no idea how to fix it. Good luck explaining how to build something from source to someone who hasn't even seen the terminal.

 

Why do you think I keep saying "you should not need to drop into the terminal to do anything" on a desktop. That is not common language with Windows and OSX.

[Bramimond]

On 10/3/2019 at 3:14 PM, Dat Guy said:

I'd suggest FAR.

That looks like a NC clone and NC isn't up to snuff when it comes to expectations for modern file managers. Personally speaking, do you prefer FAR over something like Explorer?

 

I use ranger as my daily driver, since it's the best file manager I currently know:

Spoiler

 

 

[wasab]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

RTFM.

http://imagemagick.sourceforge.net/http/www/install.html

T

I hit install, and done. I seriously have no idea why you would find this complicated that you feel the need to rant about imagemagick installation as if it is beyond the understanding of mere mortals.

 

  

[Dat Guy]

3 hours ago, Bramimond said:

do you prefer FAR over something like Explorer?

Partially, depends on the task at hand. The Explorer is not a good file manager and FAR has a lot of lovely features built-in.

 

But you can also use LF on Windows if you dislike NC.

[Underfire17]

Well, in some cases less stuff means less garbage that gets put on the system. With Linux you know that you aren't going to have adware, spyware or what not installed on your computer. I mean yes, you can reinstall Windows from the recovery partition of your PC (If you bought your PC from HP or whoever) but in most cases, the crap that bogs down your system will still be installed alongside Windows. I had a Windows Vista era machine that did this. Linux is always free from this issue. It comes with the essentials to get the user started. It is also very light on system performance. My laptop is about 10 years old and can run Ubuntu 19.04 no problem. I can even do some light gaming on this thing. Also, Linux is pretty much compatible with anything. You can run the first version of Ubuntu on a Motorola 680000 processor from what I heard. I am currently modding a Mac Mini G4 and am thinking about dualbooting it from Ubuntu's PPC distro.

[jagdtigger]

On 10/3/2019 at 1:00 AM, leadeater said:

. It is of course simpler on Linux due to it being just files

Not to mention you can put /etc and /home on a different partition and you dont have to do anything extra to preserve your settings across installs...

[Donut417]

I just learned that you can install and use diffent versions of the Kernel. Was having issues with the latest Kernel and my Linux install locking up when using Chrome. Went back a few updates and use a Kernel that worked. Kinda nice to be able to do that. I use Linux mostly because Im sicken and tired of Windows 10 and Windows 10's bull shit break everything updates. At least with Linux you get a few more options and your not forced to update your system. 

[muito_gostoso]

because you can install linux in your playstation 4.