General Linux Chat and Small Questions v. Year of the Linux Desktop! - Hardware & Software

[QUOTE=Adam.GameDev;48613316]Great I installed Debian 8.1 on my netbook last night and I just found out that they're releasing 8.2 tomorrow[/QUOTE] You likely already have most of the 8.2 packages installed. It's just a minor upgrade to the ISO's to include security fixes.

hi I'm kinda new to the world of Linux and free software but I've always felt my heart belongs here. Windows 10 really pushed me to try for real and after trying a lot of distros and desktop environments I feel very comfortable using kubuntu or mainly KDE. I have some applications I'd like to use on Linux but I use them so rarely I might as well just dual boot. The games I play (not many or often) are all supported on Linux anyway. I've been porting my own software to Linux which went fairly straight forward but most challenging was dealing with Mesa and its OpenGL implementation. Even on windows there are some differences between AMD and NVIDIA that can wreak havoc. Usually it's because you're doing something wrong but AMD or NVIDIA forgot to check something because they're not following the specs properly. It feels so much better when I can go to an offical IRC channel to discuss a potential bug [I]while pointing to source code[/I]. I've already reported a few things and some have already been resolved. I know from a developers point of view this is very important. But I really wish more end users (especially people coming from Windows) could help do the same instead of just saying "it's buggy" or "it doesn't work" to the people closest to them.

I've reported a couple of bugs to KiCad, pretty nice to drill down to the root cause when you have a developer on IRC holding your hand.

So after a period of interest in Linux, I finally decided to make a 100gb partition from my main drive and install Linux on it. After a period of trying (and failing) to get Steam working on Debian (breaking the OS's graphical drivers completely in the process), I'm now on Linux Mint. The scariest part about a Linux install is trying to get graphics card drivers working. I have had no success with nouveau, and everyone has their own idea about installing NVIDIA's drivers (and none of them work). Is it really a bad idea to install from their website? I've noticed Mint has a driver manager in the system settings and I used that instead, but I see people advise not downloading the drivers directly from Nvidia. Why is that?

It's not proprietary drivers that are the problem. When I was busy breaking Debian installs, the Debian wiki specifically advises against downloading the drivers straight from the site and using their experimental repository instead because from the site breaks your kernel or something wacky. It seems proprietary is the only way to go, really. Nouveau is terrible.

If anyone uses an AMD GPU and has driver issues, I might be able to help, but I'm not familiar with NV stuff with Linux.

rm does not preserve root if it's mounted in more than one place... Oops. It's amazing how much keeps running without /bin or /usr [editline]7th September 2015[/editline] And thanks to the magic of btrfs snapshots everything is back running in 10 min!

[QUOTE=Samiam22;48630044]It's not proprietary drivers that are the problem. When I was busy breaking Debian installs, the Debian wiki specifically advises against downloading the drivers straight from the site and using their experimental repository instead because from the site breaks your kernel or something wacky. It seems proprietary is the only way to go, really. Nouveau is terrible.[/QUOTE] NVidia's kernel build scripts are wacky. If you're at or near the latest (from the LKML guys themselves) version of the kernel, and have a reasonably recent gcc, you're fine. I think NVidia's latest version of the drivers assume you're already running the latest version of the kernel (when it came out) and just go from there, which works fine if you're only one or two minor versions behind, and generally works if you're a version ahead, but if you're all the way back at kernel 3.9, that's going to cause some serious issues. The reason all the other distros say "DONT DOWNLOAD FROM NVIDIA ITS BAD" is because they're still running older kernels (sometimes fucking ancient kernels) so they do all the patchwork to get the latest version to run on their old as balls kernels.

Okay so after my period of getting a successful dual-boot of Windows 10 and Arch working on my main rig I wanted to try to do another arch install on my macbook. I did this many times before, for Arch I had to do the old bios-legacy boot because for some reason UEFI would always fail. This only happens on arch, every other distro (e.g. Ubuntu) works just fine out of the box. This is a mid-2011 air (macbook4,1) and when booting into the UEFI bootloader on the usb and selecting the first option results in a black screen and nothing else. Not even the usb drive shows disk usage with it's led. Any ideas or kernel paramaters to fix this? Yes I have tried nomodeset, video=S-VIDEO-d:1 and i915.modeset=0 with no success. Google isn't helping much either. I would like to find an obvious solution than spend hours reinstalling Yosemite because rEFInd fails to install on El Captain, or am I out of luck? :/

So #!++ was having memory issues. On Arch now for my consolebox. Since I only use this system for minicom and SSH, I'm going to let FP decide what DE to use. The one with the most suggestions will be installed. Don't pick one I hate.

KDE

xfce

i3wm

[QUOTE=eurocracy;48639586]KDE[/QUOTE] May god have mercy on this low end Core2's soul if KDE ends up winning. [editline]8th September 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=nikomo;48639708]i3wm[/QUOTE] Right now I'm actually just using straight X while I wait for a decision and it works pretty well.

Is GuixSD worth installing right now, or should I wait?

bspwm is a cool tiling wm

awesome

[QUOTE=Darkwater124;48640055]bspwm is a cool tiling wm[/QUOTE] Hmm. I haven't used just a straight tiling manager in ages. I'll give it until tomorrow when I get to work, they the most votes wins. Though so far each only has 1...

Does Openbox even fit into this category? [editline]8th September 2015[/editline] I'm tempted to install BunsenLabs, what init system does it use?

[QUOTE=Levelog;48639383]So #!++ was having memory issues. On Arch now for my consolebox. Since I only use this system for minicom and SSH, I'm going to let FP decide what DE to use. The one with the most suggestions will be installed. Don't pick one I hate.[/QUOTE] evilwm is very lightweight, and very usable.

[QUOTE=Levelog;48639854]May god have mercy on this low end Core2's soul if KDE ends up winning.[/QUOTE] i have a single core craptop that I'm surprised supports amd64 and KDE runs fine my official vote however is AfterStep, if that's still in development

XFCE for sure

Pantheon is pretty.

Enlightenment DR 17 :v:

[QUOTE=EmilioGB;48639932]Is GuixSD worth installing right now, or should I wait?[/QUOTE] It's totally worth installing now, but for testing, not for ordinary day-to-day use.

Looks like XFCE is the current winner with 2 votes.

perflect blend of lookin smooth and light weight

XFCE with Numix. Generic as fuck, but for good reason.

is linux fine right now to host a gmod server on it?

fine as ever, why wouldn't it be?