this is a club for linux users! discuss you're distors what laptop/computer you have or in other words anything linux related! so anyways i use a linux distro called zorin os on a samsung r540 laptop with 1 terabyte hard drive and 4 gigs of ram

im sorry to say this but...

I use arch BTW

I USED to use arch btw but it broke

Summoning @OlTrout *snicker*

So I don't neck with Tux anymore after a few bad mariadb reactions. But I should at least get up to speed on what's hip. Started with RHEL 5, or something like that. Last time I tried the Ubuntu, I paid in life hours. Ditto arch. Are we done with systemd yet? What's the best WYSIWYG distro without severe apt-get/etc library hell?

*ducks and covers*

All you need is Ubuntu. Change my mind

Ubuntu is good for office work or web browsing but for everything else I recommend zorin os lite or endeavour os with xfce

This must've gotten buried in my notifications somewhere. Glad I popped into the forums to see I'm a highly sought-after Linux-enthusiast.

I'm on endeavourOS at the moment. I wanted to get up and running on an Arch-based system immediately without the headache of installing everything by hand again. I never made a script for re-installation like many Arch users do. I'm liking systemd boot over grub... Like a lot. The support for my Intel Arc A750 card has been pretty hit or miss, though, with each kernel update. But it's seeming to steady itself, slowly but surely.

I'm running the bspwm edition of endeavour. I used bspwm back when I first installed Arch a year ago, and my dotfiles were still on my GitHub. I can't imagine life without a keyboard-driven tiling window manager anymore. My brief stint with Mint made me realize that simple is better. Why would you ever need to resize a window or have your windows stack on top of one another? Seems like a silly gimmick from the early days of GUI desktop environments that never seemed to go away.

I have polybar this time around and I really don't see the appeal of having a status bar, beyond having the time displayed in a consistent location. But I'll leave it alone for now.

I originally posted my desktop in the desktop thread, but since general has closed its doors for the time being, I'll repost it here.

What you're referring to as "Tux" is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux...

Richard Stallman has some wonderful foot trimmings I'm sure you'd... nevermind =D

Regardless of how the thread goes, this would probably be great info for people to know about as you go along!

You're scaring the children, Trout ;).

Nice!

Now to the group - in truth, I'm unlikely to run Linux as a main desktop, as Win10 has a Linux subsystem that actually works well enough for console stuff. At last check it'll tank apache and such. I'm not even sure if most people were ever aware of this?

But my ancient Acer pseudo-netbook needs a helping hand! Difficulty is, when I've stuck Linux on it, the usual suggestions have performed slower than Windows. Ubuntu seems to be the preferred WYSIWYG distro for such things, but perusing the thread, it's clear there's probably something far less resource hungry I could auto-install on that sucker to help it out.

"Back in the day" it was xfce, on some baseline Debian kernel with low latency I've forgotten the name of. I assume everyone's moved on. Any suggests for a super-simple lean install that will support touch screens, without having to configure All Of The Things?

How's the overall performance characteristics of Zorin / Endeavour ? Just asked above in regards to trying to speed up an old netbook.

I think it's still XFCE for the win in terms of lightness, either that or LXDE. I have a spare tablet lying around that I should really start using before its battery corrodes out of disuse, and perhaps installing Linux on it might be the perfect excuse even if it's only 32 GB in size.

I'm not so sure about touch controls though. Ubuntu Touch for the desktop uses Lomiri, which is available for all Debian-based distros. Since my tablet isn't terribly slow, I might install it instead of more lightweight environments.

I should note though that battery life isn't as great on Linux, unless things have improved a lot in the past 5 years or so. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

So far endeavour has been a really light distro that works out of the box. It's lean and has some basic functionality to get you going, but I still find there's *some* bloat that I don't use but also can't be arsed to remove. Many of the problems with Arch, as of late, have been problems with grub. systemd boot seems to resolve that. If I remember correctly, you get some choice in what kinds of packages you install for the base system, so there's a good chance you can remove some stuff there ahead of time. Because endeavour takes care of installing your DE and display manager and a few other behind-the-scenes features, there's some weirdnesses in the non-standard handling of multiple-monitor setups and wallpaper setting and things like that. I'm sure having a proper DE would correct some of that behaviour, but the community-driven bspwm edition is duct-taped together. All of this was especially complicated by the mixed-bag of Intel Arc support.

It works good! Now for endeavour os I would recommend either lxde or xfce but for zorin os I suggest zorin os light

Artix Linux user here!

Sorry for the late response. OK, Lomiri, no idea that was the package doing the lifting. That's probably the ticket. I completely forgot about LXDE too. Thanks!

What's up with battery issues on *nix? Background compilation? Not making use of CPU sleeps? Luckily, my netbook is basically wired up to power permanently, so I can get away with an experiment ("soon" :)). I do wish QNX wasn't so esoteric / commercial / ARM-centric - it seems to handle battery like a boss in all its forms...

I'm not sure why. I think it had something to do with better drivers being written for Windows, the last time I read up on it. Maybe things have changed since then, but yeah most of my laptops are really just portable towers because they're always plugged in to power.

Now that you mention it, I've used QNX 7 earlier at work and it was...interesting to work with. Not sure I can talk much more about it but it was unfortunately mostly on emulators, so I have no idea how it would handle on a real board. There's hardware images of QNX 6.3 on the Internet Archive, but apparently they need license keys to work properly so I dunno if those would be useful.

Ahh yes, duct tape and spit, who needs anything else ;)...... quality second, code hard first.....

I will try endeavour under a VM to test its install characteristics. I'm impressed by the number of familiar packages, but at the same time, their disclaimer list before ISOs is so lengthy I'm unlikely to try it on real hardware until I can first see how it behaves in a test environment.

Keep us posted on your Intel Arc adventures :)

Lately it's been a crapshoot on whether my second monitor (plugged into the DP output with a DP to HDMI adapter) will start when lightdm starts. When I log into bspwm sometimes the monitor starts and sometimes it doesn't. I added an autorandr script to the bspwmrc which sometimes allows the monitor to turn back on. Other times it doesn't. Sometimes just restarting the computer again will fix the issue. I am pretty sure there's two conflicting start scripts that use xrandr in some capacity to set the primary and secondary monitors and their positions. They're often reversed when lightdm starts and corrected when bspwm starts or I force a restart.

Beyond that, the GPU has handled gaming incredibly well. My monitors only run at 60Hz and 1920x1080 but I can handle Doom Eternal at 60fps and nearly maxed out settings. Castle Crashers (which is admittedly pretty old and only 2D) sends all the computation to the GPU and so my CPU is only ever at like 1-2% usage when playing that, when it used to be at 100% before I had a GPU. So far no stuttering or other weird crap seem to be cropping up. And this is all with games running under Proton as well which has its own problems, sometimes. Skyrim, for example, doesn't play super nice with the Arc GPU because the Arc is optimized for modern titles and doesn't handle things like DX9 or 10 (or whatever it is) all that well.

The biggest difficulty was finding a distro that was easy to use, quick to get up and running, but also had bleeding-edge kernel updates since I knew I would need the latest kernel to always have a system that supports the Arc GPU through its cycle of constant improvements, as it's a relatively new card. I didn't want to go with manjaro again after kind of a shitty experience previously. Endeavour has satisfied me a lot that way, and even though it's a little patchwork bandaid and duct-taped, I still like it quite a bit.

Sounds like standard linux stuff unrelated to the video card itself? We'll chat about it soon *poke* =P.

I just rolled over Betsy the Bulldozer, verified VT-X settings and such, and VirtualBox is still complaining about x86_64 when trying to boot endeavour. Man, it's been too long, doesn't VirtualBox require an extension to enable 64-bit passthru?

All very good to know! Does Eternal run with Vulkan support proper? It's a highly optimized game, so I'm not surprised in comparison to Skryim. A bit odd that the Arc doesn't handle DX9/10 very well,

Paging @SpermFactoty - "Ubuntu, change my mind" --- I'm kind of leaning in that direction...

Some people hate it because its scope is too great and it's too prolific. Others think it's code base is unmanageable and therefore insecure. Some people use non-systemd distros because why not. There's nothing wrong with using runit or openRC if that's what you want to do. I like the convenience of systemd and the fact that most internet help assumes you use it.

I'm rocking a ThinkPad X220 rocking Q4OS and Trinity desktop. Gonna hop to Slackware though soon with WindowMaker. A comfy retro setup.

Figured I'd make a post here since General closed as well (and the desktop thread people didn't like the discussion on X11 :p).

I used to use CRUX, Slackware before that, and Arch prior to that; Lubuntu was my first distribution. These days I manage my own distro - right now I'm working on porting the Common Desktop Environment to it. Two versions currently exist, one that's suitable for a basic desktop system and one that's more experimental (for example, one of the goals is to eliminate all GNU code. Perhaps surprisingly, the hardest components to replace thus far have been GNU Make and M4, given the proliferation of the Autotools).

Eventually I'd like to rewrite most of the core components myself in SUS-compliant ANSI C - portable POSIX and SUS utils, a simple actor model-inspired X11 desktop environment, and so on. I don't think I'd be willing to write and maintain a C compiler for myself, though... I'll likely work on the QBE backend and CProc frontend projects once my understanding of computer science is up to snuff.

Once I get things working, I'll post an image of CDE, if anyone's interested.

Too slow

Agreed, too slow :)

I use Arch, btw.

No, I really do. Started with Ubuntu back in 2015 or so, then switched over to Mint a few years later, until I encountered problems with my two monitor setup. I then switched to Manjaro, which not only has no problems with two monitors, it's also a lot smaller than Mint.

On my Netbook (Samsung N220, so it's pretty old) I have Peppermint installed after Mint got slower and slower with each dist upgrade.

Ah I see we are both proud owners of a Samsung nugget

is it also a overheating pile of shit like mine?

Never had any overheating problems with it, no. But the battery only lasts for like 30-60 minutes now, if I'm lucky.

Once when I decided to turn on the laptop after 2 years of it not being powered on, when I charged the thing it DIDN’T EVEN GET PAST 3% so I had to get a new battery(yes they still make batteries for Samsung r540’s)

I thought about getting a new battery for it as well, but I don't think it's really worth it. I sometimes take it with me on travels, but only use it where I have access to a power outlet anyway.

The time has come for me to admit defeat =D. "Back in the day", VirtualBox had some kind of x64 plugin or whatever that used to let *nix OS's pass thru on an x86_64 Windows host. I've tried a couple distros, and keep getting errors. What gives, peeps?

So basically you were able to go into a backdoor in windows using a vm?