[SpookyZalost]

so I know there's a bunch of dedicated linux threads but I wanted a general one for general linux discussion.

so for anything relating to linux that doesn't have or need it's own thread, like usage, setups, etc, general discussion on the topic.

so what do you guys run as a nix box?  and what are your thoughts/experiences with it?

[Lain]

Running latest Gentoo. dwm as wm, no i3 bloatshit. Compton as comp manager because it just werks™. Compiled kernel myself because /g/entoo memes (and also you kinda need to to install it.)
Feels good when software respects my freedoms so much that it needs to specifically ask me every time it wants to use a nonfree dependency/cflag. Get these CIA f*** out of my box STAT. Also when I can do my own code reviews on anything that does seem sketch.

I'm an absolute schizo, I'll admit it.

[Darth-Apple]

I run Debian 10 Testing personally. They say you're better off using Stable, but Testing has been absolutely great for me. I have never once had it crash or have a single bug that was enough for me to notice.

I do prefer Ubuntu, but Ubuntu crashes too much. It's sad when an LTS version of Ubuntu is less stable than the testing version of the distribution it's based on.

@Lain: Seems like a good system! I would love to self-compile, but I lack the know-how and comfortability of it. What made you decide to self-compile your kernel?

[SpookyZalost]

I'm currently running Pop!_OS at home, IBM redhat at work.

great so far.

but for my home use, I hate Pulse Audio.
it's interfering with my efforts to get my old linux games running, and I'm giving serious consideration to either gentoo or arch for OSS4 support.

[Lain]

I'm currently running Pop!_OS at home, IBM redhat at work.

great so far.

but for my home use, I hate Pulse Audio.
it's interfering with my efforts to get my old linux games running, and I'm giving serious consideration to either gentoo or arch for OSS4 support.

Funnily enough, Pop! was allegedly designed with gaming in mind. Weird that their support really isn't great 
I'll only suggest gentoo if you have a REALLY good handle on linux. Compiling your kernel is easy, but manual partitioning/installing, compiling all your packages from source tarballs with CFLAGs and learning the entire Portage ecosystem is a completely different hurdle.

If you don't have any familiarity with BSD, I'll recommend you try that out first, since lots of Gentoo was inspired by the way BSD does things (ie. package management and modules.) Arch is a little more user-friendly (babby's first headless distro) but it's also complete CIA shitware so I haven't touched it for a few years. Systemd is a bitch, let me use OpenRC for f*** sake.

I run Debian 10 Testing personally. They say you're better off using Stable, but Testing has been absolutely great for me. I have never once had it crash or have a single bug that was enough for me to notice. 

I do prefer Ubuntu, but Ubuntu crashes too much. It's sad when an LTS version of Ubuntu is less stable than the testing version of the distribution it's based on. 

@Lain: Seems like a good system! I would love to self-compile, but I lack the know-how and comfortability of it. What made you decide to self-compile your kernel?

Debian testing was my saviour. You're right, everyone discourages you from using testing/rolling release on the forums and everywhere you turn, but I also don't like being five versions behind on packages just because they're not considered """stable""", whatever the f*** that means. It really f*** me over when Qt stable was on like X.9 and I needed like X.13 or some shit, since there were tons of deprecated or new functions between those releases and packages like LatteDock were taking advantage of them. When packages are pushed to the Debian repos, it's because they're considered to work fine (or with minimal bugs.) There won't be anything completely broken because if it were really that bad, the devs wouldn't even be able to run it themselves.

Compiling your own kernel is easy as f*** as long as you know how to use make and how to mount your EFI/boot partition. Do it like once or twice and you'll have it down, the worst part of it is just figuring out which modules you need for your specific hardware, and doing that research will probably eat an hour or so.

Mainly decided to do it because of Systemd. Shit has parts of it that haven't been updated for like three years and every gov't in the world probably has exploits for it. All proprietary, doesn't respect freedoms. But because it Just Werks™ and because every popular distro on Earth was pressured by the CIA to include backdoors, it's become standard and I can't stand that. I have a complete hatred for the AlphabetBoys© (CIA, FBI, ATF, GCHQ, any fiveeyes shit, etc.) and I don't want them poking around my computer, so that really narrowed down my candidates to Slackware, Gentoo, MXLinux/AntiX, and a few more poorly-maintained distros. MX looked cool so I gave it a shot and the install script they provided hosed my machine so I f*** it off and went back to the list.

Tried Gentoo, installed fine and I slowly built it up with kernel modifications, then realized how bloated everything else seemed in comparison. I don't need fancy software suites and whatever else is packaged in the OS, along with all the services for kernel modules, drivers, spyware, etc. and if I build it all up myself (with the help of a little C programming,) then I can optimize the shit out of it. Less than 100MB RAM in headless mode, only around 170MB RAM in idle in Desktop mode (X+dwm+compton+feh) and I can heavily customize each one of those options to make my desktop look exactly the way I envision it.

That's another peeve I have about people who claim Linux is '''customizable''' or whatever, since those are the same people that only know about XFCE, GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon and MATE, and their version of customizing is just installing a theme some other nerd made lmao. Seems a little hypocritical if you don't go beyond that.

[SpookyZalost]

@lain: that's the thing, Pop! works great with modern linux games and steam.
hell proton works like a dream on it, no extra config necessary.

it's the old games from back before ALSA that's the issue, the stuff like quake III, simcity 3000, the sims, etc.

since pop! is based on ubuntu and debian, pulse is the audio system of choice, built on top of ALSA.

now if it was just ALSA I could use the compatibility libraries, but it seems that 32bit vs 64 bit causes a hangup with the padsp_oss compatibility system as near as I can tell.

you have to remember that a lot of these games were for sale for linux back when Nvidia geforce 2 and 3 was the graphics card of choice and people were running mandrake 8.1 for gaming.

it's a real PITA but it's probably easier to just reconfigure a linux distro with OSS4 support since that's backwards compatible and shouldn't have any issues beyond that on modern linux apps, in fact OSS_alsa is a great alsa compatibility library lol.

beyond the sound issue, and the bit where old games ran as root and new stuff ran under the user account system (run as root lol), I've had no issues other than graphics settings not being saved (root/user account issue).

mostly I run the old games with a -w argument to force them to run in windowed mode so they don't mess with my graphics settings as the graphics don't return to 1920x1080 when I exit out of them.

I will say this though, I'm having far better luck getting old linux games working than 16bit/win 95/98 era windows games on 8 onwards.

for the graphics settings I'm going to test something on my install of SC3K.
the argument: -r:800x600 should change the resolution to a higher one since it won't save my settings, but we'll see.

[Lain]

I will say this though, I'm having far better luck getting old linux games working than 16bit/win 95/98 era windows games on 8 onwards.

That's literally the funniest thing I've read all week lmfao

But yeah, the ability to reconfigure shit like that should be in essence what Linux is all about, in relation to a Desktop OS.
If it can't do that, trash it tbh, that's my philosophy. Seems like you'll probably have a good enough handle to get Gentoo running, but Arch does have the AUR so there's probably waaaaaaay more compatibility if you go down that route.

[SpookyZalost]

@lain: honestly, I'd love it if I could just rip pulseaudio out of pop! and install OSS4, but from what I can tell debian doesn't support OSS as well as slack arch and gentoo, in some cases being way behind in updates.

OSS also has some serious advantages over ALSA/Pulse.

like it interfaces directly with the audio hardware.
you can set the volume on individual applications natively.
there's almost no delay on audio capture/playback.
it's tweakable.

the downside is, there's not as much hardware support as ALSA for audio chipsets since ALSA became the defacto norm sometime in 2004/2008 I think?

[Lain]

Just installed Void Linux on one of my Pis, building it up for wardriving and might make another guide on it.
Install was surprisingly easy, basically just like a liveboot version but you need to play with a bunch of settings, since they do have Pi/aarch64 specific images available on the site.
Idle RAM usage is 25MB, I feel enlightened. Would recommend. Most things just werks™.
Installing new packages is hell of a lot faster than Gentoo too, because not as much compilation needed unless you specifically want to compile. I like how pretty much every major aspect of Void is written by the devs like the init system (runit/sv) and the package manager (xbps). I trust them hell of a lot more than I trust other major distro repos/package managers.

I also like that they opt to use musl over glibc, seems to be a really good option for keeping things lightweight and still just about full with compatibility. Need to look more into the specific differences with my own code, but so far it's been treating me nicely.

I should also note that 25MB is in headless mode, so no xorg or any other bullshit. Still working with some init scripts but I'm not getting any major changes in resource usage.

[SpookyZalost]

I've actually used my Pi for wardriving before, it's great because it's so small and can easily be attached to the dash with velcro.

or slipped into a cubby lol.

anyway I look forward to any guide you decide to make on it.

[Lain]

I've actually used my Pi for wardriving before, it's great because it's so small and can easily be attached to the dash with velcro.

or slipped into a cubby lol.

anyway I look forward to any guide you decide to make on it.

Yeah I've always considered it but whenever I'd build one and set it up, it would be too slow to do anything useful, even installing metasploit would take a few hours.
The kali images are pretty shit too, only including like five actual packages for security and everything else a manual install. I'm looking for something a lot more passive so it'll involve writing a lot of scripts and maybe something like writing a whole new interface to control with just a keypad and reading statuses with an LED matrix to get a semi-headless build.

Also need to consider power-draw at that rate. Agh, I think I'm addicted to optimizing shit.

[SpookyZalost]

well... usb is dc 5volts 1.5 - 3.5 amps so that should be within normal draw from the accessory circuit of a car.

I ran a PI 3 plugged into a USB to accessory adapter without issue, in fact it ran normally, I only really ran into overheating issues.

but then again most "wardriving" I did was scanning for networks, capturing the packets using deauth and getting encrypted wifi addresses using an alfa usb wifi antenna (you can program these like SDR and they're great for hacking... also compatible with linux out of the box).

then I'd take those encrypted files and feed them to my main desktop at home to crack the passwords and next time I'd log into that network when I was there. usually only if I needed the connection though and only for basic stuff.

the majority of my wardriving was making a list of open wifi networks and their gps coordinates for further investigation, then go back using signal strength to determine where it's coming from and writing an anonymous letter informing them of their network security issue if it was a private residence.

it was fun

[Guardian]

Finally got Mint loaded on an old laptop of mine. Checking Makestation with it right now.

Love Mint!

[SpookyZalost]

ya, mint is a nice stable linux distro.

it's what I gave my grandfather when I set him up with a linux laptop to run his old photoshop software which refused to install and run on modern windows

wine FTW!