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I Miss BSD/Linux

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Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#231

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

rpigab wrote: post #224
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #186

Buy a ThinkPad. Install Ubuntu. Don't think about it again for 6-10 years.

I have a T480/Ubuntu-Gnome at work and a T480/Debian-KDE at home, both work fantastic, however for some reason the Lenovo Universal USB-C docks with 2 1080p external displays connected (1 HDMI and 1 DP) cause a lot of Gnome crashes when docking, and when it happens, I lose external displays and/or the usb keyboard, and have to spend 15 minutes fiddling around deactivating and reactivating in settings, or unplugging t…

Fair points. I've had some frustrations with bluetooth; but, to be fair, same things happen for me on my Windows box (can't use high quality playback and mic at the same time).

Gaming I don't even attempt on Linux, though I've met two or three people now who are convinced you can 100% do it these days with Wine-based platforms and the right drivers.

Docks, in my limited experience, are a shit show on any system. I use Lenovo's thunderbolt dock (the expensive one) with my X1 Carbon Gen 6. It mostly works. I've been having problems with HDMI lately, no idea why.

FWIW, I used to have a super duper high end MacBook from work. It had similar problems. :shrug:

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#232

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

pjmlp wrote: post #206
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #186

Buy a ThinkPad. Install Ubuntu. Don't think about it again for 6-10 years.

As long as one doesn't use bleeding edge technology like fingerprint scanners or webcam logins.

I finally found something that worked with my fingerprint scanner, only to learn that the scan can't unlock the keyring or something -- it's a password but not actually a password. So I'd unlock the desktop with the fingerprint scanner, and then an indeterminate number of seconds later something would pop up asking me to type a password for my keyring.

So now, instead, I just type my password to begin with, and it's all gravy. I'd have to type it anyway.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#233

Post by NekkoDroid »

int_19h wrote: post #68
thrownawayjests wrote: post #53

After running Linux (plain, crappy boring Ubuntu) as my daily driver for the last few years, I'm convinced that we're at the point where the only real barrier to wider adoption is software, and this is less and less of an issue the more we work in the browser. For your basic user, it's performant, simple, stable, and does everything a computer needs. Every time I boot up Windows it takes forever, I find that a new up…

Hardware support can be a problem as well. There are many combinations that "just work" - definitely more so than 20 or even 10 years ago - but you still need to be careful with network cards, for example. And graphics is still kind of a mess, enough so that all major browsers are still either using whitelists to enable hardware acceleration on supported hardware (like Firefox), or straight up disable it by default o…

> but you still need to be careful with network cards, for example.

Funny you say that. A while back I reinstalled Windows on a new laptop (get rid of all the default installed garbage) and I couldn't connect wirelessly. Had to connect via ethernet and install and update everything just to have wireless work. I haven't installed Linux on it, but considering its a Broadcom card I don't exactly have high hopes of it working with only upstream drivers.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#234

Post by m3047 »

bitsandboots wrote: post #36

I feel the author's grief over lack of time, but it has lead me to very different solutions. All around the idea of the OS should not interrupt, should not change rapidly, and my interaction with programs should not be much different from OS to OS. At work, I opted for a mac due to how terrible the windows options were. But macos itself fought me all the way so the way to be happy at work was to replace finder, to re…

In Mac vs Windows I'm Mac for $reasons. That said my personal daily driver is desktop (not laptop) Linux. I've used primarily Macs at work for several decades; that said, my work focuses on systems running primarily Linux these days, and occasionally BSD or in the distant past VMS (once in a while some embedded stuff). I run Linux in a VM on my personal laptop so that I can run KDE desktop apps in the native Mac windowing environment (X forwarding).

Working for a threat mitigation company, I built KDE actual with Brew on my company-issued Macbook. Admittedly that was masochism. We didn't use Brew for anything; we didn't do any development at all on our laptops. Fast forward. I transferred to the threat intel team; we did some work in VMs on our laptops, still no Brew. We got bought.

New overlords wanted to swap spit / infect themselves with that threaty DNA so loaned me to their prod team. They did all their development in Brew, and deployed to cloudy Linux. They said "use Brew, be like us" and I said no way I am doing that, because my laptop touches bad shit; everything needs to be isolated; loan me a different laptop. But no can do. So I used the devops runbook (and submitted edits!) to build the deployment environment in VMs on my laptop. Prod didn't take kindly to this and threw me back. Left shortly thereafter for $reasons.

But not before I made a runbook for the threat team. Some months later heard through the grapevine that the threat team had been tasked with red teaming the actual deployed system which prod was responsible for and that the pwnage was epic.

The moral is obvious: your security team shouldn't be the only team eating dog food.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#235

Post by lief79 »

hollerith wrote: post #158
nequo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you’re an Emacs user. Then it is 100 percent.

Emacs users spend 100% of their time in a web browser?

If they use emacs as the web browser, quite likely.

My dad spent a couple years basically using it as his standard OS while consulting. Couldn't guarantee what software a company required, but if everything was done through emacs, he'd have no problem setting it up to his liking.

Emails, builds, etc. I think this was before the web browser was up to snuff though. I never quite got into it at that level, but the power users easily demonstrate the value of knowing a powerful system very well.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#236

Post by jwells89 »

RGamma wrote: post #212
jwells89 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever it’s worth, newer Intel wifi/bluetooth chipsets (e.g. AX200 or AX210) have consistently worked very well for me under Linux. If your EliteBook has a socketed wifi/BT card, it might be worth buying an Intel card (they’re dirt cheap) and installing it. My issue with battery life isn’t getting it to match what it is under Windows, but that x86 ultraportables tend to have disappointing battery life under eit…

Wonder whether you've ever experienced this problem: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203709 (spurious wifi disconnects due to "beacon loss" on Intel cards, been open for 5 years). There were two good blog posts summarizing the situation around that bug but can't find them anymore. It's been really annoying with my Intel wifi/bt CNVi card for years and there's a lot of people having similar problems...

Don’t think I’ve ever encountered this on either AX200 or AX210 cards.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#237

Post by Suppafly »

hulitu wrote: post #126
Ferret7446 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence the existence of Chrome OS.

> Hence the existence of Chrome OS. Which is useless besides browsing the internet.

>Which is useless besides browsing the internet.

What else do most people, outside of tech, use computers for? There are web apps for basically everything now. Chromebooks have replaced 'real' computers in most schools and I'm really surprised that they haven't in most Offices. A lot of the windows PCs in offices end up being used as dumb terminals to run citrix or access web apps anyway.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#238

Post by lenkite »

Philpax wrote: post #49
hnarn wrote: post #40

The title for this blog post should be "I Miss BSD/Linux for Apple devices". Unsurprisingly, if you buy hardware from one of the most FLOSS hostile hardware manufacturers in existence, your BSD/Linux experience will not be great. > Why doesn’t a great MacBook alternative exist? I really don't understand this question. Is the author seriously suggesting that MacBooks are objectively the best laptops for any use case a…

The Apple Silicon MacBooks are very, very good. They're efficient, fast, well-built, have great peripherals, don't power themselves back on when you close the lid, and are generally the best laptops I have ever used. The worst part of them is macOS, and I hope that either Asahi Linux can get all of the hardware working correctly or the other laptop manufacturers can get their act together. Unfortunately, I suspect th…

Its kinda funny. In the past Apple had terrific OS and bad hardware. Now its the other way around.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#239

Post by rewgs »

skydhash wrote: post #177
pjmlp wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the virtual hardware is a more stable surface, than the plethora of hardware Linux is supposed to run on. That is what I have been doing since hardware virtualization became mainstream.

Currently doing the same with macOS as the host. Still have the nice apps but with a better dev platform.

Doing the same thing, it's fantastic.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#240

Post by hnlmorg »

TheRoque wrote: post #214
hnlmorg wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you’re doing CUDA, almost nothing requires Nvidia GPUs specifically. And in the case of CUDA, that’s already really well supported on Linux.

My point was different, the parent was saying "pick the right GPU then". But if I pick AMD I don't have Cuda, and if I use NVidia I have CUDA but buggy graphics. Some other features might or not be well supported by Linux depending on your GPU and the driver (e.g. You might be force to used Xorg). So yeah it's kind of a mess and you have to have everything aligned (Driver, GPU and use cases) to have a flawless experi…

Good gaming machines don’t usually make good ML or mining systems, even in Windows.

There are trade offs you have to make regardless of what OS you’re running.

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