Linux geeks unite

[LittleBabyJake]

I've been using Linux for all of my professional life and run it as my main OS on my personal computer. Any other Linux users on here? If so, what flavor. I'm currently running Manjaro and loving every bit of it. The rolling release update model really keeps things snappy.

Have had this install for about 3-4 years already and it has not been bogged down by bloat or anything. I used to run an Ubuntu that did bloat up quite some after dist upgrades I think more people are getting more privacy aware and choosing to use a more friendly system over what they are used too. I've been helping some friends out understanding some parts of Linux and helping them troubleshoot. So, curious if people like that are on here as well? Generally AB/DL'ers are not really techies but they are out there!

The best thing about Linux is Proton at the moment. It was the ONE thing that kept me on Windows, gaming. Now I can run Guildwars 2, just installed Knights of the Old Republic. All the other software was already available and I've been using it for over a decade now. Software like GIMP, Blender (for 3D moddeling for printing as well as video editing), Inkscape, OpenOffice, Firefox, PHPStorm.

If you are using Linux, what is your favorite thing about Linux in general? What are your favorite programs?

 

[ShippoFox]

I started using Linux regularly last September or so. I'm using Manjaro on PC and Arch on laptop. I rarely ever use windows now (and I wouldn't want to go back, especially because I use i3 window manager (i3-gaps)). I basically only use windows for the occasional games that don't work.

 

[winterheart01]

I've been using Linux since 2001.
Started out with mandrake Linux, tried opensuse, the old red hat 8 ( not the current red hat enterprise Linux 8) and even FreeBSD.
However for 14 years i found m y home in Gentoo Linux until I got too many portage issues, that image was passed on to 3 computers, just needed the kernel recompiled with the correct drivers.
This Gentoo was first my desktop pc but i turned it into a headless server. It no longer exists since the quality of Gentoo went downhill.

Now I'm using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our work VM's and Ubuntu in WSL also Ubuntu is the most used platform on the azure kubernetes nodes
I also maintain a Debian server running GitHub Enterprise Server (on premise) but we migrating to GitHub.com so that machine will disappear.
At home i don't use Linux anymore as i want to play games without Wine and issues.

 

[LittleBabyJake]

I also maintain a Debian server running GitHub Enterprise Server (on premise) but we migrating to GitHub.com so that machine will disappear.

Hmm, how you feel about that? I know it's not quite the same but we used to run Jira on premise and went to cloud for some odd reason. The company is huge and if you asked me it would've been better to keep on premise. The cloud experience is way worse if you ask me. Sooooo much slower it's unreal.

At home i don't use Linux anymore as i want to play games without Wine and issues.

Not going to lie, I still have to do that for the occasional game here and there. However, Lutris/Steam make it easy-peasy to run games if you ask me. Driver support is still an issue but it seems like Nvidia cards might be supported a little bit better in the near future. Most games I play on the regular play fantastic though like Guildwars 2. Performance exactly the same on Linux as it is on Windows.

I started using Linux regularly last September or so. I'm using Manjaro on PC and Arch on laptop. I rarely ever use windows now (and I wouldn't want to go back, especially because I use i3 window manager (i3-gaps)). I basically only use windows for the occasional games that don't work.

i3, nice! I use Xfce. It's my goto DE. All the features and customizablity I want whilst still being super snappy.

 

[friendlyArm]

Still using Windows, just because Steinberg does not support linux. Computer wise, I am amazed about how much resources Skype takes. Even after you kill the app.
I only use my computer for music (and it is a crazy resource heavy load), and I am amazed about the load for internet explorers, chat softwares...

F*ck ! How comes it that a lame chat software takes a lot more resources than a emulated full orchestra, with a proper reverb for each instrument ?

Bad programming. It sucks !

 

[Troy]

I just skimmed through this thread and realized I have absolutely no idea what everyone is talking about lol . It's like a totally different languages to me, I think I might still be living like a neanderthal

 

[LittleBabyJake]

I just skimmed through this thread and realized I have absolutely no idea what everyone is talking about lol . It's like a totally different languages to me, I think I might still be living like a neanderthal

That's totally fine. I still think it's kinda geeky when you run Linux. It's an operating system like Windows and MacOS. The distinction here is that Linux has been built open-source. Free as in Freedom, you can do with the software as you like. People from around the world can contribute and read the code. They will check if the code is free of bugs and do security audits. This makes it a very secure operating system.

Additionally it is a very privacy friendly operating system. Most people in the open-source community have their opinions aligned when it comes to telemetry or other forms of tracking - be it ads, weather widget, that sorta stuff - on operating system level. They still are available but as an end user you would have to make a conscious choice to enable or install it.

Lastly, it is also a very suitable OS to get more out of your (older) hardware. Linux runs fantastic on older hardware. It's got great driver support for older hardware. Though, in the end, I would not recommend Linux to the average user. It is met with frustration and a learning curve when you are not familiar. Especially when you've been using Windows. MacOS kinda get's some points here as it gotten its roots from FreeBSD. A major Unix (not Linux) derivative.

 

[friendlyArm]

The learning curve is steep in the beginning indeed. But it is not so long. And at least, your OS will do what you explicitely ask it : there is no surprise.
The only problem is that there are not so much professional softwares compatibility. If one day Steinberg and Vienna would come to Linux, I will go for it. Faster, full control of your OS, and as a bonus everybody will consider you as a geek. Just because you type some commands on the console

No, linux is not THAT complicated. And it is quite fun to use !

 

[LittleBabyJake]

Just because you type some commands on the console

I always switch to a fullscreen terminal window and start `cmatrix` and just mash any key in sight

 

[BoundCoder]

Yup. Discovered Linux pretty early on. Started with Slackware, used Gentoo for a long time, gave Arch a shot when Gentoo started falling apart but didn't like it, currently on Fedora but might finally give in and go with Ubuntu like everyone else.
Tried all kinds of misc distros in the middle of course, but those are the ones I actually used for any length of time.

Professionally I've worked with some form of *ix or Solaris pretty much exclusively for my career. I've been in environments where we used Windows for email and internal office stuff, but I've never done any actual Windows development work since getting out of school.

I used to be a lot more involved in the open source community back in the day, and used to absolutely be into customizing every little thing (former Gentoo user remember). I maintained a custom overlay and a whole pile of custom patches and tweaks. That said, my interest in doing computer stuff at work /and/ home has waned a lot, and while I still have a relatively complicated setup, I pretty much just use it for browsing the web and watching Netflix and stuff like everyone else, and am a lot more willing to just use things the way they are out of the box.

 

[friendlyArm]

Hmmmm... Debian ?

That is really a Linux answer. When you talk about Linux distributions to a Windows user, you allways have that feeling that you are talking about Goldorak weapons.

 

[BoundCoder]

Even as a long time supporter of Linux and Open Source in general, I'm also a pragmatist, and never bought into the whole FSF / GNU ideological extremism. The amount of political BS surrounding Debian is just too much for me, even if we do owe it a lot for where we are now.
Basically I view Debian as Linux but with more headaches for silly reasons. Great if you are a crusader, shitty if you just want to get stuff done.

 

[friendlyArm]

Do you remember this time where Windows Update wanted to install Candy Crush on your computer ?

From a scale frome one to ten, Microsoft had won a score of 20.

 

[LittleBabyJake]

Even as a long time supporter of Linux and Open Source in general, I'm also a pragmatist, and never bought into the whole FSF / GNU ideological extremism. The amount of political BS surrounding Debian is just too much for me, even if we do owe it a lot for where we are now.
Basically I view Debian as Linux but with more headaches for silly reasons. Great if you are a crusader, shitty if you just want to get stuff done.

Depends on what you use it for of course. As a desktop user I find Debian to be just that. To many headaches for silly reasons. In a professional environment that changes. That said, everybody can choose their own flavor for their own reasons. That makes part the appeal for Linux. It also scares some away. It's a knife that cuts on both sides.

 

[friendlyArm]

I really need all processor resources, this is not a joke. All my softwares are optimized, it is totally silly to see that there are 24 virtual instruments players who are doing each dozens of reverb queues (thousands of sounds mixed with reverb).
And yet Skype takes 50% of all processor resources, without using full-duplex technology. WHAAAAAT ? It is a joke.

 

[winterheart01]

Hmm, how you feel about that? I know it's not quite the same but we used to run Jira on premise and went to cloud for some odd reason. The company is huge and if you asked me it would've been better to keep on premise. The cloud experience is way worse if you ask me. Sooooo much slower it's unreal.

Well, it's a double edged sword.
For pull, push, clone etc and the user management, the cloud version is very good and fast enough, never had issues even when they had serious outages.

Github Actions on the other hand is a whole different story. They are much slower than our on premise jenkins, even if we use their own hosted ubuntu-latest github runners.
But often we need to use self hosted runners on Azure via a VM scaleset, this scaleset however requires a few Azure Funtions to automatically up & downscale because Azure is not informed about the active jobs on github, so every time a new job is launched, a webhook is triggered via an Azure function to check if enough instances in the scaleset are idle and every 6 hours (we had to to prevent deadlocks) a ceck is done to clean up idle runners.
But the time to spin up such a runner, even though it's all light weight and in the cloud is more than 3 minutes sometimes, on occasion due to a bug with Microsoft, the whole scaleset deadlocked.
We're migrating slowly to Azure Kubernetes because we do not have the people or knowledge to host k8s on premise but it's really a pain nonetheless, updating all the helm charts for core kubernetes stuff like kured, coredns, nginx-ingress, grafana, prometheus etc, it's all chinese to me. I can make YAML's for namespaces or role bindings sure but I still prefer a classic Linux VM, either on premise or in the cloud that I can manage with my trusty Ansible. The speed for our on premise Nutanix clusters is still much better than having to go through 2 firewalls, an express route of 2 Gb and an F5 load balancer (sounds weird but yes, even though these VM's on Azure are in a private network we still need to go through all these loops and it lags.
I work for the federal gov. so I know what it is to work for a big company, hence all this stuff.
A lot of our people wanted Jira badly but the ministry of finance didn't want to approve the budget so we got stuck with a cheaper Youtrack, that we run on premise but god that product is sloooooooow.

Also, both the on premise github and youtrack are very expensive in resources, they both love 8 cpu's, 32 GB RAM and 100's of GB in storage, but then again, our oracle exadata gen2 is also a powerhouse and the software in it requires a truckload too, there we have the problem that our applications in the AKS that want to make a call to the oracle database on premise take 53ms / query on average while if everything on premise it is 24ms, these nrs seem slow to what we had 5 years ago, then a regular database connection would take 142ms alone to get :s (even if it was prefilled in a database connection pool in JBoss)

whoops, went a litlle off track but you get the idea for a lot of things cloud is good, as in, faster, but mixing cloud and on premise makes it a pain, plus if you work with sensitive data you have to keep security in mind and cloud may not always be a juristically allowed option (this is still a hot topic with us)

 

[winterheart01]

Not going to lie, I still have to do that for the occasional game here and there. However, Lutris/Steam make it easy-peasy to run games if you ask me. Driver support is still an issue but it seems like Nvidia cards might be supported a little bit better in the near future. Most games I play on the regular play fantastic though like Guildwars 2. Performance exactly the same on Linux as it is on Windows.

damn, i forgot to reply on this one ;D
I'm a performance freak, hence I used Linux at home so much, but when it comes to games windows has been much better (not because of windows but because the games were optimized for windows and directx).
I really looked for Linux native games and actually had 2, Loki and descent 3.
but after trying to run Doom 3 in wine with failure and crashes I just gave up and ran windows.
I did disable every unnecessary feature on windows to improve performance though. (still do but they make it harder by tight coupling things, which I don't understand because they teach developers that loose coupling of your code and modules is the future of flexible code.

Nvidia has indeed always been supported much better than ATI/AMD in Linux, I once had a laptop from work and it had an ATI chip, Ubuntu crashed on it lol. and I wasn't even trying to run a game, just the desktop xD

 

[friendlyArm]

@winterheart01 : you have it right : PACKAGE MANAGEMENT. It is so silly not to have it on Windows !!! F**k ! It should be a stadard on every OS !

And don't be sorry about Descent 3 : it was a mistake. Descent 2 was the pinnacle (gameplay, music...), period. Descent 3 was pathetic, it just didn't give you that feeling of danger nor that feeling of being overpowered.

 

[Chimera]

I used to be a big linux user when I was a teenager in the late 2000s. I used the hell out of Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10. I loved playing around with it and learning how to compile and install source code into a working "package" back when package managers were very hit or miss. I also made a slackware 14 media server years ago with PS3 media server, so I could stream music and videos on my blu-ray player and my playstation 3. It involved me learning how to install tmux and how to setup telnet, so I could have remote terminal access, so I could keep the computer unhooked from any monitor and just have the computer sitting around looking pretty. I haven't used Linux in professional settings, just for personal use. However, like Winterheart, my use of Linux as my "daily driver" desktop just didn't work anymore when I got into PC gaming. Linux is still great for in-home server needs, but gaming puts a huge damper on using a linux distro for daily desktop use.

Granted, Wine has come a long way in the past decade, but it's still far from perfect. Especially if the games you play use anticheat software that just doesn't work well with wine.

 

[friendlyArm]

Wine is an ambitious project for sure !

Talking about nostalgia : I was a huge fan of C (not C++, it sucks). Then I discovered R. Then, I discovered Python, its package managers, and the way you could do anything in one line of code where it would take hundreds in Java.

Sorry ADISC, I don't need anyone in my life anymore. I have met Python and PiP. Real people are useless now