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Computing Linux, BSD, Qubes; and Other Alternative Systems - What Distro Is on Your Windows?

Joey said:
Windows ME is a good option if you want something that's historically great in it's impact across computing and comes with a small footprint on your resources. It's the best.
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Joey thanks for the suggestion. it's not that the laptop didn't have enough resources to run windows, it comes down to a cost benefit analysis and the use of the laptop - I couldn't justify the cost and malarkey that comes with windows. A long long time ago I used to be quite familiar with SunOS, Solaris, DecOS and IRIX call me a dinosaur, whatever, using any recent linux distribution is a walk in the park compared to those. When you can load a linux distro on a laptop/pc and have control, efficiency, transparency as to what is going on as well as meet your computing requirements then I can't see why would you would go anywhere near windows anything. My take on windows is that it should only be used if there is no other viable alternative (and depending on the requirement quite often there is not).
 
I got win 10 and as vm's I got other win 10's. I don't see no reason in using amateurish and buggy os' such as any of the gazillion distros of linux.
 
wirkdy said:
I got win 10 and as vm's I got other win 10's. I don't see no reason in using amateurish and buggy os' such as any of the gazillion distros of linux.
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in what way do you consider them amateurish? just curious cos i consider windows 10 to be amateurish. even if you can now get a bash terminal on it, i couldn't do my job on it nor could many IT professionals i know. the ones who are willing to put themselves through the pain of dev on windows are much richer than us though.

i'm not really sure you can call linux distros amateurish and buggy when it is basically the only OS (that i know of at least) used in supercomputing clusters. assemble the human genome or compile an image of a black hole on a windows box and i'll revise my stance.

re bugs, i can't find a windows analogue of this:

Bug List

bugzilla.kernel.org bugzilla.kernel.org

but apparently windows 10 is also pretty buggy:

www.techadvisor.com

Don’t update to the latest version of Windows 10 (yet)

Windows 10's KB5013942 update is only a few days old, but it's already causing a variety of issues that mean most people should avoid installing it
www.techadvisor.com www.techadvisor.com
 
I once started with mandrake v 7.0 and slackware v 7.0 ages ago if memory serves me right on versions.

Fuck that shit to spend hours just getting online to get stuff working mandrake was a bit better than slackware in those days.
 
I don't wanna start the never ending win vs linux discussion especially with users who use linux for any particular reasons and it fits them well, fine and much respect.

Linux has often been found to contain critical issues in its kernel also very recently.

Data are facts, fact is that usage of linux as a home/office os is at the level it has always been which is the level of irrelevance but actually if you take into account how much tech spread in the last 15 years it is not completely wrong to state that linux somehow didn't grow at all or better its users declined. Do not bring up Android, that would be wrong and lame.

Have a laugh here:

 
Yeah, I used these OS's in devices other than a "home desktops". I spent a lot of time in embedded device and scientific computing which is an entirely different world. The Solaris apps ran on Sparc Stations and were used for Medical Imaging file storage and retrieval, for example.
Most of my work now is in Windows applications so there is absolutely no reason to run anything else.
 
wirkdy said:
Data are facts,
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so present them. back up your claims as per the guidelines of this sub forum.

there is a difference between most users, and best OS. CF all of pop music if you want to see why popularity is irrelevant when discussing quality.

what are the bugs that bother you and how do you know there are not analogous ones in windows? i don't know, maybe linux is more buggy, i spent 30s looking for an analogous bug tracker for windows and didn't find it so i don't see how we can make the comparison.
 
chinup said:
so present them. back up your claims as per the guidelines of this sub forum.

there is a difference between most users, and best OS. CF all of pop music if you want to see why popularity is irrelevant when discussing quality.

what are the bugs that bother you and how do you know there are not analogous ones in windows? i don't know, maybe linux is more buggy, i spent 30s looking for an analogous bug tracker for windows and didn't find it so i don't see how we can make the comparison.
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not getting sucked into it brah, 🙃 and it is not hard to type: linux usage share in "x year" into a search engine of choice or simply looking at how many devices come out with linux preinstalled, 0.0x maybe? (again bringing up Android is just incorrect but you could bring up pinephone or ubuntu phone 😆).

If you need stats about how much IT hardware and software spread in the last 15 years there should also be data for that too, but I guess that as long as someone hasn't lived in a cave it is very well known by looking around the level tech has spread.
 
Windows is like buying a house - you turn the key and have a nice place to stay, but you need a certified tradesman to install anything and you've somehow agreed to rent the water heater for $25 a month until the end of time

Linux is like buying property - it's cheap and there's no unwanted software to remove, but before you can sit down to a nice meal you have to bring the gas to fuel the generator to run the tablesaw to build your own furniture out of driftwood using loose guidelines you gleaned from a youtube video.
 
thujone said:
Windows is like buying a house - you turn the key and have a nice place to stay, but you need a certified tradesman to install anything and you've somehow agreed to rent the water heater for $25 a month until the end of time

Linux is like buying property - it's cheap and there's no unwanted software to remove, but before you can sit down to a nice meal you have to bring the gas to fuel the generator to run the tablesaw to build your own furniture out of driftwood using loose guidelines you gleaned from a youtube video.
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kinda. but the windows house is full of holes so burglars can get in, bits fall off all the time, every decision is made for you and you have no choice if you don't like it, there will be maintenence at no notice and you won't be able to use it while its happening.

ubuntu is pretty plug in and play, only issue i have with linux is it not playing nicely with nvidia.
 
Never had any issue with proprietary Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu/Debian myself.
On laptops you might run into some minor driver issues on Linux that can take some time to fully resolve, and I have somehow managed to fuck my night light up to the point where I can't choose how yellow it gets anymore. Otherwise it's extremely clean and it's a joy not to be bothered by the countless little Windows bugs.
 
Buzz Lightbeer said:
Never had any issue with proprietary Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu/Debian myself.
On laptops you might run into some minor driver issues on Linux that can take some time to fully resolve, and I have somehow managed to fuck my night light up to the point where I can't choose how yellow it gets anymore. Otherwise it's extremely clean and it's a joy not to be bothered by the countless little Windows bugs.
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we've had absolute nightmares with it, we use bespoke bioinformatics rigs but i don't see why that should have an impact but then i don't know.

every time we get a new box its touch and go whether it will be days of tearing our hair out to get it sorted. on my own (well, work) computer sometimes when it updates it loses the proprietary driver and i have to fix it. sometimes its relatively easy if you have a bootable drive and password for chroot, sometime its day or 2 of hell. once i got so frustrated i deleted random bits of the kernel and thought i'd bricked my machine and had to log in through the GRUB menu for months then it magically fixed itself.

i'm shit at sysadmin and have no interest in becoming good.
 
I run ubuntu fedora and debian on my linux systems.

though I do have a love for FreeBSD and have been known to run solaris on a sparc server.

I also used to run a heap of SGI Irix machines and had some experience with SCO

I love how the posix system works and love coding for it in C++ (probably because I am an elitist arsehole who hates python)
 
chinup said:
we've had absolute nightmares with it, we use bespoke bioinformatics rigs but i don't see why that should have an impact but then i don't know.

every time we get a new box its touch and go whether it will be days of tearing our hair out to get it sorted. on my own (well, work) computer sometimes when it updates it loses the proprietary driver and i have to fix it. sometimes its relatively easy if you have a bootable drive and password for chroot, sometime its day or 2 of hell. once i got so frustrated i deleted random bits of the kernel and thought i'd bricked my machine and had to log in through the GRUB menu for months then it magically fixed itself.

i'm shit at sysadmin and have no interest in becoming good.
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A lot of problems with graphics drivers in linux can be drawn from dual graphics systems like the intel HD with a nivida chip in a laptop.

always have problems as the drivers for nvidia are mostly old and not updated so new dual graphics systems often have major probs.

for proprietary graphics you should stick to ubuntu though debian will do as it has the same package manager.

I dont have a lot to do with the 3d cards in linux as I am a coder not a grapho but the little I have played with leads to what I have stated above.
 
i've tried a bunch, from slackware to debian to weird linux forks specific to music production (actually found that fl studio running on ubuntu using wine was MUCH faster in terms of latency than on windows, same hardware), i settled on debian as my favorite.

on my main computer right now (the family uses it too), i use windows (sorry)... cause i'm lazy and it was a free computer with windows already on it.

will definitely use debian again, have wanted to try a bsd type for a long time though.

i honestly cannot stand windows, especially windows 10. have disliked it since windows xp, and funny that Millenium Edition was brought up... that one was always my favorite.

i miss linux, but i don't have the time (hobbyist and not computing professional)
 
chinup said:
i'm a pleb so use ubuntu.

do any other linux distros play better with nvidia? i'd be up for trying if so.

especially given i realistically need to reinstall my operating system at some point cos i still don't understand how my computer even boots into ubuntu after i randomly deleted bits of the kernel in a particularly severe nvidia/linux related rage.

i don't use windows at all and haven't for maybe 15 years, no intention of going back, even if you get a bash terminal now so don't need to use putty for ssh.
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Haha, I borked my filetable by fucking round with ubuntu on a stick.

I really don't get the internet now. It feels errr.... interactive. Like are websites such as github, when not logged in, showing you code specific to your installs? I find it highly odd and confusing.

I could swear when my firefox broke (it crashed after Id just installed a theme firefox claimed was a cryptominer)... and like devs were fixing it and I was reading their code discussions live in the json files. I've got no idea if it's just me trying to read code, wrong. But then again they did say they were stopping for dinner. Ive told people they were breaking down over stuff like this on here. I couldnt message them so I used firefox to inject a code message and sort of got a warning to definitely never do that. Do people actually... log in?

What commands can you use to check your pc internals? What the fuck exactly is a kernal? Where is it? How in the fuck does a hypervisor work?
 
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Tranced said:
What commands can you use to check your pc internals?
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sysfs is the native interface to query drivers for hardware information, for example the /sys/class/hwmon directory is where you can find info like cpu temp or fan speed. /sys/class/net gives you network interface information, /sys/class/drm gives you GPU information, etc.

there's also procfs for information about current running processes.

there are more user-friendly tools for CPU info; and for GPU info, and NIC info, and so on, but the best tools for those often depend on exactly the sort of hardware you're running so this would have to be a much longer response if we get into that.

Tranced said:
What the fuck exactly is a kernal?
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a program

Tranced said:
Where is it?
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/boot

Tranced said:
How in the fuck does a hypervisor work?
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a kernel is the interface between hardware and software. a hypervisor pretends to be hardware, intercepts and translates instructions between the virtual machine kernel and the baremetal kernel, so the virtual machine can indirectly use hardware resources.
 
thujone said:
sysfs is the native interface to query drivers for hardware information, for example the /sys/class/hwmon directory is where you can find info like cpu temp or fan speed. /sys/class/net gives you network interface information, /sys/class/drm gives you GPU information, etc.

there's also procfs for information about current running processes.

there are more user-friendly tools for CPU info; and for GPU info, and NIC info, and so on, but the best tools for those often depend on exactly the sort of hardware you're running so this would have to be a much longer response if we get into that.



a program



/boot



a kernel is the interface between hardware and software. a hypervisor pretends to be hardware, intercepts and translates instructions between the virtual machine kernel and the baremetal kernel, so the virtual machine can indirectly use hardware resources.
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I know you've tried to help me with this before, which I appreciate. As you can see I've made little progress. =D

So

/boot has no file system (table?) name... due to the fact it preceeds it? It allocates and regulates it maybe and also hence, it is root, or system level privs? All boot certificates, providing/allocating/checking resources to windows in order to load?

And the kernel is a program? How? Does it have a .exe or other executable file? Or is it the boot allocating a bunch of stuff? Is it a linux program?

Is the kernel, hardware (just saw you said yes, im genuinely thinking out loud here trying to figure this out). Is it wlan wide? Connected to your network? What's kernel panic? I noticed even old phones in my house are on the same linux kernel as new and have gradually upgraded. Is my PC on the same linux kernel How to check?

Also, things get a bit matrixy when it comes to virtual machines for me. I start wondering if I'm in god knows how many layers of virtual machines and how would I ever know? Whats the sysfs for checking?

Is the virtual machine kernel the reason Ive seen a lot to do with "enumeration" on my pc? Is it enumerating devices to build the kernel via the hypervisor; into a sort of virtual, proxy, kernel? AMD 3700x, W10 btw.

I actually have a secure boot file, in UEFI, which is untrusted. Problem there or not?

Thanks man.
 
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