Captain Aggravated

It’s a bit behind the times for gaming though it’ll probably still play a decent round of Counter Strike.

I used a system even older than that (A core i7 with a three-digit part number, circa 2010) a couple years ago to rip DVDs and run MakeMKV/Handbrake, it did the job fine. Decade old computers aren’t the problem, Windows is.

The real thing that Flatpak offers is one place to publish for Linux. You put your app in the App Store for Apple, you put it in the Play Store for Android, you put it in Flathub for Linux.

To further the analogy, most distros are pre-packaged salads. Somebody figured up a salad recipe they like and they put it in to go bowls. You know what’s in it so you can grab it and go. Some distros like Arch hand you a empty bowl and invite you to fill it yourself, so each copy of Arch is at least somewhat unique. Gentoo expects you to slice your own veggies.

A lot of the choices basically don’t matter to you at this point; like the process manager. There are people who are irritated with Systemd, the de facto standard one, and prefer some other. They’ll all work fine for desktop use, you’ll probably never notice let alone form an opinion. The main things you will experience as meaningful differences between distros are the Desktop Environments and Package Managers. The GUI and the app store.

I just make sure that the word “Intel” is used somewhere in the bullet point about the Wi-Fi. If it’s built into the motherboard or on a separate card.

Once you get into the ecosystem it probably will, yeah.

If you think of the Linux ecosystem as a whole, it’s like a big salad bar. There’s a bunch of stuff to choose from, several kinds of each thing. An individual distro is a salad made from that salad bar, you might have romaine lettuce, tomato slices, onion, green pepper and thousand island dressing and that’s Fedora KDE, change the thousand island to ranch and that’s Fedora GNOME. Switch out the romaine lettuce for spinach, switch the onion for cucumber and go with raspberry vinaigrette dressing and you’ve got Mint Cinnamon.

1. The various versions or flavors of Linux are called “distributions” or “distros.” There are several that are intended to be ready to go out of the box. Linux Mint is a pretty good one for general desktop use though they’re kinda behind the times with Wayland and such. I see a lot of folks recommend Bazzite but I personally know nothing about it. I’m using Fedora KDE, Fedora is meh, KDE is pretty good.

2. If you’re building a gaming desktop specifically for Linux, I recommend going with AMD GPU and an Intel wi-fi adapter. There are some Wi-Fi adapters that don’t play nice with Linux but Intel’s drivers are pretty good. AMD releases their drivers right into the kernel, there’s nothing you need to do at all to get AMD GPUs working on Linux, Nvidia is a bit more of a pain. Also, with desktop peripherals, avoid anything that needs one of those configuration utilities, they tend not to be available for Linux. I use a Coolermaster MasterKeys Pro M keyboard which all configuration happens on the board, they don’t offer any software for it. Highly recommended.

Oh also: Asrock’s RGB lighting weird and non-standard. If you want to use open source stuff to control your RGB lighting and that’s important to you, I recommend against Asrock. Just so happens my build’s RGB is controlled via a controller built into my case.

A whole bunch of software goes into making a distro a distro, and the desktop environment is a major component.

If you were to compare, say, Kubuntu to Fedora KDE edition, they would look fairly similar because both are using the KDE Plasma desktop environment. On Kubuntu you’d have the APT package manager, on Fedora you have the DNF package manager.

In a lot of cases, a distro will have their underlying tech, “We use this package manager and this feature and that feature, and we publish versions with the Gnome desktop, KDE desktop, xfce desktop and i3 window manager.” Or some combination thereof. Linux Mint for example offers their own Cinnamon desktop, MATE, and xfce.

If you’ve ever used an Android phone and swapped out the launcher, it’s kinda that.

Welcome to the club, here’s your penguin 🐧

Cinnamon is a long time favorite of mine; it has a certain practical mindedness that I like. Gnome irritates the absolute shit out of me and Cinnamon inherits just a little too much from Gnome. I’m using KDE on my main computer at the moment, which I still think is my second choice. Doesn’t really help that my move to KDE also came with a move to Wayland, which killed a few tools I still miss.

I’ve been using Fedora GNOME on a tablet I take into the shop with me, and it’s…not wonderful.

My old desktop, a Ryzen 3600/GTX-1080 mini-ITX build. After using a Pi 4 with Kodi for awhile it’s nice to have a media machine that can run Crysis.

Red Hat and Ubuntu.

Yeah, there’s an entire page bitching about it on Linux Mint’s website.

Is Crunchbang still maintained?

Precisely one person, here in this thread, on behalf of imagined others.

If I can rant a bit…

I used to do my daily journal as plaintext in Vim. I wanted something that was a little more capable and in RedNotebook I almost got it. It stores plaintext markup (I think yaml?), the thing is it has an edit and a display mode, and you can’t edit it in display mode. Inserting a picture is pasting a file path to where that picture is stored. If I linked to where the pictures are stored in my ~/Pictures directory, if I ever migrated from Rednotebook or Linux or anything like that, the links to those pictures would break. So I store teh pictures I link in my journal in a subdirectory alongside the journal itself, so the pics should go with it and it should survive a transfer easier.

This is, of course, extremely user unfriendly to do, because it would mean copying pictures, reducing their resolution so they don’t take up the entire damn journal window, and then working through RedNotebook’s interface to navigate to where I just stored that picture to generate the link.

Or, I wrote a couple lines of Bash that did most of that for me and put the file path link in the primary buffer so I could open my file browser, right click, select Add To Journal, and then middle click in my journal. Felt kind of clever coming up with that one, and I kind of wish A) it was a bit easier and B) we lived more in a world where we did that kind of thing where things interoperated more than trying to silo things.

I’m pretty sure no one else has my shell script that takes a picture, uses imagemagick to copy a scaled down version of it to a special folder, and then build a string that allows me to just middle click paste the image into Rednotebook so it appears correctly.

tilts head

plugs in USB optical drive

eject

pop

hehe

push tray back in

eject

pop

hehehe

Which I’ll use as a lighthearted excuse to mention things like the block edit mode.

I’ve used Vim for some pretty non-nerdy stuff. Like ripping my DVD collection, when I got to the TV section I had a lot of file names to modify in bulk, and Vim let me do that. Also guitar tablature, the ability to edit plaintext both horizontally and vertically is surprisingly handy. Just having a macro to be able to add a bar line saves a shocking amount of time.