Linux

[BTGBullseye]

It's close, but the wording is such that it portrays Windows' only serious downside as a server OS is its licensing model... It doesn't mention that it's a massive resource hog, or that modern legal versions have forced updates that are notorious for breaking things, or that Microsoft's official support is anywhere near as helpful as a simple Google search, or that Windows is currently the only server OS that can't run constantly for a year without significant performance degradation and massive file fragmentation. There are so many things that the article deliberately avoids talking about concerning the downsides of the Microsoft OSes that it's an obvious plug for their partner company.

[Im_CIA]

Bit off topic, but does anyone know why Segment Descriptor BASE field is split into three parts. Cleaner HEX?

[BTGBullseye]

Bit off topic, but does anyone know why Segment Descriptor BASE field is split into three parts. Cleaner HEX?

Which bit depth are you talking about? Seg Descriptors have 8-32 bit sizes.

[Im_CIA]

The book I'm reading shows it as 64 bit. Which is a not confusing because it refers to 80 x 86 processors which are 32bit.

 

Then on a wiki site shows a similar diagram, but refers to it as a G/LDT. It's my understanding that DTs just store set descriptors... So confused hahaha

 

[BTGBullseye]

Yeah, something looks weird about that diagram... That almost looks like a software descriptor, and not a hardware one. (for indirect processing, like in a VM or other emulator of some sort)

[testman]

On 1/16/2017 at 4:59 PM, testman said:

From what I see, Linux is getting more and more popular, so we are on a good track.

Also number of games for Linux is growing quite fast.

It's nice to see AF community discuss this topic.

Holy shit, I had no idea what was yet to come.
Proton, Lutris, D9VK being merged into DXVK, a LOT of native games, many system-level improvements to game performace, etc.
TImes are insanely good for us pengiuns.

[Prinny]

Being full time Linux user keeps becoming easier and convenient. I could say the same thing year ago, and this year is even better comparing to the last one.

[BTGBullseye]

On 1/23/2020 at 3:45 AM, Prinny said:

Being full time Linux user keeps becoming easier and convenient. I could say the same thing year ago, and this year is even better comparing to the last one.

If only they could find a way to easily run Windows-only/DOS-only programs and games on it without performance loss...

[Prinny]

On 1/26/2020 at 2:16 AM, BTGBullseye said:

If only they could find a way to easily run Windows-only/DOS-only programs and games on it without performance loss...

That's not a great way to look at the problem. Nobody needs run Windows-only programs, rather we need to run programs that do the job we want done.

 

So while I can't run every Windows-only program I can get my job done. Of course, depending on ones needs this might differ, just like I can't run things I'd like to on Windows.

[BTGBullseye]

On 1/31/2020 at 2:43 PM, Prinny said:

Nobody needs run Windows-only programs, rather we need to run programs that do the job we want done.

Semantics.

On 1/31/2020 at 2:43 PM, Prinny said:

So while I can't run every Windows-only program I can get my job done.

Doesn't help me play games or use Photoshop. (which is much better than GIMP, mainly due to having an actually logical layout for all the controls)

[Prinny]

On 2/2/2020 at 2:34 AM, BTGBullseye said:

Semantics.

Doesn't help me play games or use Photoshop. (which is much better than GIMP, mainly due to having an actually logical layout for all the controls)

That's my point. People have different needs and there's no reason to force yourself to use Linux if you don't care for privacy/software freedom/Linux features. For those who do care using different software or wine/proton often is worth it.

 

As for GIMP, personally I prefer to use Krita and I recommend it even for Windows users, but I don't work with graphics professionally, so I wouldn't pay for Photoshop anyway.

[BTGBullseye]

4 minutes ago, Prinny said:

so I wouldn't pay for Photoshop anyway.

Well, I definitely don't either... I still use it though.

[Prinny]

28 minutes ago, BTGBullseye said:

Well, I definitely don't either... I still use it though.

I don't  see a point in pirating software when there's free and open source application doing all I need. I'd use Krita on Windows as well. Of course, again, there are things Photoshop can do that Krita can't, that's why you look if application can do that you need done.

[BTGBullseye]

On 2/6/2020 at 6:31 AM, Prinny said:

I don't  see a point in pirating software when there's free and open source application doing all I need. I'd use Krita on Windows as well. Of course, again, there are things Photoshop can do that Krita can't, that's why you look if application can do that you need done.

https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/introduction_from_other_software/introduction_from_photoshop.html#what-krita-has-over-photoshop

Yup. As long as it can do what you need. Unfortunately I need the additional text and blending functionality.

[ym123]

On 2/27/2016 at 12:32 AM, Heliocentrical said:

I definitely agree that Linux is severely lacking when comes to GUIs. I often thought of it as just a different kind of thinking as I like using the command line considerably more than I do using a GUI. But then I took sometime to think about it and clearly one mode of thinking is valued more than the other. At the end of the day all I want to do is support Linux as much as I physically can and one means of getting effective support would be to increase it's accessibility. So why would you discriminate against GUIs? I will say that even though I don't find Linux in general to be very toxic there's this one particularly frustrating quirk that seems to be pretty universal with all of them. There seems to be this unwillingness to open up to every opportunity with the Linux community to gain them traction. It's almost like their doing this deliberately out of spite or something. With Linux being Open-source there are countless possibilities that Linux could pursue and technically they have although not the realm of actual OSes. So while Linux has improved significantly over the past couple of years I would still say that the opportunities for them still lie in the dark due to them being not willing to pursue those opportunities and quite frankly that's a shame. I can only imagine the things Linux could've accomplished if the community was more open.

While there is a small minority of users that don't want linux to be more popular to feel more superior, saying that's the whole reason linux isn't going to get popular is short-sighted.

The real reason the linux community doesn't want it to become popular is because you lose a shit ton of things when it becomes popular. For example CLI, most people here think that adding a GUI to a CLI program is easy task, but it's very much not, whether you're using QT or GTK gui is way more (annoying) work than just doing a few simple commands like CLI, but let's ignore that and say it's easy, then you have to maintain two interfaces to the same program, adding a few features means you have to change both the CLI and the GUI code, so lazy developers will end up just allowing one interface, in a mainstream OS that'd be GUI, so that means if linux becomes mainstream it'd lose its CLI capabilities (to prove my point, just look at most pre-web utility applications for windows, most of them feature no cli at all even though powershell and CMD exist).

Now considering that the majority of linux users are developers, do you think they'd like to lose their flexible, efficient but "difficult" interface to a simple one that'd can't do quarter as much? (please don't misunderstand this as saying CLI is the best interface for all scenarios)
Another problem the linux community is built on most its users being programmers, most of the software is "By developers, for developers", when someone develops something most people expect that the code is at least readable so they can modify it to their needs, and the developer in return expects that if anyone finds a bug they'll do as much as they can to help the dev fix it (counterexamples exist of course, but they're the minority), normal users (most of them at least) don't really know how any of this works, they open an issue on github or something describing the bug as vaguely as possible with no logs or anything to help attached because they expect it to be a product, not just a hobby project for someone. Normal users don't understand community, they just see a tool.

Edited April 12, 2020 by ym123 (see edit history)

[BTGBullseye]

On 4/12/2020 at 4:52 PM, ym123 said:

do you think they'd like to lose their flexible, efficient but "difficult" interface to a simple one that'd can't do quarter as much?

The problem with that statement is that there is no reason whatsoever that a GUI should have any reduction in flexibility, efficiency, or functionality. The only time that happens is if you're incredibly lazy at building the GUI, or if you're deliberately trying to limit its capabilities.

[ym123]

12 hours ago, BTGBullseye said:

The problem with that statement is that there is no reason whatsoever that a GUI should have any reduction in flexibility, efficiency, or functionality. The only time that happens is if you're incredibly lazy at building the GUI, or if you're deliberately trying to limit its capabilities.

Then you haven't used any CLIs  I don't know how many scripts I have lying around that you can't simply (or is pretty much impossible to) replicate with a GUI, or how many oneliners I wrote in the heat of the moment to perform some annoying task

[BTGBullseye]

On 4/14/2020 at 7:07 AM, ym123 said:

Then you haven't used any CLIs  I don't know how many scripts I have lying around that you can't simply (or is pretty much impossible to) replicate with a GUI, or how many oneliners I wrote in the heat of the moment to perform some annoying task

I see you're one of those CLI purists... A GUI is designed to BE those scripts and one-liners, so you don't have to type them. It's so you can click a button to run that script instead of having to type the script name to run it. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire purpose of the GUI, its functionality, and its capabilities.

[Plegyvap]

I'm going to take the liberty of sharing my own experience with Linux which I'm using for two years now. I made the jump from Windows because of Windows 7 running out of support soon and since I had no experience with Linux I picked what looked like the simplest distribution to use - Linux Mint (18.3 at the time, now I'm on 19.3).

 

The learning experience was not actually bad at all. Most stuff worked out of the box, the few things that were not to my liking I managed to fix through available GUIs and searching through the net. I asked for help once on Mint forums which resulted in me upgrading my kernel through update manager GUI and it solved my problem.
I got to a point where I was running Windows games while still not understanding much about the OS itself, like how is the file system organized or what is upstream. I compiled one or two applications just following some instructions, never heard of makefile before, even though I work as a developer it seems alien when you are used to just open Visual Studio and hit build.
Now I am after complete system reinstall which I did when upgrading to Mint 19.3, mainly so that I have clean system to work with now that I am more experienced. Again it went very smooth and in a few days I was back in business, running World of Warcraft Classic through Wine and Vulkan. And I still don't know much about Linux itself though I am learning about it here and there.

 

In my opinion, most people would be fine using Linux Mint or similar distribution. If you take a basic computer user, who just wants to browse the web, check email, maybe write and print a little document and play some games, there is practically no difference between Mint and Windows for them. It's just icons you click and stuff happens. No need to touch the Terminal. And most of advanced users will open it only occasionally, like I do.

 

So, GUI vs CLI. I understand the pain of writing GUI (I have to deal with Microsoft's WPF) but for anything more complex or with a lot of data to display I prefer GUI. I use Terminal just for basic stuff like sha256sum where I just add first few letters of the file, autocomplete with tab, hit enter and have the result. Or for copy-pasting commands from web. Or when there is just no GUI available.

 

And finally a little more detail about gaming on Linux. I would divide it into 3 layers.

 

Native:
Just install Steam. It will run native Linux games and supported Windows games using Proton.
Or download and execute GOG installer. It will drop an icon on your desktop and you are ready to go.

 

Mainstream non-native:
Install Lutris and Wine following instructions on Lutris wiki. It's basically a manager for games and engines/emulators they run on. It makes handling Wine easier and supports plenty of console emulators.
You just need to search for a install script on their website, feed it your installation files and it will do the rest. Usually it works fine.
You can also change Steam settings to allow running any game in Proton, a lot of them run quite well even though they are not officialy supported.

 

Obscure non-native:
When there is no one click solution or when it does not work perfectly (or at all). At this point you need to manually tweak setting in Lutris, maybe add in few Windows dlls using winetricks or, when common solutions don't work, look hard at the error output and ask around at WineHQ forums.
Most (roughly over 90 %) of the games I tried running in Lutris I managed to get to work, for the rest I didn't spend much time on finding a solution and I have a backup plan of Windows XP virtual machine.

Overall I would say if you don't like where Windows is headed, give Linux a try.
However, if you rely on some modern Windows only applications, like MS Office, or you like playing freshly released games on max settings, you are better off with Windows. My friend had problems making Linux run on his computer simply because his hardware was not supported yet.

 

On the other hand, if you rely on old windows software, you might have more luck running it in Wine. The backwards compatibility of Windows is getting worse, some stuff you could run on Windows 7 can't be run so easily on Windows 10.
I actually have more confidence in being able to run my games in Wine after 10 years than I have in running closed source native Linux games on future Linux distributions. Backwards compatibility does not seem to have much focus on Linux and while open source apps can be modified to run on new systems, no such luck with games which are mostly closed source. Thats why when I archive my GOG installation files, I take the Windows ones over the Linux ones.

[kerdios]