Installing Nvidia drivers in Arch linux right now. Tell my family I love them.

Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

---------------------------------

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

So I decided to give Linux a try again.

Created live usb. Prepared myself to go through all the hassles at the beginning.

Booted in live USB. I can't see mouse cursor.

Searched in google, apparently a common problem with GTX 1070/1080 graphics cards.

Installed proprietary nvidia drivers with keyboard only. Took me about 20 minutes.

Finally managed to get the mouse cursor and install ubuntu. Time to boot and smell the fresh air of linux again.

Sound card doesn't work. Even the integrated mobo sound card doesn't work. Looked for a solution, found the bug in lunchpad but not solution yet. Everyone recommending to buy an external sound card.

I can't code without music. Decided to remove linux.

Booted back to Windows and removed linux partition. That fucked up my bootloader although I installed linux's efi loader completely separately.

Now I am sitting in front of my computer, with black grub screen, while trying to make a Windows 10 usb with my 7 years old broken laptop.

Next time I see a rant about Windows 10 that glorifies linux, I swear I'm gonna smack your face over standard TCP/IP

Not sure what Linux Desktop to use? Use this handy guide:

- GNOME: when you want no tray icons, themes that break every minor GTK release, and extensions for basic features (that are buggy.)
- KDE: pretty go-Segmentation Fault
- DWM/Awesome/i3/etc.: when you feel like the time you spent learning Vim wasn't wasteful enough
- XFCE: when you want one update per decade and poor Systemd support.
- LXQt: the biggest positive is that it doesn't use GTK.
- Cinnamon: when you like GNOME 3 but you want a different menu
- Deepin: when you want a desktop with the build quality of an HP laptop.

Aren't sure whether to use Xorg or Wayland?

- Xorg: if you want to absurdly fuck up your touchscreen, pick this one.
- Wayland: if you want to screw up most of your apps, too bad; this won't work with your proprietary drivers. If only it did.

What distro to use?

- Ubuntu: if you want to break your system with PPAs, check out this one.
- Debian: when you want Ubuntu except with more out of date packages
- Redhat: when you want Debian except with more out of date packages
- ElementaryOS: wait, someone actually made a properly designed Linux UI?
- Arch Linux: the only thing that doesn't make me sick anymore.
- Slackware: "that exists still really?"
- Gentoo: when you hate systemd more than waiting 4 days to compile Firefox on every release.

... I love Linux. I do. But it is very taxing to get things comfortable for me anymore. I feel like the Linux Desktop is in a period of flux and it's painful to be a part of right now.

"I don't use Linux because you can't game on Linux"

Shut your fucking cocksucking mouth.

Yes, support isn't the greatest and a lot of games don't work on Linux yet and some graphical drivers don't work.

But don't fucking say you can't game on Linux because you fucking can.

Steam has a Linux game library that keeps on growing and growing.
There are some platforms for games especially for Linux as well even.

I've seen steam games with freaking high requirements run with any lag on Linux computers - open source amd drivers worked well.

The support could be much better (of games/drivers) but YOU CAN FUCKING GAME ON LINUX.

THAT YOUR GAME DOESN'T RUN ON LINUX DOES NOT MEAN THAT NO SINGLE GAME DOES.

MOTHERFUCKER

HP Virtual Agent, you're about as useless as the fucking hardware that I'm troubleshooting. What part of fucking "Arch Linux" do you not understand?! Not everyone runs your fucking assumed OS choices - WanBLowS 7, 8 or 10. What's more, the hardware that I'm troubleshooting doesn't even support those bloody operating systems.

Long live HP and its random freezes due to poor thermal management. And long live Intel's fucking wireless drivers, that for no good reason disconnect after half an hour and require me to restart NetworkManager to (hopefully) get shit connected again. And long live those useless fucking "virtual assistants"!!!

Friend: "You are good with computers right?"
Me: "Yes...."
Friend: "Can you put an eye on my computer? Mint crash at every startup"
Me: (Oh Linux! For this time ok) "Yeah, show me"

My friend open the pc...
Pc: "KERNEL PAAAAANIC!"
Me: ".... WTF!?"
Friend: "Can you repair this?"
Me: (shit.)

That was a long day...
(My friend closed the lid without the drivers and then the pc from the standby did not wake up correctly)

Finally got around to installing Arch on an actual machine 😀

I went for deepin since i wanted to try something new. I didn't go for any WMs since the whole concept seems complicated to me but i wanna look into it someday.

Anyways, super happy so far. I boot in < 5s from hitting the power button which is super dope ♥️ ♥️. I did have some weirdness with nvidia drivers (as usual on linux lol) but reinstalling it fixed it.

An ability to port all Windows games to Linux without performance loss due to bad ports and bad drivers so I won't have to dual boot anymore.

I'm just waiting for the day when manufacturers will consider linux as an operating system and start giving support for linux drivers.

My WiFi adapter is not working correctly... Must be a problem with Linux drivers

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

Why on Earth are printer drivers so huge? Seriously, 1GB to print, Epson? There are entire distros of Linux that take up less than that!

Got my VisionTek Radeon 7750 today! Held my breath during the amd drivers installation on Linux (KDE Neon) but it all went well.

Rebooted, all screens (4 right now? upgrading to 6 soon) black.

Closed eyes, opened after 10 seconds and BAM, first display is working.

After some settings tweaking I've got 4 monitors up and running now, waiting for new hardware for two more.

Also waiting for a hex monitor stand ❤.

AMD, thanks for providing stable and working drivers for Linux for free!

*trying to convince a non-tech friend to switch on linux*
- Will I need to write drivers myself?
- Only when your wifi card manufacturer doesn't give a fuck.

New video card is arriving today.

I'm about literally counting minutes to the delivery time 😅

Since AMD develops native Linux drivers I thought this would be safe enough, let's see how that works out!

How to from hapiness 100 to 0 in seven simple steps:
1. Buy a new 2018 gaming laptop..
2. Install Linux on it for work..
3. Figure out your touchpad is not supported even by latest kernel rc..
4. Spend four days going through forums, bugzillas and overflows while messing around with recompiling kernel, drivers, configs and 3rd party libraries..
5. Lie down and pray someone will add support for your device in kernel in near future..
6. Try not to cry..
7. Cry, cry a lot..

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

Don't mess with Linus...

Nvidia's Linux drivers are shit

Drivers across Operating Systems.

Windows: What the fuck is any of this? Here's something minimally functional.

Mac: That's not made by Apple, fuck off.

Linux: Here you go, have fun if you're missing functionality!

So yesterday our team got a new toy. A big ass 4k screen to display some graphs on. Took a while to assemble the stand, hang the TV on that stand, but we got there.

So our site admin gets us a new HDMI cable. Coleague told us his lappy supports huge screens as he used to plug his home TV in his work lappy while WFHing. He grabs that HDMI, plugs one end into the screen, another - into his lappy and

.. nothing...
Windows does not recognize any new devices connected. The screen does not show any signs of any changes. Oh well..

Site IT admin installs all the updates, all the new drivers, upgrades BIOS and gives another try.

Nothing.

So naturally the cable is to blame. The port is working for him at home, so it's sure not port's fault. Also he uses his 2-monitor setup at work, so the port is 100% working!

I'm curious. What if..... While they are busy looking for another cable, I take that first one, plug it into my Linux (pretty much stock LinuxMint installation w/ X) lappy,

3.. 2.. 1..

and my desktop is now on the big ass 4k fat screen.

Folks. Enough bitching about Linux being picky about the hardware and Windows being more user friendly, having PnP and so. I'm not talking about esoteric devices. I'm talking about BAU devices that most of home users are using. A monitor, a printer, a TV screen, a scanner, wireless/usb speaker/mouse/keyboard/etc...
Linux just works. Face it

P.S. today they are still trying to make his lappy work with that TV screen. No luck yet.

So this happened a few days ago. I always want to root my smartphones for that little bit more control.

*Put's new smartphone into fastboot mode*
*Tries to flash root zip onto it*
"You have to OEM unlock the bootloader first"
*OEM unlocks the bootloader*
*Tries to flash but fails*
*Tries to reboot*
Phone: "The bootloader has been tampered with, the device will boot in 5 seconds".
*Screen just hangs there for ages*
FUCK.
*Tries to enter fastboot again to OEM re-lock the bootloader*
*Fastboot appears to startup RIGHT AFTER THE FUCKING ERROR MESSAGE so can't boot into that anymore*.
FUCKING FUCK.
Hmm... TWRP is still installed...
*Tries to flash some stuff through TWRP*
"The zip file you are trying to flash is corrupt".
FUCK MY FUCKING LIFE.
*Connects phone to Linux for adb flashing*
*Nothing happens after half an hour of trying*
*Connects phone to ancient windows 7 laptop*
*Laptop doesn't even RECOGNISE the phone although all drivers are installed*.
*Le me about to completely lose my fucking mind*
*Connects phone desperately with Linux again*
*Phone is recognised right away but the SPL flash tool can't detect it*
*Tries to put it into fastboot again*
*Fails for about an hour*
*phone in charging mode again*
*Presses the power button for a last, desperate attempt*
*SPL flash suddenly recognises the phone*
FLASHING
FLASHING
FLASHING
DONE.
*Android boots again like nothing happened*

I can use it again like normal but the No-Root firewall is draining my battery like crazy.
That was one hell of a journey though!

Updated Nvidia drivers, installed latest wine, Vulkan, DXVK (<3) and Overwatch. It now runs on ultra on Ubuntu 16.04 with around the same fps as on high on Windows. Gotta love the Linux community!

IPod didn't sync well on my Linux machines so decided to give windows - in a highly isolated environment disconnected from the Internet behind a firewall and sandbox - a shot with itunes.

- during the installation it wouldn't detect the fucking harddrive multiple times (genuine unlicensed copy) and after the 4-5th time it's random-fuckingly recognized out of fucking nowhere; I didn't change shit.
- crashes (blue screen and freezes) multiple times during the installation, multiple retries and suddenly it works(?!)
- it took about 10 minutes (!!!!!!!) to install 10+ drivers for an iPod and an external hdd:
Installing Apple iPod drivers... Done
Installing seagate drivers... Done
Installing apple iPod drivers... Done
Installing seagate drivers... Done
Installing Apple iPod drivers... Done
Installing seagate drivers... Done
Installing Apple iPod drivers... Done
Installing seagate drivers... Done
Installing Apple iPod drivers... Done

WHY INSTALL THOSE FUCKERS 5 FUCKING TIMES?!

- iTunes installation fails multiple times without error code (unknown error occured, restoring to original state...),just said fuck it and clicked the shortcut after the ***th fail and it works just like this, THANKS FOR NOTIFYING ME (NOT)!
- iTunes has to restore the entire ipod, this was done with iTunes in the store I bought it already, thanks for nothing.
-restore takes 30+ minutes?!
-syncs the iPod 3 times afterwards.

*clicks close button*
*are you sure you want to quit? Sync in progress*
*oh shit, cancels*
*itunes quits*
*?!?!?*

*tries to import media library*
*seagate hdd suddenly not detected*

I'm fucking tired of this bullshit, windows and iTunes can go die in a fucking corner after getting ass raped while their genitals are being scraped off layer by fucking layer and dipped into fucking acid.

*gets countless amounts of shit with Windows because of my "nonstandard use"*
WanBLowS fanbois: "Cheap hardware!! Hardware error!! Unstable drivers!!! Can't be anything else, this OS is rock solid."

I really wish that I had your ignorance. I know when I see a shitty OS in front of me. And mind you, it actually ran Linux a while back.. just that I couldn't use my Nvidia GPU in it and had to compile a kernel with all of that crap excluded to make it work decently.. fuck Nvidia. And you know what, it actually did run fucking rock solid!!! But over time I lost the config and X.org doesn't like my dualhead setup all that much, especially the ultrawide display.

So, how about we address this issue for what it is already. THE OS FUCKING SUCKS!!!

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

Alright, question about graphics cards:

I want to get a six-monitor graphics card.
Currently looking at one but there's a thing:

The visiontek radeon 7750 seems great, manufacturer is AMD.

When searching for images of the *visiontek* radeon 7750 vs the AMD radeon 7750, I get different pictures, according to some product pages the visiontek amd radeon is produced by amd though....

They both have six inputs..

Point is: I'm going to run Linux on it (i refuse to install malware/spyware on my system for obvious reasons) and AMD has native Linux drivers for the radeon 7750: are those also for the visiontek radeon 7750?

I'm lost here. Help!

Ok, I’m over windows. Done with it.

I have been a long time windows, I’ve used most versions since 3.11, and have used Linux for a few years on the side (not as a daily but have needed it for work and servers) but with yesterday’s update, not only have I lost audio for the countless time again, as far as Windows is concerned there’s nothing fucking wrong with it, besides the lack of sound and all.

Drivers are reinstalled, deleted and reinstalled, redownloaded from manufacturer, different drivers installed.
Ran a system restore back to before the update and just dropped the hdd into another laptop (it’s identical model) and still no fucking audio (to exclude the audio chip as failing)

So fuck it, I’m spending my weekend finding a distro that will work, I’m fucking done!

Allllllright. Time for another one of these. It's necessary.

We get it, you don't use/like/acknowledge Google. Please, kindly STFU already with it. The entirety of the smart internet has made your point.

Oh, because I use Google I'm a fucking idiot? No, you are for thinking that. I've used many engines and consistently have they given me worse results. "Oh, it's because they build a search profile for you, they're spying" Yeah, I get it already, fuck off.

Linux is NOT the thing that's going to solve every single human problem, so please stop treating it like a good and saying everything else is complete shit and nobody should use it.

Windows has issue, but so does Linux. At least I can (usually) comfortably update Windows, knowing what the update includes, without having to read the source code fhanges or be scared that there's a fucked up package update.

Just because something isn't open source doesn't mean it's the fucking devil. And just because I USE that closed source thing doesn't make me... Well, anything really, except for a guy who actually gets different programs. Please stop trying to tell me what I NEED TO DO to be a "good person" or user or anything like that, I'm going to do what I damn well please. If that means using Windows with Closed source things like Nvidia drivers and cards, the so be it. Got a problem? Go fuckyourself with it.

Does linux suck? Imho, Yes.
A lot of the people bash windows regarding automatic restarts, updates, bsod etc.
I may be unusually lucky, but the last bsod I saw was in 2014 because of a faulty synaptics driver.

I've really tried to use linux to see what the hype is all about. Quite frankly, it sucked. The first time it wiped out all my data, I realized the value of backups. Hence I do not have a single pic of my school now, thanks to complicated ubuntu mounting.
Next is driver support. When I plug in a device, I expect it to work. I don't want to spend a day googling for drivers.
Why the fuck would I want to use a black terminal which gives me a headache. Am I in 1980? Which sadistic asshole designed vim ?
I have seen linux developers who claim to be linux experts and love linux. They take so long to do simple shit. For god's sake don't tell me there are GUI versions of linux available. I'd rather work in windows 95.
Why in the world would anyone want to use ls to see the contents of a directory! It is seriously so fucking unproductive.
I can't just download a software, click next a couple of times, and be done. No no no. I've to do sudo apt get update. Then try to find the fucking package. And if all goes well, there's always the dependency issue which is going to bite me in the ass. If google and stackoverflow go down, most linux devs will die a cruel death.

Fuck you linux.
I'm not saying windows 10 is the best, but at least I don't have to crawl through shit to use it. If you don't like automatic updates, disable it you moron. It is easier than renaming a damn file in linux.

Someone mentioned Holy C in another thread and I automatically knew they were referencing the language, based on C, and developed by Terry A Davis from Temple OS and Schizophrenic fame.

I legit felt sad for the man, he was obviously a very talented and smart programmer. You removed all the racial slurs, crazy dialogues and biblical stuff that was caused by his mental illness and you were left with a very brilliant and dedicated programmer.

While Hurd (kernel meant to replace Linux) will fucking never see the light of day after years in the making, Terry was able to generate: his own compiler for his own programming language, kernel, drivers, desktop environment, filesystem TODO by himself. I mean, fuck me dude, he even included games of his own design into the damned thing, using very advanced concepts that were present in flight simulators or doom like fps.

It just bothers me so much, the dude would have probably done amazing non-religious things if it were not for his illness.

If you like reading about this sort of thing, check him out, there are a couple of youtube videos by him. Don't be put off by the shit that he spews in some videos, remember, he was saying shit like that out of a very real mental illness.

Oh, and fuck Hurd

Trying to install new proprietary graphics drivers on my desktop. Reboots. Black screen. SSHes into computer uninstalls new graphics driver and reinstalls Xorg.

[ Level up ]
Idiot running Linux -> Normal Linux user

Fuck strict corporate software policies, just let me WORK (⁠╯⁠°⁠□⁠°⁠）⁠╯⁠︵⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

When I came to this new workplace I was given a Windows laptop. And it came with a bunch of pre-installed corporate stuff and policies like automatic mandatory frequent driver and windows updates. Although I prefer linux, I thought, maybe I'll switch later, first let's see how everything works here, since on Windows I had all VPNs, certificates and other corpo stuff pre-configured out of the box. But imagine missing a standup, because of windows update in the morning. Or missing audio, because of drivers update in the middle of the meeting. And make it every week or so. Also, I couldn't not install my portable DAC drivers, because limited access, blah blah fuck me. And many other small things that I vaguely remember by now.
Later corpo decided to add a tracking plugin into a browser and that was it for me. Gladly, corpo policy allows using Linux (they have their own modified Ubuntu version), which has MUCH less of this crap. I mean, it's still somewhat managed by corpo (like I can't get rid of duplicated PPA, lol.. and sometimes I need to wait like 1-2 mins to login to my laptop because of login server timeout), but that's still better...

Linux, home, sweet home, I missed you <3

Also, I dodged the bullet. Win11 upgrade was a funny shit show to watch :D

Just installed Deepin ditching fedora and now there's no proper driver for my video card.
The UI is sick tho..(too broke to buy mac)

More than a year ago, frustrated by a sub par experience of linux on my laptop (drivers), I planned to buy a MacBook to get a stable Unix platform.

But it was too expensive.

I convinced myself that it will pay for itself.

And today my app, i created on this laptop, has finally paid for it. :D

I am very happy.

"Time to install Arch Linux!"
*8 hours later*
"Back to Open Suse!"

Repeat every 4-5 months.

Seriously, I would LOVE to get Arch running on my laptop, but everytime I try to something goes wrong, be it bootloader, audio, cooptimus drivers, undetected network card, window manager going crazy, etc etc etc... and I simply end giving up and reinstalling my backup.

Someday, Arch, someday...

/* My Three Wishes */

1. Nvidia starts fucking supporting the linux community with open source mainlined drivers that support GBM.

2. All five eyes countries apply some proper privacy protection laws. Other countries would be appreciated.

3. 5G and other core future tech standards are implemented under open firmware/hardware that can be reviewed and reproduced.

Please monkey paw this

Just installed linux (Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS x64) because windows update was being a cunt, instantly, it all fell into place and I got it fully running with minecraft (using generic driver, but it actually works pretty well, don't worry I will get the proper one tomorrow) and a desktop icon for it within two hours compare to windows (update) taking 4 days to do barely any updates, not accepting java or graphics drivers, which it requires because fuck opengl with the default drivers.

Fuck windows. Hooray for linux!

Now back to programming...

Thanks for putting up with me but I just need to vent because I felt like I couldn't program (and I didn't) because of FUCKING DOOLALY WINDOWS 8!

Btw thanks to the local charity shop for introducing me to (SUSE) linux when I was like 11, giving me a hope in hell of using linux. I now have around 11 bootable linux disks and 1 bootable flash.

1) Built an entire SoC around a MIPS CPU. Fixed bugs in the CPU. Created hardware, busses, firmware, wrote Linux drivers, ported Linux.

2) Still working on a C++ abstraction framework for heterogenous computations for 4 years. About to solve / create a prototype for GPGPU and maybe even HDL code generation. Utilizes dynamic dispatch for scalar, SSE, AVX and other targets. I started this only because I did not like the performance of procedural noise algorithms utilized in a game prototype I started in 2015.

3) Created a game in 5 months to drag myself out of depression. Feeling success while your job sucks is soooo goooodd...

For 2 hours...
Still haven't solved it, I just love AMD drivers on Linux

for real i can't imagine what all you people are doing wrong getting those blue screens in windows all the time reasoning your change to Linux. been using it like forever and had experienced some in the early days, very few in windows 8.1 when i was messing with some drivers and shit but not a single one since windows 10 while using it normally on a daily base.

sure, there is a lot to rant about in windows generally justifying a change to Linux but are you talking about windows 98 or fucking raping your system till it BsoD's just to point at it and say: oh Linux is so much better because i don't get BsoD's all the time? or are you using 10 year old hardware?

enlighten me pls

This is a followup to my earlier RealTek networking rant.

After reviewing and researching all of the wlan adapter suggestions on that rant, as well as a few more, I settled on an Alfa AWUS036ACH usb3 wireless-ac adapter. Every Alfa I've ever owned has been amazing, so I happily bought it.

It arrived today, and I excitedly threw my existing RealTek garbage across the room, hooked up my fancy new toy, and... nothing.

Fearing it was doa, I ran `lsusb` to see if it was even showing up... and it was! but identifying itself as a RealTek device...?

All of my research showed it uses the Atheros9k chipset. It's advertised and praised as using the "famous Atheros AR9271 chipset" and the Ath9k drivers. Except this particular unit appears to use the RTL8821AU chipset, therefore requiring RealTek drivers. askfja;sldf.

I unhappily fetched the garbage from the dirty laundry where it landed, installed it, and began my research anew.

I found, among all of the wonderful promises of Ath9k bliss, a thread on the Kali forums corroborating the RealTek driver nonsense, and it explained how to get the RTL8821 drivers working with it. which is pretty much the very last thing I want to do.

If you've read any of my networking rants, well, they've all been about how totally awful RealTek linux drivers are, and that's pretty much common knowledge anyway. So I'm like extremely pissed off.

ARGH WHY IS NETWORKING WITH LINUX ALWAYS SO FREAKING DIFFICULT? haslkfjasgdskg

Why is it so hard to get WLAN working on Linux? 😭😭😥

bro just learn C bro I promise it's all smooth sailing bro haha lol just take up HTML with CSS bro its a piece of cake bro what bro lol just start coding up differential equations with numpy library haha its so simple bro just start with Ruby bro it will take only couple days bro what lol bro take this aeronautical course on how to code an airplane simulation bro its so simple bro just start algorithms on cryptography bro its so easy i cant bro just start writing drivers for printers bro haha lol just start writing a bootloader for a new Linux distro bro lol haha easy bro just make a billion dollar company bro haha its so simple.
keep going bro haha invent your own JS framework over a billion existing ones haha bro typescript is so easy bro lol what u say take up redis bro go from the first command bro learn mongodb and mysql together bro its so simple.

but bro don't try to master JS bro .. u will regret it forever bro.

Fuck android studio updates, fuck OpenGL libraries, fuck nvidia graphics on Linux, fuck it all to hell.

These bullshit updates keep breaking stuff in apps, and then the emulator itself gets broken somehow, then I need to run a bullshit shell script I found on some esoteric Arch Linux forum to symlink OpenGL .so libraries on my Linux machine every time I update because fucking OpenGL and nvidia crappy drivers on Linux, which also broke my xrandr configs and segfaulted the xfce4-display app.

Seriously that's horseshit. Linux will never ever ever break through the glass ceiling and become idiot-proof non-tech user friendly like the botnets Winblows and macPrison.

Sometimes, I really fucking hate Windows.

Having trialled Linux for a week on a spare HDD, I wanted to move to a proper dual boot with Windows on my SSD, and I decided I may as well downgrade to Windows 7 at the same time (10 had started to really annoy me).

Booting into the initial USB yielded an unresponsive mouse and keyboard. Hmm, not a great start. Turns out the Windows install USB doesn't like the rear USB ports or the wireless mouse. Strange but plugged in a spare USB mouse into the front and could install Windows.

This install was very unhappy about not having SP1 - to the point where I couldn't even install the network drivers so I could download SP1. Fine, I just downloaded an ISO with SP1 on my Mac.

Then I discovered that you can only really make a Windows USB with Windows. But I've just removed both my Windows and Linux partitions so I can reinstall them ...

After hours of searching and trying to create a bootable USB on my Mac, I finally give up and install a trial of Parallels. So I ended up using the same ISO to install a VM of Windows on my Mac, so I can create a bootable USB, so I can install Windows on my desktop. Well done Microsoft ...

And then I needed to install various drivers for the install to be even remotely useable.

To top it all off: Linux just worked. The keyboard and wireless mouse worked when installing. I didn't need to do any additional set up to be able to use it all. It can even use all 3 monitors, rather than just the 2 that Windows recognises for some bizarre reason.

Thanks to Windows being special, I've lost a day of productivity 😡

Ditched MacOS in favour for Fedora.
First thing that I notice is the increased framerate and more OpenGL extensions in OpenGL extensions viewer.

Never imagined a day that the video drivers in Linux surpasses these of MacOS.

Gotta love Linux!

Wanted to install Arch on my Rasperry PI yesterday, but don't have a cardreader on my PC. Still had an SD with a different distro (RasPlex) lying around. Popped that in, connected power and ethernet only, looked up the default SSH credentials and got to a blinking terminal on my desktop PC.
Well, how am I gonna format my microSD? Rasplex comes without fdisk, and I booted it from the only microSD slot.
Well, here we go - Extracted arch to a usb thumb drive, chrooted into it, switched microSD cards, partitioned and formatted it from the USB-Arch, installed Arch on it, chrooted from Arch to Arch (😁), set up drivers, network and ssh access, rebooted to my why-the-hell-not distro.

Everything worked!

I love open source and all that fun stuff but I am very unimpressed by having to use GNU/Linux based OS after the last fuck up... the lack of games, stuff that actually works, the almost constant need to compile something and the need to have DDG open at all times because something broke. I mean why the fuck do I need to install libcurl3:i386(for 32 bit programs and games) if there is already libcurl4 and why the actual fuck does it conflict?!... Why the fuck do I need to glue together and compile drivers for my printer?! And they only have "beta support" so like half of the functions that the printer would normally have... Why the fuck don't any games work? Witcher 2? Nope, you click launch and the launcher just closes itself. osu!lazor? Nope, the game will run but only as a process in the background, no window will open no matter what I do. StarCraft: Brood War? Nope, Wine hates the battle.net client and running it in a VM is a really bad idea, the game flickers like crazy... Any other games? Pretty much out of luck... I would really like to play KCD but I doubt it would be playable...

I just installed Opera Mini on my PSP. That alone isn't very exciting on its own, although I am stoked that my website does in fact render on a device from 2009. With the helpful guidance of a laptop from 2004 that's doing the hotspot duties for this thing.

No, what really got me stoked is that Opera still supports these old platforms, and how small they managed to make it. The .jar file for Opera Mini 4.5 is ~800kB large. There's a .jad file as well but it's negligible in size and seems to be a signature of sorts.

Let that sink in for a moment. This entire web browser is 800kB. Firefox meanwhile consistently consumes 800 MEGABYTES.. in MEMORY. So then, I went to think for a moment, how on earth did they manage to cram an entire functioning web browser in 800kB? Hell, what makes up a web browser anyway?

The answer to that question I got to is as follows. You need an engine to render the web page you receive. You need a UI to make the browser look nice. And finally you need a certificate store to know which TLS certificates to trust. And while probably difficult to make, I think it should be possible to do in 800k. Seriously, think about it. How would you go *make* a web browser? Because I've already done that in the past.

Earlier I heard that you need graphics, audio, wasm, yada yada backends too.. no. Give your head a shake. Graphics are the responsibility of the graphics driver. A web browser shouldn't dabble with those at all. Audio, you connect to PulseAudio (in Linux at least) and you're done. Hell I don't even care about ALSA or OSS here. You just connect to the stuff that does that job for you. And WebAssembly.. God I could rant about that shit all day. How about making it a native application? Not like actual Assembly is used for BIOS and low-level drivers. And that we already have a better language for the more portable stuff called C.

Seriously, think about it. Opera - a reputable browser vendor - managed to do it in 800kB on a 12 year old device. Don't go full wank on your framework shit on the comments. And don't you fucking dare to tell me that there's more to it. They did it for crying out loud. Now you take a look at your shitpile for JS code and refactor that shit already. Thank you.

Why I sometimes hate linux:
Found old computer with freya os.. I usually work on Windows, so I thought lets try to work on linux for a change..
First things first: sudo apt-get update / upgrade and while it is doing all the updates lets get something to drink..
Came back, logged inn and mouse is gone.. after some googling and searching on my mobile i found out that alt+ctrl+f1 and then alt+ctrl+f7 fixes problem..
Mouse now is back but upgrade failed half way though because no network.. wifi stopped working.. something wrong with drivers.. so to continue upgrade of OS i need a cable now.. (restart didn't work)
Two hours later I managed to update everything, wifi drivers are working and I managed to post this.. But it's too late to do anything, so I will probably put this away again for couple months and will go through same shit next time I open it.

Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.

First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.

Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.

Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.

Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON

Ok no problem, done.

Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.

The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD

Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.

I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.

Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.

My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.

I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.

Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.

"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.

I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django

Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.

But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.

Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.

Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence

Which Linux flavour should I install in my newly ordered ssd ?
My usage will be
vscode, chrome, mongodb,
android studio

Please take consideration of ease in installing hardware drivers. Didn't want to waste so much time on it.

About a year ago, I started a new position as a Full Stack Java Developer. When I started my employer got me a brand new, shiny, Asus laptop. As I prefer Linux (mint) to perform my magic I had to whipe Windows 10 and reinstall it. It turned out that my new shiny laptop was in fact so shiny that Linux (mint) didn't support/contain all the necessary drivers (yet), especially the network/bluetooth drivers and the gfx's drivers turned out a bit of a pain.. Over the year things slowly got better with every new kernel update that came in. However, due to me trying to fix things before those updates, Linux also had become somewhat unstable.

So ... last week I took some time to re-install that laptop and also take the opportunity to upgrade from Linux mint 18 to Linux mint 19 ... or so I thought ... Linux mint 19 was running (very) hot to the point where the laptop would shutdown due to the MOBO's thermal protection mechanims kicking in. ... Ok ...maybe Linux mint 19 was not such a good choice .... let's see if Ubuntu 18.04 is an option ... Nope ... Linux would lock up within a minute after booting up ... no mouse, no keyboard ... nothing. .... *sigh* ... let's (re)install Linux Mint 18.3 again ... and behold, I can start performing magic again.

Linux, it can be such a pain at times. I still prefer it, but running into all those 'weird' things on my laptop when reinstalling, I have to admit I have seriously considered 'just' installing windows 10 again and be done with it. Luckily I could also remind myself of what a pain Windows is to do serious docker/java development in comparison to Linux which gave me the strength to keep going ... :)

Why so much hate for Windows? I can do all the scripting that I do on Linux on Windows as well. AutoHotKey for the win! In fact, the hacks that I can do on Windows directly cannot be done on Linux unless I have the terminal open. I'm still learning, yeah, so I'll learn how to do that in due time, but I've never had any issues with drivers, software issues, or security threats while using Windows.
And Windows Defender is so good now! I don't need an antivirus. Well, good browsing habits and common sense is enough of an antivirus so it's a moot point anyway.
Either way, I like embracing the power of AND. Why choose? I love both Windows and Linux!

People talking about NVIDIA drivers on Linux and how bad those are. Pretty sure that if I had any recent GTX 1080 I'e be able to actually play Rocket League on any fucking Linux distro. AMD drivers are worse. How the fuck can I have my RX 480 work in 3D applications (read: Rocket League) on any other Linux distro than Ubuntu 16.04? The internet doesn't have a solution for me.

*needs to repartition disks
*is mounted, need live usb
*download and burn gparted live, ≈20min
*reboot, usb not bootable
*try again, maybe it's corrupt...
* nope it just won't boot
*download and burn puppy Linux ≈20min
*is bootable
*installs gparted
*opens gparted
*repartition disks
*NOPE
*e2fsck failed: get a newer version of e2fsck
*already the latest version
*hmmm, maybe if I build it myself
*dependency hell
*dependency hell
*dependency hell
*give up
*download and burn Debian live ≈40min
*try to install gparted
*can't get WiFi drivers working
*give up
*download and burn Ubuntu
*opens gparted (already installed)
*partitions disk, leaves to complete overnight (it will have to move ≈60GiB)
*comes back in morning
*computer went to sleep after 10 mins
*late to work but oh well I at least got it done

TL:DR; DON'T GET INTEL+NVIDIA LAPTOP FOR LINUX.

In the same vain as Linus Torvalds: "Fuck Nvidia, and Intel".

Trying to get intel+nvidia laptop prime w/e working is a living hell.

I'm running Manjaro(arch for lazy people) with I3-gaps(larbs).

So Manjaro provides this handy script/program mhwd that supposedly would enable the non free blob Nvidia driver except it doesn't work cause it uses bumblebee and it's saying it can't find the clearly installed fucking Nvidia driver.

Bashing my head against a wall is more fucking productive then getting my cum stain of laptop to work properly.

"Just disable the intel graphics in bios"
I would except my old shitty Acer bios piece of fucking crap can't even after booting Windows for usb hdd and flashing BIOS.

GUESS WHAT LINUX COMMUNITY THAT'S WHY NOBODY WANTS TO FREAKING USE LINUX FOR GAMING.

I fucking love Linux but I gave up gaming for it.

I'll start joining red team from now on instead of trying to use your broken shit.

-_- every time I use windows recently, I'm reminded of why I haven't for years... I swear, the simplest things are so freaking hard to do. It's like, windows doesn't support W, but blog post A references program B, which converts Z into Y, and after spending 3 more hours googling I find programs C and D, which convert Y into X, and then X into W. Were you able to follow along? Yeah, neither can I. The logo comes up and I immediately get PTSD and start falling down Alice's rabbit hole only to realize I've just wasted 5 hours of my life...

Unfortunately, ASUS is horrible and refuses to make even the most basic, minimally-functioning Linux drivers, or provide anybody with the resources to do it themselves, and they put everything on GPIO chips capable of frying the laptop!!! I'm so freaking done...

I feel like an adult locked in a child-safe playroom full of baby toys...

I accidentally let some malware on my computer and it installed drivers so i couldn't delete the reg Keys or the program itself because I didn't have the proper permissions (super administrator account )

I busted out Linux, used a piece of software to open the register, manually deleted the register key entries, because Linux doesn't care what level of admin you are on Windows, he just sudos that shit.

Rebooted, malware gone.

Only if I could use my sound card with Linux :(

I'm a fan of Linux, and have used many distros (arch, ubuntu, debian, fedora, mint, centos, rhl) and many desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, xfce, Enlightenment) before asking this question.

But every single one of these desktop environments always have felt slow to respond in some cases, where I click something and it doesn't open/close immediately, or i double click something but it fails to open or select something. basically I'm not confident my actions on the GUI will have guaranteed, quick responses within reasonable time. I've never ever had this issue with Microsoft OSes (keeping aside the many badly coded softwares which hang or crash). I'm not talking about specific softwares, this is just general usage of opening settings and using the file manager, window menus.

I'm pretty sure my hardware is not the issue. I've run everything on the same rig. And this has always kept me from fully committing myself to a Linux distro. But I can never be sure about display drivers, as they're not identical. But the issues in Linux has been noted by me for many years. So I doubt it's the drivers either.

Is there anybody who agrees with me and know why Linux is the way it is like that, or is this just me facing this annoyance?

So our new hardware guy who is being managed by our lead embedded developer had the task of designing me an expansion board for my Linux board. The Linux board uses the 40 pin expansion like the raspberry, bananna and orange pi family and as you all know there are many different types of expansion boards for this.
I said at the start come to me and tell me what you want to connect to before deciding which pin you connect to so it is less work for me with Linux board configs and drivers.............
No no no we will sort it all... erm.....
So today they come ask me if they can use an SPI port for GPIO and I am like erm... why there is plenty of GPIO...
It turns out they have been designing the board based on the pin outs of an expansion board and not the actual connector of the Linux board.. I mean seriously WTF!

So recently I installed Windows 7 on my thiccpad to get Hyperdimension Neptunia to run (yes 50GB wasted just to run a game)... And boy did I love the experience.

ThinkPads are business hardware, remember that. And it's been booting Debian rock solid since.. pretty much forever. There are no hardware issues here. Just saying.

With that out of the way I flashed Windows 7 Ultimate on a USB stick and attempted to boot it... Oh yay, first hurdle to overcome. It can't boot in UEFI mode. Move on Debian, you too shall boot in BIOS mode now! But okay, whatever right. So I set it to BIOS mode and shuffled Debian's partitions around a bit to be left with 3 partitions where Windows could stick in one more.

Installed, it asks for activation. Now my ThinkPad comes with a Windows 7 Pro license key, so fuck it let's just use that and Windows will be able to disable the features that are only available for Ultimate users, right? How convenient would that be, to have one ISO for all the half a dozen editions that each Windows release has? And have the system just disable (or since we're in the installer anyway, not install them in the first place) features depending on what key you used? Haha no, this is Microsoft! Developers developers developers DEVELOPERS!!! Oh and Zune, if anyone remembers that clusterfuck. Crackhead Microsoft.

But okay whatever, no activation then and I'll just fetch Windows Loader from my webserver afterwards to keygen my way through. Too bad you didn't accept that key Microsoft! Wouldn't that have been nice.

So finally booted into the installed system now, and behold finally we find something nice! Apparently Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate offer a native NFS driver. That's awesome! That way I don't have to adjust my file server at all. Just some fuckery with registry keys to get the UID and GID correct, but I'll forgive it for that. It's not exactly "native" to Windows after all. The fact that it even has a built-in driver for it is something I found pretty neat already.

Fast-forward a few hours and it's time to Re Boot.. drivers from Lenovo that required reboots and whatnot. Fire the system back up, and low and behold the network drive doesn't mount anymore. I've read that this is apparently due to Windows (not always but often) mounting the network drive before the network comes up. Absolutely brilliant! Move out shitstaind, have you seen this beauty of an init Mr. Poet?

But fuck it we can mount that manually after every single boot.. you know, convenient like that. C O P E.

With it now manually mounted, let's watch a movie! I've recently seen Pyro's review on The Platform and I absolutely loved it. The movie itself is quite good too. Open the directory on my file server and.. oh. Windows.. you just put db.thumb on it and db.thumb:encryptable. I shit you not, with the colon and everything. I thought that file names couldn't contain colons Windows! I thought that was illegal in NTFS. Why you doing this in NFS mate? And "encryptable", am I already infected with ransomware??? If it wasn't for the fact that that could also be disabled with something as easy as a registry key, I would've thought I contracted ransomware!

Oh and sound to go with that video, let's pair up some Bluetooth headphones with that Bluetooth driver I installed earlier! Except.. haha nope. Apparently you don't get that either.

Right so let's just navigate the system in its Aero glory... Gonna need to flick the mouse for that. Except it's excruciatingly slow, even the fastest speed is slower than what I'm used to on Linux.. and it's jerky as hell (Linux doesn't have any of that at higher speed). But hey it can compensate for that! Except that slows down the mouse even more. And occasionally the mouse driver gets fucked up too. Wanna scroll on Telegram messages in a chat where you're admin? Well fuck you mate, let me select all these messages for you and auto scroll at supersonic speeds! And God forbid that you press delete with that admin access of yours. Oh maybe I'll do it for you, helpful OS I am!

And the most saddening part of it all? I'd argue that Windows 7 is the best operating system that Microsoft ever released. Yeah. That's the best they could come up with. But at least it plays le games!

My buddy told me Apple is Linux with nice drivers 😯

For all the hate against windows I built over the now 8 years using linux as my main os. Now I feel windows 10 is quite good.

I got a little beefier desktop lately, been using just laptops from the last 8 years(8D) so I got this urge to get a desktop for gaming, I bought an entry level machine. ryzen 5 2400g, put my lovely linux mint and... the fucking machine was hanging up when the load was too high, and the load was too high too often because react/node etc.

I gave up in less than a day, I just did a quick search and some people said about secure boot or whatnot, some other claimed that ryzen cpus had no problem with mint, I got fed up quickly and did not try any solution with linux. Then I installed windows 10, installed the godamned drivers from the provided dvd ... since then it was a breeze.

The dark mode is gorgeous and no hanging up at all... I'm just sad that mint did not worked soo well. I wanted to have consistency between my laptop/desktop and I loved mint above everything. But well, some things improve while you're not looking at them, win 10 is quite good, I'll keep my desktop as gaming/programming pc with win 10, and well, the laptop will be auxiliar programming machine.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Buy a Nvidia card for my PC and deal with its drivers on Linux or buy an amd card? What do you think guys?

I bought a corporate refurb HP desktop to use to replace a rpi3 in an IoT project I was working on. It came with Windows 10 on it. It has an ethernet port on it, which is what I prefer, but Windows 10 couldn't see it. So I installed Debian and everything worked perfectly, with no driver config.

Windows makes me genuinely angry. Why is it that when I boot my computer, I am expected to wait 10+ minutes for windows to launch 5 startup applications, most of which are already patches for things that should be there to begin with, before I can even begin to use explorer to open GeForce experience because for some reason, windows said "Graphics drivers?! Who needs those?!" And threw them out the window! And then I get notifications about apps needing permissions to things, BUT IT WONT TELL ME WHICH ONE! I clicked the update driver notification 5 minutes ago and the installer literally just now opened up. This is a computer with a r3 processor and gtx970! It may not be the best, but it is by no means underpowered! Why must Halo online not have a Linux version? :(

It's amusing how every time something doesn't work with Linux somebody spent a bunch of time customising their OS into oblivion (because well, the whole point of using Linux is the ability to have it your way, d'oh), and it's never their fault for changing everything or using some distro with 0.05% market share, it's the company's fault not providing bulletproof support for their exact setup and not testing everything they put out on every combination of kernel & system software.

Linux tip: if you're setting up a new computer w/ a fresh install of Linux or you got some new device you'd like to make Linux friends with, don't start by searching for drivers. Start with upgrading your kernel to the newest Mainline version you can. It's very likely it will bring your devices' support with it.

Damn I didn't think I'll like my P1 gen4 THIS much. Even better with a flavour of LMint!

@linuxxx’s recent post inspired me to try out linux again and see if I want to use it as my primary OS. My past experience with linux has always been endless fiddling with settings or drivers or whatnot, so I was wondering if you’ve got advice on what level of complexity is appropriate in solutions. E.g. if using the terminal and changing a bunch of config files is normal, or if that is generally unsustainable on the long term.

Thanks, I can’t wait to see how this experiment goes 😄

I hate that I have to have windows for my music production hobby. Does anyone know about any good DAWs for Linux?
Maybe I'll need a new audio interface as well though. Yamaha is about as bad as Nvidia when it comes to drivers for Linux.

I invested in a brand new 27" curved monitor to work more efficiently with my laptop but now
HDMI isn't recognized by my linux distro on dual boot where it works perfectly with fucking windows and it used to work nice before the latest update
Tried to install official nvidia drivers to try to fix that
🙃 Guess who has a fucked up X configuration now 🙋🏾‍♂️

After the base installation of arch linux..I am trying to install the display server,Nvidia driver.and i3 wm...but getting errors..
Shall I install Display server xorg after or before the installation of Nvidia drivers??
What is the proper way to configure xorg and Nvidia?
When I give the startx command it is showing black screen....
@deadlyRants

Struggling with Linux driver bullshit today. Trying to update the graphics driver completely hosed the networking, second monitor (HDMI), and I assume a bunch of other stuff. I tried using the Additional Drivers utility and it nearly made my system non bootable. So on my second computer I had to look up how to unfuck my machine using the command line. Yet another classy set of bullshit from Gnome. The driver for all this was trying to fix some java programs that show wonky depending upon where the window is on my second display. After unfucking the machine I found that resetting all the display settings for both displays magically fixed the java program fuckery. How the fuck? Literally setting things like display resolution, default display, moving virtual displays around. This bullshit somehow fixed display problems with java apps.

So I decided there is a perfect OS out there somewhere, but it isn't iOS, it isn't Windows and it isn't Linux. I decided to make the Perfect OS, or P-OS for short. Gonna use P-OS as a fake OS in my games I make. lol

AMD DRM Linux drivers, so much wow much usable

So I installed the JACK audio connection kit on my Linux box, set up drivers, configured routings properly, etc etc.

Tried playing basic sounds. No output. Panic.

Redid configuration, tried again. No output. Panic++

Reinstalled JACK, tried again. No output. Panic++

Reinstalled drivers and checked ALSA (audio subsystem). All good. Tried again. No output. Panic++

Hit the Mute shortcut on my keyboard to unmute my speakers, tried again. Worked. :facepalm:

I am such an idiot, fml.

Making a Hackintosh - Round 2

Also, Linux is love, Linux is life. But if I have to choose my secondary OS between Windows or macOS, I would rather have macOS. And I know about Mojave existence, but I'm stuck with High Sierra due to the lack of Nvidia drivers on Mojave

- i = ++i or i = i+=1
- No Documentation
- Not Splitting up a Stylesheet
- function()
{ }
if(){ } (inconsistent style)
- Using a ton of if's instead of a switch
- Installing Nvidia drivers manually on Linux thrice! Had to reinstall it everytime!
- sudo rm -rf /
- Being unorganized in terms of personal projects.

Didn't install linux for years now. Today, I have to and nothing changed about wifi drivers, at all ! Even the install process still sucks !

And they still ask to "sudo apt-get install fucking-wifi-driver" ?!?!?!

I don't have internet yet, that's the all point, damn it !

OMG. This weekend, there is Rainbow Six Siege free to play on Steam. I have a desktop PC, but I can't get it to work. Tried Ubi support, but they give shit. So...I was hoping, I could finally try this crap game on my laptop. And here we go...

Normally, I use Linux. Only Linux, because Windows 10 on my laptop is extremely fucking painful. I knew it's going to be torture to install that game on it, but whatever.

OK, firstly, I was surprised, that Windows booted in just about 1 minute. I was like wtf just happened. Everything seemed to be fine and working. I downloaded uPlay, installed it and tried to install the game. Just to be clear, this rant is written from Linux again. And why?

Because FUCKING WINBLOWS desides to FUCKING UPDATE WIFI DRIVERS. 1 minute - internet works, second fucking minute - WIFI IS FUCKING DOWN. Thanks fucking pussy Gates. I really like you. And use this crap daily. Holy shit I would die...

Argh! (I feel like I start a fair amount of my rants with a shout of fustration)

Tl;Dr How long do we need to wait for a new version of xorg!?

I've recently discovered that Nvidia driver 435.17 (for Linux of course) supports PRIME GPU offloading, which -for the unfamiliar- is where you're able render only specific things on a laptops discreet GPU (vs. all or nothing). This makes it significantly easier (and power efficient) to use the GPU in practice.

There used to be something called bumblebee (which was actually more power efficient), but it became so slow that one could actually get better performance out of Intel's integrated GPU than that of the Nvidia GPU.

This feature is also already included in the nouveau graphics driver, but (at least to my understanding) it doesn't have very good (or none) support for Turing GPUs, so here I am.

Now, being very excited for this feature, I wanted to use it. I have Arch, so I installed the nvidia-beta drivers, and compiled xorg-server from master, because there are certain commits that are necessary to make use of this feature.

But after following the Nvidia instructions, it doesn't work. Oops I realize, xrog probably didn't pick up the Nvidia card, let's restart xorg. and boom! Xorg doesn't boot, because obviously the modesetting driver isn't meant for the Nvidia card it's meant for the Intel one, but xorg is to stupid for that...

So here I am back to using optimus-manager and the ordinary versions of Nvidia and xorg because of some crap...

If you have some (good idea) of what to do to make it work, I'm welcome to hear it.

Ladies and gentlemen... It finally happened... I finally killed a Linux install!

Was stuck at 1024 x 768, installed NVIDIA drivers, crashed, restarted and ended up in an endless login screen loop and then boom, crash and is no longer recognised in Grub.

Don't know what I did seeing as the machine hasn't been on for 3 days ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Guess I'll have to do a reinstall when I have internet again!

I knew this might be an issue, but really Linux just sucks balls. It may not be Linux's fault, but the user experience could be a fuck ton better.

Spent 1.5 hours trying to get mint installed on second drive. It works fine if you don't want to do anything with it.

As you can probably surmise I died on getting the gpu driver installed. Just starts to a black screen. No amount of juggling is helping. It just refuses to show the screen with an nvidia driver installed. What is worse is that settings that might help are not set. Like nomodeset in grub. If you know some drivers fuck up the grub interface then add nomodeset and not leave it up to the user to "figure this shit out". Because users are tired of figuring this shit out.

Really really fucking disappointed. I thought to myself: lets install steam and see how it does. The reality: fucking stuck for 1.5 hours on trying to boot into x with graphics acceleration and failing.

Many of you hate on windows, but one thing it has going for it. It doesn't do fucked up shit like this. It has failsafes that try and account for this.

Fuck you linux. You need to fucking grow up and stop relying on users to fix every damn thing in the command line. Go back to server where you belong.

I know I will get the "I told you so" messages, but guess what? The computer I got doesn't come preinstalled with windows. You have to pay to get it. At this point windows is the only fucking viable solution to make my shit work.

Nvidia, go die in a fire bitch. Fix your fucking Linux support you worthless shit heads.

This has been a rant brought to you by "the pain of others". I hope you enjoyed the experience.

PS, I love you all. Even the "I told you so" bitches.

Ubuntu 16 lts wifi drivers have problem and i am unable to fix this shit, everytime there's a new problem with ubuntu I hate ubuntu now for these many problems I'm not going to use it again.
If I didn't find any good linux distro I think I should switch to mac

One does not simply install Nvidia drivers on Linux

Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.

iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.

After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.

When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.

iPhone actually cured me.

MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.

Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.

I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.

iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.

True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.

I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.

Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.

Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.

Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.

Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.

It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.

Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.

Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.

Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.

Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.

Before I switched, I defended Linux.

My life was a lie.

I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.

Dual-booted Gaming Computer: A Saga of Frustration, Alcoholism*, and Relief

So a while back my gaming computer was booting Antergos Linux and Windows 10. It took me a few months, but I finally became fed up with Windows 10's bullshit of putting ads in the OS (Suggested Apps, OneDrive, etc.) and reinstating all of their defaults after an upgrade (Edge, privacy settings, the People Button in 1709).

So, I backed up my data and installed Windows 7. Windows 7 has a bright, consistent look, and in my opinion still holds up as a good operating system.

However, I couldn't boot into Antergos after that. For whatever reason, no matter how hard I tried, I just wasn't able to. So, I decided to reinstall. Might as well, anyway.

Now, I have an nVidia card, which does not play well with the OSS drivers, so it's basically normal for me to have to unplug my card and use the on-board graphics. So I do that and boot into the LiveUSB, do the install, boot into the desktop, install the nVidia drivers package, shut down.

I reinstall the card, turn the computer on... and nothing. Just a black screen with a flashing underline. I can't even get into a TTY session.

I ended up trying a few other distributions--Gecko Linux, Arch Labs, Manjaro--but all had the same issue. I was about to give up, but decided to try Antergos one more time, but with the newest install media.

And it worked! I was so freaking happy! I can finally play my Linux games again!

TL;DR: Microsoft updates break drivers, make unbootable. Hours wasted. Such rage.

Lol. I come home, try booting my windows desktop. Need desperately to play some videogames. Power is on. Monitor lights up. Bios splash. Windows startup spinner.

Suddenly, windows startup spinner gone, monitor shuts off. Wait 5 minutes, no change. Force power off and reboot, same behavior.

Google says it's probably a bad video driver. I don't remember installing any in the last month, but heck I don't use this computer for shit outside of games, so may as well do a full OS reinstall and hope the problem drivers are gone.

Reboot and force power off halfway through boot to let windows know something's wrong next boot. Literally no other way to get to alternate boot methods.

Run the reset. First time, percent-counter starts. I leave the room at 30% to go get a sandwich. Come back and it says it's "undoing changes". Something went wrong and I have no way of knowing what.

Oh well, I'll just try again and see what the problem was. NOPE! Completes windows reinstall without a hitch on the second attempt.

Okay, now let's get my stuff back on here. First things first, Microsoft updates for my processor, graphics card, "security". Halfway through the updates, monitor shuts off and I'm back to square one. IT WAS THE MICROSOFT DRIVER, NOT THE ONE FROM NVIDIA GEFORCE EXPERIENCE!!!!

Fucking Microsoft. To all ye who rail against Linux as a gaming platform because of its unstable drivers, observe here the stupidity of Microsoft and weep.

Let me introduce you to sys. admin + network admin + teacher at our school... She gave us "materials" to study for our school-leaving exams (called matura here - wiki that shit) so I looked at it and just had to comment everything that's wrong (and that's only the first paragraph)...

Apart from making utterly useless documents she also likes to think she is the best in the world and what she says is right and everyone is wrong. Networks that she builds crash 8 times a month, she can't install proper drivers and believes that open source and GNU/Linux is evil. (She also lives by herself, is around 48 years old, is a lesbian(not that it is a bad thing - just for context) and got one brilliant teacher who actually knew what she was saying and doing fired because she broke up with her)

Thinking about it - no wonder my classmates are all so confused and stressed... she can't teach and says bullshit like printers work with the RGB color space and when confronted she would shout that there are no printers that use CMYK, she has never seen one so they do not exist. (only to proceed changing CMYK ink cartridges in the printer)... I mean it's good for me because I get to teach pretty girls programming and informatics but I am sorry for the boys... Unfortunately I don't have the patience to teach someone programming and informatics unless they are a girl and I see a chance to evaluate that person's qualities to be a girlfriend.

This is the worst possible thing that can happen, when you setup a new computer.

I live for about a decade on ubuntu. I got an invite for a LAN where games are being played that I cannot run with wine or are not ported to linux.
Fine I get an old harddrive and setup a fresh Windows 7. I have a little update script that takes care of updating and restarting.
BUT I CAN NOT DO ANY UPDATES.
As you can see in the picture the original Windows 7 installation disc that was part of my computer did not carry the matching NIC drivers.

A friend of mine gave me a spare WiFi dongle. That did not bring its drivers on the USB dongle but on disc that he lost.

WHY?! HOW?! This is not plug and play. This is a part that SHOULD be plug and play.

After I got an other WiFi dongle that was plug and play, I could finally download the right drivers.

Why can the Windows 7 disc that was part of the computer setup not contain the right drivers, but a ubuntu 12.04 live disc can?!
ARGH

Installing the nvidia drivers on my linux machine is the bigges nightmare I've come across sofar. As soon as I have installed it and reboot, blackscreen and literally no way around it. Starting the desktop, nah stuck in a crashloop. Installing different driver, same issue. Using diffrent distro, that shit wont even boot properly. Uninstalling the driver seems to fix it but whats the point of running only on third gen i5 graphics. Shit cant even handle 1080p yt properly. And there are ppl saying if it aint broke dont fix it. FFS I DESPISE MAKING COMPROMISES WHEN I FUCKING KNOW IT CAN WORK BUT ATM IT IS NOT IN THE FREAKING MOOD TO DO SO!

The propietary video drivers for my system are broken. Depending on desktop environment it might even force me to enter GRUB rescue mode.

It hurts me to see how little companies care about their GNU/Linux users.

Was installing Arch linux in dual boot with Windows and I fucked up.
Now I can't boot back into Windows. I tried to restore the boot 'thing' and I wasn't able to.
So tomorrow I will have to reinstall every single program I had since Microsoft doesn't make installed softawared recoverable.
P.S. This is the 4th time I try to install Arch without success (had problems with the bootloader, kde and gpu drivers and ended up bricking the os) but I'm still going to try until I get it to work. Why? Because I hate my life.

The main reason I moved from Linux to macOS was that I grew up. If we count not just Linux experiments but prolonged usage, I was an avid Crunchbang fan. After it died, I moved to elementaryos.

What I want to say is, Linux can be very fun and educational when you're still in the uni. You have all the energy in the world, and you can afford to diverge from your daily routine for an hour to debug GPU drivers.
Now, the backbone of my life is keeping a very tight sleep schedule, taking meds on time, avoid infohazards, avoid scrolling on the web, all to remain in a very fragile state of balance that keeps the bipolar disorder away. I'm in the middle of all this, earning derealization (yes, I'm also autistic) every time I design a data model. All I want from my computer is to be treated like a careless, regular user, not like someone with a CS degree.

I use Sublime Merge instead of command line Git. I use Postico to explore PostgreSQL databases, not psql from my terminal. By the way, my terminal is not iTerm, Alacritty or some other such thing, my terminal is whatever came with my Mac, with whatever default settings.

Linux is crawling into a non-street-legal racecar's cockpit and strapping yourself in, ready to blast off. MacOS is your chauffeur, holding your old shaking hand as he helps you into your Maybach's backseat. They're different, and that's okay.
Can Maybach race? Well, it has a 621 HP V12, so if _you_ can race, it probably can too, but we all know it's not a racecar.

Windows? Windows is an SS officer, wearing the all too familiar Windows logo for swastika, throwing you into a gaswagen.

I've been noticing that without any specialization development can become repetitive, as in, a bunch of fancy ways of doing the same CURD operations.

Something that just calls me is low level development, wether it is embedded development (microcontrollers and such) or Linux Kernel and device drivers. I've been polishing my C skills for a while now and started to look into kernel development and uff, is it overwhelming!

I just wanted to see if some of you guys are or had experience in system development and how you got there. Thx!

Windows 10 update rant:

Didn't even just force the update on me, also broke one of my drivers permanently or something like that. 100% CPU on system interrupt, can't run anything, even task manager is dead. Have to reinstall. Lucky I mainly use Linux and that's fine. Just wanted to play some Doom ffs.

Really pisses me off. Idea for Doom mod: swarm mode with windows updates coming from all directions, only weapon is chainsaw and you could charge up for berserk by doing glory kills.

I wonder if you guys can help, nobody else seems to.

Nine months ago I packed my desktop away because I had to move.
I then turned it on a few weeks ago and noticed a curious problem: the audio and video stutters.
I don't know why this happens.

I tried booting into Linux, and didn't see any stuttering. I went back over to windows and updated all the drivers, but nothing worked.
Last night I did a full system wipe, and re-installed windows without leaving any of the old files.

The error still persists.

I have no clue what might be wrong with the computer.
For all I know it's the hardware that's failing, but I don't have any idea which component in the system is leading to this strange behaviour.

Maybe you guys know enough to shed some light on this?

WTF Ubuntu! Why did you uninstall my nvidia drivers.

Today, I have installed/uninstalled a combination of [windows 7, arch linux, dual-boot] a total of 9 times...

I wouldn't be surprised if my 120G SSD fails next week

It all started when I had to whip up a GUI-wrapped youtube-dl based program for a windows machine.

Thinking a handy GUI python library will get it done in no time, I started right away with the Kivy quick-start page in front of me.

Everything seemed to be going fine, until I decided it would be "wise" to first check if I can run Kivy on said windows machine.

Here I spent what felt like a day (5 hours) trying to install core pip modules for kivy.. only before realizing my innocent cygwin64 setup was the reason everything was failing, and that sys.platform was NOT set to "win32" (a requirement later discovered when unpacking .whl files)

"Okay.. you know what? Fuck........ This."
In a haze of frustration, I decided it was my fault for ever deciding to do Python on windows, and that "none of this would've happened if I were installing pip modules on a Linux terminal"...

I then had the "brilliant" idea of "Why don't I just use Linux, and make windows a virtual machine within, for testing."

And so I spent the next hour getting everything set up correctly for me get back to programming.... And so I did.

But uh... you're doing GUI stuff, right? -> Yeah...

And you uh.. Kivy uses OpenGL on windows, doesn't it? -> Yeah..?

OpenGL... 2.

-> Fuck.

That's when I realized my "brilliant" idea, was actually a really bad prank. Turns out.. I needed a native windows environment with up-to-date non-virtual graphics drivers that supported at least OpenGL2 for Kivy GUI programs!

Something I already had from square 1.

And at this point, it hurts to even sigh knowing I wasted hours just... making... poor decisions, my very first one being cygwin64 as a substitution for windows cmd.

But persistent as any programmer should be in order to succeed, I dragged my sorry ass back to the computer to reinstall windows on the actual hardware... again.

While the windows installer was busy jacking off all over my precious gigabytes (why does it need that much spaaace for a base install??? fuck.). I had "yet another brilliant idea" YABI™

Why not just do a dual-boot? That way, you have the best of both worlds, you do python stuff in Linux, and when it's time to build and test on the target OS, you have a native windows environment!

This synthetic harmony sounded amazing to the desperate, exhausted, shell of a man that I had become after such a back-breaking experience with cygwin

Now that my windows platter with a side of linux was all set-up and ready-to-go, I once again booted up windows to test if Kivy even worked.

And... It did!

And just as I began raising my victory flags, I suddenly realized there was one more thing I had to do, something trivial, should take me "no time" to do, being in a native windows environment and all.................... -.- (sigh)

I had to make sure it compiles to a traditional exe...

Not a biggy, right? Just find one of those py2exe—sounding modules or something, and surprisingly enough, there was indeed a py2exe—sounding module, conveniently named... py2exe.

Not a second thought given, I thought surely this was a good enough way of doing it, just gonna look up the py2exe guide and...

-> 3 hours later + 1 extra coffee

What do you meeeeean "module not found"? Do I need to install more dependencies? Why doesn't it say so in the DAMN guide? Wait I don't? Why are you showing me that error message then????

-------------------------------

No. I'm not doing this.
I shut off my computer and took a long... long.. break.

Only to return sometime the next day and end up making no progress, beating my SSD with more OS installs (sometimes with no obvious reason to do so).

Wondering whether I should give up Kivy itself as it didn't seem compatible with py2exe.. I discovered pyInstaller, which seemed to be the way Kivy wants exe's to be made on windows..

Awesome! I should've looked up how Kivy developers make exe's instead of jumping straight into py2exe land, (I guess "py2exe" just sounded more effective to me then)

More hours pass, and you'd think I'd have eliminated all of my build environment problems by now... but oh, how wrong you'd be...

pyInstaller was failing, and half the solutions I found online were to download some windows update KB32946..whatever...

The other half telling me to downgrade from Python 3.8.1 to Python 3.8.0000.009 (exaggeration! But you get the point)

At the end of all that mess, I decided it wasn't worth some of my lifespan, and that maybe.. just maybe.. it would've been better to create WINDOWS GUI with the mother fuc*ing WINDOWS API.

Alright, step 1: Get Visual Studio..
Step 2: kys
Step 3: kys again.

What's your most trusted computer part manufacturer list? Personally, it goes something like this:

CPU: AMD. They're performing at or above Intel's spec, without the weekly IME holes. Sometimes cost a little more, but they last way longer.

GPU: AMD, ASUS, MSI. MSI is usually over-priced but performs a smidge better, ASUS is usually a good middle-ground. Anything with an AMD chipset's usually gonna hold together fairly well, though, and won't require massively-unstable closed-source drivers for decent Linux performance. "but muh cuda" doesn't fly when OpenCL is actually, well, open.

Storage: Seagate, obviously, and SanDisk for cheap SSDs. SanDisk SSDs, especially their cheapest ones, are durable as shit for price. As for the Seagate pick... is that not self-explanatory?

Mobo: ASUS, ASRock if you need garbage in a pinch. ASUS boards are usually fairly tough, and ASRock is cheap trash for that backup tower that's gone bad in the closet.

PSU: EVGA, accept no substitute. EVGA PSUs are durable as fuck and fairly cheap, compared to other "ultra-durable" brands.

Question to all of you guys using linux:
Is it normal for my PC to use 100W power with just x11 running, nothing fancy open while when using windows it just takes about 60W. I didn't find anything about that on the web so I'm really concerned at the moment.
My hardware is a xeon e3 1230v5 and a amd rx 480. My guess is that the amdgpu drivers don't support AMDs low power thingie. What are your thoughts?

I have never understood people ranting about how Linux is incompatible with their machines. Back in 2006 what ever machine I had tried Linux on was working better with it. More than that all the drivers were working out of the box and the only problem that could possibly happen was with graphics.

FF 10 years. I am using MacBook for some time now and I did no installation of Linux for couple of years now except on bare metal servers. And have just bought my sister a new hp envy. Nothing fucking works. Not even wifi. Installation is hanging and I do not fucking know why! Her previous computer had problems with wifi. If wifi is turned on you could not turn the fucking pc off. It would fucking freeze.

Well fuck my life :(

Fucking nvidia and its fucking proprietary linux drivers. Of course I had to attempt an update, because the game was freezing, and of course it ruined my Friday evening. Because the newest kernel apparently cannot even boot (with any version of the proprietary drivers).

For whatever reason my Nvidia card is not showing my desktop after a reinstall. I've installed the drivers, ran the xconfig script, and even manually gone in there and edited things. It still won't boot.

This is why the state of Linux needs to get better.

sigh. I hope one day Linux can be rewritten in something with more sensible package management. C/C++ can just be a real pain more often that not. My case was trying to install CUDA on ubuntu 16 following the OFFICIAL developer guide. gave up after trying for an hour. It needed the kernel headers for compile the drivers and it was jsut alot of pain dealing with files being in the wrong place and gcc version mismatching and tons of other cryptic errors. and this is for ubuntu which is a pretty mainstream distro.

Most the devs are yelling Linux is best and blah. But since I installed eOS on my new ideapad my productivity is zero.

I'm just solving problems with the OS or other software. It seems some of the drivers are missing, because sometimes this fucking piece of shit just don't boots or just hangs. Installing node and npm was definitely one of the worst experiences because I messed up sudo privileges... I had to change my workflow because node-sass wasn't able to compile because of this.

And still I kind of feel more comfortable with eOS. 😥

Had to reinstall Linux on my gaming PC today. I tried Korora (Fedora based) but failed at installing the NVIDIA drivers.

So, back to Antergos I go. It's so much easier running [sudo pacman -S nvidia] than having to blacklist nouveau...

Bought myself a new graphics card as my old one died. After i got my system runnning again ( Linux Mint 17), by fixing the video drivers i concluded that i may want to get into gaming again.
I have a free Windows 10 Pro licence lying around so lets try to get dual boot running.
Hmm seems like i cant install windows after linux without installing grub2 again through a recovery disc. Well okay wanted to try out mint 19 anyway.

Downloaded both Isos. Linux mint is 1,5Gb and Windows 10 is 4,3Gb. MS what are you doing ?!
Only have a 4GB USB-Drive and dont want to buy a new one. GOD FUCKING DAMNIT MICROSOFT.
So at a forum i found a software to remove packages from windows isos and now i'm sitting here removing windows bloatware for 4 FUCKING HOURS, JUST TO INSTALL WINDOWS.

Ofc that tool was only windows specific so i had to install windows in a vm first.
Fucking tired of this shit.

Me: "I think I'd like to try out the new Ubuntu version. I really liked Gnome before, maybe the OS is better now?"

A couple days later...

"Man, it's really nice not having to emulate bash. I'm so much more productive now with Linux tooling! Wait, why did everything freeze?"

A week after install...

"What do you mean 'I need to recompile wireless adapter drivers'? Why isn't that included or updated through 'apt'!? Who's the person sitting at their desk saying 'yup, that's a reasonable solution?'"

Two weeks after install...

Me: "Oh, so it's not Chrome eating up system resources, there's a memory leak in gnome-shell.... WHAT!? WHY!? How do I switch back to Unity?"

One month after install...

Me: "Yeah, so I tried it out, but then I threw my computer in a river and I'm *so much* better off now."

The reason I don't use Linux on my desktop is its hobby of saying “fuck off” spontaneously and without warning when I need it the most.

A designer friend shares his After Effects project and asks to export that to Lottie? Fuck off.
Your Android phone decided to brick itself with an OTA update (yep, happened to me, thanks Sony), and you need to unbrick it? Fuck off!
A musician friend wants to connect his audio card (that of course has no Linux drivers) and record some bass riffs? Tell him to fuck right off mate.
Your boss suddenly asks you to check an MS Access file for him as he's en route to an important meeting? Yep, you guessed it — fuck off.
Your government now requires your tax papers to have digital signatures? Fuck off, it only works for Mac and Windows.
Want to connect an old digital camera? Would you please fuck off?

I know I'm gonna get heat from Linux fanboys, especially on this platform. After all, a designer should know how to export to Lottie if he's a real designer, you should've bought a better phone, your friend should've had his laptop with him, your boss should've used open source tools instead of MS Access… Wait, he was tasked that from above? Then his boss should've used open source tools! Government mandates digital signatures? Well, tell them to port that to Linux! Start a riot! Get a better government! Move to a better country! Digital cameras? Who uses them in 2024, especially old ones! Are you some kind of hipster?

I know preparing for corner cases is bona fide premature optimization, but that's the whole point — with Mac or Windows, you don't have to prepare at all. You always have options. With Linux, your number one option is to have Windows handy if need be.

Linux works perfectly on my server, but not on my laptop.

Yo, so does anyone here have any experience about using Windows or mac printer drivers on GNU+Linux? So far my strategy has been to try to extract a ppd file from the Windows/mac drivers. It's an epilog fusion laser printer/engraver

A friend of mine who wants to learn about Linux has a stronger will than me, as I think installing Linux in 2020 is gonna break me but he's still stoked as shit. I'm fucking serious. He asked me to install several distros, in order of interest (because they all fucking failed, because of fucking course they did) on a USB HDD he was using just for this.

We tried, in order:

Arch: initramfs wiped his Windows HDD when it crashed. IDFK how, but it zeroed the top 32KB of the drive. It wasn't even the right HDD...

Linux Mint: nvidia drivers refused to see his GPU after install. No matter what we did. Live media saw it fine until it was installed on the external drive, too.

Debian: Installer couldn't see the external HDD, ever. No matter what we did. It had a /dev entry, lsblk and fdisk saw it, I could format and mount it, but the installer crashed when it refreshed the device list when it was present. Every goddamn time.

Fedora: Installer broke halfway through as an executable (or 70) were corrupted, but the disc matched the ISO and the ISO sums correctly, so this is apparently how it was packed and shipped.

CentOS: Refused to boot. Just entirely. GRUB would go to load the kernel and it'd hang.

All ISOs and discs were verified as matching provided sums using MD5 and SHA256. How the fuck is Linux so fucking hard to get working on older hardware in 2020? Worked great in 2008, worked great in 2018, why is 2020 such a goddamn issue?

What do we do when the WiFi dont work
What do we do when the WiFi don't work
What do we do when the WiFi don't work
On Ubuntu 18.10

Disable secure boot and sign your own driver
Disable secure boot and sign your own driver
Disable secure boot and sign your own driver
Build it from the source code

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

A friend of mine asked me which Linux distro is beginner friendly, I told him that gentoo is pretty beginner friendly. Next I find a laptop flying out of his house, ok no but he spent 5 days trying to figure out how to get the audio drivers to work.

It's been 10 days and now he's on Windows XP....

Why do I always forget how much work it is to get a new linux machine running? One minute I'm happy with my new Hardware the next I'm cursing it because I need to get my wifi drivers from some github account.

Is there a Linux distribution without a lot of problems with Nvidia drivers? I'm currently using elementary os, because I like the look of it, but I'm getting a lot of graphical glitches and black screens all the time and I was wondering if changing to another distro would help. Is elementary is known for graphical glitches, or is it just the Nvidia drivers? I've also turned my display manager into a mess while trying to customise my login screen, so it might be a good time to change to another distribution. Any recommendations? And one more thing, just out of curiosity, can you install multiple distributions and use the same home directory if home is mounted on a separate partition?

Am I the only one that feels like the Linux sound driver (alsa) have a more clean sound than the windows drivers? I'm a pianist (at least I'm playing the piano in my free time 😜) and I feel more comfortable with the sound on my Linux. (I use the same physical piano modeling software on both systems)

I installed VSCode in Linux. I keep finding thing about Linux that make me think its kinda shit. Maybe its just Gnome, but I don't know.

So I startup VSCode. Blank screen. I do a search and find its gpu shit. I start it up with argument to disable gpu accel. Then I go into settings and turn of gpu accel. It now works. Cool that it has these options.

What made me install VSCode. I installed VSCode because I wanted a decent json editor. I search for Linux json editors and I am bombarded by online editors being pushed by Linux websites. Who the fuck in their right mind is going to use a fucking website editor for json data?

I "had" a decent json editor by running notepad++ under wine. But since I turned on GPU in Linux Wine shit just doesn't work correctly anymore. Which is the whole reason I went looking for an editor.

How can a platform like Linux take itself seriously when turning on GPU accelerated drivers breaks every fucking thing in the OS?

Why did I enable GPU accel drivers in Linux? Because updating to 22.04 caused all my java apps to draw incorrectly. Enabling GPU fixes this shit. So I enable GPU to fix one thing and then it breaks a bunch of other shit.

This shit right here is why I have trust issues with Linux.

So, I took the plunge into a new dostro base, and now I have Manjaro installed on both of my daily drivers. One question I have... What are the advantages/disadvantages of different term shells? It offers bash, zsh, and fish. I'm used to bash, but I once chose zsh by accident and it looked interesting.

Also, general new Linux distro advice? No apt ; _ ; it's hard to install stuff now xD

First Nvidia drivers problem on Linux in 5 years. Due to multiarch (32bit executable, 64bit drivers). Had to happen in a rush.

I got a new computer recently. I got it with an evo 970. I tried installing the Samsung controller software so that I can view the health of the drive.
No go. Why?
Looked around and everywhere they are saying turn off raid. I checked in bios. Says my drive is not in a raid volume.
Okay, now what?
Look at manual of laptop maker. Says there is a mode that allows you to use either VMD or RAID on the drive. Apparently I was in VMD mode. I had already backed up the computer at this point. Yes, I suspected this was coming. So I changed the mode.
No boot.
Okay, I have Aomei backup and linux boot disk I made using Aomei. Linux boot disk won't boot... Well fuck.
Luckily I have my old computer and a Windows 10 install disk. I install Windows 10 again, install Aomei and proceed to try and restore.
4 hours later... I dunno how long. I went to bed.
Wake up and test.
No boot.
I try disk repair.
No go.
So I boot into Windows 10 install disk to look at partitions. 5 or 6 fucking partitions. It has installed 3 partitions into the space of one.
Delete all the fucking partitions. Cause fuck you!
Okay, lets try this again.
I make a window pe boot disk this time.
It boots.
I do restore while I am at work.
I get home.
No boot.
Check partitions and find only 2. Better than last time.
I try disk repair.
No go.
Search the net. Literally: "Aomei restore no boot"
Someone says, just assign drive letter with drive C using diskpart.
Seriously?! Disk repair couldn't figure this shit out by context?
Seriously doubting this solution.
Solution works...

Now, I am an engineer/programmer/computer genius. I have been learning how to fix this shit for over 30 years.

How the fuck is Joe Bloe ever going to fix an issue like this? I feel sorry for the technically un-inclined. I honestly don't know how neither Aomei nor Microsoft cannot solve restoring disk images by setting a drive letter. How did this not get backed up by Aomei? How did this not get detected as one of the most common problems with a disk restore? Why has this been a problem with Aomei restore for over 3 years? I love Aomei. It works most of the time. But this is terrible. The tech world is definitely a shit show at this point in time.

I also read that VMD actually makes the communication to the drive a bunch faster. Not sure if the samsung drivers do the same. So there may be a tradeoff. Oh well. I can see the temperature of my drives now! Woot!

Windows be like: "bro is that a fucking usb drive? I don't have drivers for that"

Linux be like: "Hold on, is that a Millennium Falcon? I've got the drivers for that"

While Indian govt. talks about digitizing the country and is pushing ahead with it, their Employee's Provident Fund Org (EPFO) infra is absolutely shit and it's killing small time business that want to help their employees.

You need to add Digital Certs to do just about anything (great security wise) BUT,
The digital sign interface is written in Java Flash, that was dropped by all modern browsers 4 years ago.
The only stable working latest browser for it is Firefox 52 released 3 years ago.

The USB tokens used/supported are all Chinese that don't respect OSS drivers and fork built their own (read Watchdata) with no/shitty and cumbersome linux support (couldn't get it working after 2 nights of trying different versions of drivers).
You still have to run Windows to sign the docs or to interact with EPFO using legacy browsers from 2016

Non Tech problems: EPFO charges 500 Rs/month minimum admin charges, and I pay 1200 Rs PF for my driver. That kind of commission is plain stupid and will make small employers run away from paying PF for their employees.

Any interaction with EPFO is like having to eat thorns. painful, unnecessary bullshit. How useless can someone be building such a system released in 2019?
I just hope they fix it. A simple google search shows there is Web Crypto API for modern browsers. Someone wake these people up. SMH

So this week I'm working with special purpose printers (Dymo, Label, Card-printers).
They only connect via USB and there are no linux drivers, so CUPS on a Pi and sharing them won't work '-.-
Guess I'll try that USB over IP thing and see how that goes.

Let me tell you about my wonderful weekend. It all started with a game that doesn't run in wine and it ended up in the biggest nightmare of Windows Update and EFI configuration.
1 - let's boot on my Windows partition to play trackmania 2.
2 - Windows Update interrupts me while driving a track.
3 - Update keep failing over and over again.
4 - I keep trying things to fix Windows Update, but with no success.
5 - Let's try system restore, failed
6 - Let's try to do a reset. "You don't have a recovery drive". Oh, right...
7 - Let's try to upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 10, just because. Nope, "we could not determine if your pc can run Windows 10". Wait what....
8 - I guess I'll be reinstalling this trash. "Nope, can't. Don't like that partition I just formatted". Of course you can't...
9 - Had to delete the partition and let it create new ones. It created a new EFI partition. Just why???
10 - Okay that worked. Let's fix grub now.
11 - Maybe not, let's try rEFInd, because it looks fancy.
12 - After rebooting on the live USB for about 50 times and reconfiguring rEFInd without any luck, I realised the install script didn't install fs drivers for ext4. Oh, right... That's why you didn't find any Linux kernel...
13 - It can't boot windows, they're using a different EFI partition. Let's move rEFInd to the new EFI partition windows created for me.
14 - Finally everything works again. So much effort to play a freaking game without being bothered by windows update. And rEFInd abience theme looks beautiful.

I've got to say though, I learned a lot and the Arch wiki is awesome!

Either my experience with Linux got better or this OS improved a fuckton over the last years. About 3 or 4 years ago installed Ubuntu on my laptop just to try out something different. My experience:
- Reinstalled Ubuntu three times due to me fucking up something.
- Wine, with as little as it could run back then, could not be installed with proprietary nvidia drivers.
- I could not use LibreOffice because of some word bulshit which was needed for school.
- Managing dependencies was a literal hell for me (Different versions installed which resulted in conflicts)

And now:
- Wine 3.0 is about to be released
- Can run most games of today. (Fallout 4, Wolfenstein II, Overwatch)
- I can say that I could do 95% or even more on it. (Which is mostly due to me getting more experienced)

That feeling when you insert the driver disk for a wireless adapter to find they actually do provide Linux drivers!!!!!

Nobody ever provides Linux drivers, this is a god send! Thank you!

That feeling when they don't compile correctly! Damn you! ASUS pls. Halp. You're so close to being amazing.

More linux driver woes:

Driver is passed a file position and byte count when asked to read from a device. Sounds easy, right? FUCK no.

For reads, driver is passed struct `filp` with field `f_pos`, a direct pointer to the same struct field, int `count` as a number of bytes to read, and `buf` to return those bytes with. Problem is, requesting, say, 256 bytes from location 10000000h will give the driver `filp->f_pos = 0`, `f_pos = 256`, and `count = 0`. I don't know how to fix this and there's NO help for this shit. None whatsoever.

This shit, right here, is why Linux drivers suck ass.

I finally got a nice Ubuntu setup working and running. No wrappers or drivers for my existing wifi dongle but a new one on the way. And Cities Skylines has Linux support so I'm happy. I love it Cheers guys xo

Thanks to @nik123 I know have a new side project: creating an fs (or fuse) driver that hides bad blocks on block devices and makes them usable again.

Yesterday I bought a thumb drive for installing Windows 10. I've also tried booting the Windows 10 installation media from a partition with grub, and adding the storage drivers to the install.wim image, but the drivers don't install correctly and I don't get it to work. I'm on Arch Linux and a laptop.
I spent 4+ hours on that. uefi-ntfs.img, Windows 10, also tried Windows 7, gparted, cp, bla, bla, bla.
On attempt n12903813280, I open again gparted.
/dev/sdb: unrecognized disk label
Turns out somehow I damaged the thumb drive after so many writing. In just a few hours.
Dude I'm literally stuck on Linux. Get me out of here. I want to be normal and play Valorant.

Hey Guys,
I am planning on getting an Vega 56 for Linux. Does anyone know how it performs. I heard a lot of good stuff about Vega 64 on Linux. But the power consumption is quite high and I am not sure if the drivers work well.
So I was wondering if it's actually worth it or not.

My mind is not stable.
Office work requires - Linux Internals (knowledge on kernel, Device Drivers, Yocto etc) & Networking ( security ) -> CR on C/C++
Office work also requires - Python for tool development
My personal project requires - NodeJs, React
And I also want to appear for Interviews so also require DS & Algorithm

I hope you don't judge me

Shall I completely switch to linux???

Can i find drivers for graphic drawing tablet and awesome download manager????

Those two have been keeping me in windows for years...

Linux Mint on an iMac.

I attempted to install Linux Mint on an iMac, unfortunately I did not realize how difficult that would be. And the current keyboard I was using didn't let me access the boot menu. when I finally found a keyboard that worked, I installed LM and found that some drivers just refused to work with LM. I then got my hands dirty and somehow managed to fix everything. This took me around five days to figure out.

Up until now, I never had any breaking updates on Linux on my laptop, Except for Nvidia drivers stopping. It would switch to noveau. Even my cobbled together hack of Broadcom Bluetooth solution worked without even having to touch it. Well, I still don't have problems with core Linux but add gnome to the issue mix today. Surprisingly, Nvidia drivers for the first time Nvidia drivers upgraded (to 340) and I didn't had to do anything for it to work. Gnome deprecated synaptics driver support and now uses libinput implementation for it. Well Ubuntu Gnome updater won't clean the configuration and I had to remove the driver and clean config myself. Nothing too much, i have to deal with these stuff on my arch installation but Ubuntu has been "it works fine. No need to interfere" thing for me. It works fine on Wayland (it always used libinput on Wayland a if I am correct) but nvidia drivers doesn't support Wayland. And then since the update gnome has been disabling some of my extensions at random. All on X. I have no problems with Wayland except for Nvidia fucking drivers. All that said, its still better than windows where I lost fucking network connectivity during something important. And the trackpad drivers on Linux are somehow much better than anything I have used on windows. (that or Sony made fucking great trackpads and nobody noticed). Here's to hoping Nvidia starts supporting drawing on Wayland and I can ditch X completely. I have seen visible improvements in performance under load and slight decrease in battery usage with Wayland.

I really don't want to dual boot windows and ubuntu, trust me,
but when I'm getting frame drops in chromium, while having a gtx1070ti, it's kinda hard to be a linux/ubuntu advocate and windows hater when every stackoverflow answer tells you to reinstall drivers
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Any of you uses Fedora with an Nvidia-GPU?
The distro seems pretty cool, but i doubt I'll get everything to work, since fedora doesn't offer premade packages for proprietary drivers.

I recently bough a HifiBerry Pro DAC+ ADC for my raspberry pi.

That is when I remembered....

Linux is bad, but embedded Linux is worse.

I just wanted to connect via Bluetooth to a speaker and play sound through a microphone.

Unfortunately, after hours of configuring software, Bluetooth drivers and then testing python scripts with PyBluez, I still hate my life.

I guess the fancy new Linux GUIs (that compete with windows) really do not work correctly, because I swore the Bluetooth symbol was lit up in the top right.....

Kill me.

I think I will never be fully able to switch to Linux. I have dual booted my laptop and my printer only has drivers for windows. It does have drivers for Ubuntu 10 but they don't work at all in Ubuntu 17. I thought of making a raspi wireless receiver so I could print wirelessly but since the drivers don't work on Ubuntu I had yo trash that idea.

Finally managed to install Manjaro with working hybrid nvidia drivers on my lapptop! I fucking love this OS already. Now I can start learning linux by actually using it.

So my friends USB drive suddenly doesn't work. It shows up in Windows' device manager (with no exclamation sign) but not in My Computer or even Disk Management (So I can't partition it) Reinstalling drivers doesn't work either. When trying to mount it in Linux, Linux complains that it can't see the drive. fsck and gparted don't read it either, but it shows up in lsblk. Dmesg complains it can't read the partition table (error -110). Any of you guys have bright ideas? Nothing like this has shown up in SO before so I've asked in both here and SO. Any ideas?

I understand the desire people have to use an open source driver for their graphics card, but it feels like that's not the only reason people seem averse to using nvidia's closed-source driver on linux. I have used it for years, and never had a problem, and though I have an admittedly specific use scope, I would like to know what it is that people dislike about it. What problems do you have with it?

Ok, so here is the thing:
After a very long WINDOWS UPDATE
the sound has gone. No speakers or headphones working. After wasting >10 hours (not in a row)
trying to find the FINAL SOLUTION, I have just gave up. Bought a working external sound card, but I could only use headphones plugged into it.
In a week, I booted Linux (cos I have never really
used it and not with the sound problem in mind) and guess what - on Linux sound works normally! On THE SAME LAPTOP!!!
I belive the update somehow harmed the audio drivers. I'm really fed up with it.

En route to free software. installing Linux on an old pc at office. i think the drivers are still proprietary tho

Nvidia's drivers for Linux are absolute dog shit. Like how difficult is it to make something functional? I only have 2 monitors connected but the second one is causing the driver to crash, wtf.

Why is it that windows 10's network adapter takes so fucking long in order to work and connect to the internet!!

Does anyone know a way to trace back what's causing it? And why it takes like full 15 minutes for the Ethernet or wifi drivers to even work? (I'm not even sure if this is something with the drivers or the way windows's network adapter way of working)

I couldn't find Jack shit on the internet (most of them are ghetto do this and that and hope it works) I want something more advanced so I can figure out for once why this happens on numerous windows computers

(Linux people, I understand you, please don't rant your stuff here, this is a bit serious issue, thx)

Lend me your wisdom o wise ones!
I'm tired of windows updates and im tired of it eating my background resources on my low end convertible(atom, 2gigs ram).
The only reason i'm still on windows is the touch support. Haven't yet found a distro where everything just works. Anyone here using a touch screen with linux?

Edit: I've tried hacking away with drivers and shit but feeble touch support just doesn't help as i primarily use it as a tablet

I read that installing Nvidia drivers on Linux is usually a bad idea because they break if your OS updates. Is that still a thing? I still have a GTS 250 so would like to squeeze what little performance I can out of it.

I'm on Mint Cinnamon as of yesterday.

Fuck this shit. I'm buying an AMD card next time!

Windows plug & play is shit. Change my mind.

Wasted so much time trying to connect my camera and I still cannot plug it in (not sure if the PCI driver is missing, or just Windows sucks at this). I thought fresh Windows installations handle the drivers automatically, at least last time I looked it worked out of the box.
On the other hand, I've rarely had any issues with Linux in these regards. I'm probably biased, but I'm still more productive when working on Linux.

I've been trying to find a linux distro/de that "just works" for like a week and honestly, I'm kinda giving up and going back to Windows.

Everyone single one I've tried had some weird quirks, mostly audio and video related. Screen tearing everywhere, mic not working, distorted audio, jittery animations and very low responsiveness.

I really wanted to use Linux as my main OS, at least for work. I love the simplicity of package managers and the terminal. But honestly, I don't understand how something like that could be depicted as better than Windows. I'm sorry but Windows runs waaaaaaaay better on my desktop and PC it blows linux out of the water. Zero issues with drivers, no screen tearing, no distorted audio flying smooth animations and responsiveness.

I'm very disappointed, I was expecting Linux to be quicker and less bloated but god those hardware compatability issues just destroy everything good that linux has to offer.

Guess I'm going to install some background VM since I only really need to run terminal stuff and daemons for work.

I have no idea why and how people get adware/malware/spyware/viruses, ransomware, and the like on Windows machines. I've been using Windows since I was a small child and on the machines I've used (mainly my older brother's), automatic updates were always off. I only had a virus issue once because I was small didn't know what I was doing at the time, but that was easily fixed by my brother.

Bottom line: Fuck Windows and all the drivers it broke that one time I decided to enable updates

P.S. I started using Linux a few years ago, and it's been pretty wonderful! I've used dozens of different distros, but I still can't get away from Windows because games, certain programs, and compatibility issues (like some drivers and devices not properly working in Linux), so oh well

tldr: Deleted Win10, turned out for better
---------
**This happened a few months ago**
---------
So one day I decide I have had enough of Windows 10 and wanted to go back to Linux (A long time ago I had dual booted Ubuntu, but messed it up changing video drivers). So I create a Mint installation USB and get to work. I boot up the installation and delete the old partitions from the Ubuntu install. I install Mint and boot it up, everything works fine and dandy! I decide I want to get back on Windows to get back a few files that I wanted copies over. I turn off the computer and *try* to boot up Windows. I get an error message that I am UNABLE to boot. WHAT! After further checking, I realize that I had deleted the MBR partition of Windows. Pretty sure I could remake it if I tried hard enough, but I am starting to realize that it feels good to be totally MS independent! Now I am using all open-source software available to Linux and have no need for Windows. I do miss some of the games though...

PS: No files were lost due to backups. Save Lives, Do Backups!

Something I should've ranted a while ago, it just came to my mind

We had to learn html and css (I knew a lot about it already, heck, I'm building a website for someone)
So, we had to use object tags to embed parts of the page like you'd do with php

The thing that fucking annoyed me was the stuff that's in the files we had to refer to in the tags

You had
doctype
Html
Body
The whole fucking header with its title and fucking meta tags and shit

Why the fuck would you teach it like that?!
I would've posted a picture but I was too annoyed by the code and deleted everything I had from that course

Ah yeah, they told us to use bluefish
I used notepad++ since I'm not a noon and I know my html tags and css stuff

OK I just tried to unlock my laptop with my fingerprint a thousand times and the smiley just fucking winks at me.
don't wink at me, fucking LET ME IN

It's dual booted with Linux, to try Linux, I'm actually liking it so far.
couldn't find any drivers for the fingerprint sensor yet, but we'll see

Has anyone experience with putting Linux on a asus e200ha Netbook? Want to get rid of Windows but I'm concerned about driver availability and battery life.

I can't wait until I feel like Dr. Frankenstein when I build my PC this week. My first real computing rig!!

Some backstory: My main dev machine is my old Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu (my baby). I took Windows off of it when I got a Surface through a job and have been using that for Windows specific work. I'm going to be giving that to my little sister next time I travel home. In short, this is the first computer that will be able to cut through anything I throw at it and play games that aren't at least 6 years old.

The build is centered around an i5-8400 and gtx 1060 6GB, and I'll be running Windows as a primary OS for gaming. However, I fell in love with programming on Linux and there is no way Linux won't be on my machine. I understand the differences between dual-booting and virtualization, but I want to hear how you guys run Linux on your Windows gaming machines or if you go about it another way. I also have heard horror stories about drivers for Linux, and wonder if my graphics card being certified by Ubuntu LTS actually means that it will operate correctly. I have also only ran VMs on crappy computers so I haven't had any experiences where that performed better than dual-booting. I'd love some feedback or to hear about all of your setups, as hardware has never been my strong suit.

I'll post a pic of my setup when it's done too.

Ok... Can someone explain me this?
Happen a few weeks ago.
My pc would crach on any 3D program or game.
Did some tests, was the graphic card.
Send it to repair (amd, Asus made)
Placed my old Nvidia, installed drivers all good.
My new card came, nothing repaired, nothing found, passed all stress tests.
Placed the card back ok, no OS.
Bios detects both ssds but don't start (windows 10.... Ya tryed Linux but doesn't work for my main past time in pc, Arma 3).
Loaded the USB with the windows instalation, used command line drive C is completely empty but has 160gb used.
Ended ip formating.
GC works perfectly.
So... Wtf happen?

So it's basically impossible to install Arch Linux on a MacBook without an Ethernet cable.

I downloaded the wi-fi drivers and put them on a separate USB and then tried to compile them in archiso, but without success

Finally, installed nvidia drivers on arch linux and I can watch videos without screen tearing.

It took me 8 months to figure out to download the main driver from their site instead of using the commands mentioned in arch wiki.