Why do you like linux?
3I wanted to try out arch linux by dual booting into it alongside my existing windows 10. Long story short I now only have arch linux.
So far, I’ve been frustrated by various round-about ways to get hbo now to work and not much else. No success there yet, but it looks like I’ll need to use wine to run the windows version of firefox, which seems insane to me since I have a perfectly good windows 10 license.
I’m torn between giving it a real shot and just going back to windows and leaving well enough alone. Despite the frustrations, I’m tempted to give it a shot since I’d have to set up windows the way I like it and download all my software again anyway if I go back.
All I use the computer for is watching shit (downloaded, netflix, hbo now), browser-based things, and programming (C++ with CUDA, Java, a tiny bit of Python).
- 6 comments, 5 replies
- Comment
I’m assuming you’ve given pipelight a shot?
And to answer the original question- I don’t.
At least, not as a desktop OS.
For servers or specialized workstation work, it’s the cat’s meow. Small footprint, able to patch in a non-disruptive way (generally speaking), more granular/powerful security models (selinux, apparmor)… the list goes on.
But as a desktop OS I think it’s a long way (if ever) off from being “nice” as a practical desktop environment. I’ve been hearing “year of the linux desktop” since LinuxWorld 2005, and it still hasn’t come to fruition in my opinion.
This quote nicely summarizes the problem, I think:
@hanzov69 Yup- apparently firefox stopped supporting npapi, so pipelight doesn’t work in new versions.
Thanks for the feedback too. Definitely will make me feel less bad about it if I give up.
I got the idea to build a HTPC a while back, built a quiet PC on a microATX form factor, picked up a HDHomerun and a cable card from TWC. Figured I’d save a buck and go Linux rather than Windows. So I installed Mythbuntu as it seemed to be what all the cool kids were doing.
Got it all working, codecs installed, not a huge fan of the Linux UI, but w/e, it’s for watching TV. So, moved it out to the living room, hook it into the receiver, and … nothing. No sound, no picture, just WTF. It’s really hard to troubleshoot a problem with no visual feedback. Hook it directly into the TV, and it works. But I need my surround sound, y’all! After a very long couple of weekends playing with drivers, I realized it was beyond me to get the thing to pass through my audio receiver correctly.
Gave up, installed Windows. Quickly realized that Windows Media Center was a superior product anyway (damn you Microsoft for killing it).
Yikes… well, this’ll be lengthy, but you did ask. I’ll try to keep things relatively terse.
As to why I like Linux… the answer is sprawling: I mess about with open source projects and spend a lot of time in either scripting languages or on the command line. That’s very natural on Linux, not very natural on Windows.
I am interested in understanding my system’s moving parts, and that is easy to accomplish in Linux (relatively), and a bit harder in Windows. That joke up the thread about five steering wheels is true, and it’s great. You can easily swap one window manager for another, for example, which is nice. I’m the kind of person who thinks, “Xmonad? Tiling window manager written in Haskell? That’s exactly what I want.” (Not much of a selling point to a new user or non-enthusiast, though.)
I like knowing that my operating system is behaving uh, without ulterior motives, which isn’t really something you can get from Microsoft anymore. As a lesser, related second point, I’m fairly confident that I’ll always be able to run Slackware on whatever the commodity desktop hardware is. I won’t be likely to run into a completely business-driven “upgrade to Windows 10 or die!” scenario. When Slackware updates do happen, they’ll tend to maintain the status quo where it’s reasonable, rather than switch to a new business model.
I use ZFS to store my files. I love ZFS. You can’t get ZFS on Windows. The point of that is, the way I’ve got it configured, if any two hard drives fail, I don’t lose data, and I can do cheap filesystem snapshots, and I can rely on checksumming data to make sure that nothing has gotten corrupted from undetected hardware failure or bad luck.
Related to the window manager point above, on Linux, you (can, optionally, depending on the distro) tend to live and breathe code. Nearly any piece of software that you’re using is sitting right next to the code that you could modify freely to change it. I haven’t actually done a lot of programming in that context (something, something, day job), but I love the idea of it. Everything is open, everything is accessible, everything is optional.
I wouldn’t have started with Arch. It’s one of the distros that requires more intervention up front, and (this may be dated) is more of a bleeding-edge distro, prone to brokenness. I’d have gone with either Slackware, if you wanted to get your fingers dirty, or the likes of Ubuntu or Mint if you wanted a lower bar to have to clear to get onboard. (I personally would have started with Gentoo, which I did, which went terribly.)
Depending on your motives, you may have even been ahead to just install the bits of Ubuntu that can run alongside / inside Windows 10 – those come from Microsoft. You get aptitude, bash, and you’re off to the races, for the most part.
I don’t remember what I did to watch HBO (or if I ever did watch it on the Linux machine), but you can watch Netflix and Amazon video in Chromium, using some native Flash, IIRC.
If I were you, and I was that in the fence about it, I’d install Windows 10 on the hardware, and install Arch in a VM, maybe VirtualBox, if nothing else. ('course, that might not play nice with doing CUDA development inside said VM.)
You could still set up dual-booting, give Linux a small partition, tinker in there. I’d be hesitant to throw away Windows 10 entirely… especially in the context of doing normal desktop / DRM-oriented media stuff.
@InnocuousFarmer Thanks for the detailed response. I was afraid of that. Theme of my life recently has been sinking a ton of time into solutions I end up not using. I have VMWare, so I’ll just put it on there.
Anyway, the reason I chose arch is because I’ve run Ubuntu before and it just felt like a slightly more inconvenient Windows. Figured I’d try something different.
On the plus side, I’ve discovered I do like CLion, which I never would have tried if visual studio worked here.
@Pantheist
I used to be able to do a little linux. A very little. But that was in the 1990’s.
My notion for the best way to do it if you are doing it to learn and play with, and you need a usable regular machine, is to to buy something super cheap and used from Ebay or Craiglist Amz Warehouse. Or get a friend or family member to give you a cast-off.
Then you still have your main machine, and you can tinker to your heart’s content. If you get good, and you can live with the driver and media content hassles, you can then switch over full time on your main machine.
I have a few friends who alway run linux on their file-servers (usually debian). Then the main desktop goes back and forth from debian to win depending on which one is most irritating to them at the moment.
Well, I’ve got my windows stick back. See everyone on the other side.
@Pantheist back where I started, just without any of my stuff… hooray.
I use Arch VMs for development and testing sometimes, the main benefit for me is that it is constantly tracking the bleeding edge of everything… which is why it’s probably a bad choice for novices or first-time Linux users or just people without a lot of time … etc. (I used to use Gentoo but Arch doesn’t need all the endless compiling.)
These days I mostly run a couple big CoreOS Container Linux VMs and run a separate Docker container for each programming project I have going on. The advantage there is a) each container mimics the environment of each client I am working for and b) I can pull files from GitLab and replicate the environment very quickly on anything that runs Docker. Because sometimes my power goes out and stuff.
So I guess the moral of the story is to virtualize or containerize everything.