What Linux Distro do the Linux users of GH use?

[henz]

Dont update to Arch Linux - linux 4.7.1-1 (x86_64) its toxic, killed a bunch of stuff on my computer at work, tried to fix but was a no go.

[dustigroove]

Dont update to Arch Linux - linux 4.7.1-1 (x86_64) its toxic, killed a bunch of stuff on my computer at work, tried to fix but was a no go.

Define "toxic" and "killed"...

[dustigroove]

So I got a thinkpad x220 about a week ago [...] one of the known laptops to work [...] with [FreeBSD]

That says everything about why FreeBSD isn't an option for me with my laptops... I like things to *work*.

[SBJ]

The best thing that I did though, 6-7 years ago, was to drop Outlook. That thing is a heartless bastard.

I'm still using Outlook. I haven't found a good Linux alternative.

[CSCoder4ever]

So I got a thinkpad x220 about a week ago [...] one of the known laptops to work [...] with [FreeBSD]

That says everything about why FreeBSD isn't an option for me with my laptops... I like things to *work*.

lawl, I also wanted something I'd have no qualms about leaving in the trunk of my car when I work, I call it a win win on my part!

[dustigroove]

So I got a thinkpad x220 about a week ago [...] one of the known laptops to work [...] with [FreeBSD]

That says everything about why FreeBSD isn't an option for me with my laptops... I like things to *work*.

lawl, I also wanted something I'd have no qualms about leaving in the trunk of my car when I work, I call it a win win on my part!

In seriousness, I should revisit BSD as a desktop... I do manage a few pfsense devices, but that's just a lazy toe in the water.

[CSCoder4ever]

So I got a thinkpad x220 about a week ago [...] one of the known laptops to work [...] with [FreeBSD]

That says everything about why FreeBSD isn't an option for me with my laptops... I like things to *work*.

lawl, I also wanted something I'd have no qualms about leaving in the trunk of my car when I work, I call it a win win on my part!

In seriousness, I should revisit BSD as a desktop... I do manage a few pfsense devices, but that's just a lazy toe in the water.

and an understandable one, I wouldn't use anything else ( although maybe OpenBSD ) for a firewall lol

[iri]

Do BSDs support HiDPI?

[dustigroove]

Do BSDs support HiDPI?

As far as I'm aware you can use GNOME 3 with FreeBSD which has pretty decent HiDPI support.

[CSCoder4ever]

atm no, but if steam ever ports steam to FreeBSD, that will probably accelerate development quickly

[xtrafrood]

I really didn't want to make a new thread for this question since so few probably use Gnome, so here is my question - what do you guys think of Wayland?

I tried the non-default version that came prepackaged with Debian 8/Gnome. At first, it seemed snapper but then my mouse cursor disappeared. I noped through a restart and switched back to default Gnome in my grub menu. Does this make any sense? Am I just being silly or does Wayland have ways to go before I can take advantage of those yummy graphical gains that may or may not be possible with a functional Wayland/Gnome? I'm still very much a noob

[vivalarevolución]

Seriously, the only thing I can think of when anyone mentions BSD is BDSM.

[rowdy]

Seriously, the only thing I can think of when anyone mentions BSD is BDSM.

We have BDSM at work.

Bugs & defects + support & maintenance.

Literally charge codes BD + SM.

[iri]

Seriously, the only thing I can think of when anyone mentions BSD is BDSM.

kinky

[sean]

I haven't updated Arch in three months, and at this point I'm too afraid/lazy to.

[vivalarevolución]

Seriously, the only thing I can think of when anyone mentions BSD is BDSM.

We have BDSM at work.

Bugs & defects + support & maintenance.

Literally charge codes BD + SM.

Nice.

[SBJ]

Seriously, the only thing I can think of when anyone mentions BSD is BDSM.

We have BDSM at work.

Bugs & defects + support & maintenance.

Literally charge codes BD + SM.

Hah that's awesome.

[algernon]

I really didn't want to make a new thread for this question since so few probably use Gnome, so here is my question - what do you guys think of Wayland?

I tried the non-default version that came prepackaged with Debian 8/Gnome. At first, it seemed snapper but then my mouse cursor disappeared. I noped through a restart and switched back to default Gnome in my grub menu. Does this make any sense? Am I just being silly or does Wayland have ways to go before I can take advantage of those yummy graphical gains that may or may not be possible with a functional Wayland/Gnome? I'm still very much a noob

I have tried Wayland a couple of times, because it is interesting, and is technically superior to X. It has some nasty bugs from time to time, so I'll give it another year or so. By the looks of it, it should be pretty solid by then. (I used it for a month in the past, with very few issues, but then I switched from an Intel GPU to Nvidia, and things went downhill)

[xtrafrood]

I really didn't want to make a new thread for this question since so few probably use Gnome, so here is my question - what do you guys think of Wayland?

I tried the non-default version that came prepackaged with Debian 8/Gnome. At first, it seemed snapper but then my mouse cursor disappeared. I noped through a restart and switched back to default Gnome in my grub menu. Does this make any sense? Am I just being silly or does Wayland have ways to go before I can take advantage of those yummy graphical gains that may or may not be possible with a functional Wayland/Gnome? I'm still very much a noob

I have tried Wayland a couple of times, because it is interesting, and is technically superior to X. It has some nasty bugs from time to time, so I'll give it another year or so. By the looks of it, it should be pretty solid by then. (I used it for a month in the past, with very few issues, but then I switched from an Intel GPU to Nvidia, and things went downhill)

Oh cool someone has checked it out. I saw a bit of what you mean although I'm running Radeon with OpenGL, it suffered from a few issues as well. I'll probably wait a bit to try it with Ubuntu/Gnome or something like that in a year or so too.

[rowdy]

Every time I hear about Wayland I think of https://www.weylandindustries.com/

[vivalarevolución]

Every time I hear about Wayland I think of https://www.weylandindustries.com/

Well, at least we know where the LInux guys got the name.

[rowdy]

Every time I hear about Wayland I think of https://www.weylandindustries.com/

Well, at least we know where the LInux guys got the name.

Almost.

Got an A instead of an E.

[xtrafrood]

Every time I hear about Wayland I think of https://www.weylandindustries.com/

Well, at least we know where the LInux guys got the name.

Almost.

Got an A instead of an E.

I'll take the name Wayland over Mir any day )

[iri]

Every time I hear about Wayland I think of https://www.weylandindustries.com/

Well, at least we know where the LInux guys got the name.

Almost.

Got an A instead of an E.

I'll take the name Wayland over Mir any day )

It's the other way round for me

[xtrafrood]

Every time I hear about Wayland I think of https://www.weylandindustries.com/

Well, at least we know where the LInux guys got the name.

Almost.

Got an A instead of an E.

I'll take the name Wayland over Mir any day )

It's the other way round for me

Hehe, Mir reminds me of cat sounds

[iri]

it's just a word for 'peace'

[xtrafrood]

Fair enough

[rowdy]

it's just a word for 'peace'

And this little thing ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir

[iri]

Also, this little thing:

[xtrafrood]

it's just a word for 'peace'

And this little thing ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir

Well, I guess it's safe to say that Mir will probably beat out Wayland stability wise. From what I've read and seen Ubuntu is basically Linux's productivity/gaming powerhouse. Just a quick glance at the Wine compatibility list will kind of verify that claim. Maybe I should check out Unity 8 before I download a copy of Ubuntu Gnome. I'll keep my eyes on the Phoronix benchmarks just to be sure, but still.

[Giorgio]

Ubuntu 14.10 (Yes, I'll update it very soon).

Raspbian on my two raspberries.

[fohat.digs]

Maybe I should check out Unity 8 before I download a copy of Ubuntu Gnome.

Mint is Ubuntu-based and Cinnamon is Gnome-based, so Mint/Cinnamon is not too far afield yet so much nicer to use.

[davkol]

Well, I guess it's safe to say that Mir will probably beat out Wayland stability wise. From what I've read and seen Ubuntu is basically Linux's productivity/gaming powerhouse.

lol, where are you getting this?

Ubuntu is just a common distro based on Debian. Meanwhile, Canonical has a long history of reinventing the wheel and detachment from upstream/communities. As a result, there are plenty of components that are fundamentally broken in Ubuntu, ranging from kernel to DE components.

Mir is only a part of Canonical's attempt to break into the portable-device market, which has been a major failure thus far. Nobody else really cares.

[xtrafrood]

Well, I guess it's safe to say that Mir will probably beat out Wayland stability wise. From what I've read and seen Ubuntu is basically Linux's productivity/gaming powerhouse.

lol, where are you getting this?

Ubuntu is just a common distro based on Debian. Meanwhile, Canonical has a long history of reinventing the wheel and detachment from upstream/communities. As a result, there are plenty of components that are fundamentally broken in Ubuntu, ranging from kernel to DE components.

Mir is only a part of Canonical's attempt to break into the portable-device market, which has been a major failure thus far. Nobody else really cares.

Mir is a branch of Wayland. From what I've read Mir and Wayland are bits of code used to pass off some high-level computing to the kernel to basically relieve the middle man of the burden. Who knows, maybe one day it will completely replace X. Kind of kills all my middle mouse emulation for the moment, though

My point was Mir is probably going to be stable before Wayland because more people use Ubuntu/Unity rather than Debian/Gnome. If you want to check out some Phoronix benchmarks you'll see that Unity-based distros are simply leading the pack in productivity/gaming. I can't even install the latest version of Blender for 64bit Jessie but if I rolled Ubuntu on another HDD I could include the Blender PPA and have the bleeding edge releases. I love Debian/Gnome don't get me wrong but I'm keeping my mind open to the next level of Linux productivity. I'm not talking about benchmarks for equipment running Raspbian. Raspberry Pi 3 or Odroid clusters look really cool but only something like a Jetson TK1 or TX1 could even run Blender so those ideas are completely out the window for me. I'm not about to pay $200-600 per node when I could just build a single system with 200x the computation power.

[davkol]

Mir is a branch of Wayland.

Here's your problem. Mir is a display server, whereas Wayland is a protocol.
Wayland is widely supported by upstream projects and there are plenty of related tools (e.g., Weston, libinput).
Nobody except Canonical cares about Mir. They either have to rely on the rest of the world, or completely reinvent the wheel. Ironically, they're currently just repackaging others' work at this point (XMir, reliance on libinput, libhybris,…)

Phoronix benchmarks

I hope you're joking.

[xtrafrood]

Mir is a branch of Wayland.

Here's your problem. Mir is a display server, whereas Wayland is a protocol.
Wayland is widely supported by upstream projects and there are plenty of related tools (e.g., Weston, libinput).
Nobody except Canonical cares about Mir. They either have to rely on the rest of the world, or completely reinvent the wheel. Ironically, they're currently just repackaging others' work at this point (XMir, reliance on libinput, libhybris,…)

Phoronix benchmarks

I hope you're joking.

Ah, I see. I kind of get why Mir is further along in general desktop deployment. I'm not joking when I mention Phoronix. They're the first company I've heard of that routinely does benchmarking with Linux using pretty powerful equipment. If you know of another website that shows what nearly all 9 series Nvidia GPUs (Also 10 series and Titans) can do on various Linux distros as well as Windows 10 please let me know! Seriously! I would love more benchmarking sources. I'll try to work on my hopelessly optimistic approach, this is all so new to me.

Phoronix - Deep Learning & CUDA Benchmarks On The GeForce GTX 1080 Under Linux 
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gtx-1080-cuda&num=1

They run more general use benchmarking tests in other articles, the link above is just an example of how far Phoronix is willing to go

[davkol]

Ah, I see. I kind of get why Mir is further along in general desktop deployment.

Mir isn't "further along" anywhere on desktop. It might show up as an option along with Unity 8 in Ubuntu 16.10 (they already claimed this before 13.10/14.04 too).

Meanwhile, Fedora has been showcased with Wayland for several releases. You can use KDE Plasma or GNOME Hell with Wayland right now. No, it's not entirely production-ready, but it's a real thing—a story similar to, say, PulseAudio.

I'm not joking when I mention Phoronix. They're the first company I've heard of that routinely does benchmarking with Linux using pretty powerful equipment. If you know of another website that shows what nearly all 9 series Nvidia GPUs (Also 10 series and Titans) can do on various Linux distros as well as Windows 10 please let me know! Seriously! I would love more benchmarking sources. I'll try to work on my hopelessly optimistic approach, this is all so new to me.

Look up Moronix.

Larabel's benchmarks are fundamentally flawed and he has his own agenda (example).

[xtrafrood]

Ah, I see. I kind of get why Mir is further along in general desktop deployment.

Mir isn't "further along" anywhere on desktop. It might show up as an option along with Unity 8 in Ubuntu 16.10 (they already claimed this before 13.10/14.04 too).

Meanwhile, Fedora has been showcased with Wayland for several releases. You can use KDE Plasma or GNOME Hell with Wayland right now. No, it's not entirely production-ready, but it's a real thing—a story similar to, say, PulseAudio.

I'm not joking when I mention Phoronix. They're the first company I've heard of that routinely does benchmarking with Linux using pretty powerful equipment. If you know of another website that shows what nearly all 9 series Nvidia GPUs (Also 10 series and Titans) can do on various Linux distros as well as Windows 10 please let me know! Seriously! I would love more benchmarking sources. I'll try to work on my hopelessly optimistic approach, this is all so new to me.

Look up Moronix.

Larabel's benchmarks are fundamentally flawed and he has his own agenda (example).

Unfortunately, I'm not the type to use Fedora. My loss I guess. Yea I've tried Gnome with Wayland and things did not function as they do without Wayland. I looked up Moronix. I'm not finding a lot of objective information I'm afraid. I recently found Phoronix but I'm not married to the site just yet. Thanks for the clarification

[vivalarevolución]

I installed Elementary OS on my old laptop for the sole purpose of trolling my Apple-obsessed family at a wedding this weekend.

[CSCoder4ever]

I installed Elementary OS on my old laptop for the sole purpose of trolling my Apple-obsessed family at a wedding this weekend.

were you successful?

[captsis]

Well, currently running custom kernel with Arch. Still use windows for gaming but have been running dual boot with Linux for several years.

[vivalarevolución]

I installed Elementary OS on my old laptop for the sole purpose of trolling my Apple-obsessed family at a wedding this weekend.

were you successful?

No, elementary OS trolled me first and freezes at the login screen when I wake up from suspend or a locked screen.

I actually don't mind the elementary OS experience, it isn't bad.  Looks great, easy to use, and the stock keyboard shortcuts actually make sense.  But very locked down on the customizability, as expected because it is intended for first time Linux users.  I added a GUI package manager and x-tile to make it usable for myself, and by the time I made some adjustments, it was basically Linux Mint.  If the login screen didn't freeze, I would probably still have it on my laptop.

[vivalarevolución]

So I went on a bender this week trying out eye candy DEs and distros, because I wanted something pretty on my laptop.  I tried the following: 

Ubuntu Unity
Ubuntu GNOME
Manjaro KDE
Linux Mint Cinnamon
Solus Budgie
Elementary OS (Pantheon)
Deepin

Overall, they all look attractive, and my favorites were Deepin and Elementary OS.  I admire a design that is visually attractive, easy to navigate, and is something you can work with, rather than work against.  But the tradeoff for all of them is limited out-of-the-box customizability and flexibility, as expected.  Except Cinnamon and KDE, they both can look pretty and have plenty of customization options, I just annoyed with having to configure my desktop to work how I want.  I was looking for something attractive and ready to go for my laptop without much configuration.

I know that I'm repeating well known info, just wanted to share some thoughts about my Linux adventures this past week.

[xtrafrood]

So I went on a bender this week trying out eye candy DEs and distros, because I wanted something pretty on my laptop.  I tried the following: 

Ubuntu Unity
Ubuntu GNOME
Manjaro KDE
Linux Mint Cinnamon
Solus Budgie
Elementary OS (Pantheon)
Deepin

Overall, they all look attractive, and my favorites were Deepin and Elementary OS.  I admire a design that is visually attractive, easy to navigate, and is something you can work with, rather than work against.  But the tradeoff for all of them is limited out-of-the-box customizability and flexibility, as expected.  Except Cinnamon and KDE, they both can look pretty and have plenty of customization options, I just annoyed with having to configure my desktop to work how I want.  I was looking for something attractive and ready to go for my laptop without much configuration.

I know that I'm repeating well known info, just wanted to share some thoughts about my Linux adventures this past week.

Deepin window manager is absolutely gorgeous! It's a shame that I'll have to support the more 'gamer friendly' (Mint/Cinnamon) distros and window managers because of my needs. But a part of me wants to switch from Debian/Gnome to Arch/Deepin as my new 'non-gaming distro' for when I start dual hot swapping. So purty

[vivalarevolución]

Deepin is quite gorgeous.  I configure it to look like Chrome OS, as I prefer the simplicity of that interface.  The keyboard shortcuts on Deepin and Elementary also are quite logical, whereas a lot of the DEs have nonsensical shortcuts that I end up changing.

[fohat.digs]

Except Cinnamon and KDE, they both can look pretty and have plenty of customization options, I just annoyed with having to configure my desktop to work how I want.

I found that KDE was good but the learning/adapting curve for Yast was steep and help is hard to get.

Cinnamon seems excellent in almost every way and I have had very few complaints.

However, if you are an Apple guy, then I don't know what to say. Whenever my wife (an Apple worshiper) asks me for help I feel like I am lost in a hostile alien universe. Of course, 90% of her questions are for things that I would do simply in Windows with Control Panel, Disk Management, or add-on utility programs. In Linux, I have to Google for instructions, but they are usually available.

[jal]

That says everything about why FreeBSD isn't an option for me with my laptops... I like things to *work*.

lawl, I also wanted something I'd have no qualms about leaving in the trunk of my car when I work, I call it a win win on my part!
[/quote]

Typing this on a Mac Pro, so you know my tastes in laptops. But in general, I disagree...

As I see it, hardware is transient; ultimately disposable. The OS (and keyboard!) is what I interact with, and I've learned buy the hardware to best serve the OS. It doesn't hurt that I tend to build biggish systems, so I generally don't care about the latest driver needed to support some cost-cutting crapification of some subsystem.[1]

Coincidentally, the motherboard on my (FreeBSD) storage server died about a month ago, and I'm hoping I can make time to rebuild it this weekend, now that all the parts are finally in. While changing OSes at this point would be really painful (something like 22-ish TB of data on sitting on ZFS), I'm extremely happy with FreeBSD, and almost always have been since I started using it in the 90s, so making sure the hardware was compatible was a no-brainer.

So yah. Started rambling a bit, forgive an oldster. But my point is that you spend more of your precious time using your OS of choice than you do the hardware, which dies or becomes obsolete. So modulo a need for some specific hardware with OS requirements (I'm thinking proprietary data acquisition boards, some robotics platforms, that sort of thing), match your hardware to your OS.

[1] One painful exception to this is my main desktop. I'm running Ubuntu on it now, due to a highly aggravating conjunction of software/hardware that I went out on a limb with. Briefly, I'm running virtualized win7 on it to support win-only software, and configured VGA-passthrough for an Nvidia Quadro K4000. Due to complicated issues I didn't anticipate related to Nvidia being poopy-heads, and to the IOMMU and the way my PCI bus ended up configured, I had to patch the kernel with an Nvidia-specific hack as well as a PCI patch. Never figured out why, but I couldn't get the combination working on vanilla Debian, which is my preferred workstation OS, but could when I tried it with Ubuntu. (Also had some stupid issues with the Nvidia driver under virtualized Windows, but I expect that, because I'm so very not a Windows person.) And after ripping out Gnome and some of the other Ubuntu crap I don't like, it it close enough.

[vivalarevolución]

As I see it, hardware is transient; ultimately disposable. The OS (and keyboard!) is what I interact with, and I've learned buy the hardware to best serve the OS. It doesn't hurt that I tend to build biggish systems, so I generally don't care about the latest driver needed to support some cost-cutting crapification of some subsystem.[1]

I completely agree with this sentiment.  The laptop I spoke of earlier is a Lenovo T420 released in 2012, pulled from a business environment (The T420 is one of the last models with old-style Thinkpad keyboards, by the way).  For basically any distro that I use, it works perfectly fine, even the ones that have more eye candy and are heavy on system resources.

[CSCoder4ever]

As I see it, hardware is transient; ultimately disposable. The OS (and keyboard!) is what I interact with, and I've learned buy the hardware to best serve the OS. It doesn't hurt that I tend to build biggish systems, so I generally don't care about the latest driver needed to support some cost-cutting crapification of some subsystem.[1]

I'm not sure who you are disagreeing with, but I too agree. At the same time though, if I can get one year out of my y700 that would be incredible 

[vivalarevolución]

Except Cinnamon and KDE, they both can look pretty and have plenty of customization options, I just annoyed with having to configure my desktop to work how I want.

I found that KDE was good but the learning/adapting curve for Yast was steep and help is hard to get.

Cinnamon seems excellent in almost every way and I have had very few complaints.

However, if you are an Apple guy, then I don't know what to say. Whenever my wife (an Apple worshiper) asks me for help I feel like I am lost in a hostile alien universe. Of course, 90% of her questions are for things that I would do simply in Windows with Control Panel, Disk Management, or add-on utility programs. In Linux, I have to Google for instructions, but they are usually available.

KDE and Cinnamon both do a great job of being visually attractive and thoroughly configurable.  I admire some wiz-bang type stuff every now and then.

I found Yast entirely too comprehensive and powerful for my OS administration needs.  I know that OpenSUSE tried to make a bigger play for a more casual computer user with the whole Leap/Tumbleweed thing, but I think the OS needs more refinements to make inroads with the casual user.  I also had some of the wireless connection issues that you have mentioned in your posts.

I used to be an Apple guy, until they moved all their machines to soldered on RAM and storage drives, which meant buying a new machine for performance upgrades, and also made operating system changes that inhibited my workflow.  I reached my limit with their forced adoption, sold my Macbook Pro, and haven't looked back.