#a history of all the distros and things I've tried

[sl33py-g4m3r]

ramble about FreeBSD and Unix~~

how out of my depth would I be trying to install FreeBSD?

would it even boot on my machine?

am I smart enough to go through the install for the system itself as well as get the GUI that I want?

I think you have to go through the command line for quite a bit of time before you get a GUI up and running....

I started off being really interested in BSD/Unix in high school, and tried to fiddle around with a BSD live disc thing in a book (that I don't remember the name of) and then only fiddled around with Linux.

I've been watching videos on youtube of people expressing how stable FreeBSD's modern release is~~

I want to use it on my own hardware; but that's a problem with it I believe, is that it works on sort of limited amount of hardware, as opposed to Linux, that you could even run on a toaster...

Is it really that much harder to deal with than Linux?

Of course I've only dealt with a few distros~~ the rundown of distros I've messed around with are;

Ubuntu (not anymore tho)

Debian (current os being Linux Mint Debian 6)

OpenSUSE briefly (tried to get my sibling to use it on their laptop, with them knowing next to nothing about Linux, sorry...)

Fedora back in high school, I ran it on a laptop for a while. I miss GNOME....

Mageia (I dual booted it on a computer running windows 7, also in or right after high school, so a long time ago)

attempted GhostBSD but it wouldn't boot after install from the live CD (also many years ago at this point)

I like to hop around and (hopefully now I have, yeah right...) I can't make up my mind which I actually want to use permanently.

Linux Mint Debian edition is really good so far tho~~!!

Current PC is an ASUS ROG Stryx (spelling?) that I bought on impulse many years ago~~ Was running windows 10, fixed the issue and now use the OS stated above~~

or maybe I should maybe ditch Mint and run straight Debian... Thought of that too. and it might have an easier time installing and actually booting than FreeBSD on this machine...

but then BSD and by extension unix is meant to be used on older hardware and to be efficient both in execution of things, and space.

"do one thing and do it well" iirc was a bit of the unix philosophy...

yeah, no I HATE technology /heavy sarcasm/

[samflir]

What makes a good boot sequence?

A while ago, I had my first truly viral post on Mastodon. It was this:

You might've seen it. It got almost four hundred boosts and reached beyond Mastodon to reddit and even 4chan. I even saw an edit with a spinning frog on the left screen. I knew the post would go down well with tech.lgbt but I never expected it to blow up the way it did.

I tried my best to express succinctly exactly what it is I miss about BIOS motherboards in the age of UEFI in this picture. I think looking at a logo and spinner/loading bar is boring compared to seeing a bunch of status messages scroll up the screen indicating hardware being activated, services being started up and tasks being run. It takes the soul out of a computer when it hides its computeriness.

I think a lot of people misunderstood my post as expressing a practical preference over an aesthetic one, and there was at least a few thinking this was a Linux fanboy post, which it certainly is not. So here's the long version of a meme I made lol.

Stages

I remember using two family desktop computers before moving over a family laptop. One ran Windows XP and the other ran Windows 7. Both were of the BIOS era, which meant that when booting, they displayed some status information in white on black with a blinking cursor before loading the operating system. On the XP machine, I spent longer in this liminal space because it dual-booted. I needed to select Windows XP from a list of Linux distros when booting it.

I've always liked this. Even as a very little kid I had some sense that what I was seeing was a look back into the history of computing. It felt like a look "behind the scenes" of the main GUI-based operating system into something more primitive. This made computers even more interesting than they already were, to me.

Sequences

The way old computers booted was appealing to my love of all kinds of fixed, repeating sequences. I never skip the intros to TV shows and I get annoyed when my local cinema forgets to show the BBFC ratings card immediately before the film, even though doing so is totally pointless and it's kinda strange that they do that in the first place. Can you tell I'm autistic?

Booting the windows 7 computer would involve this sequence of distinct stages: BIOS white text -> Windows 7 logo with "starting windows" below in the wrong aspect ratio -> switch to correct resolution with loading spinner on the screen -> login screen.

Skipping any would feel wrong to me because it's missing a step in one of those fixed sequences I love so much. And every computer that doesn't start with BIOS diagnostic messages is sadly missing that step to my brain, and feels off.

Low-level magic

I am extremely curious about how things work and always have been, so little reminders when using a computer that it has all sorts of complex inner workings and background processes going on are very interesting to me, so I prefer boot sequences that expose the low-level magic going on and build up to the GUI. Starting in the GUI immediately presents it as fundamental, as if it's not just a pile of abstractions on top of one another. It feels deceptive.

There may actually be some educational and practical value in computers booting in verbose mode by default. Kids using computers for the first time get to see that there's a lot more to their computer than the parts they interact with (sparking curiosity!), and if a boot fails, technicians are better able to diagnose the problem over a phone call with a non-technical person.

Absolute boot sequence perfection

There's still one last thing missing from my family computer's boot sequence, and that's a brief flicker of garbage on screen as VRAM is cleared out. Can't have everything I guess. Slo-mo example from The 8-Bit Guy here:

[mountmortar]

also kind of down the same vein as this post, the idea that "what's most important in an operating system is that it works for you" can also be expanded to "what's most important in a browser is that it works for you". i say this as an enthusiast of firefox (and its forks) myself and someone who daily drives it: sometimes firefox fucking sucks (ESPECIALLY on mobile). it can be very resource-intensive and it does have a history of memory leakage among other things. despite what people online may tell you (and i have seen plenty of like. fear-mongering posts about it. for SOME reason) it is not the end of the world if you have to use a chromium-based browser because firefox keeps fucking up on you for whatever reason and nothing you do seems to fix it. yes it sucks that chromium has a monopoly on the browser market but like goddamn sometimes you do need your shit to just work. if your main concern when web browsing is privacy and you don't mind putting up with jank sometimes then yes, firefox and its forks (e.g. librewolf) will probably be a perfect fit for you. but if you're someone who just cannot fucking get it to work for you then there are a lot of other chromium-based browsers out there that aren't google chrome that you can also try to see if they work for you. and like. That's Fine. just find what works best for you and doesn't fuck up your computer.

if you'd like a couple extra options to consider, currently the two most popular chromium-based alternatives to chrome (but absolutely not the only ones!) are brave and vivaldi. i've used both extensively and can vouch for the fact that they work damn well (on both macOS and linux, at least. i can't say anything about windows because i don't have windows). in my own personal experience, brave outperformed vivaldi on macOS and vivaldi outperformed brave on linux (tried it on a few different ubuntu-based distros).

that being said, brave might be an automatic turnoff for a lot of people because it has a fuckton of cryptocurrency + AI features baked into it. you can disable all these features and wipe them from your sight, but obviously a lot of people will understandably take issue with the fact that these features are built into it in the first place. and getting out of the tech side of things for a moment just for the sake of transparency (and because i know it's important to some, though the Average User is probably not going to give a shit), the ceo of its parent company is brendan eich, who is also the creator of javascript. and he also sucks bad, to put it lightly (link to wikipedia article; he did donate to a campaign against gay marriage in 2008). but i can say that the browser, which is open-source, runs very well and it plans to hold on to support for extensions like ublock origin (which google is planning to fuck over for chromium-based browsers) for as long as possible, even when the plug for manifest v2 is pulled entirely. it has its own adblocker as well, which, while not on ublock origin's level, is pretty good. i can vouch for it on mobile (android) as well—it runs smoothly and i never had any issues with it whatsoever.

brave's privacy policy can be found here. an article getting into a controversy regarding brave's handling of user data can be found here.

vivaldi catches a bit of flak for being proprietary freeware instead of totally open-source, but it has no crypto/AI features and is probably one of the most customizable browsers out there (note: more customization means the likelihood that something breaks on you is increased, but that holds true for literally anything you do. think macOS vs. windows for example). for the sake of equal comparison and transparency, i'll also mention the ceo of its parent company, jon stephenson von tetzchner, who co-founded the opera browser (originally released in 1995, still used today) before he eventually left and started vivaldi in 2015. he doesn't seem to suck bad on the like brendan eich does at the time of writing this (no donations to oppress gay people, lmao). getting back into tech things, i will say that while vivaldi has its own adblocker like brave, it is not nearly as good. also, they are not currently planning to try and hold on to support for extensions affected by the manifest v3 change like ublock origin at the time of writing this, and instead are going to continually upgrade their own adblocker to be better than it currently is. ultimately, vivaldi can be a bit more resource-heavy than brave because of all the customization options, but i didn't find it to be too over-the-top and the browser itself worked just fine with no breakage. vivaldi is actually my main mobile browser!

vivaldi's privacy policy can be found here. as of the time of writing this post, there have been no privacy controversies associated with it.

[autolenaphilia]

MX Linux review

I've used my old secondary computer to distrohop and try out various Linux distributions. And I've recently tried out MX Linux. It is Debian-based, one of my favourite things, and its flagship desktop environment is Xfce, another of my favourite things. I'm currently running Debian with Xfce on my main machine, which provides a good point of comparison.

I have used Antix, which is a closely related distro, with developers working on both. MX is a more fully-featured distro, a self-described "middle-weight" rather than lightweight. The gist of the history is that Antix was originally based on a distro called MEPIS, and when development on that distro died, the Antix community got together with the Mepis community to create a continuation, which is MX.

So what does MX add that is not in vanilla Debian with Xfce? Quite a lot actually, that makes the whole experience a lot more user friendly. The main thing is the MX tools, a set of GUI-based tools that does a ton of useful stuff. The most important IMO is a package manager with update notifications that handles flatpaks in addition to .deb based packages. On Debian, I have to use synaptic to manage .debs, install and update flatpaks entirely via command line, and remember to check for updates myself. Like I know how to do that, but can't argue with something that makes things easier.

One of the more interesting tools is a boot options manager, which enables you to configure boot options from within a booted-up system. This enables you to choose init systems between sisvinit and systemd. Systemd is not enabled by default, the default is sivinit, but it is included in order to run programs that require it. And with the boot options, you can set MX to use systemd as the default. Now systemd is controversial and there are other distros that are systemd-free versions of popular distros, like artix for arch, and devuan for debian. And MX Linux provides a good compromise in the debate by allowing you to choose the init system quite easily.

There are other mx tools, like a multimedia codec installer, a gpg key fixer, and a live usb boot maker that enables you to clone a running system, and make an iso of it, to transfer it to another computer.

MX also does other useful things, like backporting newer versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Libreoffice than what Debian provides. And flatpak is enabled by default.

The distro's documentation is excellent too. The user manual is excellent, providing information on how to use MX Linux and how it works, but also on Linux in general works and how to migrate from a proprietary OS.

All in all, MX Linux is a solid derivative distro. It adds features and options to its Debian base without breaking things in the process. And it's entirely community-run, no corporate bullshit like with Canonical. One of the devs even has "anticapitalista" as a handle.