What are Reddit's favorite Linux Distro Apps?

Oh, she probably got 'tech support' from some 'geek' or kid next door, who figured she had a virus or some other malware, or otherwise live in an alternate universe where everyone shares their opinion and is adept at learning new systems and software. If you don't know the type I'm talking about, some day you will - it is how a lot of old people end up with Ubuntu and can't understand why they can't install Microsoft Word or load their software for their Cricut machine. Their particular 'kink' must've been MenuetOS, and they decided to 'evangelize' and have her 'adopt' it.

https://www.archlinux.org/retro/2002/

Hello, it appears you tried to put a link in a title, since most users cant click these I have placed it here for you

^I ^am ^a ^bot ^if ^you ^have ^any ^suggestions ^dm ^me

Anonymous is you.

It's a concept; no kings, no goverments, no coorporations; just people, absolute nobodies, anonymous people without name; so what can a nobody do?...

Hence the slogan: "We are anonymous"

https://www.kali.org/ Here, start learning :D

The author may want to check Qubes OS and its domains with colored borders.

They even mention fake prompts and alerts in their doc.

This is just reactionary and useless word salat. Like seriously, take two steps back and figure out what problem you are trying to solve in the first place. Than figure out if having that document would be helping with that. Take this bit:

> Individual characteristics, including but not limited to, body, sex, sexual preference, race, language, religion, nationality, or political preferences are irrelevant in the scope of the project and will not be taken into account concerning your value or that of your contribution to the project.

What problem is that trying to solve? None of those things have ever been a problem in any project I have seen. Writing down "These things that never mattered, don't matter" isn't helping anything, it's useless waste of ink.

> Authority or position in the project will be proportional to the accrued contribution. Seniority must be earned.

So if you a really useful person comes along they can't get into an authority position due to not being long enough involved in the project? Not very Meritocratic.

For a good Code of Conduct see Debian. It tells you how to behave, what to expect and gives you a rationale for why. It's a project specific set of rules that tells you the philosophy behind the project is already running it at and things that have proven useful, it's not trying to reshape the community by means of authoritarian rules.

A Code of Conduct needs to be minimalistic and actually address problems a project is having.

New stuff in Debian 8:

systemd is now the default init system.
arm64, 64-bit port for ARM machines and ppc64el, 64-bit little-endian port for POWER machines are now supported on Debian 8.
Gnome 3.14
Cinnamon & mate-desktop
You can easily install audio, midi, graphics, video, using the tasksel interface.
New updated documents including video tutorials.
More info here.

I hate to be that guy, but Linux is a less consumerist alternative that really just requires a bit more time and patience. You can always start with Ubuntu.

Sorry I just had to please don't hate me

*Arch Linux

Arch Linux is the sweet spot between the two.

Have you heard about Arch Linux?

I use Arch Linux.

I think you should try Arch Linux.

Arch Linux is the best.

Did I mention Arch Linux already?

Everybody should use Arch Linux.

You should use Arch Linux.

Arch Linux is the way to go!

Arch Linux^Arch Linux^Arch Linux^Arch Linux^<strong>Arch Linux</strong>

Edit: Disclaimer: I ^do ^^actually ^^^use ^^^^Arch...

To be fair, unattended-upgrades is actually a good idea because it only cares about security updates, so this shouldn't take long and afaik it should usually not happen during shutdown.

But I personally think that this makes a lot more sense on a server than on a desktop computer, because of the exposure of the server to the open internet.

download linux desktop
install on USB drive using universal usb installer
download SNES roms (1gb for every game ever including fan games)
open up terminal and type: sudo apt-get install zsnes
buy 8 dollar usb controller off of amazon

you now have a what you want.

want it portable? buy an raspberry pi and an hdmi chord.

This sounds like the kind of thing its creator would've probably talked about in an interview at some point...so let's try that -

https://www.google.com/search?q=arch+pacman+interview

The second link looks perfect.

~~-------~~

>Pacman doesn't really do anything that other package managers have not done before. It's goal is to do all the mundane parts of package management, leaving the tricky parts up to the ever-capable administrator.

"Would you be able to compare pacman with apt-get? Is there anything that pacman does better than apt-get?"

>Apt-get is far more mature and feature-rich than pacman. But functionality-wise the two are comparable. Pacman's --sync operation was definitely inspired by apt-get, but pacman is more of a "complete" packaging system, whereas apt-get fills in the features that dpkg doesn't provide.

>In my limited experience with apt-get, the only complaints I had were the awkward split between apt-get and dpkg, and the odd time when apt-get would fubar my system with its recommended upgrades/replaces. Otherwise it's a great tool. I used it for a good while with PLD.

~~-------~~

And there you go, there's your answer. Judd Vinet wanted to create a simple standalone package manager for his operating system.

It's probably not what they meant, but yeah that could use some re-wording.

You may as well remind them that torrenting Ubuntu Linux or a Humble Bundle purchase is not illegal & won't break any copyrights.

You would be the perfect candidate to give Linux a go to be honest - works very similarly to MacOS (both Unix-based) and you can even customize, say Ubuntu to look pretty similar.

There are even Distros that come "Mac-Like"such as ElementaryOS

Under the Ubuntu font license, you are not allowed to make changes to the font even for your own personal use unless you also change its name, and you are not allowed to distribute the font without changes unless you keep the name the same.

This is considered a violation of freedom one, so the software is not free.

This is why I use an audio normalization filter.

Movies constantly do this shit. I don't want quiet dialog and super loud explosions. I just want to listen to things at a normal volume.

EDIT:

If you're on arch, install swh-plugins, then create the file ~/.config/pulse/default.pa and add the following lines:

.nofail .include /etc/pulse/default.pa load-module module-ladspa-sink sink_name=ladspa_sink plugin=dyson_compress_1403 label=dysonCompress control=0,1,0.5,0.99 load-module module-ladspa-sink sink_name=ladspa_normalized master=ladspa_sink plugin=fast_lookahead_limiter_1913 label=fastLookaheadLimiter control=10,0,0.8 set-default-sink ladspa_normalized

Reload pulseaudio (pulseaudio -k) and presto, now all your audio is normalized. You can quickly toggle the filter on and off through the pulseaudio GUI or even set it to only run on certain streams. I have the filter set to my Chromium and VLC streams, but not my music player stream because that's the only one where I appreciate the higher dynamic range.

Edit2:

VLC has a built-in normalization setting. You can just use that if you're not on Linux or don't feel like fucking with pulseaudio.

Because nothing underlines the concept of 'humanity to others' like a tribute to persons that are responsible for the killings of millions of people, right?

Former Manjaro user here. In the 2 years it was my daily driver, my system broke twice. I'm all for a 2 week delay to make a more stable system. But what is the point if you are never going to act on the issues reported upstream?.

Unlike Arch, they include an distro automatic updates by default. Yet they don't act on major bug. And they don't rush those bug fixes. So you have to wait 2 weeks for the fix to automatically be applied.

Funny this bug is getting so much attention. Far more serious issue have gotten through their nonexistent QC.

I believe the telemetry stuff was backported to 7, someone correct me if I'm wrong.

And Mac is closer to Linux than it is to Windows. I mean, for the most part you're not going to know that unless you're the type to open a terminal, but it is maybe something if you're in tech.

If you're looking for something a little easier to use with a clean UI out of the box, you could check out ElementaryOS.

Yes, comrade:

>Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It is often described as reminding us that ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. We bring the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers and software. The Ubuntu distribution represents the best of what the world’s software community has shared with the world.

Check https://www.archlinux.org/news/ before running an update and 99% of those problems are gone. I'm an arch user since 2013 and had only a couple of problems since and most of them were fixed by a later update. Had more trouble with Ubuntu to be honest.

Oh, it's not reviewers and reddit that made Intel drop this idea. In fact Debian devs straight out said they refuse to publish this microcode update... and that means no patches to a SHITLOAD of companies and government agencies all over the world:

https://www.debian.org/users/

Heck, depending on how it would be interpreted it would be illegal to use monitoring software on servers. As in - any half decent company must be using something to measure CPU load over time. Now, they would also install this microcode update and see it possibly CHANGING from the original data. It could even make them consider having to buy additional servers if the load increased too much. That's the very definition of "benchmarking".

Intel dropped a ball on that one alright and could possibly find itself under a rain of lawsuits since this would effectively make system administration not compliant with their license terms, that's ONE HELL of a fuck up to fight bad reviews.

No, a lot of people don't like the specific CoC that they introduced (I'm fairly certain nobody would have a problem if they used the Ruby CoC or the Debian CoC) and the baggage that comes with it (the writer of the CoC they chose has a habit of going into GitHub issues and demanding that certain people not be allowed to contribute to a project because of something they said on Twitter, views that specific CoC as a political document, and views it being adopted by Linux as having "won," whatever that's supposed to mean.)

Don't install Kali ever

It is not a general use distro

If you make forum posts asking how to install steam on it or why it's so hard and no one will help you, people will just laugh at you

Stop it. Using Kali does not make you hackerman. It's a specific tool for use in live usb environments by a specific profession or researchers

This, I think is something most people who already use Linux don't get. Like, think of the iPhone. Imagine if it had repos. How the hell would a new developer get traction on his software? The App Store team collates, editorialises and promotes software. I can literally go on the App Store, look at the programs there and download/buy one if I like it. If I were to go on the App Store and find nothing but a list of software available organised either alphabetically or date last updated, well, why the fuck would I want to even open the app store? Case in point: if the App Store looked like this, I'd be one of the first to nope out and I like to think I'm pretty tech savvy.

Sure, you could build a GUI like synaptic, but the point is that the App Store model is built on top of the repo model to ensure discoverability, something most ordinary people need, and even tech nerds on occasion appreciate. Synaptic attempts to do it, but it doesn't have traction because people in this realm don't really see the need for discoverability. There's other channels in the FOSS world for that, and there aren't enough new programs coming up for one to require curation.

You are forgetting the trusted users.

Developers maintain [core] and [extra]. They also do the decisions regarding the distribution.

Trusted Users maintain [community] and the AUR. https://www.archlinux.org/people/trusted-users/

>How can such a small team support so many packages and make sure everything works?

[core] and [extra] are tested while [community] is not. We also do close to none patching and mostly package whatever upstream gives us. Most of the bugs/problems are usually related to the software from upstream, and not us doing something wrong with N number of patches.

There was a better one in 2012: https://www.archlinux.org/news/the-lib-directory-becomes-a-symlink/

It was nice when pacman deleted everything in my /lib except for two items, preventing me from even opening a shell.

A lot of people use the word "open source" to mean "the source is publicly available."

A lot of people use the word "open source" to mean "complaint with the OSI's Open Source Definition," a document which is essentially the Debian Free Software Guidelines edited to remove specific mentions of Debian.

GP is one of the former group, which confuses everyone in the latter group whose definitions of "open source" software and "free software" are basically the same. (So I've largely stopped using the term "open source," personally, unless the meaning is clear from context.)

Then, of course, there are the people who use "open source" to mean "the same rules about licensing as free software, but describing a profitable business practice and not an ethical ideal," which gets super fuzzy....

I don't know what you're talking about. Microsoft is just trying to help us poor consumers try to navigate the vast world of proprietary software. There's literally no better alternatives, so we should just accept Windows as the standard, fellas.

Being sarcastic is fun an all, but there are actually many free tools available that you can download, which will disable all of the "undesirable" features of Windows 10. I don't know why some people make such a fuss about it.

I feel like the bigger point of this story is that Microsoft has elected to monitor your computer use.

https://www.ubuntu.com/

Edit: An additional link for all my haters to help them turn off windows 10 key logger, which monitors your computer use.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2974057/windows/how-to-turn-off-windows-10s-keylogger-yes-it-still-has-one.html

Eine für mich verständliche Kritik an dem Linux CoC ist, dass er sehr viel Spielraum in der Auslegung lässt. Das kann dazu führen, dass ernstgemeinte Kritik am Code nicht mehr stattfindet, weil Leute Angst haben, dass ihre Kritik als persönlicher Angriff aufgefasst wird. So etwas lässt sich mMn vermeiden wenn man eine Unschuldsvermutung in den CoC übernehmen würde. (Wie z.B. bei Debian)

Sounds like you're looking for Linux From Scratch then, where it isn't an option to not learn how everything works underneath.

However, I'd still consider keeping distros like Debian around, because while you can learn a lot from doing it that way, it's also not all that practical to have to manually track everything like that.

Yeah, KDE is not perfect and there is a long road ahead. But compared to other projects, even Gnome, it's by far the most promising player. But please, focus on new developers more. T

he docs are written like a wiki. Consider creating something like this https://developer.elementary.io/ and especially this https://elementary.io/docs/code/getting-started#git something written in more "digestible" form.

Elementary is focusing on developers a lot recently and while it seems not important from the point of view of the "veteran" KDE devs, I think KDE would make a huge mistake if it ignores the new developers.

So, updated docs, more digestible and easy-written getting started guide and perhaps a few video tutorial of creating a simple text editor and perhaps simple widget would be great.

A well thought out and prepared 20 or 30 minute video would be great.

Maybe even showing how to use KDevelop instead of QtCreator.

And the most important thing is to use a simple language and not to advance and in depth explanations.

Example of what I mean: "Remember how when we compiled our code, we used the valac command and the argument --pkg gtk+-3.0? What we did there was make use of a "library". If you're not familiar with the idea of libraries, a library is a collection of methods that your program can use. So this argument tells valac to include the GTK+ library (version 3.0) when compiling our app."

Experienced programmers will jump to docs, you need to think just about the beginners. Just my 3 cents.

The Debian Social Contract. Ubuntu is run by a company, Canonical. They are motivated by profit, and so they make decisions that are not best for users or for free software as a whole.

> Who uses bleeding-edge systemd anyway? Arch?

Core is at 239, https://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/systemd/

240 is available in the testing repo, but I'm guessing it won't be moved to core because of this.

So their license no longer meets the Open Source Definition

> 5) No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

> 6) No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

These came from the Debian Free Software Guidelines

Makes perfect sense. Canonical sells ESM support already, it's really just extending it a couple of years and maybe providing the packages to everyone to try and gain adoption (details haven't been published yet). Both Red Hat and SUSE have ten year support with additional addons available that extend it to 13 years.

My advice:
Install newsbeuter (RSS feed reader).
Put

https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/

in your ~/.newsbeuter/urls file
Put

alias update='newsbeuter && sudo pacman -Syu'

in your ~/.bashrc
now typing

update

will start newsbeuter so you can read the Arch news about current updating issues, then as soon as you quit it, start pacman.

Spot on point about Debian's shitty download page. Clicking through several links looking for an ISO for making a bootable USB drive got me here...just a list of files. Do I need all of them? Just one? Several links back there's long-winded a guide that might have the answer buried in it somewhere.

Compare this to Ubuntu, where you can just download the ISO directly from their download page and then use the "Make Startup Disk" tool to install it. Debian would be #1 if they spent some time on their usability.

Yup, there's a new sheriff in town. And her name is Jessie :) On a related note:

Grab pre-built OpenStack images ready to use here.
And, you are just an apt-get dist-upgrade away from Jessie! Find how, reading the official installation guide

If you’re really interested:

Debian Administrators Handbook (PDF)

Securing Debian (HTML)

Even the Debian project leader agrees:

> We should always be asking ourselves the difficult questions such as why the Debian Wiki did not become the much-lauded Archlinux Wiki

For people who don't want to install completely different OS, but still want the benefits of NixOS: You can also install the nix package manager on every Linux distribution and even macOS.

Then there is the Home Manager project based on Nix which gives you the (almost) same benefits as the NixOS configuration file for every Linux distribution. The only difference is Nix can this way you can only manage your userland programs and not for example the kernel itself!

that's a super general question.

as far a ricing (looking "pretty") goes, you can rice any distro. it's all about setting up the applications you want and configuring them. the first, and biggest, step is deciding which environment to use. full blown desktop (DE) or just a simple window manager (WM). both have pros and cons, but many (not all) the setups you see here are just a wm. i suggest to everyone who asks this to try the linuxbbq cream live iso. it's got 76 different window managers pre-installed so you can try out lots of them and see what you like.

the distro question on the other hand is much harder to answer. there are a great number of them, and many are variants of the same base, each with different goals and methods of doing things. i guess my best suggestion is to visit distrowatch and read up. i'm a distrohopper. i try out lots of them and change my setup when i see something new i want to try out. i don't understand fanatical devotion to one or another. at their core they're similar in many ways. just pick one and dive in. for me, the best way to learn is to do. lots of people will suggest you start with a simple system to get and get your feet wet, while others will tell you to try something more challenging and learn a lot very quickly. it's all about how you want to learn.

Kind of fun to watch the zealots twist themselves up over this. Started out as strident "apple would never do this".

Then when Apple itself came out and said "Yep, we're gonna scan your phones, ipads, laptops and desktops... Um.... For the children!!!! Yeah, that's it. For the chiiiiiildren!!".

Now the zealots are all gushing and weeping with joy that Apple is policing them. "Scan me harder, Daddy!!! For the children!!!"

It is kind of heart warming that there's starting to be a bit of push back over in the apple subreddit. I'm tempted to venture over there and tell them about qubes OS.

"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more." http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

The Arch Wiki has database backups but it's also distributed in a couple forms via Arch Linux packages.

Even if the wiki and all the backups were wiped out, the rendered formats (lite, html) would still be present on many people's machines and archives of old packages.

You have complete control over your system with pretty much any distro. This isn't something exclusive to Arch. You can choose your window manager, DE, core apps etc. on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and so on.

Similar story with pre-installed stuff. Arch is only more minimal than the default install image for other distros, but most of those other distros also offer very minimal install images. For example: Debian's netinstall for amd64 is ~250MB, compared to Arch's 476MB image. This is only the install image so it doesn't exactly reflect the size of the system once installed, but I hope you get the point regardless.

People who don't understand much about Linux often tout customisation and non-bloat as advantages of Arch, because they don't understand that those points apply to most other distributions as well. In fact, I'd argue that Arch is less customisable than most. It's a shame, since Arch has quite a few actual advantages that people tend to skip over.

Your points about the AUR and the wiki are exactly the biggest selling points of Arch, in my opinion, on top of its bleeding-edge rolling-release nature. Closely tied to the AUR, I also like the package build system - it makes it very easy to compile a package yourself, for example if you wanted to patch it or adjust a compile-time option. It's hard to grasp exactly how great the AUR/wiki are until you switch from Arch to another distro and realise that a once-trivial task has suddenly become a pain, or that the concise and accurate wiki pages you're used to no longer perfectly apply to your system.

Don't undersell Arch as being "the customisable distro" - Gentoo has that title, and even among binary distros Arch isn't as customisable as some. No point giving people misleading information about customisation when there are plenty of real reasons that Arch is awesome :)

>Following 9 months of deprecation period, support for the i686 architecture effectively ends today. By the end of November, i686 packages will be removed from our mirrors and later from the packages archive. >For users unable to upgrade their hardware to x86_64, an alternative is a community maintained fork named Arch Linux 32. See their website for details on migrating existing installations.

Ever? The bug introduced into the RNG used for key generator one was pretty bad, and came from a Debian patch.

There needs to be another panel below this where spongebob goes super siyan 2 and it says: "Using a computer's motherboard CMOS/BIOS ROM boot terminal, with no operating system and then writing your own Linux distribution from there, using tips from Linux from scratch".

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/6.6/chapter01/how.html

It's not as bad as it used to be, now that it doesn't use root as default user anymore. But Kali simply isn't really made for everyday use. It's even mentioned in their docs: https://www.kali.org/docs/introduction/should-i-use-kali-linux/

>As the distribution’s developers, you might expect us to recommend that everyone should be using Kali Linux. The fact of the matter is, however, that Kali is a Linux distribution specifically geared towards professional penetration testers and security specialists, and given its unique nature, it is NOT a recommended distribution if you’re unfamiliar with Linux or are looking for a general-purpose Linux desktop distribution for development, web design, gaming, etc.

I'd instead recommend trying Debian (which is what Kali is based on) or OpenSUSE, which are more beginner friendly and actually made to be used as a daily driver.

I think the best representation of how it will look and feel is using a live usb. First create a live usb. Then give it a try by booting from the USB. Just be sure to select the live session instead of installing. When you're ready to dive completely in you can install using the same usb drive.

Here's my long-ass alias that I use:
alias pac='curl -s https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/ | xmllint --xpath //item/title\ \|\ //item/pubDate /dev/stdin | sed -r -e "s:<title>([^<]*?)</title><pubDate>([^<]*?)</pubDate>:\2\t\1\n:g" | colout "^.*$" 205 && sudo pacman -Syu'
Through the second pipe fetches the latest news on updates from Arch. Gives you the heads up if there is an issue with a pkg that might be coming your way. The 'colout' part is a program that adds a bit of color to the output from Arch news, so not necessary. And lastly the actual update part. It's a long one-liner, but pretty useful.

E: Took out an extra space out that was causing it sed to error out. Thanks /u/ronjouch

Firstly, Debian likes forks :) (http://distrowatch.com/search.php?basedon=Debian&status=Active). We're quite comfortable with others taking Debian and modifying to suit their needs.

In Devuan's particular case though, I think they run the risk of underestimating just what a large job running a distribution is. In the end, it comes down to volunteer time. There wasn't enough people who were willing to put the work in to ensure that sysVinit was the default in Debian itself, so I'm not convinced that Devuan will continue as long as Debian has. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though!

Quite a question, one that I'm not sure can be entirely answered in a reddit comment, but I'll give it a go.

Generally, I'm very disturbed about the lack of diversity in not only Debian, but the free software movement generally (and even more so in STEM subjects). The Debian Women project has helped foster a more welcoming atmosphere in the project and I applaud it for that. We also have a diversity statement.

The main way I'd alter the programme would be to offer more funding, which we now do via an outreach team.

Why not? On Arch at least, the Intel microcode is managed through pacman, as is the more generalised linux-firmware package which includes AMDs ucode and WiFi chip firmware among other things. There's zero reason to force people to do it through the software center when the distributions package manager and maintainers can do all the work and make it just another update.

Depending on how you look at it this may be possible.

Here: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ Run through Linux from scratch and you’ll be able to build your own in days not months. Once you grasp how this works you can customize it and call it yours.

Putting together a distro is not that hard. The hard part comes when you are talking about package management on what you’ve built, packaging software, upgrades, etc. That’s the reason most people use a well established distribution.

That refers most probably to the linux-firmware package. It contains many proprietary binary blobs, that are required to get certain hardware to function, even if the corresponding kernel module is free software. Might also refer to some proprietary kernel modules in Arch's repos (like nvidia).

Alternatively, subscribe to the RSS feed.

(On a related note, get a feed reader. They're brilliant for following blogs, webcomics, service status feeds, news and all manner of things.)

I'm surprised that there's no mention of the official Debian Documentation. Specifically, the administrator's handbook and debian reference are great.

You can find both of them here: https://www.debian.org/doc/

(Though that should have been enough for 99% of all users its a downgrade, plain and simple. ? I tought the main problem is that people are pissed that someone else uploaded LibreOffice to the Windows Store as opposed to say Ubuntu Server?

The easiest way would be to follow a time-tested method like Linux From Scratch. But it is still quite hard, and most people who build a LFS do it for the learning experience and never actually use it in production.

Maybe elemenary os^1 ? Currently the most eye candyish distribution I think. Gnome looks also pretty simple, but it is a bit different than windows or os x, so she has to get into new habbits there. Or the most common solution, ubuntu, easy as hell, nothing to say there

when fiddling around with stuff, rebuilds even after the slightest configuration change take a really long time compared to the classical "edit config files directly" approach. Waiting 30s for your change to take effect can be frustrating.
While most of the packages in nixpkgs are reasonable up to date, there also are a lot of them that are (at least essentially) unmaintained. In most other distros you can expect every package in in the repositories to be actively maintained (in the packaging sense), but this isn't really the case in nixpkgs where everyone and their mother is a maintainer.
Packaging stuff is is still usually harder than for more conventional distros (at least ones with a somewhat sane build system), but nixpkgs has a lot of nice tooling for most "types" of software.
Documentation seems to be somewhat lacking. It feels like a lot of stuff is just glued together by hearsay and random blog posts you must know about. I also wish there was a nice way to access the documentation of the nixos modules that does not involve going to search.nixos.org all the time (Obligatory manix mention though).
You can't really make (local) changes to more central packages of your system without degrading your system to a gentoo.
Stuff not managed in configuration.nix is very prone to having security vulnerabilities as dependencies are never patched (by design). The fact that 100% of the GPG keys listed at https://nixos.org/community/teams/security.html are expired also does not make the best impression.
The command line sucks compared to the one of the lispy competition.

> Oh god, ask any question about Kali and that lot come out of the woodwork "yOuR nOt sUpPoSeD tO iNStAlL iT, yOu'Re sUpPoSeD tO oNlY rUn iT lIvE".

And we're right. If you're asking basic questions you shouldn't be using Kali. The Kali developers say so themselves.

elementary employs 2 people full time, one person part time, runs a bounty program, and kicks money upstream as much as we can afford to. We also maintain over 90 Open Source projects several of which have their own downstreams including Xubuntu, Deepin, and Pop!_OS to name a few. I don’t know where you get the idea that we put out a product that is mostly others’ work, but this is entirely incorrect. We provide a desktop environment, a number of apps, libraries, services, etc.

The vast majority of people do not pay anything at all for elementary OS, and as of such we do not have the money to hire any more staff than we currently have. The employees that we do have make far below market rates

And you can't attach to instances created with the older version if you update:

>Gaetan Bisson wrote:

> Upstream improvements in screen-4.2.1 will make users unable to reattach instances created with version 4.2.0 or older. Please upgrade to screen-4.2.1-2 only when they are unneeded. Apologies again for the inconvenience.

> URL: https://www.archlinux.org/news/screen-421-cannot-reattach-older-instances-either/

> > > Debian needs to let their "stable distro" user's know what to do with their problems and bug reports. Those go to the distro packager, not to JZW.

We do. We have our own bug tracker, our own documentation on how to report bugs, and our own tools (reportbug) which report bugs directly to Debian. I'm certain we could do a better job, but we've definitely tried to address this problem.

If you (or any upstream) is getting bug reports from Debian users directly, and have specific patches or methods that can be used to mitigate them, we'd love to hear about them. You can even contact me ( or ) directly.

They don't necessarily at all, it's entirely a property of the particular systems you seem to have experience with. As far as I know it's possible on both desktops and servers, but on desktops it may have some additional caveats as servers typically have simpler setups, e.g. no graphical interface to complicate things. I couldn't immediately find out how difficult it is to pull this off for desktop systems.

It's easier to just expect people to restart a device though, and since there is little market demand for devices not to reboot, many companies are reluctant to put aside resources for this.

Even as a home user who knows that this is possible, I don't require continuous uptime, so I too just reboot after receiving important updates.

Debian makes a point of running on a broad variety of architectures, so I doubt it. See here: https://www.debian.org/ports/.

Ubuntu has always focused on the PC, and because x86 is becoming more and more of a niche thing in favor of amd64, this move isn't too surprising.

> What bits of Linux are replaceable/swappable?

Everything.
From the C library to the init system to the desktop environment.

Everything, in fact, apart from the Kernel. Linux itself.
Because then, it's not a "Linux system"

Swap out the Kernel, and you have a non-Linux system.
Examples of which are:
Debian kFreeBSD
Gentoo FreeBSD

On top of the other steps already mentioned (VPNs and Tor):

Use open-source software (including for your OS). Not because it's better but because it allows for code review by anyone, which makes it more difficult to hide a backdoor or a malicious piece of code. Not impossible by any means, but it's more likely to get noticed and removed.
Don't link your services together. There is little point in using a VPN to protect your privacy if you then use your Facebook account to connect to Spotify, for instance.
Never use the same password for different services (especially for your mail account). Not directly linked to privacy, but if one of the services you use gets hacked at some point it ensures that the hackers (or whoever use the hacked infos) cannot connect to your other accounts.
Get to know the best security practices for your OS. Stuff like Debian has some awesome guides : https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/index.en.html
Kind of related to the previous point: Take some time to understand how firewalls work (especially the one you use). A good (but very strict) practice is to forbid all incoming/outgoing traffic by default, and then explicitely allow traffic from/to the services you trust. A well-configured firewall will get you a long way in terms of privacy/security. Also tools like Wireshark can help you see what's coming in and out of your network.
Stallman level of privacy: use open-source hardware and encrypted communication services (like Tutanota for e-mails). Thought that's very inconvenient in a day-to-day basis.

Edit: also forgot to mention the obvious: disable stuff like Javascript by default in your browser (plugins like ScriptBlock can make this more user-friendly). Your IP address is not the only way to figure out your identity: information like your screen resolution, OS, browser version, plugin combinations... can be used to narrow down your "profile", and Javascript for instance can provide those infos.

!Meanwhile in debian.org: Let's never update our website and keep updating pages that are never going to get linked to in the main page. Perhaps we should also drop the iso images in ftp/http and update the new ones as torrents without seed.

Keep in mind that Canonical asserts right on images and binary packages that goes beyond branding:

Edit: formatting

Should be the IP address of the Arch Linux homepage btw.

Edit: I found it. Take a look at /usr/lib/NetworkManager/conf.d/20-connectivity.conf. NetworkManager requests https://www.archlinux.org/check_network_status.txt to check for connectivity. This should be changeable by copying /usr/lib/NetworkManager/conf.d/20-connectivity.conf to /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/20-connectivity.conf.

In theory that should be Aaron Griffin, but he isn't super active these days. I recommend sending an email to a few Arch developers, and possibly send an email towards our mailing list.

I also proposed adding an [email protected] email address, so i'll notify you if anything changes.

https://www.archlinux.org/people/developers/

You might also use some alternatives that offer coloured output by default. I can recommend ripgrep as a nice replacement for grep. There is also exa for ls and tree but I have not tried it.

Why don't you simply use <code>reflector</code> and a pacman mirrorlist hook?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Reflector#Pacman_Hook

See reflector --help for all available parameters.

I'd start by doing Linux from Scratch and seeing what parts of that you want to dig more into. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Also consider checking out /r/homelab and building your own infrastructure for something interesting to you - maybe a Plex server, maybe hosting your own email server, that kind of thing.

I just don't see why we don't model a Code of Conduct after Debian's:

https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct

Be respectful
Assume good faith
Be collaborative
Try to be concise
Be open

I'm not certain, but I think even on Gnome (and other DE's) you can just install KDE Connect without the entire KDE/Plasma desktop.

On Arch at least, it only lists 9 dependencies, and in my non-expert poking around they don't seem to be too heavy or anything!

The issue is that this is a solved problem but the developer in question didn't like the already existing/debugged solutions and decided to roll his own. Typical case of "Not invented here" (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NotInventedHere)

Practically all newb friendly distros make mounting happen "like windows" (read automatically, with friendly popups asking what you want to do). And I'm fairly certain they do it without setuid root crap too, instead using something like DBUS to ask HAL to do it (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/cvs/general/hal.html).

Even newb-unfriendly distros have allowed the administrator to create a group which is allowed to mount specific devices, and configure those devices in /etc/fstab. I've been using Linux for the last 8 years, and I can't remember not ever being able to do this. Someone please speak up if you know about restrictions on older systems that I'm unaware of.

Beyond that though, if you are for some godawful reason writing a setuid program you restrict it heavily to avoid the issues calibre is having. Basic mistakes that shouldn't even happen but did here:

Doing a shell exec on user supplied strings. WTF. (Sanitize your input is CS 101).
Not restricting the path in which directories can be created/removed
Allowing arbitrary command execution as root. This may be a consequence of 1, but I've only read the thread not the code.

In general setuid root programs should: 1. Never trust user input 2. If they must call exec, do it on a string they built themselves so it is a known value limited to a finite number of options 3. Do one simple thing, very quickly and then get the fuck out of root access 4. Not exist

If you're going to write a setuid root program at least do your homework. Test it for basic command injection. And find somebody who knows what they're doing.

You can try other distros that use Elementary’s desktop environment (Pantheon). For example, [NixOS](/r/nixos) has a config option to use Pantheon if you prefer it over Gnome or others. I’m sure some other distros probably have this option too (I’d be surprised if Arch didn’t).

I have 2 hard drives. One is windows for nothing but gaming and a couple windows only programs. And one for linux. Modern linux is as easy to use as android. I like elementary os. It's free https://elementary.io/

Archlinux made the switch almost 5 years ago with barely any issues. If you need to use Python 2, just specify it at the beginning of your script, or simple use a virtualenv with Python 2.

Don't use pacman to install stack (or any haskell libraries). It pulls in ghc and all the dependent libraries - and will update them frequently. https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/stack/ is terrifying. It's on release 101!

Just install using the instructions on haskellstack.org. I also use stack to install haskell executables.

As for the resource, u/lexi-lambda wrote https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2018/02/10/an-opinionated-guide-to-haskell-in-2018/ which gives a lot of detail (but you did ask for comprehensive).

I know this is the copypasta response to the "I'd like to interject" pasta, but that aside, I'm not saying Linux is called "GNU/Linux", but the version of Debian that comes with the Linux kernel is known as "Debian GNU/Linux" (as opposed to "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD").

In this case, it is irrelevant whether your definition of "operating system" refers to a distro or the kernel.

> The combination of Debian's philosophy and methodology and the GNU tools, the Linux kernel, and other important free software, form a unique software distribution called Debian GNU/Linux.

~ What is Debian GNU/Linux?

That's correct. If a MITM attack directed you to a website with a download and hash, they could just as easily change the hash (to the hash of the malicious download) as they could the download.

To mitigate this, a developer can sign their download and hash with their PGP key. A MITM attacker would not only have to inject a malicious download and hash, but they'd have to sign those items with the PGP key of the developers of whatever you're downloading.

If you trust the developer to keep their PGP signing key secret, and you know the fingerprint of their key, then there's no way for a MITM to deliver a malicious download/hash.

See more about signatures and hashes in this documentation from the Qubes OS team.

Easiest and closest would be manjaro.(gui installer, comes with steam preinstalled) https://manjaro.org/downloads/official/kde/

After that would be arch linux(you choose the packages, command line setup)

How old is the Netbook? I have one from 2008 that I just installed Lubuntu on and it runs perfectly. Lubuntu is a somewhat lighter version of Ubuntu with the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, and I highly recommend it!

You could also look into the LXLE distro. I haven't tried it, but it's based on Lubuntu and is supposedly even lighter. Plus, there are countless other distros out there that emphasize old hardware/netbooks. Check out Distrowatch to start the search!

I mean, it’s not a direct democracy but it is Open Source. You can file issue reports, make comments, make pull requests, get involved and lobby for your ideas. There’s no guarantee that people will want to do what you want them to, but anyone can participate. I would like to think we’re reasonable folks and we take our users’ feedback seriously and try to build things based on problems our users express having.

But I also wouldn’t call elementary OS common. We maintain like 90 Open Source projects right now including a complete DE, a suite of default apps, and a few libraries. We also contribute to upstream projects and libraries and have a number of downstreams of our own (including Xubuntu, Deepin, and more). And then on top of that we maintain Valadoc.org, our own developer documentation, and the whole of the AppCenter server infrastructure which now has 100 new Gtk+ third-party apps. There’s a lot going on here, it’s not like we throw GNOME on [insert distro here] with a different wallpaper.

I've used Debian for ~15 years and I have never seen an LSB application. Debian is still going to be compatible with other Linux distributions; there's no reason to change that.

Most likely I am part of a minority with my opinion, but actually I am okay with this; Up to now, it seems to be a responsible way of doing advertisment. I do not oppose advertisment as a whole (although I think most do not work as well as intended, but that's not the topic), I'm against the heavy tracking every advertiser is doing today. That's why I'm using Ghostery and NoScript. But if my browser is locally determining which advertisment will be shown and my privacy is minded, it is a valid way of creating income for Mozilla.

Additionally, it's very easy to turn off these advertisments if people are still concerned:

> Note: if you set DNT=1, it is possible that you may not be receiving Suggested Tiles. You can very simply enable them on the new tab page with the cogwheel. We made the decision to opt users out of all sponsored Tiles experiences if they have DNT=1 quite early on, as we believe that most DNT early adopters are seeking to opt out of all advertising experiences. However, it’s important to understand that no tracking is involved in delivering Tiles.

They actually mind people's position indicated via Do Not Track (sounds to me like this is the first documented effect of DNT).

I'm not really sure how people expect companies giving their product away for free are making money to survive or take up the fight against the "evil" parts of the internet. Yes, you even bought a shirt - That does not feed a developer and their family for long. The Linux ecosystem is based on corporate sponsoring as well, it's not like your OS is just happening. Even Debian, the most community distro, is only working because of its sponsors/supporters. And a lot of innovation pushing forward Linux as a whole is coming from Red Hat and Canonical.

Linux From Scratch isn't based on anything. It's Linux... From Scratch. No package manager. No extra fluff. You configure and build everything yourself. It's for those who Gentoo and Arch aren't enough for, and want to further their superiority complex.

Jokes that will get me slaughtered if anyone takes them serious aside, LFS always seemed like a fun project, and something you could learn a hell of a lot from. Though my knowledge of it is pretty limited. Check out this support page for LFS to see support materials, and the site itself will probably have extra details too: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/support.html

No. Would you suggest for a 5 year old to be air dropped into the pacific on its own to learn how to swim? Would you give someone who wanted to learn Linux a LFS handbook and say "go to it?" See the point I'm trying to make?

Stick with Java for now, no need to learn a new language yet. Save your killer game idea for later, and stick with things like tic-tac-toe, pong, snake, etc. Learn the basics of game development first, don't just dive in the deep end head-first.

I know I'm being a little harsh, but trust me. You sound like (I don't mean any offence by this) someone who would end up giving up within a month. I've seen it happen many times. Please just start small and work your way up to your bigger ideas. You'll thank yourself, and anyone who plays your games will surely thank you. I'm sure you could hack together your game at this point, but I'm also sure it would feel like a game that was horribly hacked together by someone with very little experience.

No, absolutely not. /u/Tired8281 is likely referring to a blog post about paying for software from a few years ago that was extremely poorly worded, but they have since clarified their position and corrected the language.

elementary OS is a legit distribution, based on Ubuntu LTS (currently 16.04, with the next version based on 18.04). Check it out at elementary.io.

IMHO - if you're not a gamer, and your day to day doesn't require some Microsoft only software (which is increasingly rare nowadays as everything is shifting towards the web and mobile devices)..Linux on the desktop/laptop has never been easier.

And hell.. put Windows in a VM and use it only when you absolutely need it.

Regarding updates specifically, it's just amazing to me that here we are in 2017 and WIndows still has this problem. Every update, requires a reboot.

And Microsoft has become incredibly aggressive with reboots and pushing both updates and upgrades ( i could go into some reasoning about Indian software development cultural differences from the west but I'll save it) But it's just made the user experience worse.

And it all boils down to the fact that Windows can't replace a file on disk if that file is being held in memory. It's a limitation of the OS that Unix systems (read: Linux, Solaris, BSD, OS X) don't have. On most Unix systems, at most you need to reboot for Kernel updates but that's it.

And with development of tools like k-splice or Ubuntu's live patch, even kernel upgrades can be done without a reboot.

So on Windows, it downloads the files and waits for the boot or shutdown process, where users can't possibly put those files in memory, to do the actually upgrade/update. And this goes for kernel and non-kernel related items.

Anyways - I worked at a Windows only shop that did Win Server 2012 R2 Vmware/citrix hosting, Exchange, and AD for customers and I did all my work from an Ubuntu box for the 2 years I was there.

Suspicious package called "shadow" found in the official CORE Arch repository!

HACKING tools have been spotted in the official Arch repositories!

The same way as you do with Windows.

You download a Linux distro .iso. http://distrowatch.com/

Burn the .iso into a bootable image. onto any type of media. Rufus is a good tool for this.

Change boot sequence to boot off that media device.

Now you follow instruction to install Linux onto that drive.

You can buy the media just like you can with Windows. By going here.

https://www.osdisc.com/