The first step is to make sure your hardware is supported. I’ve found the linux hardware database to be invaluable getting new systems configured. The site is overwhelming at first, but the easy path is to just click the big ‘Probe your computer’ button and follow the instructions. Once you’ve done a probe, you’ll get a web-page with a listing of all your computer’s hardware and the support status. Even better, you get links to additional drivers or kernel modules required to get stuff working which isn’t supported out of the box.
Definitely. I have a pair of pixel buds that give me very noticeable latency when paired in Windows. I’ve never been able to find a way to use the low latency codecs to fix this.
In Linux it’s a complete opposite experience. I have a menu with every codec in the book, and I can actually watch video in Linux without even noticing any latency now.
The company I work at has ~100 employees at our location (there are other locations too, but they each work rather independently).
We primarily use Windows throughout the company, but anyone who wants can run Linux. So we have ~20 people or so running Linux.
It’s primarily people in Software Engineering that use Linux, and here mostly devs and devops. In these areas there is more than enough software for Linux, so that’s not an issue. We sadly use Microsoft’s office stuff a lot, so we have Teams, Exchange and their cloud stuff. So on Linux we use teams-on-linux and Prospect Mail (third-party wrapper apps for Microsoft’s cloud stuff), and they work about as well as you’d expect third-party wrappers for Microsoft’s cloud stuff. Screen sharing apparently still doesn’t work on Wayland, so X11 it is.
A big hurdle is the DPI (=>deep packet inspection) solution that is used in the office, since it doesn’t play nice with Linux for some reason. That took a while to get to work correctly.
It is so nostalgic, although I struggle to see a good reason to use this as a daily driver other than if you need stability that might even exceed that of Debian Stable.
I need some tips on how the old-timers manage installation of packages without dependency management.
This is probably one the most Unix-like Linux-based operating systems ever. Gentoo probably comes next with Void being third in said list. If one didn’t want to run BSD but still wanted similarities with old Unix systems, this is probably it.
Thanks to the Slackware team for such a fantastic distribution.
I started with Linux using Slackware in the late 90s. I had to give up on it - first on the desktop around 2007, then on my server maybe 5 years ago. Dependency hell. For the server, the final straw was when I got some Ubiquiti equipment and needed to run the Unifi controller - I just did not want to deal with figuring out the dependencies and then worrying about them every time I updated.
The desktop and laptop run Kubuntu, and the server runs Debian. It’s so nice being able to update things without having to worry. And I haven’t noticed any effective difference in stability or anything like that. Just that much less time I spend maintaining things.
I wonder if the UnRaid team has figured out an easier method to take care of dependencies, considering they run a webserver with considerable assets on Slackware.
Slackware will always be a consideration for me since I do not like systemd (philosophical reasoning), but yes, managing dependencies manually is a pain and said pain grows with almost every package that one installs and then needs to upgrade. I wonder what was the motivation for the Slackware team to not include automatic dependency management to their distribution, which would likely have been my choice for lean and stable distribution over Debian if it had that feature.
If i remember right, it takes a lot of resources to maintain a package manager, and the focus on slackware is to be on the improving the distro overwall hence its superb stability. Community members have created sbopkg + sbotools to create a 3rd party package manager if you want to go that route on slackware. Sbotools would be the gui to take care of depenencies
From a server point of view, where it’s focused on a limited set of functions, with a limited group of packages, it’s not too bad. I can see it working fine for that purpose.
But a general purpose server that does several things in my house… It gets messy.
We don’t install packages without dependancy management, for the most part. We use one of the half-dozen or so pkgtools wrappers made by community members that interface with SBo and handles the dependencies for us (examples include slapt-get, slpkg, and sbotools). Also, Flatpak/Distrobox/Nix etc are all available and easy enough to install if slackbuilds.org doesn’t have what I need (rare tbh).
I run an Ubuntu laptop for work [system engineer] by choice. I have to write stuff and interact with the 200 or so linux servers daily. For work, it’s perfect. For doing anything corporate, it’s a fucking nightmare. Thankfully the good outweighs the bad but stuff like VPNs, remote desktop, all that stuff works terribly.
There’s always software I can’t use properly (and not just Windows stuff), some stuff badly configured with weird error messages… last time I was not able to even use the apt command
I’m not sure what you were doing to break apt, but it was probably something pretty funky (or at least adding a bunch of repos without really thinking about it).
The thing with Linux is that it doesn’t stop you doing stupid shit as much as Windows. If you know what you’re doing, that’s a really good thing. It’s really annoying when your OS stops you doing something for your own protection if you know that you’re not going to break anything. Simple example: Windows locks any file that’s open, Linux doesn’t. That’s really convenient, but you can screw things up badly if you’re not careful.
If you’re a beginner, I would suggest sticking to the GUI, i.e. control panels, software installed, etc. in Ubuntu. If you ever go into command line, be really careful, and understand what you’re doing. Definitely do not copy and paste commands you find online without understanding them reasonably well. Ubuntu puts in pretty good protections in its graphical tools. You’ll be able to do whatever you need to do, but shouldn’t break anything. Over time, you’ll pick up some knowledge and be able to do more in the command line (etc.) without breaking things.
I’ll shout out chatGPT for being a huge help explaining Linux commands or how to do certain things on Linux. If you have a guide you are following chatGPT will do a great job explaining the steps if you don’t understand.
Paint is especially surprising to miss, but yeah. I tried a few different image editing programs on Linux but they were all either too limited in scope or were too complex to quickly learn.
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