I want a Computer that I Own

submitted by gebTA48 from misc-stuff.terraaeon.com

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[–]magnora7 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (7 children)

I got a new computer, I am switching to linux for home computing finally. A lot of my games I worried about ended up working fine with a little tweaking. The WINE windows emulator thing is amazing, it just runs exes as if linux could run the exe itself, I always thought you had to boot a virtual copy of windows within linux and all that jazz, I didn't realize they'd built exe functionality on to the linux OS itself. You just click an exe and it runs instantly. So that was a nice surprise about WINE.

But there's a lot of exes it can't run, seems to work about 40% of the time, so I guess the next step is to do a window 7 virtual machine emulation on linux and boot to the windows desktop and stuff, I guess that's compatible with more types of executable files because it emulates the entire windows environment. So there's a few programs I might have to do that with.

The one thing that still miffs me about linux is installing programs. In windows, you click a download link, a thing downloads, and you click it, and it installs. You can use a mouse the whole time, it's very straightforward. In linux you almost always have to open a terminal, the installs are a list of terminal commands and instructions you have to copy-paste one by one, instead of a simple download link. Out of 20 programs I downloaded, I think only one had a linux download link that was clickable and worked. Just feels old and clunky tbh.

But otherwise linux has come a long way, especially mint and ubuntu. For instance, every driver worked instantly, I haven't had to install one driver or dependency. This was not the case 10-15 years ago, it used to be dependency hell to get all your devices working.

Anyway, pretty pleased with linux these days for personal computing. I'm about 50% switched over, I still have some programs to try and migrate. There will probably be a few things I'll keep my old Windows machine around for. Linux is definitely faster though. And probably the only way to truly own your computer anymore. Windows and Macs are full of built-in backdoors.

[–]asterias 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

In linux you almost always have to open a terminal, the installs are a list of terminal commands and instructions you have to copy-paste one by one, instead of a simple download link.

You are not supposed to do it like this. You open the graphical package management tool, select the program(s) you want and let the OS install them for you. In most cases, the desired program is already packaged by the OS maintainers.

You can do it using the command line as well, but again it's a simple procedure and basically the same thing.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Yes but there's lots of things not in that GUI manager because they run on linux, but not on that specific package, so they're not in the list, so they have to be downloaded via terminal.

[–]asterias 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Distros like Solus that are not that old may have a smaller selection of packages, but mature ones like SUSE have a really big selection of packages and it's not that easy to find something not included there.

There are some notable exceptions, like Brave which is not yet available in most official repositories, so you have to add the Brave repository to the existing ones.

Some times you have to do it this way, but generally it's not a good idea, even security-wise, to stray away from the official repositories.

[–]Airbus320 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

The vkd3d and dxvk has been amazing for gaming combined with open drivers in recent years. Now if some cad software would run flawlessly that would be great, like autodesk inventor

Anyways kde still has bugs...

[–]fred_red_beans 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yea, installation of programs on linux is not the same as windows as there's always dependencies to figure out.

One of the thing that attracted me to debian over red hat when I first got into linux was debian's package management system apt. It keeps track of all the dependencies, conflicts, etc. I use the package aptitude which is usable in a text console to manage all my packages instead of using apt on the command line. It's worked well for me.

Although, I have yet to switch my desktop to linux though. I don't want to go to win 10, so as windows 7 gets phased out I'll likely will just go linux.

[–]Optimus85 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

As a Linux user, file suffixes are a funny concept. .exe tells the Windows kernel that it's an executable file. Linux, as Unix OSes, have three types of actions and three types of users for file permissions. Actions are: readable, writable and executable. Users are: user, group and others. This alone makes the system inherently more secure. Also, the package manager is your best friend. You should always install your programs that way unless you're comfortable compiling programs from source. If you download programs from the Internet, .deb packages should install fine on Ubuntu, Mint, Pop! OS, and of course Debian and .rpm packages should work with SUSE, Red Hat and Fedora(not 100% sure). Anyway, enjoy the switch!

[–]deleted 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Wine Is Not an Emulator (it's a compatibility layer)

Linux is a kernel, not an OS

Also with wine you're probably going to want to use wine bottles because as you've noticed not all functions are implemented. This can most often be a problem as only certain versions of a library work for any particular program (or only the 32bit version works for example). Lutris is a great tool to help create bottles and install common redists inside a particular bottle so as not to clutter other environments your other programs run in. Hope that helps!