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 -  (3 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.