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Hahaha, this recent exchange epitomizes my experience with X Windows over the last 25+ years, though I haven’t intentionally used a Linux gui in more than a decade, save for gparted in a live-cd environment. Linux is an incredible and indispensable tool, but if you want/need a gui just bite the bullet and use Windows or buy a mac. Almost certain I spent more time in a ‘startx; brief X cursor; crash’ loop than actually using it! And most of that was before insmod. Nothing worse than compiling a new kernel overnight and then realizing you hosed up. But, that’s 90% of the fun. RTFM
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Apr 7, 2023 22:18
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I just started playing Shenzhen I/O, which has a whole RTFM instruction in the game.
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Apr 7, 2023 22:22
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ihafarm posted:Hahaha, this recent exchange epitomizes my experience with X Windows over the last 25+ years, though I haven’t intentionally used a Linux gui in more than a decade, save for gparted in a live-cd environment. Linux is an incredible and indispensable tool, but if you want/need a gui just bite the bullet and use Windows or buy a mac. They're using Arch, this is a deliberately self-inflicted wound.
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Apr 7, 2023 22:38
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I've got 3 drives in my system, one older 500GB Samsung EVO ssd and 2 1TB nvme drives. I use Arch as my daily, but now I need Windows (ugh) too. I'm planning on wiping the EVO and using that for Windows, and just choose which drive to boot from in the BIOS. Normally I'd just disconnect the 2 nvme and install windows on the EVO but the nvme drives are under my big rear end GPU and heat sink so I'd rather not fiddle with removing them to access the drives. Will windows play nice and allow me to select the 500GB EVO and install there without it touching the other drives?
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Apr 7, 2023 22:56
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If you have to type startx you are GUI-ing wrong
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Apr 7, 2023 23:09
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You should run Linux like the great RMS
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Apr 7, 2023 23:09
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isaboo posted:I've got 3 drives in my system, one older 500GB Samsung EVO ssd and 2 1TB nvme drives. If I were doing this, I would disconnect the Linux drive before installing Windows. It can't screw up a disconnected drive. I just don't trust Windows or my ability to install it enough to make the risk of losing my Linux stuff less than the cost of pulling the cable under a GPU.
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Apr 7, 2023 23:20
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isaboo posted:I've got 3 drives in my system, one older 500GB Samsung EVO ssd and 2 1TB nvme drives. I haven't done that in forever, but if you have to ask the answer is probably no. A compromise could be to make an image of you linux drive, so you can reimagine it if it gets hosed. With clonezilla or something.
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Apr 7, 2023 23:24
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ok, like y'all said I don't really trust windows either. My hands are big and arthritic and the tiny drives are in the most difficult place possible of course. I've been meaning to make an image anyway so I'll do that and just hope for the best
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Apr 7, 2023 23:37
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isaboo posted:I've got 3 drives in my system, one older 500GB Samsung EVO ssd and 2 1TB nvme drives. windows really likes fondling drives, i found it impossible to burn a fedora iso using the official windows fedora iso burner onto a usb stick such that it would pass the fedora integrity hash check or whatever because windows would add a index file or something to it every time. that said, in your position i would 100% install windows with the nvme drives in because there is no reason i can see that windows should touch them, and i am lazy, and i would angrily deal with the consequences were i wrong.
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Apr 7, 2023 23:37
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zhar posted:angrily deal with the consequences were i wrong. I'm going to predict that this does come to pass.
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Apr 7, 2023 23:59
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ziasquinn posted:Yeah that's what I'm thinking and hoping -- I'm swapping the motherboard tomorrow with a new one with +7 more usb ports, should be a grand time at the end of it all. I have reinstalled my OS and changed distros several times to various improvements and non improvements. I swapped the mobo and my system's overall performance is vastly improved??
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Apr 8, 2023 00:50
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ihafarm posted:Hahaha, this recent exchange epitomizes my experience with X Windows over the last 25+ years, though I haven’t intentionally used a Linux gui in more than a decade, save for gparted in a live-cd environment. Linux is an incredible and indispensable tool, but if you want/need a gui just bite the bullet and use Windows or buy a mac. This has honestly been fine for something like a decade, though I cheat by using intel and AMD GPUs. Plug in the fedora usb stick, boot into the graphical installer, switch the keyboard layout and tell it to use the unpartitioned disk space, and when its done, enjoy one laptop lifetime of working linux desktop. Of course, it can fail, but so does Windows. No idea about the relative frequencies but both are low enough that it's not the deciding factor for anything. Running Arch is basically "may you live in interesting times" in distro form, so it's not entirely representative.
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Apr 8, 2023 02:16
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isaboo posted:ok, like y'all said I don't really trust windows either. My hands are big and arthritic and the tiny drives are in the most difficult place possible of course. In the past I'd join in on the "remove other drives" chorus. But Win 10 and after have gotten way better about this, as long as you are using a UEFI-only GPT-only system. Windows fucks with other drives when it thinks, based on BIOS/MBR booting, that another drive is the master and so it needs to put the bootloader on that one, rather than the target drive you told it to install on. If your bios is set to boot UEFI-only and all your drives are GPT, it recognizes that a boot partition can go on any drive. And it doesn't have any MBR sectors to confuse things / gently caress with. In this case can I can say with fair confidence that you don't need to bother removing drives. It'll put the bootloader on the 500GB EVO, and then tell your bios to boot from that one.
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Apr 8, 2023 03:25
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VostokProgram posted:If you have to type startx you are GUI-ing wrong Yeah, well this was mid-late 90’s. Never grokked the purpose of X at the time, as my usage was more or less an alternative to screen.
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Apr 8, 2023 17:10
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Decided to just  and stick with X11 because even if I got everything working on the system end, some of the software I'm using has no Wayland support anyway (Pale Moon especially, which crashes if loaded with GDK_BACKEND=wayland set and according to a google search, has no plans for ever supporting Wayland). Computer viking posted:Running Arch is basically "may you live in interesting times" in distro form, so it's not entirely representative.  functionality you want. X11 is not as nice as a fully functional Wayland would be (or Windows for that matter), but it does the job.E: One frustration I have had with all the Linux distros I use is that the compatibility with legacy software and hardware is vastly worse than Windows. One thing I've always liked about Windows was running programs up to 30 years old without any problems, and not having that in Linux is a bit painful (except in wine where ancient software works great  ).If Windows can maintain backwards compatibility, more or less, to Windows 3.0, does that mean X is vastly worse than Windows 3.0's windowing system? Because Windows apps don't need to "support" the new windowing systems, they work because rule #1 of Windows is you don't break Win32, ever, and for all the many problems Windows 11 has, the rendering seems both modern and extremely reliable. Are the seams between Wayland and Xwayland X's fault for just sucking so much? Personally I blame all this on the nvidia drivers, nVidia on Linux has always sucked and, even if it sucks less than it used to, it still sucks. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Apr 8, 2023 |
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Apr 8, 2023 20:31
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You can't actually run 30 year old Windows programs any more, those are all 16-bit and Microsoft dropped support for that in 64-bit Windows.
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Apr 8, 2023 20:47
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It's probably bad form to reply to the author's 60 lines of comments on my 3-line patch with "look, bozo," right?
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Apr 8, 2023 22:12
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pseudorandom name posted:You can't actually run 30 year old Windows programs any more, those are all 16-bit and Microsoft dropped support for that in 64-bit Windows. Eh, well 25 then. Lots of late '90s mod tools work fine under either 64-bit Windows or Linux with wine. Very few native Linux programs of similar ages can do that from an existing binary, or even be compiled to run on a modern Linux system.
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Apr 8, 2023 22:41
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Woolie Wool posted:If Windows can maintain backwards compatibility, more or less, to Windows 3.0, does that mean X is vastly worse than Windows 3.0's windowing system? Because Windows apps don't need to "support" the new windowing systems, they work because rule #1 of Windows is you don't break Win32, ever Win32 is NT tech not Win 3.0 as everyone else points out. More importantly, conflating Win32 with XWindows isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Especially in this sense -- Xwin is the part of linux that has good backwards compatibility. It's the other parts of linux (kernel ABI, glibc) that are the problem for your 30 year old program. But, basically, yes, the windows graphical / desktop architecture was "better" than Xwindows. For a couple pretty logical reasons: 1. Xwindows is 80s tech, NT is 90s. A lot changed in the decade interval. People in the the unix world were writing about X's major failings before Microsoft even sat at the drawing board. MS had also had 2 previous go-arounds (win16 and working with IBM on OS/2) to learn from. 2. GDI was small and simple by comparison, and designed for just one thing: render GUI on a local video device. Xwindows was always doing a lot more stuff than old GDI ever did. The first time I ever tried linux was in 2000. The CS classes used Sun workstations for labs, that was where you wrote and compiled your programs. I installed linux on my PC so that I could connect to the Sun machines via Xwindows forwarding. That was pretty cool in 2000! Starting small meant it was easier to grow, add, and supersede. So GDI/GDI+ are still there but that's one layer alongside WPF, WinUI, DirectWrite, Direct3d, etc. GDI is obsolete, nobody uses it anymore. But it was small enough to put into a little box on one side when they designed bigger and better stuff. (But also, some windows security problems are from stacking all these layers, and also old legacy APIs designed in simpler times.) I am guessing that if you tried to do the Wayland solution to backwards compatibility (run an entire X server in a window) even 10 years ago, it would have been pretty awful. 3. Microsoft has probably spent more money just on maintaining backwards compatibility in Windows than was been spent on the whole of the GUI/desktop parts of linux as an OS. Xorg, Wayland, every desktop environment, in total. Money matters. Klyith fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Apr 8, 2023 |
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Apr 8, 2023 23:12
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Both the Linux kernel and glibc have excellent backwards compatibility themselves, the problems you're going to run into with 30 year old Linux binaries is a) they use libc4 or older and are in a.out format, which absolutely nobody is willing to support anymore or b) they use garbage third-party libraries because absolutely nobody involved in making shared libraries outside of glibc cares about stable ABIs. (C++ is a particularly atrocious example of this.)
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Apr 8, 2023 23:30
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Woolie Wool posted:Very few native Linux programs of similar ages can do that from an existing binary, or even be compiled to run on a modern Linux system. Let me tell you how much of a pain in the rear it's been to keep forward-porting Ken Arnold's Rogue to compile. Like, just compile. In fact, it's been a while, my repo is probably broken again. I should check on that.
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Apr 8, 2023 23:43
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I think it's pretty unfair to criticize Linux for not maintaining compatibility with 30 year old software as Linux 1.0 isn't even 30 years old yet. It was brand spanking new at the time. But Linux does have compatibility with 20 year old binaries as glibc had added symbol versioning by then. The issue would be compatibility with other shared libraries, but for things released only in binary form (either statically linked or dynamically linked only against glibc) there's a good chance it still works. Personally I don't see "getting rid of X" as a realistic goal, and I'm not even sure the Wayland folks see it that way either. The real goal of the Wayland project was to move X out of the critical path for rendering desktop applications, primarily due to architectural security issues. But it's totally reasonable to run a Wayland compositor with one or more sandboxed Xwayland instances so that your web browser (which hopefully is Wayland native) can't interfere with your file manager or word processor (which, who cares if it uses X). SteamOS is actually a good model here where game mode runs a Wayland compositor and two Xwayland sessions, one for the Steam UI and one for game windows. While both the Steam UI and the games are X clients, they're still isolated from each other. My own desktop is similar. I run Chrome OS where the browser is a DRM-native application and also a Wayland compositor, and I run an instance of Xephyr (via Sommelier) with Openbox for the handful of times I have to run Xpdf or the GIMP or something. ExcessBLarg! fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Apr 9, 2023 |
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Apr 9, 2023 01:01
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I don’t know what’s real anymore.
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Apr 9, 2023 01:06
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pseudorandom name posted:Both the Linux kernel and glibc have excellent backwards compatibility themselves, the problems you're going to run into with 30 year old Linux binaries is a) they use libc4 or older and are in a.out format, which absolutely nobody is willing to support anymore or b) they use garbage third-party libraries because absolutely nobody involved in making shared libraries outside of glibc cares about stable ABIs. (C++ is a particularly atrocious example of this.) Hmmm, even glibc does some ABI breaking sometimes. ExcessBLarg! posted:I think it's pretty unfair to criticize Linux for not maintaining compatibility with 30 year old software as Linux 1.0 isn't even 30 years old yet. It was brand spanking new at the time. I honestly think it's fine to say it's a difference in philosophy and be ok with the fact that someone can't run a 30-year-old binary. Tough noogies. For one, a natural weeding out of old and unmaintained software is kinda a good thing? If it hasn't been updated in so long that it can't even compile, should it be part of anything critical? Windows bending over backward to keep compatibility has caused some nasty problems, like WannaCry. And for non-critical / entertainment / nostalgia stuff, maybe a better answer is VMs or emulation or containers. Safer, more authentic, and it's not like horsepower is a problem. I have a windows app that I wasn't able to make work under wine for some reason (it's pretty old). It feels silly to boot a windows VM just to run a trivial piece of software so I can copy out some old notes, but gently caress it.
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Apr 9, 2023 02:10
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pseudorandom name posted:Both the Linux kernel and glibc have excellent backwards compatibility themselves, the problems you're going to run into with 30 year old Linux binaries is a) they use libc4 or older and are in a.out format, which absolutely nobody is willing to support anymore or b) they use garbage third-party libraries because absolutely nobody involved in making shared libraries outside of glibc cares about stable ABIs. (C++ is a particularly atrocious example of this.) Just for a kick I found a couple old versions of the Quake 3 test from 1999. I was able to get it mostly working easily enough on Debian 11. I had to install the i386 versions of glibc and x11 and opengl libraries, and for some reason it couldn't find libGL.so so I copied the one from wherever in /usr to the q3test directory and renamed it a little (it was originally libGL.so.1) and it works great. The only thing that doesn't work is sound. As I understand it, Linux's sound system has gone through multiple overhauls since then. I found that you can modprobe snd-pcm-oss to emulate the /dev/dsp device that it is looking for, but it throws a broken pipe error in the console when it tries to open it. Honestly far more functional than I was expecting though, given it was unfinished engine code for 1999 32-bit Linux. What's weird is that the official Linux Quake 3 demo (final version from 2000) release is some weird shell script with tens of megabytes of binary data at the end. The comments suggest it was made with some self extractor program that makes some assumptions about Linux that are no longer true so it throws tons and tons of errors and even a bunch of usage summaries (I guess for some commands that don't work the same way anymore) but it successfully extracts the files to a random directory in /tmp that works if you copy it to ~/.q3a which is where it expects them to be. Like did they really think distributing it as a tar.gz was too advanced for someone using Linux in 2000?
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Apr 9, 2023 02:33
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BattleMaster posted:What's weird is that the official Linux Quake 3 demo (final version from 2000) release is some weird shell script with tens of megabytes of binary data at the end. Oh, wow, how can I get a copy of this? That sounds like a fun Sunday project. I bet it's just shar 
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Apr 9, 2023 02:54
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cruft posted:Oh, wow, how can I get a copy of this? That sounds like a fun Sunday project. Here's a copy of it from snapshot of the now-defunct idsoftware ftp - it's the one with the sh extension. https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/misc/ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/linux/ I assume the patch with the .run extension is something similar but I never looked at it. edit: not actually from 2000 but from late 1999! I said 2000 to hedge my bets because I didn't have it in front of me edit 2: generated by "Makeself 1.5.3" edit 3: which is apparently still maintained, and it must be the right one since it bills itself as used by idsoftware for patches https://makeself.io/ BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Apr 9, 2023 |
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Apr 9, 2023 03:05
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BattleMaster posted:What's weird is that the official Linux Quake 3 demo (final version from 2000) release is some weird shell script with tens of megabytes of binary data at the end. The comments suggest it was made with some self extractor program that makes some assumptions about Linux that are no longer true so it throws tons and tons of errors and even a bunch of usage summaries (I guess for some commands that don't work the same way anymore) but it successfully extracts the files to a random directory in /tmp that works if you copy it to ~/.q3a which is where it expects them to be. Probably from https://makeself.io/ e;fb
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Apr 9, 2023 03:12
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Yeah! Something really tickles me about how it's still being maintained and isn't just some forgotten thing. The changelog says it was rewritten for version 2.0.0 so I'm kind of not surprised that the older version was crusty and barely functional on a modern system - you usually don't rewrite something if it works great.
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Apr 9, 2023 03:17
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Klyith posted:Hmmm, even glibc does some ABI breaking sometimes. Klyith posted:I honestly think it's fine to say it's a difference in philosophy and be ok with the fact that someone can't run a 30-year-old binary. Tough noogies. But such breaks aren't done arbitrarily either, and generally they do try to avoid breaking things just for the sake of it either.
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Apr 9, 2023 03:31
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Wait until you see how apple handles backwards compatibility.
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Apr 9, 2023 04:37
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Apple actually handles backwards compatibility extremely well right up until the exact moment they tell you to go gently caress yourself.
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Apr 9, 2023 05:14
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pseudorandom name posted:Apple actually handles backwards compatibility extremely well right up until the exact moment they tell you to go gently caress yourself. Which, if memory serves, is about a year after a major change. I still fondly remember Steve Jobs swearing on his immortal soul they would never use Intel processors. 
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Apr 9, 2023 06:44
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BattleMaster posted:Yeah! Something really tickles me about how it's still being maintained and isn't just some forgotten thing. The changelog says it was rewritten for version 2.0.0 so I'm kind of not surprised that the older version was crusty and barely functional on a modern system - you usually don't rewrite something if it works great. This is how I feel about trying to get FF11 to run on every piece of poo poo I own (except ARM stuff I guess)
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Apr 9, 2023 12:46
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Which, if memory serves, is about a year after a major change. I still fondly remember Steve Jobs swearing on his immortal soul they would never use Intel processors. And we all know how that worked out for him. (Too harsh?)
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Apr 9, 2023 13:04
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why is "copy" greyed out in vim's visual interface? also, should i learn how to use it
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Apr 9, 2023 16:03
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:Wait until you see how apple handles backwards compatibility. The few times I have gotten to use a Mac I hated it so I'll probably remain ignorant on this front. 
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Apr 9, 2023 16:13
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Woolie Wool posted:The few times I have gotten to use a Mac I hated it so I'll probably remain ignorant on this front. CPU family transitions: Deeply impressive, sometimes faster than natively on the CPU they're emulating. Generational software updates: You know those SciFi societies where they kill everyone when they hit a certain age?
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Apr 9, 2023 16:24
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Mescal posted:why is "copy" greyed out in vim's visual interface? also, should i learn how to use it Why are you using the GUI controls in vim? That defeats vim's entire point lmao Though at some point I should learn it properly too, I know some basic commands like d*w, d*d and the like but not really how to use it on a deeper level than one would use nano.
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Apr 9, 2023 16:26
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