So any other penguins hereabouts? What distro do you use?

I'm running vanilla Ubuntu 15.10, btw. Nothing too special.

I've run RedHat, Mandrake, Slackware and OpenSUSE in the past, before switching to Windows 7 for several years.

Nezchan posted:

Eh, Wine is a pain. It works okay, but it can be a pain in the ass. Although I did play the entirety of Skyrim through it so these things are possible. I've pretty much gone the "No Tux, no bux" route these days, reserving Wine for stuff that'll definitely not get ported, like the older Avernum games or Legend of Grimrock 2.

There's a lot of pretty high profile games getting ported lately though. Alien Isolation, Civ V and BE, Rocket League is due in Q2, Company of Heroes, and so forth. Adding Vulkan into the mix will change a lot, given that some devs are saying it's on equal footing with DirectX 12. If that holds true, you'll be seeing even more games on the platform.

Given that games are one of the primary things that hole people back from switching (that and fear of command line, which really isn't that big a deal these days), I think it'll trigger a shift over the next decade or so.

I haven't actually bothered messing with Wine since I still predominantly use Windows. Too bad they couldn't find a way to make it simpler. It probably has similar issues that a lot of Linux stuff has. Stuff tends not to be as straight forward and simple as it would be on another operating system. Even a lot of people who have the experience required to utilize it just don't want to because it's still a bigger hassle.

Given that games are one of the primary things that hole people back from switching (that and fear of command line, which really isn't that big a deal these days), I think it'll trigger a shift over the next decade or so.

For me games are less of a concern than other software since I actually don't play a whole lot anymore. Photoshop being a fairly major one. I don't think there's a Rainmeter equivalent on Linux either and I know there's no Linux version of DisplayFusion. And the alternatives to DisplayFusion all look to only deal with the multimonitor wallpapers part of things too when there's a lot more to the program than that.

Lesbians Until Graduation? I'm not one.

j/k..

I use Redhat, only at work.

Can't be bothered to use it at home, because there, I only play games

I haven't actually bothered messing with Wine since I still predominantly use Windows. Too bad they couldn't find a way to make it simpler. It probably has similar issues that a lot of Linux stuff has. Stuff tends not to be as straight forward and simple as it would be on another operating system. Even a lot of people who have the experience required to utilize it just don't want to because it's still a bigger hassle.

Wine works mostly, but it requires a fair amount of tweaking to get it to do what you want. And even then you're still likely to have weird glitches.

For me games are less of a concern than other software since I actually don't play a whole lot anymore. Photoshop being a fairly major one. I don't think there's a Rainmeter equivalent on Linux either and I know there's no Linux version of DisplayFusion. And the alternatives to DisplayFusion all look to only deal with the multimonitor wallpapers part of things too when there's a lot more to the program than that.

Well, Gimp is basically Photoshop with a manual transmission, and for simpler graphic manipulation there are other apps like Pinta that do the job very well. The others I'm not too familiar with, honestly. Conky seems to do at least some of the stuff Rainmeter does, at least.

Nya-chan posted:

Lesbians Until Graduation? I'm not one.

Lesbians Until (the) Grave*

Nezchan posted:

Wine works mostly, but it requires a fair amount of tweaking to get it to do what you want. And even then you're still likely to have weird glitches.

Ah, so sort of like a lot of console emulators used to be.

Well, Gimp is basically Photoshop with a manual transmission, and for simpler graphic manipulation there are other apps like Pinta that do the job very well. The others I'm not too familiar with, honestly. Conky seems to do at least some of the stuff Rainmeter does, at least.

I really can't stand Gimp. I think comparing it to manual transmissions is an oversimplification cause manuals are actually quite easy in my experience. (Personally I prefer them in fact.) With Photoshop actually doing what you're trying to do is straight forward whereas just about anything in Gimp seems to require a bunch of completely unnecessary extra work. It's bad enough that before getting Photoshop I preferred Paint.net despite it being so much simpler simply because it was actually usable. I'd actually put forth Gimp as a shining example of the biggest issue with Linux for most people. They tend to put a focus on what it does with little to no regard for how the end user accomplishes that function.

And that Conky deal does look to do most of what I use Rainmeter for.

This is my Rainmeter layout. Out of the stuff Conky looks to be missing it's mostly the cpu temp and graphics card information. Both of which are things that actually require other software even for Rainmeter in the first place.

Kinda considering changing my desktop environment, but I'm not sure at this point. Mate gets a lot of good reviews, and it seems to run well on older hardware (my desktop is 6 years old, so that'd be nice). But I don't know if it makes sense to abandon Unity.

spacepowers posted:

You can set up Conky to display info from any command line program pretty easily. I've seen people put weather forecasts in it, all kindsa silly stuff. Then just tie it in with lm-sensors which gives you CPU temp.

Sounds like it actually would be an adequate substitute then. Do you have any idea how simple it is to make your own custom skins for it? Cause while most of my Rainmeter skins use other ones as a base (except the one partially covering the MSI Afterburner skin, that one's completely from scratch) they're mostly fairly heavily modified from their original versions.

spacepowers posted:

Basically you write things in conky's little configuration language, which can evaluate shell scripts as well (which is what allows you to display essentially anything). So it could be hard if you're not comfortable with that, but there are a lot of premade snippets and conkyrc on the web.

It's probably no worse than Rainmeter's language. Here is an example of the code for one of my skins. (Some of that is extremely hacky though. Ie this line:

IfEqualAction=[!UpdateMeasure "MeasureTitle"][!UpdateMeter "MeterTitle"][!RainmeterRedraw][!Refresh][!Update][!Redraw]    

shouldn't need all of those actions and will constantly refresh for the first 3-4 seconds after a track change but without even one of those it will sporadically fail to update on track change at all.)

Kind of sad that my first reaction was also "lesbians until graduation???"

I've run vanilla Ubuntu and Mint, but I haven't booted into Ubuntu in a long time because games.

Main desktop is LFS dualboot to openindiana laptop is latest unstable funtoo, the three servers are stable Gentoo installls.

Enlightenment or fluxbox for the WMs, and nice react vms to run Windows programs.

I don't think I'll be upgrading to 4.0+ kdbus and croups are not well done or stable enough for a server or desktop really and I doubt they ever will be.

Ugh, what a mess. I tried to install Mate in order to try out something different from Unity, and ended up totally destroying my Ubuntu install, so bad that I had to completely re-install. It's gonna take all day tomorrow to get everything fixed, and I've already been at it for hours.

The one big advantage is that I've done away with a pointless partition I had because of a Windows dual-boot I never ended up doing.

Just out of curiosity, why Linux? Is it cause it's free or is it cause it's not "spying" on you? Or any other reasons?

last edited at Mar 13, 2016 7:54AM

Just out of curiosity, why Linux? Is it cause it's free or is it cause it's not "spying" on you? Or any other reasons?

Because it's geeky, makes you look smart or "not part of the windows masses"? Because some people enjoy fiddling with their system endlessly?

Personally, I just can't be bothered to use it at home anymore. You end up spending a lot of time to tune it, change this and that, updating software left and right because a new version is out every week, with features you don't even need, trying to make something work for hours only to destroy your system and realize that you didn't make backups of the configuration you spent days to tune.

Been there, done that, got the think-geek t-shirt.

Now, I'm happy with Seven which works nicely and lets me run games without too much fuss.

It's a much better environment than Windows for running your own code. That's honestly the main reason I use it.

Just out of curiosity, why Linux? Is it cause it's free or is it cause it's not "spying" on you? Or any other reasons?

I simply find it a more comfortable environment. I used it originally, way back, as a free (as in beer) alternative to Windows, and even then it did pretty much everything I needed. I switched back more recently because (1) Windows was annoying me, and (2) I really didn't want to be forced to switch to 8 or 10 while staying current. I can keep completely up to date with Linux without much of a hassle.

But if I'm being honest, I just find it a computing environment that I like. Other than a few AAA games I wouldn't be able to afford anyway, and having to wait on stuff like Undertale and Stardew Valley, Linux literally does everything I need. I can write, watch videos and streams, have a full office suite, play a pretty large number of games (I've got 164 Linux games in my Steam library) with more coming all the time, which may accelerate if Vulkan works out. So in the end it's really a matter of taste for me.

Just out of curiosity, why Linux? Is it cause it's free or is it cause it's not "spying" on you? Or any other reasons?

Because it's geeky, makes you look smart or "not part of the windows masses"? Because some people enjoy fiddling with their system endlessly?

Honestly, none of that really applies to my experience. You barely need to fiddle at all on a modern Linux build, unless you're using one of the edgier variants. The only reason I open the console 99% of the time is to run Livestreamer, which usually amounts to "open console, hit the up arrow once or twice, and hit enter". I'm one of the least tech-oriented people you're likely to meet, and I avoid "under the hood" stuff wherever possible.

last edited at Mar 13, 2016 12:04PM

takachi posted:

Just out of curiosity, why Linux? Is it cause it's free or is it cause it's not "spying" on you? Or any other reasons?

Better control over your operating system (you don't have to fight it constantly like you do with Windows), a better alternative for people who disagree with Microsoft's business practices or are worried about privacy invasion, since things on Linux tend to be open sourced then if you're a programmer you can customize those programs to your own needs if you need.

Personally I've been using Windows since DOS. I was fine with it up to 7 but 8 and, especially 10, have made a lot of choices that make the downsides to using Windows an even bigger problem for me and I really disagree with Microsoft's pushing Win10 as hard as they have as well as their lack of transparency when it comes to all this privacy stuff. (And something like OSX is not a choice for me because I'm apparently cursed when it comes to using Macs. If I use one there's a very high chance that it's going to completely shit itself even though I'm doing nothing more than opening a program and using it normally.)

I'd have switched over to Linux earlier simply out of principal (plus it's free) if it weren't for the fact that up until fairly recently it just wasn't really as usable as Windows right out of the box. I prefer my system to just work without me having to do any extra work then if I feel it necessary I can go customize options and such later on.

takachi posted:

Just out of curiosity, why Linux? Is it cause it's free or is it cause it's not "spying" on you? Or any other reasons?

Better control over your operating system (you don't have to fight it constantly like you do with Windows),

I disagree. Windows 7 is very easy to use, very stable, very fast and everything works on it out of the box if your hardware is reasonably standard. You don't control much, but you don't need to.

For Linux, you get only the impression you control everything.

But as soon as you try something different than what the distro cooked for you, you are in for a world of pain with a shitty package & dependencies management which always end up destroying your system.

takachi posted:

Just out of curiosity, why Linux? Is it cause it's free or is it cause it's not "spying" on you? Or any other reasons?

Better control over your operating system (you don't have to fight it constantly like you do with Windows),

I disagree. Windows 7 is very easy to use, very stable, very fast and everything works on it out of the box if your hardware is reasonably standard. You don't control much, but you don't need to.

I'll happily admit Windows 7 was a good OS for the most part. Probably the best MS has done, in my experience.

For Linux, you get only the impression you control everything.

But as soon as you try something different than what the distro cooked for you, you are in for a world of pain with a shitty package & dependencies management which always end up destroying your system.

I'd argue with that, but then I remembered that you use Redhat.

Nya-chan posted:

I disagree. Windows 7 is very easy to use, very stable, very fast and everything works on it out of the box if your hardware is reasonably standard. You don't control much, but you don't need to.

For Linux, you get only the impression you control everything.

But as soon as you try something different than what the distro cooked for you, you are in for a world of pain with a shitty package & dependencies management which always end up destroying your system.

I don't disagree that Windows 7 is actually good, I'd argue it's the best OS they've shat out actually. But you do have to fight it with some things. Most notably Windows' permissions system is utter garbage. I can't tell you just how many times I've been unable to modify or delete a file because Windows claimed I didn't have permissions despite being the system's administrator and couldn't actually get it to give me permissions. In Linux when you do something as root you can be guaranteed that it doesn't tell you that you can't do that.

You don't control much, but you don't need to.

Says who? You? Who are you to decide this for me? This is the same sort of mindset Microsoft seems to have with Windows 10 (and Google seems to have with Chrome too). You don't need to do something so you can't regardless of whether you actually do need or want to. It's my computer so I don't see how anyone, even Microsoft or Google, has the right to make that decision for me.

Personally, if I had to choose a unix system for home, I'd use Freebsd. It's a lot more stable than the myriads of Linux distro, each with their own set of quirks and configuration files all in different locations.

As for root being able to do everything, it's a blessing and a curse. Because some things, you can't undo.

Nya-chan posted:

As for root being able to do everything, it's a blessing and a curse. Because some things, you can't undo.

Yeah, and if you do something that screws up your system then that's all on you. If I really want to do that however the most that the operating system should do is go "yo, are you sure you wanna do that? It's a pretty bad idea." then when I say "yeah, just fuck my shit up" it should go "alright, your funeral" not "sorry but I can't do that". It's my system and I should be the one in control even if my decisions regarding that system result in it becoming unusable.

But as soon as you try something different than what the distro cooked for you, you are in for a world of pain with a shitty package & dependencies management which always end up destroying your system.

I'd argue with that, but then I remembered that you use Redhat.

Company policy. Only Redhat is supported. And I never bring work at home.