linux

[Deleted]

linyx

[a most insightful post]

Macabre

[Deleted]

...i didn't install it though - today even most linux distros are too heavy for the old computers...

and besides - KUBUS GAMES!

[Aids man]

I like kubus games

[Deleted]

Me too. With the abundance of the linux distros nowadays... I wish KUBUS LINUX or KUBUS OS, or KUBUSIX (KubusBSD maybe?) was there, containing all pre-installed Kubus games in a working Wine environment, all his other works, bookmarks with kubus-related stuff in browser (which should NOT be Firefox... unless it's an old version released approximately during the time Kubus was active and around)... Rotten teeth wallpapers in 60+ designs, some clowns, and a Pink Umbrella repository allowing downloads for linux binaries of jinx's games, tapeworms johnny fangames and other stuff. Plus some old gamedev apps ported to linux.

The Kubusbox window manager should contain garish themes in bright pink, blue and yellow colors. Upon kernel updates there should be a chance of displaying an image from Friday the 13th game during reboot. And no systemd!

Fun fact: flashing a FreeBSD live iso image (or any other BSD type for that matter) on usb drive under Windows 7 with Rufus or Balena Etcher (doesn't really matter) will result in immediate BSOD just before/after the operation completes. This is a bug in Win7 which makes the OS panic upon seeing an unfamiliar UNIX file system on a flash drive, which is also worsened by the misalignment of partition table on FreeBSD ISOs themselves, after they are flashed. (Linux and other non-BSD live ISOs all flash fine) It seems you can still boot from it in BIOS, but as soon as you let Windows boot instead with this flash drive connected, it will BSOD once again and you won't be able to use your computer with it plugged. And from that point on, your USB drive will become a "killer USB" BSODding any Windows 7 machine just upon plugging it in! Takes about 1-2 seconds and is not fatal if you remove the drive and reboot. Windows 10 is unaffected (but it's probably because the system is one big BSOD in itself). So yeah. Enjoy the FreeBSOD.

[Jinxtengu]

Cool idea Macabre.
Hey does anyone know how to install a free security certificate on a website?
I realized my site is being blocked on a bunch of browsers and not appearing in
goolge searches because I have not added a security certificate.
I was looking at lets encrypt, which supposedly offers free ssls, but the process of adding them doesn't seem particularly straightforward and my time is kinda stretched between game design and code and animation at the moment.

[Deleted]

I think Let's Encrypt is a good option, even if it takes time. Nowadays, people are obsessed with getting "easy" Cloudflare certificates (I don't know whether they offer it for free though, but I suspect so) - and that's a really, really bad idea... Even this board became cloudflared not so long ago. That is also probably why google now tries to make everyone use SSL/TLS - the problem is, Cloudflare doesn't really encrypt anything - it spies on the site, its owner and its visitors, becoming a so-called "man-in-the-middle proxy". There may be other certificate authorities offering encryption for free, just don't use Cloudflare please, even if it seems attractive at the first glance. The number of visitors will be even less due to datamining ReCaptcha and blocking of old and non-mainstream browsers like Pale Moon.

People started to stray away from google gradually, and other search engines don't seem to have such policies, you might want to take that into account. And SSL encryption itself on the non-banking sites is a false hype that became a thing lately precisely to catch as many sites as possible into the crimeflare botnets. So I think that if you really only care about the google results, it's better to use let's encrypt.

[Deleted]

If anyone is interested, recently I tried switching my machine to MX Linux from Windows 7. I know there's that big scare going on about the end of support for 7. But since in my opinion, M$ made so many things worse with the advent of Windows 10, the only options for me were either to try linux or stay with 7. I chose the latter, and here's why:

I don't think that Linux is bad, geeky or unusable. In fact it seems that a lot of rumors about it being unsuitable for desktop users are untrue. The distro I tried was very easy to install and set up, people can do it just by following the PDF manual that comes with the OS. It's friendly, stable and pretty fast (though I didn't notice much difference here, because I keep my Windows 7 installations very light on resources). It's perfectly fine for browsing the net, watching movies and listening to the music. All the corporate mold like the office suites is also there. Printer and scanner support is there, but incomplete.

The community is great! People are very open to discussion and often give you helpful advice. I've heard that there's still some elitism going on, but personally I never encountered it.

However, it still has problems in the gaming department. They say that many new games are being ported to linux now via Steam. But what if you don't want to use that platform for obvious privacy reasons? Linux is very internet-dependent. You can't just back up your favourite software, because you don't download the MSIs or EXEs from a site, using a system called repository instead, which is like a (free) online store of applications that gets updated independently of your actions. So if the OS developers decide they don't want some program in their repositories anymore, you won't be able to use it anymore. Well, technically you can back up the old versions, but it requires great skills and can make your system unstable because it will no longer be compatible with the old program.

The looks of Linux is a matter of taste, but personally I didn't like how material or "flat" design is being pushed on it heavily. Now even Windows 10 suffers from that. Linux claims to be more customizable than windows, and partly this is true because it has different desktop environments (something like different versions of Explorer.exe with different layouts and designs). But often the look is inconsistent, because some applications use a thing called GTK, some use a thing called Qt and some use who knows what kinds of things, all having their own themes. It's very difficult to create your own theme, and those that exist have their own problems like menus going off-screen or options not showing at all.

New distros often include bad applications like PulseAudio, which replaces ALSA, an old audio system for Linux which always worked fine. PulseAudio makes sound laggy on linux, but thankfully it's easy to uninstall. Then there's little you can do in preventing some programs from connecting to the internet. This is a major issue nobody seems to give a damn about. This makes linux more like windows 10 from privacy standpoint. Which is not good at all.

The software for linux is mostly good. You have players that are as good as Media Player Classic (vlc, mpv). DeadBeef is similar to foobar2000, but has less features. I think this field will continue to improve, but the game support is seriously lacking. My laptop has two video cards, and switching between them is a nightmare in linux. And it is necessary to switch between them sometimes. Some windows games can work, but support is very bad for the old games (90s and 2000s). There is a working DosBox, so you can still enjoy Blood and System Shock without any problems. I even got the impression that Dosbox works better in linux. But I had to forget about games like Deus Ex or American McGee's Alice. There are happy stories on the net how people managed to get these games to work using Wine (a compatibility layer that allows you to use windows programs on linux). But they don't provide good instructions on how they achieved this, and it can take a lot of nerves to figure this on your own. I tried launching some Jinx's games, most of them worked and even had music. Though I must say that MIDI support in Linux is also not easy to set up, before I did that there was no music in these games. You can't do much game-making in Linux, but at least OHRRPGCE works. I think this may also improve with time, but it's unlikely that our favourite old tools like The Games Factory will be accessible.

So all in all, if you think about switching to linux, I think you will enjoy it if you don't mind having almost no games, material design and slightly glitchy menus and programs that can still send your data somewhere (though it will happen a lot less often than on windows 10). I don't want to badmouth this system, I really don't because I like the revolutionary idea behind it. But the freedom they propose is not always there. You'd think that you will eventually be able to fix anything once you learn the shell and the terminal, but some issues simply can't be resolved right now. Linux is strong when it comes to security (almost no viruses, and you can encrypt your system behind two or three passwords, there's an option during install), and it does look more stable than windows (but it isn't as ideal as people claim, I had applications glitch and a boot process stall once). It's unfortunately still not as good for privacy, not at all - for gaming. It's okay for multimedia, internet and work/study. I thought about setting up a dual boot: MX Linux and Windows 7 on one computer - yes that's possible. But for now, I see no point in doing so. Just my impressions.

[recidivist]

Apr 5, 2020 19:52:33 GMT @macabre said:

If anyone is interested, recently I tried switching my machine to MX Linux from Windows 7. I know there's that big scare going on about the end of support for 7. But since in my opinion, M$ made so many things worse with the advent of Windows 10, the only options for me were either to try linux or stay with 7.

I agree. Windows 10 is such a nasty OS to me, I hate using it.
People freak out about Windows 7 being no longer supported by Microsoft, but the thing is that all they'll do is stop providing security updates. What do these security updates do? Next to nothing! So in the end, that actually doesn't matter. Just use Malwarebytes or some other anti-virus software and it'll do you just as good, if not, better than what Microsoft would give you.
I remember when WannaCry was spreading rapidly, Microsoft even made updates for now-out-of-support versions of Windows, XP and Vista. So this goes to show that even if there really is something to worry about that we need Microsoft for, like another WannaCry situation, then Microsoft will probably still help out anybody using something unsupported.

[Deleted]

Yes, I think that the end of support thing is largely a marketing trick. There was a similar panic with windows xp, but at least people didn't go crazy about it. I've heard tech-savvy people say that Windows 10 is more of an advertizing platform than OS. Essentially you just rent it as a service, instead of using it as a product like it used to be in the past. Looks like the company started to care less about quality and more about money, finding a way to put as little effort as possible into getting it. I agree that Microsoft will probably still release critical updates and patches, because old operating systems are still being used in places like hospitals for instance - most medical equipment still has drivers for Windows XP, and having 10 there would be a disaster...

Related material:
invidious.tube/watch?v=KIvltxCdcKI
www.itvision.altervista.org/why-windows-10-sucks.html

[recidivist]

I always thought it was quite interesting how a lot of hospitals and stores and gas stations and the likes would use older operating systems for their machines. I hear many registers and etc. use OS/2.
I still think Win10 has some merit, it has enough things about it that make it feel like Microsoft isn't just trying to milk money out of it and they actually do wanna make a decent OS, but it just doesn't feel as pure as any one of the previous Windows iterations. Even Windows 8 feels organic, I think because it was the one to really popularize that modern metro look. While I hate that look, I still respect Windows 8. It definitely tried making changes.

[Deleted]

Some computers in my country probably still run XP or DOS, because these systems have good banking and other servicing applications. Many big sites work on FreeBSD which is old but still in active development.

Yes there are definitely some improvements in Windows 8 and 10, I think people were largely put off by the touchscreen oriented interface in Windows 8, but otherwise I've heard definitely positive opinions on it. Some good things about 10 that I know are improved SSL/TLS support (basically internet security) and better handling of bootable USB drives using GPT partitioning. There are definitely good people even at Microsoft who really want to see the system improve, it's just the aggressive marketing that's holding them back in my opinion.

There are rumors that Windows and Linux might merge sometime soon... It would be interesting to see what comes out of it in such case!

[man]

Im still using windows 7 and really wanting to switch to linux but i feel like its too much of a hassle to do it right now. I know you can emulate games but i don't game much anyway. Is it worth it?

[man]

Apr 5, 2020 19:52:33 GMT @macabre said:

So all in all, if you think about switching to linux, I think you will enjoy it if you don't mind having almost no games, material design and slightly glitchy menus and programs that can still send your data somewhere (though it will happen a lot less often than on windows 10). 

This kind of answered my question 

[neo_juice]

I currently use Linux, and enjoy it, though I admit my system took a bit to set up. I took the undertaking of going without a full desktop environment and just decided to set up and download the programs I need myself. My interface is not flat/minimalist or material design since the icons and window design I went with aren't. The window manager I chose (FVWM) allows one to fully customize, in depth, a a lot of the desktop, and gives the option of more older-school options like allowing buttons to not be flat, or allowing the use of pixmaps. I do concede that, if you don't want to spend hours customizing or figuring everything out, then you will just have to deal with the style that most desktop environments give you. As for my game experience, I just use linux for smaller games it supports and Windows for any modern stuff. Wine has worked great for the games I've tried (Stepmania, Touhou, Sunfish), but I know that some newer games won't work. Valve has done a lot to increase linux's ability to play games, but it still isn't perfect.