Linux General Questions

Yeah, I might have to load up Arch when I get my desktop assembled. Oh the configurability!

muraii wrote:

environment

I've recently gone in the other direction, realizing that all of the 'bigger' desktops weren't really adding much I couldn't do in a less resource-intensive manner. On my desktops I don't really care as much, so I have been too lazy to move away from gnome2 and all of its trappings. For laptops though, anything I can do to conserve power is good. Since I was going down that road, I'm also doing my best to avoid anything either qt or gtk. A combination of openbox/pypanel/urxvt are treating me pretty well. The one difficulty I've run into with my no qt/gtk approach is finding a decent email client. Opera appears to be the only major web browser I can use, but I've always enjoyed Opera so thats fine. It does come with an email client, but Opera yet to produce an email client that can deal well with the amount of email I make it handle. It also grossly breaks the one tool for one job philosophy. If I ever get around to truly learning how to utilize mutt I'll be fine, but I've been addicted to graphical email clients since they became available.

absurddoctor wrote:
muraii wrote:

environment

I've recently gone in the other direction, realizing that all of the 'bigger' desktops weren't really adding much I couldn't do in a less resource-intensive manner. On my desktops I don't really care as much, so I have been too lazy to move away from gnome2 and all of its trappings. For laptops though, anything I can do to conserve power is good. Since I was going down that road, I'm also doing my best to avoid anything either qt or gtk. A combination of openbox/pypanel/urxvt are treating me pretty well. The one difficulty I've run into with my no qt/gtk approach is finding a decent email client. Opera appears to be the only major web browser I can use, but I've always enjoyed Opera so thats fine. It does come with an email client, but Opera yet to produce an email client that can deal well with the amount of email I make it handle. It also grossly breaks the one tool for one job philosophy. If I ever get around to truly learning how to utilize mutt I'll be fine, but I've been addicted to graphical email clients since they became available.

Yeah, that's the way I went. I had dovecot, fetchmail, msmtp, and mutt singing along. Having a smartphone made that a little weird, so I went mutt with Gmail IMAP. But I so rarely do email on my machine now, except to send a web link periodically. I use a Chrome extension to send without seeing my inbox, so email works out.

I'm fine sticking to Openbox and tint2 (which I really like) and a panel (might actually be pypanel). I wondered, though, if there's a way to approach that simplicity but have more UI horsepower just patiently waiting my invocation.

I'd prefer to stick with Slackware, but the DEs it supports don't wow me.

I say you guys are nuts! But I applaud you as well

gore wrote:

I use GNOME Shell. A great deal of my daily use is in Chromium and gnome-terminal. I like Shell very much because it gets out of my way and lets me work.

I use the Meta key to access the "Activities" view. I start typing the name of the thing I want. I hit enter. I have that thing, and all that's left of Shell on my screen is the menu bar at top. No docks, no nothing. Gimme thing and go away. Thank you.

Same here; I'm a huge fan of GNOME Shell. I'm running it on Ubuntu at the moment, and that works well enough, though I'll just have to see how much longer that's going to remain a viable option -- they've already had a couple of cases where they've kept back packages (12.10 ships with mostly GNOME 3.6 components, but with Nautilus 3.4, for instance) because the more recent version didn't sit well with what they were doing in Unity.

I tried Arch briefly, and it seemed like a good option, so I might have to try that again soon.

I toyed with a bunch of minimal desktops back in the day, and even wrote a launcher panel app that someone seems to be maintaining, which is surprising (it still uses GTK 1.2!), but these days, I'm lazy I can see the appeal on a laptop, but I actually find that GNOME 3 seems to be even more at home on a laptop, where space is at a greater premium. I love being able to swipe up the new lock screen with a gesture on my trackpad, too.

So, Arch. Here's how I maintain Slackware for the most part.

1. Receive email notification(s) of updated system package(s).
2. Issue # slackpkg update.
3. Issue # slackpkg upgrade patches.
4. Hit "Enter".

Installing the system is super simple, too. The installer, slackpkg, and sbopkg (which is an unofficial way to install other components and easily update 'em) all use ncurses, which for me is teh bomz (no mousing). I don't mind that none of them handle dependencies, though I might change my tune if I were doing something horrendously complicated. To that end, sbopkg users have shared queuefiles which (theoretically) will build an application and its dependencies using sbopkg, in order.

I've heard that Arch is about compiling everything from source, but that doesn't seem altogether too different from Slackware. With some exceptions (e.g., Flash), I'm not installing blobs. How does Arch compare? (I'm also reading up on it, but like to get perspectives.)

muraii wrote:

I've heard that Arch is about compiling everything from source, but that doesn't seem altogether too different from Slackware. With some exceptions (e.g., Flash), I'm not installing blobs. How does Arch compare? (I'm also reading up on it, but like to get perspectives.)

sudo pacman -Syu to sync and update all packages that need it. That's it. Compiling from source comes from the AUR - and even then, you can get a package manager to do all that for you - yaourt. It sits on top of pacman and does a little extra. I tend to use it myself.

athros wrote:
muraii wrote:

I've heard that Arch is about compiling everything from source, but that doesn't seem altogether too different from Slackware. With some exceptions (e.g., Flash), I'm not installing blobs. How does Arch compare? (I'm also reading up on it, but like to get perspectives.)

sudo pacman -Syu to sync and update all packages that need it. That's it. Compiling from source comes from the AUR - and even then, you can get a package manager to do all that for you - yaourt. It sits on top of pacman and does a little extra. I tend to use it myself.

Okay. Seems like a similar experience. The wiki/unofficial beginner's guide make it seem like a pretty conventional process to install.

One thing I am interested in is a Arch's more DE-agnostic approach. It's possible to get Gnome running with Slackware, but it's not integrated into the system.

There's no installation program for Arch, although there are some useful scripts to help create your environment on the live CD and there is very good documentation.

From my perspective Arch is the best of all worlds in rolling releases at the moment: a very large number of pre-built binary packages, in addition to tools which make it easy to build from source if/when required.

I did enjoy Arch when I used it. My problem was I wouldn't use it for a month (was stuck in Windows), and I would come back and things would break from non-use. I also wasn't good about reading the Arch homepage. Once in a while there are issues you need to fix with simple direction.

But I completely agree, the amount of pre-built binaries is awesome, and basically everything else is available in the AUR. And you get to choose everything you want on the desktop.... dangit, I want to install again!

muraii wrote:
athros wrote:
muraii wrote:

I've heard that Arch is about compiling everything from source, but that doesn't seem altogether too different from Slackware. With some exceptions (e.g., Flash), I'm not installing blobs. How does Arch compare? (I'm also reading up on it, but like to get perspectives.)

sudo pacman -Syu to sync and update all packages that need it. That's it. Compiling from source comes from the AUR - and even then, you can get a package manager to do all that for you - yaourt. It sits on top of pacman and does a little extra. I tend to use it myself.

Okay. Seems like a similar experience. The wiki/unofficial beginner's guide make it seem like a pretty conventional process to install.

One thing I am interested in is a Arch's more DE-agnostic approach. It's possible to get Gnome running with Slackware, but it's not integrated into the system.

I recognize all of those words. Most of them are in the dictionary. As an outsider to your subculture, though, that's some thickly accented pidgin.
And I thought I was following along for the previous 17 pages so well.

As an outsider to your subculture, though, that's some thickly accented pidgin.

FWIW, I've been at least dabbling with Linux since '93 or so, and I still had to really focus to translate those observations into anything I recognized.

Success through obfuscation.

Malor wrote:
As an outsider to your subculture, though, that's some thickly accented pidgin.

FWIW, I've been at least dabbling with Linux since '93 or so, and I still had to really focus to translate those observations into anything I recognized.

Oh. Good?

muraii wrote:

Success through obfuscation.

Way to spread the culture?

Obviously it's not a conversation you'd have with someone who doesn't use Linux

Also, if you haven't use Arch or Slackware specifically, a lot of that could go over your head as well, even if you are a Linux head

Ok, I gotta know, though.
Gimme this one.

DE-agnostic

I know agnostic.
The only DE I can think of is diatomaceous earth, and since this is a "swimming pool general questions" thread, I'm pretty sure it's not that.

Desktop Environment. He's talking about Gnome, KDE, etc.

EDIT: duplicity.

Glibness aside--I wasn't being obfuscatory on purpose--I'm no neckbeard. I've been using Linux since 2004-2005. I only fiddle with it just enough to get by.

The specific inquiry here is about desktop environments, or DEs. This is--essentially--the combination of window manager and assorted helper tools that makes for the user interface. Gnome and KDE are popular DEs, for instance.

DEs take some resources for the overhead so sometimes people just use a window manager and a handful of tools, like panels or docks. The window manager just draws the application windows and provides some basic rendering infrastructure. Openbox and Metacity are good examples.

The primary maintainer of Slackware, Patrick Volkerding, believes or believed that Gnome was built on too many poorly maintained dependencies, and so decided against including Gnome as an optional DE in Slackware. You can use KDE or Xfce or LXDE, and you can install a few others fairly easily. But Gnome requires building its full stack of development code and such. I've never tried it, mostly because I haven't had the horsepower to not notice a little sluggishness.

Arch is a distribution that seems similar philosophically to Slackware but notably includes Gnome alongside KDE and several other DEs. That is, they seem more DE-agnostic.

After reading a few posts here about Gnome, I'm thinking of trying it. On Slackware, the standard core won't include any updates to Gnome or its building blocks, and there isn't--to my knowledge--Slackbuild support for it, either. As such, I'd be left manually updating as security fixes or new features are released. I could try either of the methods I linked to for installing and maintaining Gnome on Slackware, but they seem to be rotting a little.

In that way, moving to a new distribution might allow for tinkering with Gnome, now that I have more horses to spare, as well as trying a new distribution. I should at least play with it in a VM.

Hopefully that's not quite so stuffed up. +)

Oh, I was just having a bit of fun, really. I'd lurked though most of this thread with no problems, but your post just struck my funny bone and I did that RCA dog head tilt trying to parse it. I'm rarely outgeeked to the point of being lost, and I had to share. It was an odd and enlightening feeling.

Acronym soup is delicious.

Can I put this conversation on my CV then? "Momentarily lost a couple technically savvy gamers -April, 2013"

If only I could transmute that into a means of escaping role as Excel monkey.

The compile-yourself distros will offer a poor return on time invested, unless you plan to actively tinker with source code.

In the 32-bit world, self-compiling with your specific processor as a target can result in a fair bit of speed improvement over the stock binaries. The biggest improvement is going from generic 386 code to 686 code. Most distros get around that by offering optional kernel and glibc versions that are tuned for i686. This gives you most of the speed boost, while still letting basically all computers run the distro. There is some improvement if you custom-compile everything, but it's a huge and ongoing hassle, for only a moderate speed boost. Most code is not CPU-bound; it's typically network- and disk-bound, and recompiling it just means it waits faster.

It's even less valuable in x64 land, because all x64 processors have an extremely high minimum standard for features supported. The performance delta from base x64 to a current-gen Intel or AMD processor isn't that high. There are a few cases where that's not true, like with the AES New Instructions, but just like doing 686 versions of kernel and glibc, you can deploy AESNI-enabled versions of the kernel and crypto libraries. You'll get a substantial majority of the total speed improvement, but you only have to maintain a few source packages, instead of hundreds.

Recompiling the whole OS takes a long damn time.

tl;dr version: if you're doing Arch for fun or to learn stuff, go for it. If you're doing Arch to try to make your computer run faster, don't bother.

I'm not looking to toon performance. I just don't think I'm an apt-get/aptitude/whatever person. Maybe I'd get used to it, but then again, my first (serious) foray into Linux was Ubuntu 5.04 and I found it too easy to install things and not know where they were, tethered to a GUI for admin.

If I try Arch, it'll be to play around with something near Slackware's wheelhouse and try out some different tools.

Learn apt-get, yum, or whatever installer your distro uses. They're pretty easy to pick up and make app management a breeze. In pretty much every case, to find an app you'll do something like "apt-get list *pattern*" (the asterisk is a wildcard just like in file matching) and then "sudo apt-get install name-you-just-found". That's it.

I'd really only consider recompiling the kernel if you have specific needs that the pre-built one doesn't address. Maybe you're doing server work and need a ridiculously large number of open sockets, etc. It's not worth it just for a performance edge in desktop apps.

I'm interested in dependency resolution. Slackware doesn't do it, and it makes me track down each dependency manually. I know, that sounds like pain, but it keeps things fairly lean and it minimized the number of things breaking each other. My experience with Ubuntu was that I just installed stuff and didn't necessarily pay as much attention to what it was bringing along with it. My uneducated impression of Arch is that I can get somewhere on that spectrum, either disciplined or lazy, with the notable freedom to choose from more DEs to see what fits.

And I'm certainly not about to compile a kernel as more than a learning experience. I'm using the "huge" kernel Slackware ships pre-compiled because it's easy and I don't anticipate saving noticeable productivity time. This is especially the case when I (finally) move to the desktop machine. An E6750 isn't screaming by today's standards, but it kills my current laptop T2370.

There's not going to be a great deal of difference between Ubuntu installing dependencies with apt-get and Arch doing the same with pacman. Both tell you at the time of installation what additional packages they are installing.

You're also not really going to find any desktop environments or other software that you can install in Arch that you won't be able to install in Ubuntu. Basically, if you want it, someone has a Ubuntu PPA that has it pre-built. The AUR is nice in that you generally don't have to go anywhere else to find things, but it also brings with it plenty of its own inconveniences.

There's an appeal to Arch's build-it-up-yourself approach, but I think the main appeal of Arch is simply that it's a bleeding-edge rolling release distro. It takes just as much time to learn how to get things started in Arch as it does to learn how to turn off extras in Ubuntu.

If you want to learn more about Linux, running Arch, at least for awhile, is likely to be helpful. The more exposure you get to the more distros, the better; there are always a million ways to do everything in Unix, and the more of them you're exposed to, the stronger a toolkit you'll have for troubleshooting. Plus, it's just fun exploring other people's ideas for how a distro should work.

Unless you specifically know otherwise, however, any time saved by faster-running programs is unlikely to ever approach the time invested for the compile.

It could be argued that, since you're starting with Slackware, moving to Arch next might be a logical step toward more-automated distros. Slack is very manual; Arch and Gentoo are more automated; Debian/Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SUSE do almost everything for you.

tl;dr version: from the perspective of having fun and experimenting, install everything. If you're actually trying to get work done, you'll probably prefer a distro that does package management.

Thanks for the points. I may have an uneducated or malformed bias regarding these distros. Legion, to your point, and much as I implied, it wasn't that Ubuntu was the problem but that I had too little discipline in choosing what and what not to install. "Of course I need a molecule renderer," he said, before installing 6GB of dependencies. "Let's fold proteins now!"

The bias, though, is an assumption that the base install of Slackware, and to a similar degree Arch/Gentoo, is leaner than that of Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, etc. Maybe that's true, but maybe it's not true enough modulo the ease/difficulty of streamlining to justify the strength of my bias.

Malor, I'm looking forward to some more RAM to play with VMs for precisely the purpose of installing lots of stuff. I'll probably get a base OS going and then play with a few before settling.

muraii wrote:

Legion, to your point, and much as I implied, it wasn't that Ubuntu was the problem but that I had too little discipline in choosing what and what not to install. "Of course I need a molecule renderer," he said, before installing 6GB of dependencies. "Let's fold proteins now!"

The bias, though, is an assumption that the base install of Slackware, and to a similar degree Arch/Gentoo, is leaner than that of Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, etc. Maybe that's true, but maybe it's not true enough modulo the ease/difficulty of streamlining to justify the strength of my bias.

Those distros do install leaner defaults, although I think some people overestimate what that means. I see some people equate "leaner install" to mean "it will run faster". But really, if you're going to install X and, say, LXDE on Arch, and you run LXDE on Ubuntu, there's not going to be a significant performance difference. Ubuntu may have a number of extra services starting up by default, but you can disable those, and it will be the same ballpark in terms of amount of work as what it'll take to get X and LXDE up and running on Arch. The Linux kernel is the Linux kernel, X is X, and LXDE is LXDE.

But there's no right or wrong choice. Try them out because you're interested in doing so, and one distro will end up speaking to you more than the others. Then use that one in happy Linux bliss.