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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • I’ve been a Windows… Let’s say a power-user, no expert but I could install it, find a way to troubleshoot most problems. Then at high school a friend lent me a bit outdated Knoppix CD. I never managed to make ppp work on that so no internet, but I loved the old KDE. Somewhat later, when we had a normal DSL line with a proper router, I got Fedora. Then Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian for a while…

    Finally I found Gentoo. And there I am, some 10 years later, still on that. After a bit of a bumpy road of the first install (no automation, but the handbook is very helpful if you know the basic Linux and HW terms) it was almost flawless. I remember two problems, and both of them were my own fault. The first one was some testing kernel version that had a bug where small files on ext3 filesystem would get randomly corrupted. The second was when I was trying to remove some hidden files, mangled the command and ran basically rm -rf /* (seriously, don’t do that, it will delete everything on your system). I reinstalled the system (I had data on a different drive that either wasn’t mounted atm or it didn’t reach them before I Ctrl-c’d that command.) and all was well.

    Finally I did last clean install when I bought new (used) Ryzen build to replace my old i5-2500k, I would’ve had to recompile world anyway and I had pretty much dependency hell of my own making at that point (I was testing tons of unstable stuff, new Plasma 5 from testing repo and so on).

    Now I’m running mostly stable system with only bunch of packages unmasked from testing and there are no problems with that. I never had that with any other distro. No matter if Deb based, rpm based, sooner or later I inevitably ran into some variant of “I need a package that’s not in basic repo, and the package I found requires a version of some library that’s not available as well” or something like that. In Gentoo, the packages either compile against the version you have installed, or if not possible, you can have more versions installed at the same time in different slots. Also if you need something that’s not available in repo, you can just write a text file that downloads and compiles the version you need and it integrates in the package manager automatically, no need to create whole Deb/rpm package.












  • I pretty successfuly ran a combo of TP-Link with OpenWRT connected with cable to a cheap dumb Edimax, which in turn was connected through wifi to downstairs Zyxel ADSL router from O2 ISP.

    Essentially the Edimax bridged the internet (there was only one place where the signal was strong enough) from downstairs, sent it to the TP-Link and that one spread wifi on the upstairs floor (so we could use phones/notebook) and my brother’s and mine desktop PCs were connected to it by cable. A bit of an overcomplicating simple problem, but it worked (otherwise we would either have no wifi or would have to buy a different router with 2 separate WiFi chips).









  • This is a dumb argument. Yes, my phone uses Linux. How many of the Android users actively come in contact with the underlying system?

    Mainstream Linux means a big part of people actively choosing to install a Linux distribution or buy a computer or notebook with a real Linux distro pre installed (not that lightweight barebones distro they preinstall so they can sell it without Windows but with OS).

    I use Gentoo, the family PC has OpenSUSE, only my wife’s laptop has Windows… Because guess what, she wants to use what she’s used to, what she knows.