• devfuuu@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    4 days ago

    I still remember the old times before xorg.confs were modular. The truly hard times.

    • mutual_ayed@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      19·
      4 days ago

      I remember when /bin/sh was the default shell, when you had to build grep from source. LILO was our bootloader. Dmesg was our seer. We made fire from a friction drill. Knapped our own blades from flint.

      Simpler times.

        • mutual_ayed@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          25·
          4 days ago

          I was there when the dark magic was written. In the time before git. The shell had not yet been born again.

          The great wizard Stahlman still held sway in the high court, his Gknights of Gnu were just building their kernel. Lo gaze upon their mighty works and see they lie in ruin.

          Torvalds was the true vanguard, he lead us to build the mighty kernel, to reverse engineer the binary blobs, coax the meaning from machine code, a thin line from serial to stdout.

          No heirarchy but those inherited from the libraries. User space was our land, ~ was our home, #! was our flag. No gods, no masters, only code.

            • mutual_ayed@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              14·
              4 days ago

              '94 but I was on Usenet (actually probably not usenet but definitely one of the “readers”) when I heard about it first. That would’ve been around '93. Me and a buddy were pretty nerdy and his dad worked at Bell Labs and they got a couple floppies. That was my start. It was just the kernel and Gnu Utilities. Literally Linux+Gnu. Shortly after that I grabbed SLS Linux, that became Slack. Then Debian, I was in the listserve when Ian would still answer questions and fix bugs. I hope he’s found the peace now he was searching for in life.

              I’ve contributed to quite a few open source projects over the years, nothing foundational. I didn’t really know anybody from the old old days. Just a geeky kid lucky enough to have a computer and a modem at the time. I am very privileged to have grown up when I did and where I did.

              I don’t envy the kids coming up now. Completely abstracted away from their systems to the point where they actually think it’s magic. I had a very junior engineer ask me how to print a pdf the other week at work. I can’t imagine how modern education and tech have failed them. I hope I’m wrong but it feels like LLMs are talking away curiosity and hacking. I’m sure that’s just me being a crusty old bastard though.

              Speaking of I’ve been having fun playing around with this as of late.

              https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/m365-copilot-prompt-injection-tool-invocation-and-data-exfil-using-ascii-smuggling/

              You’d need to have access to the prompt tooling, or worse yet the RAG, otherwise you’re just hoping that a user feeds your email into an LLM. The hidden ascii though, old tricks are new again.

              • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
                7·
                4 days ago

                I’m close, 93 also I think, slack on a 386.

                Got stuck in vi, had to reboot.

                Remember thinking how awesome 6 virtual consoles were. I think my tmux addiction came from there.

                • mutual_ayed@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  7·
                  4 days ago

                  Lol! I thought vi was genuinely a new layer of the OS, like an embedded console. Ended up creating 10 files containing exit, or quit, or ^c, until I hit the escape key and the cursor changed…then I rebooted from frustration and actually read the man page. The controls are all from this dumb terminal keyboard that had useful decals on them. That’s where navigation with kjhl came from and :q to quit.

                  https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor

                  Rage quitting vi/vim really is a right of passage.

                  Remember ed?

      • devfuuu@lemmy.world
        3·
        4 days ago

        I dearly miss lilo, it was the best bootloader. But then everyone started using grub which I hated with a passion. So glad that there are so much better options nowadays.

  • Abnorc@lemm.ee
    7·
    3 days ago

    That is BSD. You can go there. Cool people. Hardware support is a bit spottier though.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      I’m pretty sure it is because nobody knows. Xorg is a massive project that has tons and tons of duck tape.

  • Im_old@lemmy.world
    18·
    4 days ago

    Gather around kids, story time. It was 2002 and I had a desktop pc with two video cards, one Matrox with dual video output (they were pretty much the only consumer ones with that at the time) on AGP slot, and one “something” (probably ATI, it still had and RCA port) on PCI. So I installed gentoo (from stage1, as it was custom at the time) and fiddled around with xorg.conf to have two monitors output from the Matrox and a third (yes, I had 3 monitors) from the ATI.

    That’s when I understood the power of Linux (no way win2000 was able to do that).

  • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    191·
    4 days ago

    professional tip for those who decided to rock Debian on a laptop with two GPU’s.

    Envycontrol will take the headache away from manually configuring your xorg & xrandr, trust me, compared to the Debian documentation this will save you hours of your life.

    • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      94·
      4 days ago

      …who… IN THE FUCK!!! Reads Debian docs?

      Arch are the true Linux docs, maybe Gentoo docs, worst case Ubuntu forums.

      Run a ton of Debian, only time I check their docs is when I’m trying to remember what the current stable release is called.

      • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        4 days ago

        …who… IN THE FUCK!!! Reads Debian docs?

        How else does one learn the distro they use without consulting the documentation?

        • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12·
          4 days ago

          Like I said, I use debian docs to install.

          After that arch docs are INCREDIBLY thorough, they cover almost all of linux and are far more exhaustive than any other.

          • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            4 days ago

            Like I said, I use debian docs to install.

            You didn’t say that, you said.

            only time I check their docs is when I’m trying to remember what the current stable release is called.

            After that arch docs are INCREDIBLY thorough

            Yeah I wouldn’t trust the documentation for another distribution on my install, you do you though.

      • idefix@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        4 days ago

        I’ve had some good experience in the past. All the Debian specific information was properly documented in the packages README files.

        • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          4 days ago

          I agree.

          But honestly, how much Debian specific anything is there outside the install?

          In fact debian is branded as the most boring vanilla distro there is, for good reason.

          Almost everything Linux you do is better documented in the arch docs imho.

          • idefix@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            4 days ago

            Honestly, Linux has progressed immensely the past decade and I only read documentation when setting up servers these days. I’m mostly an Arch derivative desktop user but I still love Debian on the server side.

            The Debian specific stuff are usually in the service description (email, web, ssh servers), and they are quite nice.

            • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              4 days ago

              Debian is godly for servers, stable, robust, and most software is supported one way or another.

              Also none of that redhat bs like their management stack, or Ubuntu and snap.

              Their only weakness was they were far dated on kernels and software and that changed over the last 5 years, they’re often ahead of ubuntu now.

              My first choice is always freebsd if I don’t need kvm or docker and the software is there, arch if it’s more workstationy, Gentoo if I’m in a fun mood (mained it for years but it kept breaking), and finally Debian if I just want something that works.

              Even with Debian, wrote an lxc-based stack so it’s often just a base for arch for fun and Ubuntu for work. This is where it truly shines.

    • drathvedro@lemm.ee
      3·
      4 days ago

      Can it force apps to use iGPU when dGPU is on? It’s one of the things I miss from windows and couldn’t figure out on linux

      • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        11·
        4 days ago

        It has this hybrid option, that’s about it from what I know.

        Set graphics mode to hybrid and enable fine-grained power control:

        sudo envycontrol -s hybrid --rtd3

        Edit: the —rtd3 flag seems to have different levels of power management.

        --rtd3 [VALUE]        Setup PCI-Express Runtime D3 (RTD3) Power Management on Hybrid mode. Available choices: 0, 1, 2, 3. Default if specified: 2
        • drathvedro@lemm.ee
          1·
          2 days ago

          Ah so it’s about the same-ish functionality as supergfxctl and system76-power it seems. For me I’m searching for more granular control. e.g. if I’m gaming with dGPU-primary I might want to move browser and such to iGPU to free up dGPU VRAM, or just to put it to lower power states because spinning this behemoth up for youtube videos seems inefficient. Otherwise, when I’m in iGPU primary, it sometimes misdetects when to activate the dGPU and chokes the poor little thing down or, again, spins up the dGPU needlessly.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
      1·
      4 days ago

      Did they finally stop with that crap? Having 4k on a display size where it makes no sense but needs a dedicated GPU because iGPU were not good enough then.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      6·
      4 days ago

      I mean, there was a point in time, quite some years back, when I had to do up modelines, but Xorg can generally handle things without an xorg.conf.

      • John Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        4 days ago

        It has improved, but most developers working on Xorg have moved to Wayland. I’m not saying Xorg isn’t still useful at times, like forwarding over SSH, but Wayland has more isolation & security considerations, which can be seen as both an advantage & limitation. However, Wayland compositors have implemented most controls & protocols now to fill in the gaps.

    • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      4 days ago

      Do you really think ppl don’t break their wayland setup? For example, some systems don’t get a mouse cursor in wayland umless they switch the cursor to software rendering. To do that, they must often set an env var for the wayland process, but there is no standard way to do it. Half of them starts tinkering with their PAM and the others with their .profile . Sometimes this breaks every way to log in.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 days ago

      Still won’t handle popup menu correctly, still won’t allow copy/paste with CLI programs without using an extra, implementation-specific, piece of software, still won’t allow some window to correctly detect their position.

      Wayland might be interesting, but between blind haters and blind supporters, it’s really annoying. Forcing people to switch while some basic features are “mostly working” is not helping.

      • PlantPowerPhysicist@discuss.tchncs.de
        4·
        4 days ago

        still won’t allow copy/paste with CLI programs without using an extra, implementation-specific, piece of software

        What are you referring to here? I haven’t noticed anything out of place on KDE regarding copy/paste…

        • cley_faye@lemmy.world
          3·
          4 days ago

          vim can’t use the kde/wayland clipboard to copy/past properly, you have to script it through something. I’ve read it’s related to non foreground app not being able to manipulate the clipboard or something close to that, which a CLI app will never be.

          There are “solutions”, mostly overriding vim behavior to write/read from that dedicated program, though. It’s not a show stopper, but not every software allow this kind of flexibility.

      • John Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        I managed to work through all those issues using XDG portals & necessary software/configurations when using Hyprland & Arch, but I’d think that major distros & DEs also had solved them as part of their installs. Maybe I’m wrong. It is sad if they haven’t, because they are solvable. If this was 2 years ago, I would understand the frustrations more, but if there are still issues then I am more frustrated at whoever is packaging the crap & sending it to end users without thinking to address these problems using the available solutions.

    • renzev@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 days ago

      Still gathering up my courage to make the switch. The better security / isolation between apps is a huge feature for me. But porting all of my shitty xorg-specific scripts and hacks will be a pain.

  • cley_faye@lemmy.world
    9·
    4 days ago

    I get the joke, but I’m getting tired of these very, very old memes being reposted ad-nauseam when they’re so outdated. I did not have to open the xorg.conf file for at least a decade, probably more. It was a very annoying thing to do, yes, but hasn’t been an issue for a lot of install in forever.

    There’s a resurgence of these “but it’s very weird/difficult/annoying” outdated memes these last few weeks on a lot of websites, and at this point I’m wondering if it’s just people discovering them or just some people bashing linux systems based on their experience from the last century.

    • superkret@feddit.org
      4·
      4 days ago

      It’s people entering the Linux space and wanting to join the tribe by posting Linux memes they found on google.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
      3·
      4 days ago

      I did xorg.conf from the example on Arch wiki and it worked. Then i did it the correct way from the official documentation and it didn’t.

      • cley_faye@lemmy.world
        3·
        4 days ago

        I did not touch an xorg.conf file in forever and it just works out of the box, whether I’m running debian, kubuntu, or mint, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

          • cley_faye@lemmy.world
            2·
            3 days ago

            xrandr --rate 60. No need to mess with xorg.conf. And you put that on a start script to never have to type it again.

            • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
              2·
              3 days ago

              I have that on a key combo, together with --gamma for day/evening colors. But it is reset after display sleep. Funnily enough, even xorg.conf is ignored 50% of the times then.

    • Saleh@feddit.org
      41·
      4 days ago

      I broke xorg.conf when i installed Linux Mint about a year ago, but i forgot what for. Ironically i never had issues with an Arch based distro.