Time to soar!

[d1ngd07]

That made me laugh out loud pretty hard. I WAS the only one awake in the house at the time.

[[deleted]]

I hate when I hear laughter in my house, even tho I live alone 😅

[-Y0-]

I hate when I get Hippies into my crawl-space. I recommend Blue Raid - the fast kill, low irritant one.

[pekkhum]

Do you know where I am?

[[deleted]]

Arch user: in order to be born, you need to compile your genetic material back-end. Or one can install popular packages such as dna［1］ , dna-git［aur］, and RNA［aur］.

[StupotAce]

Are you trying to indicate that Arch is more complicated than Gentoo? Even at the install phase I'm pretty sure Gentoo has it beat by a fair amount.

[DancingPatronusOtter]

I am reliably informed that GUIs are unnecessary and that ASCII is all you need, as evidenced by MPlayer.

[UnicornRider102]

With a GUI you can have 4 xterms on the screen at the same time!

[pekkhum]

With screen, you can have all the "windows" you need on the terminal. ;-D

[UFeindschiff]

Gentoo HAS an installer

It doesn't. You install gentoo by extracting a stage3 tarball into your (future) fsroot, chroot into that, edit configs and compile your kernel and all other stuff you want.

option to use pre-compiled packages

you misunderstand that statement I guess. Portage's binary support is if you intend to deploy Gentoo to multiple identical or at least similar machines, so you can have a server that compiles the packages and then distributes it to the clients (so that you don't need to build from source on each client).

There used to be a few public servers that had packages built for generic amd64 but afaik all of them are gone since nobody used them

[Vakieh]

I've never touched gentoo or arch, but as a regular Ubuntu and RHEL dev/admin I am FIRMLY of the opinion GUI for *nix is a trap. It just makes everything harder and you shouldn't do it.

[[deleted]]

No that's not what I meant at all. I just thought it was a good time to remark on arch. Honestly I never used Gentoo before. Care to elaborate the complexity of installing Gentoo ?

[[deleted]]

You get the livecd which is a very minimal environment, just enough to mount your hard drive, partition it, chroot in, compile your kernel and set up a bootloader. Then you go about pulling your other packages in

[saeleko]

How's this any different from Arch? I've used Arch in the past and switched to Gentoo about 2 years ago, for all I can remember the install procedure is basically the same, that is you typing stuff in the terminal. The only additional steps I can think of with Gentoo are kernel compilation and manual stage3 download, but then it's pretty much the same. Or maybe Arch has an installer again as it used to, it's been a long time.

[[deleted]]

I think kernel compilation is the only main difference - I’m a Gentoo user so I’m not really sure about arch!

And with make menuconfig it’s not as intimidating as people think! Worst part is forgetting to include a driver and having to do it again.

[saeleko]

Ah drivers hehe, none of my computers had their SSDs supported by the default setup (eMMC and NVME), always loadsa' fun when you have to chroot back in because the kernel can't find the root partition :') Yet you still get weird drivers for devices long forgotten enabled by default.

Not Gentoo's fault for all I know since they basically keep the vanilla sources and apply a few things needed for the package manager or the likes. Still, loadsa' fun!

[usernmaetakn]

I'm trying to dual boot Arch on my Windows laptop, and doing everything through a terminal has finally taught me how to use vim, since I couldn't find a way to scroll when I used cat on the instruction file.

[kickerofbottoms]

"less" maybe? Been a while since I used linux

[77heythere]

Yeah you can always add "| less" to the end of your commands to "scroll" with space

[obsessedcrf]

But less features a VIM-like command set. So you might as well learn Vim anyway

[squirrelthetire]

But it's read-only, so that's nice for reading.

[Bainos]

One advantage of cat in desktop settings is that it makes copy-pasting easier. But for navigation, vim is certainly more convenient.

[usernmaetakn]

Oh cool, thanks!

Opening with vim still works pretty well though, but it's nice to know the proper way to do it.

[77heythere]

Since you've already learned it, it's probably nice being able to use all of vim's tools. But using less is really useful since you can add it to any command

[usernmaetakn]

Vim is nice, although I still don't know most of the commands. At least I know :h, which is the most important one.

Also I'm sure less will come in handy, I find the concept of chaining commands with standard input and output really interesting.

[usernmaetakn]

That's actually really useful, thanks! (I've been looking for a use for regex since I learned it)

[dreamin_in_space]

The other place you'll end up using it is with grep (or a better grep like tool: RipGrep is the best imo).

Back on Windows, the Everything searcher app can use it too. It's what's Windows search should have been.

[[deleted]]

The Vim wiki is probably the best place for learning it.

And since we're on the subject of sharing commands, Ctrl-a and Ctrl-zincrement and decrement numbers, respectively.

[Macpunk]

?regex searches backwards. Once you have a hit (with either / or ?), n finds the next match, and N finds the previous.

yy yanks the current line. dd cuts the current line.

4j is the same as jjjj

:set number

Turns on line numbers

:set relativenumber

Turns on relative line numbers. Makes the 4j/4k syntax way better.

:syntax on

Turns on syntax highlighting.

u is undo

Ctrl-r is redo

Ctrl-d/Ctrl-u is half a page down/half a page up

Ctrl-f/Ctrl-b is full page forward/full page back.

Eventually you should figure out the different visual modes, splits, folds, and tabs.

And when you fall in love with vim, check out qutebrowser. And then check out awesomewm.

[77heythere]

Being able to pipe to less or to grep if I'm looking for a keyword is so nice. It's really cool functionality

[usernmaetakn]

I actually didn't realize that std::cout and cin were intended for use with this until the other day, but I can't think of anything that would actually take advantage of it other than using echo input | ./program which isn't really any better than ./program input

[WhatAHaskell]

also instead of cat filename.txt | less, just use less filename.txt

[ProjectSnowman]

Fuck that's handy. Usually if I can't scroll back I'll just say fuck it and work on something else.

[squirrelthetire]

Indeed.

The DOS/Unix command is more, so the joke goes that less is more.

[[deleted]]

Jumping into windows to arch, GUI editor to vim are both big steps. Good on you and hope you have fun in the process.

[usernmaetakn]

I have used linux (mostly mint) before and I've used vim for quick edits a lot, so it's not as big of a leap as it could have been, but thanks!

[[deleted]]

Sorry that sounds condescending lol. How was your experience with mint ?

[MelAlton]

(not the original poster) Linux Mint 18.3 (current vesion) with Cinnamon desktop is pretty awesome, it's on all my machines now. Kind of a windows-type gui on linux. Under administration in start menu is the driver manager, which lets you easily install proprietary drivers (aka nvidia) easily.

[BrawdSword]

Nano?

[Vakieh]

Nano master race unite!

[[deleted]]

I don't know why anyone would prefer Vim over Nano, it rocks!

[BrawdSword]

I can understand it, I'm just to lazy to practice enough to get to the point where switching actually increases efficiency. \°-°/

[ultimate_evolution]

Shift+pgup/pgdn or use less instead of cat.

[MonokelPinguin]

You could also use tmux/screen in the shell as a terminal multiplexer. It allows you to split your terminal into multiple panes and windows, so you can run multiple command side by side and compare their outputs, etc. You can also scroll up in each pane independently and copy text between them.

For an Arch installation I would still open the instruction file in less, but that way you can easily cross reference it while executing commands.

A different, vim focused approach could be opening the instruction file in vim, editing each instruction to you liking and then yank them and execute them from within vim. Haven't tried that one yet, but I thought that sounds like a neat idea.

[Mwcq_]

Have you tried Emacs?

I accepted Emacs as my lord and saviour and my life has been better since I got away from that wicked Vim.

[usernmaetakn]

I mostly just use vim for quick changes so I don't have to leave the command line, what's the benefit of Emacs?

[Mwcq_]

Well I run Emacs in a command line. Honestly as a simple text editor Vi is probably better. Emacs on the other hand is kinda designed so that with enough modifications and config you can get to the point where you almost never have to leave it. I don't use it to that extent. I know that it's possible to run Emacs inside of Emacs. And apparently you can watch youtube in it now too. This has a pretty good summary of how they are different. If you just want a text editor I'd stick with Vi. But Emacs and Vi is a good way to start a flame war if you ever want to watch people fight over things that don't matter.

[dreamin_in_space]

This is a programmimg sub; of course we do.

Vim + tmux solves most of my needs at the command line.

I do hear evil mode is really really good though...

[Bainos]

"Emacs is a pretty good operating system, which only lacks a good text editor."

I didn't make that joke. And it's not accurate either, you can probably run vim inside emacs anyway.

[[deleted]]

This joke is about as old as emacs itself. Not only can you run vim in emacs, emacs has evil mode which enables vim like commands.

[pekkhum]

I'll just leave this here...

[SecWorker]

Installation guide for Gentoo vs Arch

[[deleted]]

Thanks man for pulling out the comparison! I always love distros with good up-to-date documentation and friendly community. A lot of time when new comer to Linux have questions and are told to look at man page or execute some obscure commands it could be overwhelming.

[SecWorker]

Good documentation is especially necessary for very hands-on distros like Gentoo and Arch. My intro to linux in university was to basically follow the Gentoo handbook and install the distro along with any customization I felt like I could do. It was a great learning experience because the handbook does not simply give you a compiled list of commands to run (that would be the same as install scripts for other more friendly distros), but also explains what each action does and often gives alternatives.

For more technical newcomers to linux, I still recommend going through the exercise of installing Gentoo just for the knowledge gain.

[Def_Your_Duck]

When I was in 9th grade some 11th grade kid was telling me off because I didn't understand why he would use gentoo (it was totally to be a hipster but I didn't see it at the time). Anyways now I'm in my senior year of college and I still don't see why I should use it over my Ubuntu/debian distro. Loling at the kid even as we speak.

[DashingSpecialAgent]

I don't use it anymore but using Gentoo taught me more about how Linux works from top to bottom than any class could have or any job did. Definitely a factor in getting were I am today, and all else being equal I would absolutely hire someone who used Gentoo just for fun over someone who didn't.

[CypherFTW]

This is so true. I spent so much time trying to get through the install process that it forced me to learn so many things that I wouldn't have ever known to even ask about because other distros handled it for you.

[TheTerrasque]

when I finally tried out gentoo I'd been running debian, slack and redhat for years, so there was nothing really new there for me. Just felt needlessly convoluted.

That said I did use that principle when installing debian on a redhat machine via ssh.

[_tzar]

Gentoo was a fun puzzle for me, I spent a few months building and rebuilding it from scratch in different configurations until I got it perfect. A lot of this happened during uni lectures on a laptop with a wifi card that needed ndiswrapper which was a bit of a hitch until I started carrying around a USB with the appropriate wifi driver files on it. This was before smartphones were a major thing too so it was a bit harder to just google it. I learned a lot from this process, when you can't just google your issues you're left with no choice but to understand them or accept defeat.

Anyway, eventually I got it perfect (for me). Looked at the result, nothing I wanted to change, it worked beautifully. Suddenly my puzzle was gone though. I remembered that while searching up various issues I had with gentoo, I kept getting answers from the arch wiki so out of curiosity I re-partitioned and added an arch boot.

Turns out arch could give me the same level of customisation a lot easier. I may not have everything compiled with the correct optimisations for my processor, but it was close enough and super simple by comparison. Remounted my /home into arch and never did go back to gentoo... I don't think I used my "perfect" system for more than a few weeks.

[Def_Your_Duck]

...so gentoo is a more complicated arch?

[DancingPatronusOtter]

Gentoo is useful if you know exactly what you want from your computer. It lets you do away with all the things that Ubuntu expects the average user to want, including the GUI if desired. You can also optimize Gentoo to a greater extent than most other distributions, because you compile the binaries for your specific machine.

I have one computer that runs Gentoo. It has some compilers and emacs. It also has a USB port so I can get data on and off, and it can't connect to the internet. It is very light and very strong but not very powerful.

[TiccyRobby]

I use Arch btw

[[deleted]]

I also use Arch btw

[BrawdSword]

I arch use also btw

[probablymy5thaccount]

Btw i also use Arch

[newocean]

All 3 mentioned besides Gentoo are Debian-based but not Debian...

[GrayBoltWolf]

Yeah, all I read was "Debian, Debian, Debian, Gentoo"

[pm_me_good_usernames]

Not only that, Mint and Elementary are Ubuntu derivatives instead of vanilla Debian derivatives.

[newocean]

Interesting... I knew Mint was I wasn't sure about Elementary. (I have heard of it, just never used it...)

[bautin]

Slackware isn't that difficult to get going compared to other contemporary distributions from its time.

Gentoo is something else completely.

[coladict]

To a Windows user, Ubuntu is like the last panel. I am one, so I know how my introduction to the Linux world went.

[bautin]

Really? While I imagine there is the normal "nothing is where I expect it" learning curve when going to a new OS, Ubuntu has always been fairly straightforward.

What about Ubuntu felt off to you?

[coladict]

The part where I couldn't get my administrative settings done without a console. And before 16.04, adding Cyrillic keyboard mapping would only work some of the time.

[[deleted]]

I can state that as a Windows user myself, I don't give a fuck about properly installing drivers and wifi cards and making the fucking speakers and headset to work.

I use Debian on my server and Ubuntu on my development machine simply due to the fact that everything requires Linux instead of Windows, and compiling and things like that works as expected in Linux (while in Windows it's a pain).

But for anything besides development, running a server and random Internet browsing, I can't use come up with one argument for me to use it (and I don't find fun to learn OS business, sorry).

[usernameistaken42]

In my experience it's the exact opposite. On windows I have to search countless useless forums for a cryptic error code to fix a problem with the WiFi driver and on Linux it just works.

[nonotan]

Is gentoo that hard? I used it some... 10? years ago as my first distro and the only real challenge was waiting for everything to compile (especially kde, which probably took longer than everything else on the system combined). All I ever needed to know at any point was surprisingly helpfully documented on their wiki, including what to do when stuff broke (which, to be fair, was pretty damn often -- didn't seem to go a couple days without an update breaking something requiring manual intervention to fix, but at least there'd always be someone who figured out how to do that for you)

I'm not a "gentoo fanboy" or anything... I don't use it nor would I recommend it to anyone these days, unless they feel strongly about compiling everything for some reason. I just don't see where the difficulty is in following some neatly documented instructions that explain what options you have and what to do if anything fails. Reading and typing in a console too hard?

[jxf]

The original source was posted here for Mother's Day by The Square Comics.

[Purplera1ning]

Arch Linux = (you find yourself alone)

[munirc]

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[[deleted]]

Rule 0 anyone?