The pinnacle of Linux asceticism is going bald, becoming adept at vim while using ancient thinkpads and adopting a habit of saying "ok" every time you finish a sentence
Ive waited so long for this conversation, Ive always liked the thought of minimal case specific distros so I compiled Slackware LFS into a router (like freesco) distro. Thanks Slackware, you have always had a place in my heart since 4.1
Arch/Hyprland here. I thought I needed a bar, until I found out I didn't. I just learned the hotkeys. Learned how to change configs. Even though I have a bar, I don't load it. I have a few other things I thought I needed but I didn't. Now I just have installed what I want to use for programs. I launch them. I use them. Then I close them. It is that simple. Why did I go to Linux? Well, I was fed up with Microsoft insisting it had to use my computer more than I was using my computer. I was fed up with forced things that were using my CPU's clock cycles and my network resources for their own purposes. In other words, living rent free on my system. That company didn't buy my computer for me. No philosophizing here. Just plain old: hey what are you doing on my computer kind of stuff. My computer is for me, it isn't some ugly billboard by a highway that I have to accept is going to obstruct the entire landscape for the sake of their own interests.
For real, there are a lot of things you think you need but you really don't. For instance, ricing for looks: It's definitely a fun learning experience and it is a nice way of artistic expression. But in my case I spent too much time perfecting the way things looks, theming, effects, etc, but really I am best served spending my time on other things. Not to mention it just adds another layer of things that might break at some point when you never really needed that theme for functionality, now you need to debug to open your desktop. Now I just use the default look for everything, and if I need to change functionality that's a different story
same, tbh. I spent quite a while configuring waybar to pull colour schemes from my wallpaper and all that jazz, and 99% of the time I have my bar toggled off, because I prefer having the half-inch of screen space over knowing the time at all times.
I went without a bar for a period time too because I got sick of wasting time ricing. In fact, I also went no gaps and no wallpaper. That period of 'abstinence' helped me a lot, and though I eventually restored the bar, gaps, and wallpaper, I now focus more on productivity and learning, whereas the (very) occasional ricing is just painful.
Brooo~ Same story. I've been messing with ElKowars wacky widgets, which is honestly awesome, but entirely unnecessary. I have a Fuzzel. If a program doesn't have an entry, I can simply run a command from there without having a terminal taking up space. Also works for searching my clipboard history. The only thing I feel like I'm missing is the systray. I should probably arrange for a hotkey to toggle a Waybar instance or something. Either that or find get some togglable HUD. Overall, customization is more art than practical functionality. Love me some animated wallpapers though. Swww remains one of my favorite applications. Just makes my desktop feel alive, ya know?
this swings both ways, you "can" hyper customize Linux be as minimal as possible, while the blank slate is nothing but a tablet waiting for a chisel. Then there is the whole thing of "I want my computer to do what I need it to do, and I don't want to have to fuss about configurations because i had the audacity to download... Audacity"
The thing is, Linux doesn't do what you want it to do. It does what Linus and all the other component devs want it to do. You assembled a system of components that do what their respective devs want them to do. Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, etc, users just let someone else do the assembling too. Not much different than buying anything else. Take cars for example. VW only makes like 1/4 of the Golf. The rest they buy from suppliers and add it to the assembly. In theory you could do the same yourself.
@@rightwingsafetysquad9872 that’s a bad take, Linux is open source so you can edit it however you want… and if you’re too lazy to edit it yourself, someone else has most likely already made the change already and you can just download their changes. There’s a reason why there are so many distros out there, everyone wants it a bit different… you fundamentally misunderstand Linux
Smhmh. Still reliant on the products of complicated fermentation? I subsist entirely on air, receiving hydration and minerals from airborne particulates. My body has become so efficient at processing energy I haven't crapped in aeons.
@@FeldiArts no, vinegar is just a dilute solution of *acetic acid* , plus some small amounts of flavour compounds if its a wine vinegar or whatnot, then a lot more flavour compounds, but the bulk is still water+acetic acid
I've compiled LFS. I've installed Arch. I've used Alpine to make a laptop into a wifi-to-ethernet adaptor including a squid cache and dns server. I'm currently running a streamlined Hyprland on Debian Trixie with a custom compiled vanilla mainline kernel that cold-boots in less than eight seconds. I've done all this for the worldly pleasure it brings me, only to learn from this video that I'm doing both decadence and ascestisim all wrong.
So I am an astrophotographer, I take pictures of the night sky. But I only process my photograph using my own program that I wrote from scratch in Fortran. My pictures are not as pretty as others since many of the fancy enhancements effects available in software people use i was not able to implement myself. But on the other hand, it feels like my photos are more mine? Feels like I have hand crafted every picture myself. That also feels like a bit of an ascetic approach.
I get the joke, but I don't know why it uses atheist instead of Christian. Christians literally can't shut up about their religion. The push it on people before every meal. They push it on people at every public meeting. They push it on people at football games. They go door-to-door pushing it on people. They push it on people as a condition of charity. They even take mission trips overseas to push it on people. What do atheists do that even remotely compares to that?
False. Most atheists will not bring up religion unless a theist attempts to impose their practices on others. In fact it's quite easy to mistake a theist for an atheist, especially when most of their beliefs conflict with yours.
im a linux ascetic. its crazy when you realize that you can do 99% of your daily tasks with just a terminal and a web browser. theres a ton of things that you really dont need after you learn stuff like gnu coreutils.
I learned this and now my friends look at me like I'm crazy when I use one of my machines. But I can't help it. All I need is gnu utils, nano, ratpoison, librewolf, st, and steam/bottles for games. And anything extra just feels clunky and weird after embracing this minimalism. Which has also turned me into a happy C programmer too. XD
I'd argue he hasn't cooked long enough. The next phase is using a traditional package manager on an immutable system without disabling the layer that makes it immutable 😎
My first year on Linux was entirely in the virtual terminal as the drivers for my ATI Rage 128 didn't exist yet. It was honestly a pleasant experience! I could still play games and watch movies in SVGA mode (which was perfectly fine at the time), listen to music and write documents (using Vim). Since then I've used pretty much every desktop system out there and have also ended up on KDE, but, I would never trade the knowledge I got from starting, basically from scratch, as it means I always have a pretty good idea as to what's happening on my system and can change things if I want to. EDIT: I'm also on NixOS these days after years on Arch and I'd recommend you start with home-manager for a "training mode" introduction to the language and ecosystem, without having to build the rest of your system from scratch.
Even though it's often very frustrating when trying to find the required information, creating one's own DE with a simple window manager, and adding all the extras required is definitely a great learning experience. It's also nice to have an interface that works as the user wants, and not be stuck with something that feels clunky and awkward.
many environments would "feel clunky and awkward" at the start, remember to figure out if something is "intuitive" means you hand it to an 8 year old or 80 year old, given them no instructions or help and see what happens. will some of them figure it out, sure/maybe, but the more graphical the interface, the faster they will adapt to it.
Honestly back when we were building distros in the early to late 90s it his how they were built. We kept adding things that we found needed. We had some ideas from the Unix days, but not to the level of a general purpose desktop or environment. It was all a blank slate for the most part. You can see the evolution from SLS, Slackware, Debian, RHL, etc. Same with eh DE/WMs. Now that I am old, I just want my shit to work out of the box and tweak it. 😎
I guess my approach is very similar to this, although I wouldn't give any religious meaning to it. It's going minimalist not just to keep things simple (which has enormous mental health benefits, btw), but also to have better control (when possible) and, above all, to have a better understanding of what is going on. There's a great feeling that comes when knowing that something is working just as you want it to work, and that there's no magic behind it, nothing mysterious. To the degree that you understand, it is all very logical.
9:40 I could relate so much to all the things you were saying about the starting and building an environment, the move to Wayland and trying to find new tools that are close to what you want, now that you know what you want, and especially the newfound appreciation for Desktop Environments, as I have been using the COSMIC alphas exclusively full-time for close to 2 months now, and similarly to you, I found myself appreciating all those features being built in and available, after having to grab together all these components on my own and make them work together in a way I want. And it really makes me appreciate COSMIC as it has almost completely replaced everything, and my hope is that upon the full release, or maybe even as early as Beta 1, when all the alpha features are done, I should have almost all features and capabilities (except my browser, and static workspaces) available in COSMIC, so my entire setup will soon be COSMIC+Neovim+{Vivaldi-or-Zen-Browser}+zsh.
The problem with essentially all open source software operating systems is a combination of a lack of highly polished killer apps like Photoshop or QuickBooks plus a massive pool of software that doesn't play nice and has severe quirks due to bring made for the makers, not for users.
I have a rough understanding of how the software stack on my computer works (EFI→GRUB→Linux→systemd→services&plasma→programs), but I am very glad that there are solutions out there that have it pre-configured for me. I recently switched from Ubuntu to Fedora (which is a bit more DIY than Ubuntu, though not by much) and I like the freedom I have on Linux, but I appreciate that I am not forced to tinker too much with it because it's not only my hobby but also my tool.
Myself I'm an outlier, a "filthy casual" PC hobbyist, really I'm just a gamer that takes interest in the "high brow" computer talk without being a programmer/developer or anything like that. Sure i could learn more about computers but there's a slight problem there: i am a chronic pain sufferer so even though technically i have lots of free time, i really don't since so much of that time is spent either in bed or just hurting so much that I can't actually learn anything; so what time i can spend on my PC is spent playing games I'm already familiar with, even learning a new style of game is a nightmare most times. That's also why I don't play multiplayer stuff anymore, because it's too difficult for me to keep up with people and the meta and whatever the shiny new thing is (i miss being able to make money) Also yeah, dude cooked a bit too long but broken clocks and all that.
0:55 guys if you think about it Linux is about based traditional monarchies after all we have various little kingdoms and we all know the best ones have a BDFL
I'd suggest using either a virtual machine or a secondary computer for at least the initial playing with a new distro especially if it is something like arch/gentoo which has a steeper learning curve than some of the others. That way at least then when you inevitably break something you still have the use of your main machine to lookup how to fix it (it also removes some of the pressure to get things working again)
I started to use Linux (with Lubuntu) because my computer with a core 2 duo and running Win XP was getting blocked by websites due to being outdated and I didn't wanted to invest in a new one at the time. Passed the first week of getting used, I got stunned by the choices from start (distros and desktop environment) and all these great and free softwares available. Later my first laptop with Win 8.1, after a few years I dualbooted with Linux Mint and rediscovered the pleasure of Linux and used it more and more. I also did some distro hops, such as Fedora Plasma, Ubuntu Gnome and MX Linux. Eventually my laptot broke 5 years after purchase and bought a second hand cheap laptop with Win 10 but quickly slapped LM on it. That's also from that time I went full Linux (Mint). Since december 2022 owner of a Tuxedo desktop (more recently slapped LM over it) and don't consider Windows as a option whatsoever. No asceticism at all from my perspective. I have all I need. But mention to some games I can't run anymore typically Crossout that I really enjoyed. But plenty of other games to play if only my fulltime job allowed me.
All sides here are pretty silly... linux is appealing to me because working with the Linux system is beautiful and logical. I really enjoy working with it, that's the reason I use it.
I also believe in FOSS principles and I don't think that's silly at all but I agree with you. If Fedora cost $150/year vs Windows I'd still use it, all else the same. I just like it.
Brodie, try looking at the mic stand's joins, maybe lube them and tighten the screws a bit more. Those can get loose over time and you probably never cared to even look at those ever. It also might be a worn down washer on the screw itself, you can go to any hardware store and get new washers and replace those. You'll need to disassemble the boom stand (both for replacing the washers and also because a lot of stands like that have rubber parts that can accumulate a lot of dust and dirt).
@@BrodieRobertsongood! I was going to suggest replacing the springs. I did appreciate your ability to keep talking and furthering the plot while having issues with the mic!
back in the days when i was a student for a computer science degree, i had a lot of time to tinker and I used to be a gentoo user. it was really fun to customize, and literally "build" your system in the way you wanted it to be. now unfortunately it's no longer how it was back then, and i need to use what works for my job and leisure. which unfortunately includes also using windows. When it comes to Linux, now I'm all in with debian, it comes with everything i need out of the box, without being bloated by any mean. it just works fine... for me
I think I agree in the sense that if my linux breaks its good to learn how to fix it because its transferable skills and also minimal installs have less that can go wrong in the first place and are less bloated. I use arch/hyprland/gnu/linux btw with pulse audio
I'm slowly diving into Arch yet again, but haven't touched audio setup yet. From your experience, is PulseAudio good nowadays, can you recommend it, in comparison to PipeWire?
I have gone through my "tinker with everything" phase a long time ago. Now i only do that for "hobby machines", and even then, it's more of a maximalist "how much can I get this old beast to run?" philosophy. For my regular everyday computers I'll just run some variant of Fedora with KDE.
So we're stuck with Linux, Windows, and MacOS as the big 3 forever because of the asceticism companies practiced (in many respects, but especially for operating systems) so no experimentation was allowed in the big 3 garden beyond what makes line go up and to right. Glad to know that...
Guess you could try applying that "pulling the system apart" to your mic stand and see if there are any screws or tensioners or stuff that could be tightened while you wait for the new stand.
I think the bare minimum for someone new to linux is a distro where you can figure out a network connection, a web browser, and software updates, without help. You shouldn't need a second device or booting into another OS in order to search for a solution to your problem. If any of those don't work out of the box, you need a printable cheat sheet on the download page with all the information that will let a complete newbie get to that stage. From there at least you'll be able to search for what you need. If you download an OS and it won't update because of out of date keys, that's a major problem.
reminds me a bit of what I enjoyed about learning gentoo. But for me it's not some philisophical ideal I'm trying to achieve; I'm just a weirdo who like command lines and manual transmission cars because I like the interfaces that bring you closer to what's actually going on under the hood. Learning how to build it bit by bit without needing to actually go in and compile things by hand was great i don't even see the "preferring terminal" as an ascetic thing that makes me stronger, I genuinely think it's easier and faster for lazy people like me, i also use a lot of gui and mouse driven apps
I think what he says makes perfect sense. I do feel if you do your system in that way yes, you will learn if you want to but at the same time. The majority of people definitely won’t do it which is unfortunate but understandable.
Asceticism means in this context only "reduction to the essential" or "focus on the basics". You seem to have it mixed up with religious asceticism. Edit: maybe better: "try to understand the principles"
The article point of view is a bit exotic but it is not wrong. I am a engineer and all design tools I need for work were based on workstations running Solaris (yes, I am old) and later PC's with Linux/RH. I decided to learn more about the OS properties and replaced my Windows install at home by Linux (debian). Since then, I learned a lot from an initial KDE environmet to my custom AwesomeWM with widgets I created using Lua code. The journey is continuous as I learn more about security and FS, etc. Windows, its bugs, expensive licences and 'analytics' are gone from my house. 🎉
My philosophy is software is a tool. Like all tools, it is best to understand how it works so when it isn't working correctly you have a chance to fix it. I'm not ideological about free software, so long as the license says I can use it when I want, where I want, forever. Mac mostly does that for me. I'd much prefer to be on Linux or even Windows, but the MacBook Pro is just so much better than anything else on the market from a hardware perspective that I can't go back. Asahi is about 85% functional, which makes it 0% usable.
I've been a minimalist for a long-arse time now. I started out on Mint more than a decade ago (OK, I actually started out on Red Hat in the late 1990s but it was short lived so I don't count it) before moving to Arch. I ran a fairly minimal system with various DE-less (I think OpenBox for the longest) WMs. I've also tried XFCE and LXQT for a while. But regardless of what stripped down minimal environment I tried, the visual inconsistencies niggled at me. So I jumped on Deepin for a long time because it felt like a nice balance between aesthetics and minimalism. Until Deepin went more Windows-like and then I jumped to Budgie and then Pantheon. But they both had their issues that were too much time to overcome. Over the years, my disability and faigue got worse and I just don't want to mess around tinkering so much any more. So I took the plunge to KDE. And frankly, I just like the KDE ecosystem. Do I wish for something more minimal? Yes, but not at the expense of usability and It-Just-Works. Still on Arch though because you can pry pacman and AUR out of my cold dead hands. 😅
I use fedora because I feel it has the basics set up well enough, but then there's a lot of default that allows me to tweak and figure things out as I go. I feel more user friendly distros don't invite experimentation as much as Fedora, and I like that.
It's the other way around. I use Linux because I love UNIX. I have been using UNIX since about 1991 and then Linux since about 1994. Using Windows is a pain that I have to go through every day for work, to read e-mail, attend meetings and connect to Linux VM's.
funny, I had almost the exact same journey as you. cold turkey'd arch, started with xfce, then i3, then more recently kde for work and then my home pc after a few years of windows to play AAA games on release. arch taught me so much in my decade or so using it (though mostly in the first few), that it basically landed me aforementioned jobs, I'm thankful
I actually like this approach, but maybe I'm biased. Minimalism in software was something I first learned watching RUclips channels like yours, like using a window manager and doing most stuff in the terminal. So I began to think "Which features do I REALLY need? Can I get away using sbase or 9base instead of the Gnu core utils? Using Dinit/Sinit instead of SystemD?" The list can go on forever. And maybe I could, but the effort to actually do so (and kinda creating a highly specialized Linux distribution) was way to high and i stuck with Void Linux (for now). The idea of creating my own Linux (or using something like Oasis Linux) still hits me and maybe I'll try again in a couple of months. But for now I'm happy with my setup (Using River, Rofi and Yambar mostly).
I actually did kind of the same thing with game dev. In my first big (and failed) game I ran into a lot of issues caused by me not understanding how game programming works. The project failed partially because of technical issues, so I decided to ditch Unity and make my own game engine to truly understand every little thing that is needed for making a game and I am a much better programmer today.
Brodie, much of the time I have no idea what you are talking about, it goes right over my head. But damn you make me proud to be Australian! Keep it up mate. 👍👍
Tbh what is referring to is a concept called Vairagya that doesn't really translate that well to English and it roughly gets translated to Ascetism when even Householders can practice a limited form of it. It simply means without the colors. So an Vairagi Linux or Ascetic Linux experience would be a software that has only minimal things that is necessary and nothing else. Basically the CLI 😂. But at that point it is counter intuitive to the whole concept of Vairagya because you are essentially being obsessed with "Minimalism" which itself is the Raga of life. A better way to approach this would be "Just use what works".
As long as it does what I need with minimal fuss, lets me maximize my screen without turning it into a bunch of tiny monitors, stays out of my way and causes no problems(especially with forcing old packages), and runs smoothly we are good. That is why I use Plasma on Tumbleweed Minimizing the system maximizes the configuration I need to do. Linux is a tool that I use to do my work. If someone wants to spend their days configuring Linux distros, they might want to sort out their life.
I think that this idea of just trying, over and over, until you learn it is why I approve of bistro-hopping. I have used so many different distress, and I still would not call myself proficient at Linux, but doing that has given me the ability to fix issues that pop up. I have used Nix, Ubuntu, Fedora, Redcore, OpenSuse, Garuda Cachy, and a few others that are niche and I can’t remember, an in each there were issues I needed to learn how to fix. I may not know how to set up a network with full firewall protection, but if my keychain is buggered, I can deal with it.
I think I had all the asceticism I need when I installed OpenBSD 2.5 on a Mac Performa which I upgraded with a used 68040, 20 MByte of RAM and a 200MByte harddisk. And I had quite some experience with several Unix flavours and Linux since Kernel 0.95. Come to think of it, the old Mac is still working!
I got interested in Linux through privacy concerns. I switched completely to Linux because of Windows 11 and the buggy mess that it was at launch. I stayed with Linux because I just enjoy using it more, and all my tools are easily available here. Also, after switching, I got a lot more interested in FOSS. Now when I use Windows at work, I now notice all the stupid ways you have to circumvent things (if you even can circumvent it), and the horible way things work in general. Also, in retrospect I am really glad that I switched, as the Windows 11 stuff seams to just get worse and worse. When I started daily driving Linux, I used Linux Mint with Cinnamon, then I switched it out with DWM. Eventually I switched over to Arch, and I continued to use DWM. Then I ended up switching to KDE, as I just wanted something that would work. Using a minimal way of interfacing with Linux has taught me a lot, but it can also get annoying with the amount of things you have to deal with yourself, etc. (Before starting to daily drive Linux, I had messed with it a few times, and through that I tried KDE, Gnome, DWM, i3, XMonad, etc. So I already had some experience with various DEs and WMs.)
I use Linux because I like it. I used to be more into this kind of minimalism (WM and minimal distros), but nowadays I just appreciate that something like Fedora KDE exists.
Proclaiming proudly, "I started on Arch Linux with i3", that's cute. I started on Slackware with IceWM, later upgrading to Window Maker. And back then, yes, recompiling the kernel was done at least once. Compiling X from source, yes. Internet speed where 10 Mbit was blazingly fast and only affordable by companies and universities. Tell me more about your struggles with "early" Linux.
I hop distributions a bit depending on my current needs. Right now, my setup is a little strange. I have 3 machines. On the left is my laptop, which runs windows (because school requirements) in the center I have an IMac (because Apple requires me to use one to compile software for work) and on the right is my Linux machine. When I’m having a little fun, I’ve been messing around with Linux From Scratch, as I have low-level control, and manually can keep my software small, though for regular use, I’ve been using NixOS. I write a lot of software, so having a setup that’s repeatable and relocatable is nice. Say I’m on vacation and don’t have access to my Linux box. Spin up a VM with NixOS and install my normal software setup by cloning a git repository.
I use minimal Linux for old hardware that can't run a desktop such as KDE or gNome. My philosophy is to reduce e-waste as much as possible. More practical than philosophy to me. I'm running into an issue now trying to get the Brave Browser cache into a tmpfs I created. It's difficult to find a guide to help me do that. May have to use a different browser. The idea is to boost performance of the browser. The device in question is a 13' HP Notebook 2000 with an AMD E-300 APU. Very weak APU. I've managed to get RUclips videos to play at 720 in VP9 codec. If I can get the cache on a ram drive, I might be able to eek it up 1080
I find it much easier to start with a working system, and then trying to figure out how things are put together from there. See how the people that already know what they're doing do, and figuring out why they did it the way they did.
"Strengthening your body and mind to make yourself indifferent to and indifferent from the things outside of your control." Sounds like plain and simple stoicism. Can we just call it that?
I didn’t start with it (started with Ubuntu and then Xubuntu) but I learned more installing and running gentoo than anything else. Not sure of the current state especially with Wayland but I used to say if you actually wanted to understand Linux run gen too for awhile
I'm interested in NixOS for the portability aspect. Being able to start from absolute zero, do a git pull and have everything set itself up seems really attractive. If I could get to the point where I understand everything in the nix files, why each line is there that seems like it would be fantastic.
Personally I want my system to just work so I tend to focus my customisation efforts on things I actually need to change. There is definitely value in an OS having sensible defaults so you don't have to set everything yourself. With that being said I am thinking about installing Arch on a separate drive and setting it up from the ground up to learn more about how Linux works.
I been kinda obsessed with making custom tools for sway nothing ready to be released public but I working on a display kit that just basic cairo drawing tool that event driven refresh
Brodie, You've never finished LFS book 1? It's not that hard, just tedious. I consider you FAR more Linux savvy than I am. Give it a shot again sometime. I'd love to watch.
Simplicity can be a custom dwm setup that uses 1MB of ram, but requires a lot of work to maintain and use, or you having a simple experience with little work on GNOME or macOS.
Askesis (Άσκηση) literally translates to training, gotta love when people take words from a language they don't understand and pretend there's a deep meaning to it
I like thinking this way, but it's definitely a spectrum when it comes to linux minimalism. For some, handpicking some desktop tools can feel ascetic but for others, maybe using a specialized desktop tool at all is not minimal. I have been striving in my free time to write my own versions of tools I use, so I know exactly how they work. But for tools that are really complex, I'd like to try and read the source code. But it's very difficult. I think I also do this for "ascetic" reasons but I never really thought about it.
Asceticism doesn't feel like it jives with me, but truth be told, my PC (which is much-superseded by modern hardware despite the tech) has been struggling with Windows 10 and 11 regardless of what trims I do, even when I toss the kitchen sink. It's hit me now that my form of asceticism was to give my PC as much wiggle room as I can while maintaining a good desktop experience. This Darwinism also led me to go back to Windows 7 pre-upgrade scandal using VxKex for newer programs and not look back, with 7 as my main OS and Linux as a fallback. For now, I'm using Ubuntu (specifically Ubuntu Unity) 24.04 because they since sorted out the problems I began to have starting with 18.04 mid-development to 20.04. It's not 12.04 Precise Pangolin, but it does the job nicely, though I'm currently experimenting with BSD in VMs.
At first I thought I wouldn't be able to stop rolling my eyes, but the author didn't go as far as I thought he was going to go. I thought it was going to be another gatekeeping post about who is a real technical person/developer and who isn't, but I didn't get that vibe. I went to Linux because I just wanted to learn a Unix like environment as someone whose only encounter with it was using SSH to log into a server for reasons I couldn't even remember now. I did learn a lot, but mostly about hardware and configuration stuff. I know how to configure my way to get my system to where I want it to be for daily driving without using a distro that is going to do that work for me. From that aspect there is a lot someone could ask for help from me now that I could actually help with. Where I fail is the basics of command line tools that underpin the traditional unix server experience. I've never used grep for example, I just haven't had to. To get there I think I would have to annex myself from all my nice applications and pretend that it's just me, the console, and my tasks. And that absolutely has merit IF your goal is learning. But if someone acts like that they are above you because they have that knowledge, I will slap them silly.
The pinnacle of Linux asceticism is going bald, becoming adept at vim while using ancient thinkpads and adopting a habit of saying "ok" every time you finish a sentence
what about farming
so RMS at 80?
@@stroodlepup I think he means Luke Smith at 20
Ive waited so long for this conversation, Ive always liked the thought of minimal case specific distros so I compiled Slackware LFS into a router (like freesco) distro. Thanks Slackware, you have always had a place in my heart since 4.1
Vim too comfortable for true ascet
I do not argue. I only explain why I'm right.
Arch/Hyprland here. I thought I needed a bar, until I found out I didn't. I just learned the hotkeys. Learned how to change configs. Even though I have a bar, I don't load it. I have a few other things I thought I needed but I didn't.
Now I just have installed what I want to use for programs. I launch them. I use them. Then I close them. It is that simple.
Why did I go to Linux? Well, I was fed up with Microsoft insisting it had to use my computer more than I was using my computer. I was fed up with forced things that were using my CPU's clock cycles and my network resources for their own purposes. In other words, living rent free on my system. That company didn't buy my computer for me.
No philosophizing here. Just plain old: hey what are you doing on my computer kind of stuff. My computer is for me, it isn't some ugly billboard by a highway that I have to accept is going to obstruct the entire landscape for the sake of their own interests.
For real, there are a lot of things you think you need but you really don't. For instance, ricing for looks: It's definitely a fun learning experience and it is a nice way of artistic expression. But in my case I spent too much time perfecting the way things looks, theming, effects, etc, but really I am best served spending my time on other things. Not to mention it just adds another layer of things that might break at some point when you never really needed that theme for functionality, now you need to debug to open your desktop. Now I just use the default look for everything, and if I need to change functionality that's a different story
same, tbh. I spent quite a while configuring waybar to pull colour schemes from my wallpaper and all that jazz, and 99% of the time I have my bar toggled off, because I prefer having the half-inch of screen space over knowing the time at all times.
I went without a bar for a period time too because I got sick of wasting time ricing. In fact, I also went no gaps and no wallpaper. That period of 'abstinence' helped me a lot, and though I eventually restored the bar, gaps, and wallpaper, I now focus more on productivity and learning, whereas the (very) occasional ricing is just painful.
Brooo~ Same story.
I've been messing with ElKowars wacky widgets, which is honestly awesome, but entirely unnecessary. I have a Fuzzel. If a program doesn't have an entry, I can simply run a command from there without having a terminal taking up space. Also works for searching my clipboard history. The only thing I feel like I'm missing is the systray. I should probably arrange for a hotkey to toggle a Waybar instance or something. Either that or find get some togglable HUD.
Overall, customization is more art than practical functionality. Love me some animated wallpapers though. Swww remains one of my favorite applications. Just makes my desktop feel alive, ya know?
I wish someday people will stop even mentioning Microsoft when they explain why they use Linux
I want to see a shonen where the protagonist trains by using linux
Well you can develop pinky strength with vi!
There is a Ubuntu manga lol
I guess eMacs is for the Vulcan death grip
Isnt that emacs ant not vi? @@billeterk
Yes, and the final opponent will be Bill Gates.
I want my operating system to do what I want it to do. I do not want my operating system to preach to me about how it wants me to use it.
Unfortunately a lot of Windows users would disagree
this swings both ways, you "can" hyper customize Linux be as minimal as possible, while the blank slate is nothing but a tablet waiting for a chisel. Then there is the whole thing of "I want my computer to do what I need it to do, and I don't want to have to fuss about configurations because i had the audacity to download... Audacity"
Ableton Live?
The thing is, Linux doesn't do what you want it to do. It does what Linus and all the other component devs want it to do. You assembled a system of components that do what their respective devs want them to do. Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, etc, users just let someone else do the assembling too.
Not much different than buying anything else. Take cars for example. VW only makes like 1/4 of the Golf. The rest they buy from suppliers and add it to the assembly. In theory you could do the same yourself.
@@rightwingsafetysquad9872 that’s a bad take, Linux is open source so you can edit it however you want… and if you’re too lazy to edit it yourself, someone else has most likely already made the change already and you can just download their changes. There’s a reason why there are so many distros out there, everyone wants it a bit different… you fundamentally misunderstand Linux
I'm not single, I'm practicing Linux Ascetisim.
No matter how minimal i go, i'm including firefox and losing all possible moral benefits
I'm so ascetic, I've replaced my diet entirely with vinegar.
That doesn't sound like a very basic lifestyle.
@@coarse_snad That is the best chemistry joke I have ever heard. Well played, sir (or madam).
Smhmh. Still reliant on the products of complicated fermentation?
I subsist entirely on air, receiving hydration and minerals from airborne particulates.
My body has become so efficient at processing energy I haven't crapped in aeons.
uh... I think you confused that with acidic :P
@@FeldiArts no, vinegar is just a dilute solution of *acetic acid* , plus some small amounts of flavour compounds
if its a wine vinegar or whatnot, then a lot more flavour compounds, but the bulk is still water+acetic acid
Philosophy: I spend 3 hours configuring wayward only to start from scratch next month. Very inspired by Sisyphus, as you can imagine
I've compiled LFS. I've installed Arch. I've used Alpine to make a laptop into a wifi-to-ethernet adaptor including a squid cache and dns server. I'm currently running a streamlined Hyprland on Debian Trixie with a custom compiled vanilla mainline kernel that cold-boots in less than eight seconds.
I've done all this for the worldly pleasure it brings me, only to learn from this video that I'm doing both decadence and ascestisim all wrong.
What DNS server do you choose? The default BIND or something else?
@rogo7330 At the time, and most other times, dnsmasq.
So I am an astrophotographer, I take pictures of the night sky. But I only process my photograph using my own program that I wrote from scratch in Fortran. My pictures are not as pretty as others since many of the fancy enhancements effects available in software people use i was not able to implement myself. But on the other hand, it feels like my photos are more mine? Feels like I have hand crafted every picture myself. That also feels like a bit of an ascetic approach.
An atheist, a Linux user, and a vegan walk into a bar.
I know because they told everyone there.
I'm all three, but also gay, and only use bicycles for transport, in a city with no cycling infrastructure, because I don't support the system
I get the joke, but I don't know why it uses atheist instead of Christian. Christians literally can't shut up about their religion. The push it on people before every meal. They push it on people at every public meeting. They push it on people at football games. They go door-to-door pushing it on people. They push it on people as a condition of charity. They even take mission trips overseas to push it on people. What do atheists do that even remotely compares to that?
Fun fact: Everyone is born an atheist.
Source: diddy and drake
False. Most atheists will not bring up religion unless a theist attempts to impose their practices on others. In fact it's quite easy to mistake a theist for an atheist, especially when most of their beliefs conflict with yours.
@@voinea12 Shoots bro, you too (minus the gay and vegan)?
1:43 it's pronounced "sou-fee-ism", basically islamic spiritualism for anyone wondering, very culturally infleuntial in many parts of the world.
TempleOS 2: Askesis Sudoloo
First version of this joke I've enjoyed in several years. Nice job
im a linux ascetic. its crazy when you realize that you can do 99% of your daily tasks with just a terminal and a web browser. theres a ton of things that you really dont need after you learn stuff like gnu coreutils.
I learned this and now my friends look at me like I'm crazy when I use one of my machines.
But I can't help it. All I need is gnu utils, nano, ratpoison, librewolf, st, and steam/bottles for games. And anything extra just feels clunky and weird after embracing this minimalism.
Which has also turned me into a happy C programmer too. XD
Web browser and terminal! Agree.
Honestly, that probably just means you aren't doing much. That and I'd chew my own arteries if I was forced onto Google docs 24/7
@@pmester228 pretty sure they get more job done than most people this way
I'd argue he hasn't cooked long enough.
The next phase is using a traditional package manager on an immutable system without disabling the layer that makes it immutable 😎
Me on silverblue with homebrew 😭
The layer after that is only communicating with the PC in binary.
@@dracostyx there we go :D
My first year on Linux was entirely in the virtual terminal as the drivers for my ATI Rage 128 didn't exist yet. It was honestly a pleasant experience! I could still play games and watch movies in SVGA mode (which was perfectly fine at the time), listen to music and write documents (using Vim). Since then I've used pretty much every desktop system out there and have also ended up on KDE, but, I would never trade the knowledge I got from starting, basically from scratch, as it means I always have a pretty good idea as to what's happening on my system and can change things if I want to.
EDIT: I'm also on NixOS these days after years on Arch and I'd recommend you start with home-manager for a "training mode" introduction to the language and ecosystem, without having to build the rest of your system from scratch.
Even though it's often very frustrating when trying to find the required information, creating one's own DE with a simple window manager, and adding all the extras required is definitely a great learning experience. It's also nice to have an interface that works as the user wants, and not be stuck with something that feels clunky and awkward.
many environments would "feel clunky and awkward" at the start, remember to figure out if something is "intuitive" means you hand it to an 8 year old or 80 year old, given them no instructions or help and see what happens. will some of them figure it out, sure/maybe, but the more graphical the interface, the faster they will adapt to it.
@@gardian06_85 I was referring specifically to having the options to modify things to make the interface more efficient for a users preference.
Honestly back when we were building distros in the early to late 90s it his how they were built. We kept adding things that we found needed. We had some ideas from the Unix days, but not to the level of a general purpose desktop or environment. It was all a blank slate for the most part. You can see the evolution from SLS, Slackware, Debian, RHL, etc. Same with eh DE/WMs. Now that I am old, I just want my shit to work out of the box and tweak it. 😎
I guess my approach is very similar to this, although I wouldn't give any religious meaning to it. It's going minimalist not just to keep things simple (which has enormous mental health benefits, btw), but also to have better control (when possible) and, above all, to have a better understanding of what is going on. There's a great feeling that comes when knowing that something is working just as you want it to work, and that there's no magic behind it, nothing mysterious. To the degree that you understand, it is all very logical.
9:40 I could relate so much to all the things you were saying about the starting and building an environment, the move to Wayland and trying to find new tools that are close to what you want, now that you know what you want, and especially the newfound appreciation for Desktop Environments, as I have been using the COSMIC alphas exclusively full-time for close to 2 months now, and similarly to you, I found myself appreciating all those features being built in and available, after having to grab together all these components on my own and make them work together in a way I want. And it really makes me appreciate COSMIC as it has almost completely replaced everything, and my hope is that upon the full release, or maybe even as early as Beta 1, when all the alpha features are done, I should have almost all features and capabilities (except my browser, and static workspaces) available in COSMIC, so my entire setup will soon be COSMIC+Neovim+{Vivaldi-or-Zen-Browser}+zsh.
I still remember having to edit modelines just to get X to work on your monitor.
Dang, I basically jumped into Linux for this reason lol I just wanted to learn more about what my computer was doing.
Slackware in the 90s was good for learning an already set up system. It wasn’t quite as engineered as Debian so more transparent to a beginner.
yep, still am🗿
Then a Slackware user since 13.37. It's comfy and you can make it as minimalist as you want.
Having used Ubuntu and Debian at work for a long time, installing Slackware feels like meeting an old friend.
The problem with essentially all open source software operating systems is a combination of a lack of highly polished killer apps like Photoshop or QuickBooks plus a massive pool of software that doesn't play nice and has severe quirks due to bring made for the makers, not for users.
The reason I use Linux because I hate Microsoft
The reason I use Linux is because funny penguin mascot
I use Linux not because hating MS but because Windows got in my way and doing other annoyances (and also not being tied down to windows-only software)
I have a bad news for you. They are already inside, and already polluting the kernel with MS BS (tm).
@@rogo7330 Tfuq ym
He means that Microsoft has contributed to the Linux kernel@@DryPaperHammerBro
I have a rough understanding of how the software stack on my computer works (EFI→GRUB→Linux→systemd→services&plasma→programs), but I am very glad that there are solutions out there that have it pre-configured for me. I recently switched from Ubuntu to Fedora (which is a bit more DIY than Ubuntu, though not by much) and I like the freedom I have on Linux, but I appreciate that I am not forced to tinker too much with it because it's not only my hobby but also my tool.
I'm a maximalist. I want every desktop environment and window manager installed in my computer.
Myself I'm an outlier, a "filthy casual" PC hobbyist, really I'm just a gamer that takes interest in the "high brow" computer talk without being a programmer/developer or anything like that.
Sure i could learn more about computers but there's a slight problem there: i am a chronic pain sufferer so even though technically i have lots of free time, i really don't since so much of that time is spent either in bed or just hurting so much that I can't actually learn anything; so what time i can spend on my PC is spent playing games I'm already familiar with, even learning a new style of game is a nightmare most times. That's also why I don't play multiplayer stuff anymore, because it's too difficult for me to keep up with people and the meta and whatever the shiny new thing is (i miss being able to make money)
Also yeah, dude cooked a bit too long but broken clocks and all that.
0:55
guys if you think about it Linux is about based traditional monarchies after all we have various little kingdoms and we all know the best ones have a BDFL
I mean......
Debian as an example and other larger "kingdoms" IS democratically elected though.
@@godblessknight And Debian is chaotic, slow to change, and fairly useless.
@@nobodyimportant7804 Arch Linux then, as another democratic example
I'd suggest using either a virtual machine or a secondary computer for at least the initial playing with a new distro especially if it is something like arch/gentoo which has a steeper learning curve than some of the others.
That way at least then when you inevitably break something you still have the use of your main machine to lookup how to fix it (it also removes some of the pressure to get things working again)
I started to use Linux (with Lubuntu) because my computer with a core 2 duo and running Win XP was getting blocked by websites due to being outdated and I didn't wanted to invest in a new one at the time. Passed the first week of getting used, I got stunned by the choices from start (distros and desktop environment) and all these great and free softwares available.
Later my first laptop with Win 8.1, after a few years I dualbooted with Linux Mint and rediscovered the pleasure of Linux and used it more and more. I also did some distro hops, such as Fedora Plasma, Ubuntu Gnome and MX Linux. Eventually my laptot broke 5 years after purchase and bought a second hand cheap laptop with Win 10 but quickly slapped LM on it. That's also from that time I went full Linux (Mint).
Since december 2022 owner of a Tuxedo desktop (more recently slapped LM over it) and don't consider Windows as a option whatsoever.
No asceticism at all from my perspective. I have all I need. But mention to some games I can't run anymore typically Crossout that I really enjoyed. But plenty of other games to play if only my fulltime job allowed me.
The current trend is to go for “hire” rather than “higher” spirituality :-)
All sides here are pretty silly... linux is appealing to me because working with the Linux system is beautiful and logical. I really enjoy working with it, that's the reason I use it.
I also believe in FOSS principles and I don't think that's silly at all but I agree with you. If Fedora cost $150/year vs Windows I'd still use it, all else the same. I just like it.
Brodie, try looking at the mic stand's joins, maybe lube them and tighten the screws a bit more. Those can get loose over time and you probably never cared to even look at those ever. It also might be a worn down washer on the screw itself, you can go to any hardware store and get new washers and replace those. You'll need to disassemble the boom stand (both for replacing the washers and also because a lot of stands like that have rubber parts that can accumulate a lot of dust and dirt).
I got a new one since this video was recorded
I was going to suggest tightening things up, but then realised he's a software guy, and screwdrivers are maybe not in his comfort zone.
@@BrodieRobertsongood! I was going to suggest replacing the springs. I did appreciate your ability to keep talking and furthering the plot while having issues with the mic!
back in the days when i was a student for a computer science degree, i had a lot of time to tinker and I used to be a gentoo user.
it was really fun to customize, and literally "build" your system in the way you wanted it to be.
now unfortunately it's no longer how it was back then, and i need to use what works for my job and leisure.
which unfortunately includes also using windows.
When it comes to Linux, now I'm all in with debian, it comes with everything i need out of the box, without being bloated by any mean. it just works fine... for me
I think I agree in the sense that if my linux breaks its good to learn how to fix it because its transferable skills and also minimal installs have less that can go wrong in the first place and are less bloated. I use arch/hyprland/gnu/linux btw with pulse audio
I'm slowly diving into Arch yet again, but haven't touched audio setup yet.
From your experience, is PulseAudio good nowadays, can you recommend it, in comparison to PipeWire?
I have gone through my "tinker with everything" phase a long time ago. Now i only do that for "hobby machines", and even then, it's more of a maximalist "how much can I get this old beast to run?" philosophy.
For my regular everyday computers I'll just run some variant of Fedora with KDE.
So we're stuck with Linux, Windows, and MacOS as the big 3 forever because of the asceticism companies practiced (in many respects, but especially for operating systems) so no experimentation was allowed in the big 3 garden beyond what makes line go up and to right.
Glad to know that...
Guess you could try applying that "pulling the system apart" to your mic stand and see if there are any screws or tensioners or stuff that could be tightened while you wait for the new stand.
I think the bare minimum for someone new to linux is a distro where you can figure out a network connection, a web browser, and software updates, without help. You shouldn't need a second device or booting into another OS in order to search for a solution to your problem. If any of those don't work out of the box, you need a printable cheat sheet on the download page with all the information that will let a complete newbie get to that stage. From there at least you'll be able to search for what you need. If you download an OS and it won't update because of out of date keys, that's a major problem.
Well said!
All linux users converge to Luke
Is that the guy that talks about himself in third person?
reminds me a bit of what I enjoyed about learning gentoo. But for me it's not some philisophical ideal I'm trying to achieve; I'm just a weirdo who like command lines and manual transmission cars because I like the interfaces that bring you closer to what's actually going on under the hood.
Learning how to build it bit by bit without needing to actually go in and compile things by hand was great
i don't even see the "preferring terminal" as an ascetic thing that makes me stronger, I genuinely think it's easier and faster for lazy people like me, i also use a lot of gui and mouse driven apps
I think what he says makes perfect sense. I do feel if you do your system in that way yes, you will learn if you want to but at the same time. The majority of people definitely won’t do it which is unfortunate but understandable.
Asceticism means in this context only "reduction to the essential" or "focus on the basics". You seem to have it mixed up with religious asceticism. Edit: maybe better: "try to understand the principles"
I read the article, and I think you actually said stuff more insightful and illuminating than the author himself. So W Brodie, Brodie never loses
0:57 respect the hustle!
at least brodie's mic stand is more stable than 99% of arch updates /s
The article point of view is a bit exotic but it is not wrong. I am a engineer and all design tools I need for work were based on workstations running Solaris (yes, I am old) and later PC's with Linux/RH. I decided to learn more about the OS properties and replaced my Windows install at home by Linux (debian). Since then, I learned a lot from an initial KDE environmet to my custom AwesomeWM with widgets I created using Lua code. The journey is continuous as I learn more about security and FS, etc. Windows, its bugs, expensive licences and 'analytics' are gone from my house. 🎉
My philosophy is software is a tool. Like all tools, it is best to understand how it works so when it isn't working correctly you have a chance to fix it. I'm not ideological about free software, so long as the license says I can use it when I want, where I want, forever. Mac mostly does that for me. I'd much prefer to be on Linux or even Windows, but the MacBook Pro is just so much better than anything else on the market from a hardware perspective that I can't go back. Asahi is about 85% functional, which makes it 0% usable.
I've been a minimalist for a long-arse time now. I started out on Mint more than a decade ago (OK, I actually started out on Red Hat in the late 1990s but it was short lived so I don't count it) before moving to Arch. I ran a fairly minimal system with various DE-less (I think OpenBox for the longest) WMs. I've also tried XFCE and LXQT for a while. But regardless of what stripped down minimal environment I tried, the visual inconsistencies niggled at me. So I jumped on Deepin for a long time because it felt like a nice balance between aesthetics and minimalism. Until Deepin went more Windows-like and then I jumped to Budgie and then Pantheon. But they both had their issues that were too much time to overcome. Over the years, my disability and faigue got worse and I just don't want to mess around tinkering so much any more. So I took the plunge to KDE. And frankly, I just like the KDE ecosystem. Do I wish for something more minimal? Yes, but not at the expense of usability and It-Just-Works. Still on Arch though because you can pry pacman and AUR out of my cold dead hands. 😅
I use fedora because I feel it has the basics set up well enough, but then there's a lot of default that allows me to tweak and figure things out as I go. I feel more user friendly distros don't invite experimentation as much as Fedora, and I like that.
It's the other way around. I use Linux because I love UNIX. I have been using UNIX since about 1991 and then Linux since about 1994. Using Windows is a pain that I have to go through every day for work, to read e-mail, attend meetings and connect to Linux VM's.
funny, I had almost the exact same journey as you. cold turkey'd arch, started with xfce, then i3, then more recently kde for work and then my home pc after a few years of windows to play AAA games on release. arch taught me so much in my decade or so using it (though mostly in the first few), that it basically landed me aforementioned jobs, I'm thankful
I for one practice Linux post-structuralism.
I actually like this approach, but maybe I'm biased. Minimalism in software was something I first learned watching RUclips channels like yours, like using a window manager and doing most stuff in the terminal. So I began to think "Which features do I REALLY need? Can I get away using sbase or 9base instead of the Gnu core utils? Using Dinit/Sinit instead of SystemD?" The list can go on forever.
And maybe I could, but the effort to actually do so (and kinda creating a highly specialized Linux distribution) was way to high and i stuck with Void Linux (for now). The idea of creating my own Linux (or using something like Oasis Linux) still hits me and maybe I'll try again in a couple of months. But for now I'm happy with my setup (Using River, Rofi and Yambar mostly).
I actually did kind of the same thing with game dev. In my first big (and failed) game I ran into a lot of issues caused by me not understanding how game programming works. The project failed partially because of technical issues, so I decided to ditch Unity and make my own game engine to truly understand every little thing that is needed for making a game and I am a much better programmer today.
Brodie, much of the time I have no idea what you are talking about, it goes right over my head. But damn you make me proud to be Australian! Keep it up mate. 👍👍
Tbh what is referring to is a concept called Vairagya that doesn't really translate that well to English and it roughly gets translated to Ascetism when even Householders can practice a limited form of it. It simply means without the colors. So an Vairagi Linux or Ascetic Linux experience would be a software that has only minimal things that is necessary and nothing else. Basically the CLI 😂. But at that point it is counter intuitive to the whole concept of Vairagya because you are essentially being obsessed with "Minimalism" which itself is the Raga of life. A better way to approach this would be "Just use what works".
As long as it does what I need with minimal fuss, lets me maximize my screen without turning it into a bunch of tiny monitors, stays out of my way and causes no problems(especially with forcing old packages), and runs smoothly we are good. That is why I use Plasma on Tumbleweed
Minimizing the system maximizes the configuration I need to do. Linux is a tool that I use to do my work.
If someone wants to spend their days configuring Linux distros, they might want to sort out their life.
Those beautiful oddballs on some Amishuntu 24.04 make me love the ecosystem
I think that this idea of just trying, over and over, until you learn it is why I approve of bistro-hopping. I have used so many different distress, and I still would not call myself proficient at Linux, but doing that has given me the ability to fix issues that pop up. I have used Nix, Ubuntu, Fedora, Redcore, OpenSuse, Garuda Cachy, and a few others that are niche and I can’t remember, an in each there were issues I needed to learn how to fix. I may not know how to set up a network with full firewall protection, but if my keychain is buggered, I can deal with it.
I think I had all the asceticism I need when I installed OpenBSD 2.5 on a Mac Performa which I upgraded with a used 68040, 20 MByte of RAM and a 200MByte harddisk. And I had quite some experience with several Unix flavours and Linux since Kernel 0.95.
Come to think of it, the old Mac is still working!
I got interested in Linux through privacy concerns. I switched completely to Linux because of Windows 11 and the buggy mess that it was at launch. I stayed with Linux because I just enjoy using it more, and all my tools are easily available here. Also, after switching, I got a lot more interested in FOSS. Now when I use Windows at work, I now notice all the stupid ways you have to circumvent things (if you even can circumvent it), and the horible way things work in general. Also, in retrospect I am really glad that I switched, as the Windows 11 stuff seams to just get worse and worse.
When I started daily driving Linux, I used Linux Mint with Cinnamon, then I switched it out with DWM. Eventually I switched over to Arch, and I continued to use DWM. Then I ended up switching to KDE, as I just wanted something that would work. Using a minimal way of interfacing with Linux has taught me a lot, but it can also get annoying with the amount of things you have to deal with yourself, etc.
(Before starting to daily drive Linux, I had messed with it a few times, and through that I tried KDE, Gnome, DWM, i3, XMonad, etc. So I already had some experience with various DEs and WMs.)
I use Linux because I like it. I used to be more into this kind of minimalism (WM and minimal distros), but nowadays I just appreciate that something like Fedora KDE exists.
Proclaiming proudly, "I started on Arch Linux with i3", that's cute. I started on Slackware with IceWM, later upgrading to Window Maker. And back then, yes, recompiling the kernel was done at least once. Compiling X from source, yes. Internet speed where 10 Mbit was blazingly fast and only affordable by companies and universities.
Tell me more about your struggles with "early" Linux.
argue argue argue ❤ hope that helps 😅
I hop distributions a bit depending on my current needs. Right now, my setup is a little strange. I have 3 machines. On the left is my laptop, which runs windows (because school requirements) in the center I have an IMac (because Apple requires me to use one to compile software for work) and on the right is my Linux machine. When I’m having a little fun, I’ve been messing around with Linux From Scratch, as I have low-level control, and manually can keep my software small, though for regular use, I’ve been using NixOS. I write a lot of software, so having a setup that’s repeatable and relocatable is nice. Say I’m on vacation and don’t have access to my Linux box. Spin up a VM with NixOS and install my normal software setup by cloning a git repository.
I use minimal Linux for old hardware that can't run a desktop such as KDE or gNome. My philosophy is to reduce e-waste as much as possible. More practical than philosophy to me. I'm running into an issue now trying to get the Brave Browser cache into a tmpfs I created. It's difficult to find a guide to help me do that. May have to use a different browser. The idea is to boost performance of the browser. The device in question is a 13' HP Notebook 2000 with an AMD E-300 APU. Very weak APU. I've managed to get RUclips videos to play at 720 in VP9 codec. If I can get the cache on a ram drive, I might be able to eek it up 1080
I find it much easier to start with a working system, and then trying to figure out how things are put together from there. See how the people that already know what they're doing do, and figuring out why they did it the way they did.
I'd say I fall into this too, but man is it annoying when something doesn't work
I'm pretty sure it's actually pronounced "As-key-sis" as in "key-nesis" also bro cooked something hard... likely his brain.
"Strengthening your body and mind to make yourself indifferent to and indifferent from the things outside of your control." Sounds like plain and simple stoicism. Can we just call it that?
I didn’t start with it (started with Ubuntu and then Xubuntu) but I learned more installing and running gentoo than anything else. Not sure of the current state especially with Wayland but I used to say if you actually wanted to understand Linux run gen too for awhile
This is very similar to some arguments in favor of learning C.
I'm interested in NixOS for the portability aspect. Being able to start from absolute zero, do a git pull and have everything set itself up seems really attractive. If I could get to the point where I understand everything in the nix files, why each line is there that seems like it would be fantastic.
If you want to be an OS maintainer, NixOS is a dream.
Personally I want my system to just work so I tend to focus my customisation efforts on things I actually need to change. There is definitely value in an OS having sensible defaults so you don't have to set everything yourself.
With that being said I am thinking about installing Arch on a separate drive and setting it up from the ground up to learn more about how Linux works.
I been kinda obsessed with making custom tools for sway nothing ready to be released public but I working on a display kit that just basic cairo drawing tool that event driven refresh
Brodie, You've never finished LFS book 1? It's not that hard, just tedious. I consider you FAR more Linux savvy than I am. Give it a shot again sometime. I'd love to watch.
The tediousness is the problem, I was going insane
Linux Asceticism? So... basically... BSD :)
Simplicity can be a custom dwm setup that uses 1MB of ram, but requires a lot of work to maintain and use, or you having a simple experience with little work on GNOME or macOS.
TURKEY MENTIONED 🇹🇷🇹🇷🇹🇷🇹🇷🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🗣️
Ne mutlu Türk'üm diyene.
Fantastic video! Thank you so much 👍
Askesis (Άσκηση) literally translates to training, gotta love when people take words from a language they don't understand and pretend there's a deep meaning to it
First to Brodie video. Life goal achieved
Thanks, using lf now as file manager!
I like thinking this way, but it's definitely a spectrum when it comes to linux minimalism. For some, handpicking some desktop tools can feel ascetic but for others, maybe using a specialized desktop tool at all is not minimal.
I have been striving in my free time to write my own versions of tools I use, so I know exactly how they work. But for tools that are really complex, I'd like to try and read the source code. But it's very difficult. I think I also do this for "ascetic" reasons but I never really thought about it.
I want to use lfs, however our machine is not strong enough to compile it
we use fedora rn
tighten the bolts of the mic holder.
Asceticism doesn't feel like it jives with me, but truth be told, my PC (which is much-superseded by modern hardware despite the tech) has been struggling with Windows 10 and 11 regardless of what trims I do, even when I toss the kitchen sink. It's hit me now that my form of asceticism was to give my PC as much wiggle room as I can while maintaining a good desktop experience. This Darwinism also led me to go back to Windows 7 pre-upgrade scandal using VxKex for newer programs and not look back, with 7 as my main OS and Linux as a fallback. For now, I'm using Ubuntu (specifically Ubuntu Unity) 24.04 because they since sorted out the problems I began to have starting with 18.04 mid-development to 20.04. It's not 12.04 Precise Pangolin, but it does the job nicely, though I'm currently experimenting with BSD in VMs.
That's why I'm still on DOS, 8.3 names are a bitch.
Ironic. That to be able to use things minimally one has to know more than the average person. There is a time, a place, and a price for everything.
17:04 FreeBSD
At first I thought I wouldn't be able to stop rolling my eyes, but the author didn't go as far as I thought he was going to go. I thought it was going to be another gatekeeping post about who is a real technical person/developer and who isn't, but I didn't get that vibe. I went to Linux because I just wanted to learn a Unix like environment as someone whose only encounter with it was using SSH to log into a server for reasons I couldn't even remember now. I did learn a lot, but mostly about hardware and configuration stuff. I know how to configure my way to get my system to where I want it to be for daily driving without using a distro that is going to do that work for me. From that aspect there is a lot someone could ask for help from me now that I could actually help with. Where I fail is the basics of command line tools that underpin the traditional unix server experience. I've never used grep for example, I just haven't had to. To get there I think I would have to annex myself from all my nice applications and pretend that it's just me, the console, and my tasks. And that absolutely has merit IF your goal is learning. But if someone acts like that they are above you because they have that knowledge, I will slap them silly.
Didn't know this community exists but was doing this for like last 6 months.
I use Linux because I like trying everything out. Or at least that's what I tell myself for being addicted to distrohopping.
I personally like arch and kde-minimal, then just try to do more things without a kde utility
something something weakness of my flesh
3:37 I had this playing in the background and had to tab back over to verify that this was real. Comedic gold 👏 🍑😚
Hmm… I like acetic acid