Linux Layman

Will SteamOS Evaporate?

2018-06-12T00:08:00.002+01:00

Damn that’s a clever title. It’s cool if you want to take a minute to reel from that one.
But who cares right? Why does it even exist, it doesn’t help me? The world’s most pointless Operating System. Or is it? Valve should be making Half Life 3 and not wasting time building an OS. I mean come on, that’s what we want right, just make the damn game Gabe. Stop messing around and just end our suffering and grant us the gracious gift of your delicious low hanging fruit.

I do care very much about SteamOS, but I never plan on installing it ever, anywhere. So why do I love it so much, why did I offer to bare its children, why do I sing it from the rooftops that Valve did a thing. A thing that caused Steam Machines to rise and fall as quickly as they were announced…

Machines

They were never going to compete with consoles. Just a fact. Consoles are designed, built and shipped to the consumer at a loss. They know that this investment will become a profit at the other end through games sales. Steam Machines never had this option, pushing the price 30% above the competition. You can’t win a battle like that without some kind of fashion statement. AKA how the iPhone is a thing. Get the kids hooked on iPods, a premium device that had most of the competition beaten easily. Give it a generous markup to make it feel exclusive and boom. A business model that has been unshaken for over a decade. Not quite the same for consoles, but come on. Did anybody think Alienware could depose or even dent the PlayStation. Give me a break.

It is awfully pretty isn't it?

That said if you can pick one up second hand they are a bargain. Nice compact full PC’s (albeit with limited upgrade options) that you can stick by your TV with ease. But full retail price, no way was that gonna fly. Now had there been a gaming exclusive to give them some oomph then we’d have been in business. Seems like HL2:E3 bundle may have kick started things. Then again it could have caused a crazy backlash too. PR would be very tricky had they done that.

Tangibility

If it’s intangible you can’t lick it, whereas tangible things can be licked, understand? It might seem like it doesn’t directly benefit the rest of us using Linux as our desktop OS. But really it does, in a lot of unlickable ways.

The modular nature of Linux means that there are sections that end users don’t really see. Improving driver integration, supporting API's like Vulkan and OpenGL anything and everything that will increase functionality, give better performance or what have you. Yes we don’t get a shiny new app. But future game development can become simpler. There are a lot of obstacles holding this back, with so many distros doing things differently for so long now. I’m hoping SteamOS development can be a driving force toward consensus and standardisation for game developers. You can’t lick these things.

Just use Windows

I’m not the most avid gamer, especially compared to my friends. But I’m satisfied by what I find when I browse Steam with penguin only filters. But my mates, seem to go out of their way to only find Windows only games. Everything they suggest I look it up and boom, that annoying Windows logo standing alone, or at best with the even uglier Apple logo alongside. How dare they do this to me! Prove that my platform of choice is barren when it comes to new titles and AAA. It’s clearly an orchestrated conspiracy against me.

Do I still need Windows if I switch to Linux? Angrily I am forced to type, yep kiddo. I got Windows 10 Pro for 20 quid so who cares? I live with it taking up unnecessary disk space. It’s fine honestly. Never think about it at all. Doesn’t bother me. No Really, it’s fine. Spying on me for a few hours a month is better than every logged in hour I spend.

Slow Burn

All of this is a slow burn, it takes time for big changes across and landscape to take effect. Look at Mir replacing X as and example of that, how long did we live with that system? Far too long is the answer. But that wasn’t a problem that prevented money from changing hands. The uptake in usage of SteamOS as a platform, or it simply being a nudge that got people to switch to Linux is slow but perceptible. Linux usage as a gaming platform is bigger now than it has ever been, and it’s still growing. Yes we enjoy single digit percentage points. But this is better than the decimals of previous years. Valve have money bitches! This money should be spent making Linux do all the things. Money!

Bottom Line

It’s like Bollywood in lot of ways. I’ve never sat and watched a Bollywood blockbuster, but hot diggity daffodil am I glad they exists. From the random gifs, to the stark difference to other countries movies, particularly the west, even the colour and spectacle of it all. Fantastic. Just not for me personally. But we need this kind of diversity. Do I want Windows and osX to die, yes. But do I want Linux to be the only OS, f*#k no.

I’m glad that SteamOS exists, it needs to exist even if I’m not using it, I can still see how it is helping me. Do you need to use it? Up to you entirely, it’s a fairly niche distro. Want to build a living room gaming machine, then it may be the answer. But you know you’re gonna want to play a Blizzard game at some point and you’ll be screwed.
As Linux grows in use as a gaming platform, the incentive for developers to port their work grows. As more ports happen more standards come into place, in turn making it easier and more attractive to develop for our beloved and sacred platform. I don’t need change to come fast, I play a good deal of games that already have Linux ports. I’d say most of the games I want to play are coming to Linux on release. If not than 6 months later. This is great!
I bet I’m fairly alone in that opinion. I see a lot of comments online still about lack of support for that one game you need, the one thing you need in your life absolutely and on pain of being kneecapped you cannot live without. Granted I have a few of my own. It may take a few more years, but those few gems will erode. It’s a Tux filled future guys …honestly.
Love, Life and Peace,
Noki

Automating Crap I Don't Want to Do

2018-06-05T10:51:00.000+01:00

You can’t bash Bash. LOL I’m so pun-ny! Also puny. What am I talking about again? Oh yeah automating crap. You know how sometimes you have to do so much clicking and typing, lame. Who does that?
But I know what you’re thinking, I’m not the towering intellect you so clearly are Noki. We worship your wise pearls of words of wisdom and suckle at the teat of the life giving nutrients we crave in this crazy world. How do I even get started making my own scripts, I’m a Windows user, we click next a lot and then things do the do.

Well don’t despair, it’s far easier than it looks. Trouble is you have big ideas, and those big ideas take time and effort. You get started, you see a mountain designed to fix a molehill and you quit. It needn’t be that way though, I mean it.
I had a dream. A dream where every installation, will be automated. No matter the requirements of the machine or the content of their repository. When I began on my adventure I didn’t really plan on making a script. It just grew from a need. Probably why I succeeded (sort of), but i’ll get to that.
Let me introduce you to the almost pointless...

...and it's creation.

Starting off

When I began my switch from Windows to Ubuntu I ended up playing around and breaking things. Making my drivers do nothing when X started, that sort of thing. So I re-installed a bunch of times, sue me right!
As I found applications that I needed and liked I dumped them into a text file. That way I could just copy it into the terminal and install everything in one go. Then one day I said to myself, ein minuten bitte. If I make this executable and dump it in ~/bin/ I have myself a script. I can simply run the son of a gun and boom be back in freaking sweet Linux action.

It was simple yes, but it worked. I found more stuff to bloat it with and it grew like a fat pigeon eating ham sandwiches. But it stayed simple, a few lines of text. Then I made another machine, gave it to my dad and decided he should use Linux being the computer virgin he was at the time. But he wouldn’t need all these apps, if I split it up and I could pick and choose what to install when I run the script. Should be easy right?

Growing Pains

But then I hit a problem. A couple of months in a few packages became obsolete and died. This made the one long apt-get install not bother with anything at all. But I didn’t know what to do to fix it, so my ingenious solution, split it up into smaller chunks and give it more chance to run successfully. At least some of the chunks would work for sure. Plus it would help with different machines having different needs.
This is when I had to learn things. I know ugh right. Putting more things in this already enormous head. Ridiculous. So I learned to ask questions within the script allowing choices. Actually quite easy, read y/n from user and whack in an if statement.
This was a little lazy but then I was inspired, I wanted to do more. I knew it could do more. I could hear the clarient call of destiny beacon me to it’s sweet bosom.
So I added crap it really didn’t need. But it taught me to make loops, and I discovered functions and even made things pretty. You know terminal pretty, the best kind of pretty. It does SO many things now. Stupid pointless things it doesn’t need to do. It’s broken a bunch of times, spent ages tinkering. Long road.

The Bittersweet Taste of Success

But I learned so much, and that’s what counts. But alas I can’t look at this as a successful script, as something that both needs and deserves to exist.
If it had remained a copy and paste list it would still have worked.
It’s got some potentially dangerous stuff in it. In that it might break apt/dpkg things, not kill your sister.
A bloated hot mess that I only I can read and understand easily. Sharing isn’t caring here.
Time wasted on this was immense, I could have worked and paid for an American to go to college!
Through it all I learned how to make functions to save repeating code. Passing data from one app to another so each can do their thing. Even added some help text, who’s that for? But now I can make a reasonable BASH script, nothing crazy but pretty damned useful. It lead to me making other scripts to sync files to my NAS or hide my porn and such.

Bottom Line

I provide you with this zip, a fairly complete history of this magnificent beast under the promise you won’t actually run it. Just stare at it in awe and wonder about the kind of madman that could conceive of such a thing. It’s should be good up to Ubuntu 18.04 and cover a lot of generally useful things. It normally takes me about 20 minutes to run it fully, but that’s my amazing 6 year old beast is still kicking it old skool. Runs fine on my XPS 15 9550 too.

If you want my advise on what functionality to learn about first, if you a more of a learn a big bunch of stuff and then get to work this is what I’ll say. Take a look at this list and learn each of them before making something yourself.

Useful apps for simple bash scripts:

echo, cat, grep, wget, and begin to look at operators.

If statements, followed by reading user input.

Read $choice, then determine action using an if statement. Great starting point.

Looping, this will mean covering arrays too.

Declaring an array can be made more complex if you want to alter it once it’s made...

Case statements, and functions.

Now that you’ve made a thing, use functions to reduce duplication and make it feel like a pro-script and live out your wildest fantasies.

Extended apps for more complex tasks:

cURL, AWK, printf, plus stringing these together with operators.

This can be fun and rewarding if you let it be. If you find it dull just stop and rethink your life.
Love, Life and Peace,
Noki

Close Windows and Toss Away the Apple

2018-06-01T00:38:00.003+01:00

2 Goddamned percent. Year after year that’s where the Linux numbers sit. No more, no less. But why when it’s such a sexy topic. How is tux not a regular feature in Vogue? Picture it, that beautiful penguin on a glossy cover with beautiful women admiring it’s supple abs… but that’s enough of my wet dreams.

Why nobody wanna do Linux things?

Laziness I guess mostly. I mean I use Ubuntu so hard for me to push for others to make such an extreme effort. But we all have friends who are techy, but still use Windows or osX like who cares? How can we permit such blindness. They need us to free them of the shackles they neither see or feel and embrace the cold soggy feathers of Tux’s cute if chubby body. Aside from the Apple fanboys nobody actively praises and advocates for these poor excuses for operating systems. They just live with them, go through the motions. Apathetic to the orgasmic joy they could be experiencing each and every time they sudo something.

Ethically sourced fair-trade organic gluten-free mung beans

Everyone loves ethically sourced fair-trade organic gluten-free mung beans, that obviously goes without saying. You need to cycle to work to help save the planet. Our social media accounts need to highlight the plight of whatever injustice is hip right now. We should to protest with placards outside parliament about politician’s genitals being places their constituents didn’t expect (maybe their right on that one), but then forget instantly when the next election comes up.
But you know what, it’s fine to do these things with an iPhone in our pocket and a Windows 10 laptop on our desks right, those things are totally fine. Some days I feel like if Tim Cook were to don a Satan costume and were to literally whip the Chinese workers gluing their devices together Linux would overnight become the defacto OS. End of. I NEVER exaggerate.
I think Tim Cook does actually does that to be honest. I could be wrong though.
Bill’s a good dude you know, but he doesn’t run the show when it comes to Windows. And Sphere OS, alarm bells are ringing! There’s nothing ethical about M$ operation, cornering the markets and having a stranglehold over businesses for decades. But you it’s cool, don’t worry about it. Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. Wait, is M$ run by modified Darleks?
Clearly we should continue to support these practises, for there is no alternative!

Out of the Box

I love building things. We Linux lovers are born tinkerers. It’s what we do. This is off putting for the normals of society I think, but what do they know? They here us talking about how customisable and free to expand and change it is. Because we love it, oh god do we. But who really cares about that let’s be honest. The very act of talking about these things give the impression that it’s a requirement, or an obligation. It really isn’t though.

That’s what people want right? Windows 10 comes with Edge and everyone sticks with that forever, they don’t use it as a Chrome download tool and immediately discard it in any way, shape or form (discard because you can't remove the bloody thing). Windows Media Player kicks arse, ‘nuff said. I know plenty of gamers that reinstall Windows regularly, perhaps that’s in decline nowadays but still. If you are happy doing that, getting drivers and finding all of your applications again then why is switching to Linux a challenge? Since today Linux has more out of the box in actuality this is pretty damned easy. Easier than Windows. We need to start emphasising that distros just work now. You install them and they do the things. Well not Arch but most of them do.

No Spies on Me

We’ve all heard scary things online. The IOT is always listening and sending our personally delicious data to the Illuminati. That bitch Cortana and her sultry voice, Linux don’t do that. I can’t state this any better than others already have. My suggestion would be to check out Bryan Lunduke, he gave an amazing talk in 2017 called “They are watching you.”, sums it up epically.
Aside from the Amazon additions to Ubuntu it’s not too bad. Even as a starting point this is far less intrusive and privacy breaking that anything M$ or Apple are doing at their end. But even Ubuntu has options to remove the unwanted crap. No such luck with the others. Then again everyone is on Facebook sharing bank statements or has a smartphone in their pocket. It seems to be something everyone cares about and not at all at the same time. A super-position of having no f*#ks to give and being outraged by the indignity. In case you’re wondering you should care. This is only the beginning of this crap. We need to take a stand, and taking a stand can start with baby steps. Get off Windows, get off osX. Give peace a chance.

Bottom Line

This is a failing mission, don’t bother undertaking it. People will only switch if they feel inclined to, can’t force that and have them still enjoy the experience. Damned shame if you ask me.
Those who do switch do it because they want to. There will be a trigger of some sort. The appeal of FOSS or the negativity of the corporate big boys doing dodgy deeds. At any rate something pushes them in tux’s direction. Keep an eye out for these times, this is when it’s ok to kidnap them and install Linux for on their behalf. Some mental conditioning and perhaps a lobotomy later and BOOM! Should they figure it all out just tell them Noki said it was ok, and some rando on the internet must be pretty legit.
Love, Life and Peace,
Noki

Distro Wars: A No Hope (situation)

2018-05-29T11:58:00.000+01:00

In a word without borders, who needs Windows and Gates? Getting into Linux for the first time can be really scary. Well not really scary, about as a scary as an angry kitten. It’s not something you should spend too much time thinking about in reality. If you want to make the switch just do it. Coming from a background of knowing little to nothing about Linux means that you can’t really go wrong with whatever you choose. I see a lot of guides out there on this subject but they seem to centre around what are the benefits of each distro and weighing the pros and cons. While this kinda makes sense I think you need a little experience to really understand this fully. In my opinion what people should really do is throw caution to the wind and just pick one. Stop reading this article, it’s pointless.
Good bloggers make recommendations like that right?
With that said there is a little more to it than that and you do need to narrow the choices a little. There are distributions that are certainly not for the faint hearted (looking at you Gentoo). But these are harder to find, I imagine you would need to essentially go out of your way to find a distro that would be too complex for a new user.

If you are at the point of choosing a Linux distro then you have already have your reasons to make the switch, these will influence you final choice. I prefer to see where you might be coming from, then give you my choice given that starting point rather than letting you figure it out all by yourself. But when it comes down to it they all do all the things so I can’t possibly be wrong. And all the things is all you need. Following me? Good.

Stance One: F*#k Apple/Microsoft.

If you no longer want to suckle the teat of whatever OS you’re coming from I’d go with Mint with it’s simple Windows style GUI or Gmac. Both are Ubuntu based and behave as much like the big boys as you can really make it.

*for use in rear ports only

Stance Two: Donating a spare machine to a parent.

I did this. Since my old man had no computer experience whatsoever, when I cobbled together one for him I thought why buy Windows? He’s basically a blank slate. I gave him everything he needed to get going, plenty of basic games and a web-browser. Done. Elementary OS worked for that, but I’ve since moved him onto Mint. Again this was to familiarise him with a Windows layout, the reverse of the previous idea. Maybe lock it down so they don’t have sudo permission.

Stance Three: I do Android dev and heard it was easier on Linux.

Why are you asking me then? You should know already. But yeah anything goes in this place, just pick one. So why not Fedora?

Stance Four: I want a media centre in the living room

Here I’d pick a nice light distro like Lubuntu, or Damn Small Linux. These are super light weight and have basically nothing running. This means you can add in just media components and get the most of of meager parts. It’ll take a little work to get media apps working, perhaps DVD playback. But nothing here is strenuous.

Stance Five: I’m a sadist, and I like making life harder for no real reason

There you are Gentoo. Knew you’d find a home.

Stance Six: I want to Game

Don’t bother jumping on the long departed SteamOS train. Not saying it’s bad or it won’t work but this is a specific OS with no traditional desktop mode. You can install one, but you’re adding work you don’t need to. Really as a gamer you need Windows, shame isn’t it. But you can always dual boot, this is what I do because I want to support Linux. By playing the games on my preferred platform I am flying the flag for more development and more cross-platform titles in future. I’m one of the lucky ones, around 60% of my Steam library run on Linux, so it’s not often I need to boot to Windows. But when I do, I ‘tut’ loudly as if someone just stole my place in a queue at the bank.

Bottom Line

Get it yet, how it clearly doesn’t matter? Life is pointless and there’s no hope for any of us... Whatever you pick you’ll be installing it on probably custom hardware (if it’s not a laptop) and you’ll install and remove applications willy nilly. So you’ll end up with something unique anyway, sorta making your own distro. These starting points are merely ‘what comes in the box’ for me. Pick one, get on with it. Learn, grow, then pick a better one! Or be lazy and stick with Ubuntu for like 4 years like I have.
Consider installing Arch for an hour, then be like ugh, f*#k that!
Love, Life and Peace,
Noki

Maximising Your Linux Fanboy

2018-05-25T20:12:00.000+01:00

Ask yourself some simple questions. Am I annoying as many people as possible? Could I reach more people who are inferior to me? Has my track record of convincing noone to agree with me held firm? If you answered yes to all of these question you are the epitome of a fanboy, and I salute you sir or madam.
Don’t we all hate ‘em? Those relentless GoT spoiler numpties, the Star Wars fan that defends The Last Jedi, the Treky that can’t get over JJ Abrams sickening gut-wrenching abomination of a reboot (I’m totally over it by the way), all those plebs.
But Linux fanboys, wow those guys. They are by far and away completely equal with every other fandom out there. But you know what makes the Linux ones worse? They are right. Not just that they think they are always right, which is basically true. But because they ARE right. These guys can back up their claims with technical data, and so called “factual evidence”. Makes you sick doesn’t it.
They’ll talk about how FOSS has somehow improved the world. How it’s given access to a plethora of free source code, that’s been adapted, expanded and improved upon by countless programmers. These people talk about how businesses big and small alike can take advantage of systems and licensing that is just there, and you can use it, or not, as you see fit.
I try not to be one, I have to be honest. But it can be tough, hard to hold my tongue against the wilful ignorance of the masses. You know what? It feels good holding back, the smug superiority of knowing that I could have schooled those fools. Then they’ll see. I mean I still have those conversations, later on in my head. I always win those, they see the light then ...oh by God they do!
So what happens when you encounter a fanboy like me. You remind me, I mean them, of things they would rather forget. Keep them humble. They can’t take it at all, don’t worry about them. Poor fragile things. This is what you say.

Pardon?

ALSA, PulseAudio, take your pick they all suck. Nobody will defend those. Low hanging fruit though. Get these digs in early so they think this is all you have in your arsenal.

Lack of speed and Quality

I mean you know, who wants those things right? In the real world does that really matter? Are we so shallow that this is all we care about? Really rub this one in, it’ll sting trust me. Linux was not built with quality in mind, it was built to be lightweight and adaptable. Linus ‘the adonis’ Torvalds has said himself that 20 years of development has lead to a bloated kernel full of hacks and patches that nobody plans on ever fixing. Resulting in poorer performance, but don’t fret. Computer hardware is so fast nowadays that it’s hard to notice. Thus solving the problem once and for all!

Backspace Bug

Yes the swept under the carpet Grub issue. Many people haven’t heard of this one, but Grub2 suffered from an issue where you could press backspace 28 times and gain root access to a machine. Crazy right, super simple. This fanboy might counter with the fact it was fixed within hours, like with any major OS bug. Or the fact that it required physical access to the machine limiting it’s reach. Even the fact that nobody really enabled this password protection at the grub level, so there was nothing to bypass in the first place. Just look them in the eye, and say “Backspace, 28 times”. Then maybe fart for punctuation or something, however you roll.

It’s not me, it’s YOU.

The Linux development community can be notoriously defensive and quick to blame others for stupidity. This unfriendly environment leads to problems not being fixed and prevents those who might have an important contribution to make not even get started in the first place. I think things are changing for the better on the whole. With the mass adoption of the Linux kernel into IOT devices there is some serious money behind getting things done. This is good and bad for many many obvious reasons.

The arrogant elite are the final thing holding back mass adoption in my opinion. Yes there would be more Linux desktops out there if they came preinstalled and whatever. The game support list could and should be longer and so on. But really it’s not the inviting place it should be. It started as a niche, one that smart people flocked to. At that point a minority of that group who shouted the loudest lead to the atmosphere we’re all sick of. I’ve actually found it to be quite a helpful community in recent years, for the most part anyway. So long as you are direct and to the point with issues and keep it succinct. But even still woe betide anyone that reports a duplicate bug or missed and obscure link describing an existing fix. There’s room for improvement in any system.

Bottom Line

Thing is people need to be attracted to it too. It’s not enough that it’s a fuzzy place filled with cotton candy and fireworks. But that would be a start. Those of us who advocate for it’s proliferation would have a leg to stand on. Give us half a chance to share in the satisfaction we have. I never had that with Windows. Not since the XP days, and even then it was mostly what Windows gave me access to. Linux I enjoy how it’s mine, I took something and made it my own. Never had that under anything but Linux. Even Android lacks this forcing devices to be flashed and jumping through hoops just to move and few buttons around.
At the end of the day most people are used to Windows, others are used to OSX. When they make the change to the handsome penguin there is no hook to keep them here. Only crutches that get in their way and lead to frustration. The learning curve is shrinking, but were lacking a hook. Pretty much everything built for Linux is open platform so you can find it again when you go back to Windows or OSX. So why stick with Linux? The generosity of Linux contributes to its downfall. If there was a kernel module that dispensed cocaine, I bet more people would stay riding the penguin.
For me I would like to see Linux users be humble, help others when you can and be thankful for the space we’ve already carved out. You know what? Here and now that’s the zone we’re kinda in (maybe on the cusp of). It feels good.
Love, Life and Peace,
Noki