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I have found https://wiki.archlinux.org/, the Arch Linux Wiki to be the most useful single source of information taht is generalized enough to apply to most other distributions.

As an early adopter of Linux, I too found the existing documentation appalling and started writing better documentation, which led to co-authoring RedHat/Fedora Unleashed with Bill Ball.

My advice is to contribute to the documentation yourself since it appears that no one else, including the software authors, care much about it.

But the barriers to contributing are high. You may not only need to learn about the application, but you need to learn any number of arcane editing and versioning tools, and then convince someone in authority to accept and include your changes. It's really no different that contributing code to a project and for your average writer, that's a huge hassle and likely a big part of why more writers don;t contribute.

It's only a diff of the new fishy 7.2 changes. You can grab the source on the archlinux FTP though.

Of course you can. Many Linux distros still host the source in their source repositories. But the GGP wanted the Windows version source.

It's only a diff of the new fishy 7.2 changes. You can grab the source on the archlinux FTP though.
Presumably the guys in charge of the public crowd-funded audit could also provide a version of the source that would be deemed "trusted" by most people (and those that have already downloaded the source previously can offer confirmation).

With Windows 8 requirement of a license by the proprietary hardware in order to perform a simple Linux install, is wrong. Its real bad. Just say NO to proprietary hardware.

Re-purposing a computer for One Laptop per Child or some other education use is why I buy all my hardware (PC, laptop and tablet) from Linux ONLY vendors. I figure I can always purchase a Windows license if I want one, however down the road that Linux hardware will not require a Windows license to run Linux because of some stupid proprietary chipsets in the hardware.

While there are many Linux only vendors, my favorite is ZaReason. System76 is another one, but they seem to focus on only one or two Linux distros, where the ZaReason techs will put on many more. Loving Debian lately and plan to play with Arch down the road.

Do yourself a favor, avoid any vendor that focuses on Windows and buy Linux hardware and if you really must have the latest version of Windows, purchase a license for your better LINUX hardware. At least it can run Windows without hassles, the converse is no longer true.

A Windows 8 device no longer runs Linux without hassles, best to avoid it for this reason alone.

That's funny since there was plenty of "social pressure" on GnuTLS about its crappy code and yet it had unfixed security flaws for most of a decade.

You'll notice that FileZilla is the only major app that uses it for online work, and that's mainly used by Windows people.

The 'society' knew to use openssl.

yes there is magic tab completions for command parameters with bash:P

in archlinux:
pacman -S bash-completion
source /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion

alot of packages ( including systemd ) these days installs "parameter" completions for bash. see under /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/

if you are using arch, you should check out https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind... for some good tips to improve bash
first bashrc on that wiki shows how to enable autocompletions and "command not found" which shows you which package a missing command is in automagically..

Somebody mod up this AC. He hit it on those nose. I just did exactly as suggested and I am feeling a bit high at the moment. This is heady stuff.

While that is an Intel CPU, it isn't using an Intel GPU. Instead it uses a PowerVR which is a brand of GPU often used in ARM devices, embedded, etc.

Long story short, there are no open source drivers in the kernel for that GPU. That means that you will have to find the PowerVR toolchain and compile your own drivers, but if it is anything like the rest of the ARM GPUs it won't work on a current kernel without a ton of patches. If you are lucky someone will have released an distro designed for your hardware otherwise it isn't hardly worth the time.

From here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_GMA3600 it sounds like their driver only supports kernel version 3.1, but there is a github repo with some patches that supposedly help only tested up to 3.7 though). However it looks like it requires xorg 1.11 so you may have to downgrade that as well.

As far as i'm concerned, XBMC is pretty much the only way to go here. I keep my media files (Movies, TV, Music) on a terabyte drive in my first generation Mac Pro and samba share them gigabit to a Zotac id41 running Openelec. Openelec is an appliance-like Linux distribution that installs quickly and does nothing other than run XBMC (there's no "desktop" except XBMC; you can control it via ssh). I tried Serviio, and a couple of streaming servers, but they don't always understand what a file is supposed to do and choke on it. Samba just shares files and lets the remote machine figure them out. XBMC figures everything out that I've sent it so far; it has a host of plug-ins (what they call "add ons") including one for the BBC iPlayer, and for the ITV player, and for Hulu and you can even control rtorrent from one of them. For the Beeb and ITV I use Witopia's VPN service which can be invoked from Openelec's command line if you know what you're about. Plays 1080p nicely on my 50", all sorts of 5.1 audio goes through a semi-decent Pioneer amp. Openelec is not for dedicated Linux tinkerers. I set the Zotac up originally with Arch Linux because, you know, "I'm a geek, uh huh, uh huh" and it was a huge mistake because I was updating the damned thing every 20 minutes the way Arch people do, and I put a desktop on it and installed browsers and so forth thinking that I'd have a neat fully blown computer there in my living room and I could surf and check my email -- fahgeddaboudit! It's an HTPC only these days, plays music and video. Those Zotacs are powerful little machines though. I have a friend in town does the same thing with a Pi.

I suggest you to try any tiling window manager (arch wiki has a nice list here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Window_manager#Tiling_window_managers). I am currently using awesome on a (small) monitor and I found it to be much more practical than the "standard" window managers. These window managers would allow you to automatically separate the screen in order to show all the windows. Generally they are also so customizable that you could define custom ways to split the screen, special rules for certain programs, etc. On such a large monitor it would certainly be more practical than resizing the windows by hand.

The explanation linked by the ArchWiki article on systemd is very good:
Read this forum post.

As an Arch user, I hated systemd at first, for much the same reasons as already stated: the confusing and opaque nature of debugging. I'm now a convert, and I have been ever since I worked out how to do everything I used to be able to do. I now believe people's resistance is just growing pains. Give it a shot; it's easy and good.

If you wipe ChromeOS with Arch Linux, there's a patch available for the C720 touchpad. They even have the touchscreen working for the C720P. I know they're working on getting the patches to work with Ubuntu, Mint, etc.

Alternatively, you can just run Crouton to duel-boot alongside ChromeOS...which solves the touchpad issue.

Whenever someone comes up with a comment like yours, the easy answer is always CMYK. Gimp doesn't support it.

And that's just the most obvious problem.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CMYK_support_in_The_GIMP

Not perfect, but could be sufficient for some use cases. Not that it matters, most* of the people that bring up CMYK support in these arguments don't use it and probably never will, it's just a talking point they use to "win".

For people that need it, that would make GIMP unsuitable, but that's a relatively small subset of the overall image editing use case, and it shouldn't be used to dismiss the entire package.

* Note that I didn't say everybody, I'm not arguing that nobody needs it. Just that I doubt that all (or even many) of the people in these GIMP-vs-PS arguments use it.

Wasn't this about Microsoft changing Skypes architecture to enable surveilance? Hell, they were even brazen enough to patent aspects of it. They've even been scanning chats for URLs (which was news to me). Apparently the excuse was they were scanning the URLs for malicious software, which may be true... but most regard anything they say these days with a grain of salt, and rightly so.

Ubuntu isn't especially bloated. It runs at least as good as WindowsXP out of the box, as far as performance is concerned.

To my layman's eyes, Linux has been suffering from a bit of "X distro is/once was good and is slowly dying from lack of funds or internal politics".

Then your layman's eyes are suffering from selection bias (a common problem). There are several distros that have been running solid for a very long time. Such distros are Ubuntu's own granddaddy, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, and more recently SUSE.

ten seconds with google: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBookPro11,x

For those that otherwise recognize the awesomitude of Slackware but have gotten too old and feeble to track dependencies themselves, I would recommend Arch. (Yes, that does include me...)

To me, it's got a very Slackware-like feel to it (including a SlackBuild-like system called ABS), but also a pretty comprehensive repository.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=84960

Shitcock.

It should be this easy on ALL linux distros. Here's a screencap of me installing the latest NVidia drivers on Lubuntu the other day:
http://youtu.be/49iq5A8d0e4

Yeah. That was like super-easy and I'm sure many Windows or OS X users would be impressed..

Also what's up with the lack of usage of the tab key, the multiple clears and I guess it would had helped if you had made sure the commands actually gave the results you where after in the first place + the warning at the beginning about a distribution specific pre-installation script failing.

As for FreeBSD:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/compiz-fusion/nvidia-setup.html

Or openSUSE:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers#Easy_way_to_get_NVIDIA_drivers

Ubuntu:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia

Fedora don't seem to be all that user friendly in this regard:
http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2013/fedora-18-nvidia-guide/
http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia#GeForce_8_and_newer

Archlinux guide is a little longer.. But also cover much more:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA
Like I remember a recent thread on Slashdot where this likely would had been helpful:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA#Base_mosaic

It should be this easy on ALL linux distros. Here's a screencap of me installing the latest NVidia drivers on Lubuntu the other day:
http://youtu.be/49iq5A8d0e4

Yeah. That was like super-easy and I'm sure many Windows or OS X users would be impressed..

Also what's up with the lack of usage of the tab key, the multiple clears and I guess it would had helped if you had made sure the commands actually gave the results you where after in the first place + the warning at the beginning about a distribution specific pre-installation script failing.

As for FreeBSD:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/compiz-fusion/nvidia-setup.html

Or openSUSE:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers#Easy_way_to_get_NVIDIA_drivers

Ubuntu:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia

Fedora don't seem to be all that user friendly in this regard:
http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2013/fedora-18-nvidia-guide/
http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia#GeForce_8_and_newer

Archlinux guide is a little longer.. But also cover much more:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA
Like I remember a recent thread on Slashdot where this likely would had been helpful:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA#Base_mosaic

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Programs

* gitosis https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitosis

Easy to setup, limited. Good to setup quick remote repositories with Ssh for user management.

* gitolite https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitolite

Easy to setup, no web client. Good to setup quick remote repositories with more features then gitosis.

* gitorious http://gitorious.org/gitorious/pages/Home
* gitlab https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitlab

With web clients.

* redmine http://www.redmine.org/

My all time favourite project management web client.

* gitosis https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitosis

Easy to setup, limited. Good to setup quick remote repositories with Ssh for user management.

* gitolite https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitolite

Easy to setup, no web client. Good to setup quick remote repositories with more features then gitosis.

* gitorious http://gitorious.org/gitorious/pages/Home
* gitlab https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitlab

With web clients.

* redmine http://www.redmine.org/

My all time favourite project management web client.

* gitosis https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitosis

Easy to setup, limited. Good to setup quick remote repositories with Ssh for user management.

* gitolite https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitolite

Easy to setup, no web client. Good to setup quick remote repositories with more features then gitosis.

* gitorious http://gitorious.org/gitorious/pages/Home
* gitlab https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gitlab

With web clients.

* redmine http://www.redmine.org/

My all time favourite project management web client.

I never understood this desire to put everything as a web service.
Why is RSS not just an Email mailer that can send news to my Email address?
IMAP is perfect for it, and POP3 is also capable. Plus you have encryption (IMAPS), user management, and you don't need Yet Another App.

There is for example rss2email that can receive RSS feeds and send them as Email. Here is come better documentation: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rss2email

Works fine here.
I have zfs root + refind on my laptop and grub2 + zfs root on my desktop with ssd cache drives. Works like a charm. It eats a bit of ram though :)

Just added a couple repositories to arch and build a new usb stick with zfs included.
Instructions here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installing_Arch_Linux_on_ZFS

The only backdraw is that I have to wait for the zfs repository to update whenever arch releases a new kernel. Usually it takes 1-2 days so it's not too bad.
Also, keep in mind that you can not offload the ZIL to another (ssd) drive for the root zpool so make sure you make a separate pool for the root and one with all the rest /usr, /home, /var etc.
You can add cache ssd drives to the root pool though.
Offloading ZIL (log) speeds up the writes and cache drives speeds up the reads.

Once you go zfs you don't go back as the possibilities are endless ;)

I use Arch, and decided to stick with ext4 for now--I don't want a filesystem that bleeding-edge, btrfs does not yet directly support swap files, and though my laptop has enough memory to fit a container ship or two (16 gibs, good god...) I'd still rather have one, both for resume and general swappy stuff if ever needed.

Personally I'd like file birth time support (and not just for btrfs) to jog my memory about the times I've made old stuff, but it seems I'd have to move to e.g. FreeBSD for that and I prefer the more-up-to-date-iness of Arch.

Well, it can be even called "whatever" provided you know where your .desktop files are can adjust them to your needs. Enter "shit" in .desktop for Terminal and you will got in results when you type "shi"... GNOME 3 is damn well customizable -- go to https://wiki.archlinux.org/ and search for GNOME. I think that good part is that it's written partially in JS so I can change the source code (and thus the appearance, workflow and so on) without the least bit of recompilation. Fast, clean and efficient. And ya know what? I change my Javascript. Besides, I think their JS codebase is pretty well clean so you can just wander around the code and see where everything is and what does what. Can you name a second DE who offer similar level of customizablility? And it's not rolling, I am seriously asking.

It's mainly a problem for Linux distributors: they stopped providing things like regression tests and security advisories. Source: https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-February/024478.html

Arch Linux also made the switch three days ago: https://www.archlinux.org/news/mariadb-replaces-mysql-in-repositories/

it's helps people who use terminals for irc, email and more and when they have a link to a video stream they get easy one click access. Users of irssi have been singing terminology's praises for this

You don't need viewers integrated into the terminal for that. Just an URL aware terminal(e.g. urxvt) and something like xdg-open.

Solutions already exist that follow the UNIX philosophy. Do one thing, and do it well. Don't stick a PDF viewer into the terminal. Make a kickass terminal, and a kickass PDF viewer, and glue them together.

Or PeerGuardian Linux.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PeerGuardian_Linux

First link when I googled.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBookPro_Retina

So apparently people are happily doing it since forever, if you're willing to pay for a Retina display.

This explains it pretty well:

Systemd has plenty of advantages. People just hate change and having to type systemctl instead of rc.d. It does suck that BSD is getting increasingly left out in the cold with this and udev, though.

While I acknowledge that Gentoo has its uses, my own experience of rolling my own (LFS) turned out to be a quicker and less painful process.

That said, whenever I want to set up any kind of a server system quickly, my first and quickest choice is always Slackware. In fact, that was my only choice for my desktop machines for many years (a position currently held by Arch Linux, though I am presently reconsidering that).

The great thing about Slackware is that the zero dependency checking of the package system makes admin so simple. You just have a world to stand on while you
./configure -prefix=/usr/local && make && make install

which is all you really need to install the majority of programs,

Because that's what they officially (I guess) support. I think valve has talked about making it more distribution agnostic in the future. http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/846939854324291029/

Other distributions that are not supported will obviously repackage it. Archlinux has it in the AUR and it works fine. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/steam/

I'm fine if they only officially support ubuntu as long as they don't do too much ubuntu specific stuff. For example I think they still have no tray icon, only the indicator stuff. That's not so nice.

Those discussions seem to involve them trying to interact with each distro's package manager rather than them supplying updated versions of the libraries, but package managers are not designed to support dependencies for proprietary software like Steam; they are designed to support software that the distro provides.

They refer to providing all their own libraries as "bloatware", but I think it's the best choice since it gives them the most control and provides the most distro-agnostic experience. Modern gaming computers are probably not pressed for disk real estate.

So why do home users use Windows?

Because they don't want to deal with stuff like this just to get sound working.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture

Good and fast hashes are all you need for any purpose. You can't make a slow hash fast, but it's trivially easy to make a fast hash slow. You just use sequential rounds, enough of them to make it slow.

SHA-512 is fine for passwords. It's the best there is. You're nuts to use anything else, the US military agrees with me, and it is the default in RHEL6 and other recent security conscious distros. The thing is, nobody with any sense uses a single round for this purpose. They use 5000, or 50,000, or 719,246. When you configure your password security on linux to SHA-512, glibc defaults to 5000 rounds.

Haven't used the machine with the ATI card in it for about 4 months, but last I was on there, it couldn't run minecraft with the open source ati drivers. I mean like, min settings, 11fps if I was lucky. This is on an admittedly older laptop, with a Core 2 duo 2.0ghz+2MB L2 cache and a Radeon HD 4500M.

Basically, ATI is fine if you don't need 3d acceleration. The open source drivers are great with 2d, compositing, etc. The second you need 3d though, they're pretty much worthless (at least since I last used them), and you'll end up having to deal with the proprietary drivers instead. In my experience, they're pretty friggin sluggish in comparison. Lots of latency when starting X11 and switching between vterms and desktops, lag in some compositing/moving around windows/opening them, and a SHIT TON of bugs.

Not to mention Arch hasn't supported the binaries outside of the AUR for a few years now. Check out the ATI bar and Grill thread if you're interested.

For me, due to a bunch of random issues, I had to go the route of using third party repositories that kept me on older versions of X server in order to keep playing games. I eventually just said fuck it and haven't dealt with that machine since. Now, I actually stick to windows on it since it's mainly my work laptop anyway. Keep in mind, I'm an arch linux user, so ymmv if you go the ubuntu, mint, fedora, etc route.

So, yeah. Nvidia is a lot better from my experience. I know that's saying I'd rather get fucked with a stick than a knife, but it's true nonetheless.

As everyone else is saying, Intel is really the only company around that is worth its weight on the drivers side. Honestly, my Core i7 3770 can run Assassins Creed revelations pretty much fine on medium settings, 1080p (windows comparison, I know), so it's not the end of the world. Integrated is getting better. AMD's offerings on integrated are even better as far as power is concerned, but I'm fairly certain they have the same drivers as the discrete cards, so that's kind of a moot point anyway.

My advice? Buy a good intel chip from ivy bridge, and you won't really miss the discrete card unless you play a lot of resource intensive games. Wait around and pray to god Nvidia or AMD gets their act together soon.

Visual Studio - is lightyears (but at least 5 years) ahead of everything else.

Exchange, SQL Server, etc.. - good luck trying to find alternatives for their enterprise solutions.

Games - they run and run fast.

Device drivers - are available for all hardware. My hybrid gfx on a 2 year old laptop still has no linux support, so I have to use some hack to turn one of them off.

Xbox, Kinect - enough said.

MS is not going anywhere anytime soon. If Steve Jobs would've come up with the active tile home screen, or the unified interface across devices, everyone would've been drooling over it.

Here are a few others as well.

--Sorry bout that; it's just the way you came across. Personally, I had only a vague idea that Reiser4 was still in semi-active development until I saw this Slashdot headline.

--I did come up with a few links, but as for when $bug was fixed in Reiserfs, you would prolly have to search the kernel mailing lists or the project's home page.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Reiser4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiser4#History_of_Reiser4

https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ

Crash fix found!

Appears to work, at least for now - we'll see if it's a real fix. libtxc_dxtn needs to be installed, at least it seems to have worked when I did it on Kubuntu. Of course I've had this weird error clear itself up before.

Ah yes, Arch Linux, the operating system where people brag about their superiority even though it comes down to copy/pasting commands from a wiki without understanding what the hell they even do. Who woulda thunk that the first published book is just a copy/paste of other people's work?

Sadly you're right. I moved to Arch from FreeBSD four years ago and I was amazed at the amount of clueless arrogant fanboys which diluted the signal-to-noise of the people who know what they're talking about. Don't get me wrong, I love Arch and I still use it over any other distro on my personally owned PCs, but you're right that some of the community are idiots, especially the zealous, newish members who can't take any criticism of Arch.

Ah yes, Arch Linux, the operating system where people brag about their superiority even though it comes down to copy/pasting commands from a wiki without understanding what the hell they even do. Who woulda thunk that the first published book is just a copy/paste of other people's work?

That depends a lot. On a distro like Ubuntu, 6 months means a single real update really. On Arch, since it's rolling release (and bleeding edge), every single package may have been updated several times, as well as some not-so-minor changes to the filesystem, for example.

I've been running two PCs with arch for about 18 months now, and have never encountered any real issues with the rolling-update process.

You get the brevity and coolness of #! plus the beautiful versatility of arch, and it actually works on modern hardware. It also uses openbox.

And I know this is just a plug for DistroX (sorry, didn't RTFS), but for people insterested in other Arches that aren't:
List of Arch Based Distros

Sadly, it really can't be considered user friendly at the moment. I don't expect to take any market share away from, say, Linux Mint. In fact, I should probably actively discourage it, at least for this release. However, this fit my use case, and I figure at least a few others had similar interests but were disappointed no one distro provided all of them at the same time.

The other thing to consider is the many potential points of failure when a distro relies on other
distros with dissimilar distribution methods, library tools, packaging tools, expected directory structure, etc.

Just one little change can cause a huge ripple effect. Arch, last month changed directory structures followed by changing /lib to /usr/lib. It bricked a lot of machines requiring much manual messing around to get things back on track.

Sadly, it really can't be considered user friendly at the moment. I don't expect to take any market share away from, say, Linux Mint. In fact, I should probably actively discourage it, at least for this release. However, this fit my use case, and I figure at least a few others had similar interests but were disappointed no one distro provided all of them at the same time.

The other thing to consider is the many potential points of failure when a distro relies on other
distros with dissimilar distribution methods, library tools, packaging tools, expected directory structure, etc.

Just one little change can cause a huge ripple effect. Arch, last month changed directory structures followed by changing /lib to /usr/lib. It bricked a lot of machines requiring much manual messing around to get things back on track.

The author of the article mention a couple of distributions found vulnerable to this bug. In one of them is Arch Linux. But he also said that systems with versions up to 5.1.61, 5.2.11, 5.3.5, 5.5.22 are vulnerable. Then... How the heck can Arch (a rolling release distribution) be affected if they have an updated version of the package already in place, lol. The article is dated June 11, Arch fixed upstream release was committed May 13. So it has been already fixed for nearly 2 months.... wow https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/log/trunk?h=packages/mysql

The Arch for ARM distro isn't "stripped down" by any means. It is merely compiled for ARM instead of x86.
It doesn't contain all the packages that are in the x86 repos, but cross-compiling is possible and you can use the AUR to find what you are looking for usually.