*EXTREMELY LINUX VOICE*

you GOTTA upgrade the software on your computer or someone may hack you, and steal all your money. so make sure to ALWAYS update your computer.

btw, sometimes when you update your computer, it'll ask you if you want to replace some important-sounding script youve never heard of yet have apparently changed

this means you now have to work out:

-what the script is
-what it does
-what "your" changes do/mean
-what their changes do
-which set of changes to keep

good luck!

so i restarted my computer after that upgrade

AND NOW MY FONTS ARE BROKEN FOR SOME REASON

fucking hate linux !!!!!!!!
mastodon.social/media/_wuhTiVk

why did me upgrading my system remove the font that i use. why??? what the fuck is going on??? can someone explain how and why this can or should happen

turns out that whatever it is i upgraded reset the contents of /etc/fonts to the default. why?? who knows

/etc/fonts, if you are not aware, has the weirdest way of configuring shit (by which i mean, bad, since i only understood what the fuck was going on because i'd already had to troubleshoot an issue with it 6 months ago), you have all of these xml files and they have names like 70-no-bitmap-fonts or 70-yes-bitmap-fonts and to enable bitmap fonts you copy the file from one folder to another

why does it work like that??? probably someone has a really good explanation, one that sounds really clever. but their explanation is wrong, because it shouldn't work like that, since nothing works like that

so anyway my experience of linux, on a ~monthly basis?? you upgrade or install something, and something breaks or doesn't work, and to fix the thing so that it works you have to learn about a program you didn't know existed, understand its uniquely fucked up configuration schema, make changes you don't really understand, and then sit tight until in 6-12 months it breaks again and you have to remember how the fuck you fixed it last time

@jk so this is weird, right? i've had this installation of linux for like 3 years and never encountered an issue where i had to edit any system files or fix anything, the system just works.

@Gargron you probably arent doing anything interesting with your computer :(

@jk @Gargron what distro are you on so that I can never use it. never in my life have I seen an upgrade go so poorly and I used to run Gentoo

@Vopo @Gargron this is Mint, I’d say I have about 1/2 the number of problems on an arch-based distro but they’re still there sometimes

@jk @Vopo oh good god mint is the worst OS. stay away from it. my dad also had lots of issues with it. their website got hacked because they use wordpress lmao

@Gargron @Vopo this looks nice but i bet that if i actually end up using it, in 6 years someone will be be telling me that it's the worst OS and their website got hacked

@jk @Gargron six years is a while tho. the same has been frankly more true for commercial products. last year you could break into a Mac by not putting in a password

@Vopo @Gargron tbh although it does look nice i just can't deal with using a distro that isn't in the top 3 most popular because i need a large sized community support structure & docs

@jk @Vopo okay. i personally am using ubuntu gnome (16.04 LTS). that's the one i had for like 3 years without issues

@Gargron @Vopo ah, i switched to mint from ubuntu at the time because everybody told me ubuntu was the worst OS

@jk @Vopo canonical ubuntu is pretty bad because of the preinstalled desktop environment (unity) and some dumb adware like the amazon launcher integration. ubuntu gnome is a fork with a different DE (gnome)

@Gargron @Vopo ah, back when i used to use ubuntu the desktop WAS gnome, maybe im just extremely out of date

@jk @Vopo gnome 3 looks different to gnome 2 and i like it a lot more

@Gargron @Vopo on everything linuxy i use i3wm and uhh, idk what it's called. kde? gtk?? xkcd?? anyway i have no way to tell because everything just looks like i3. i probably use a different environment on each computer

@Vopo @Gargron someone needs to draw me a venn diagram with x, x windows system, x11, x.org, gnome, unity, kde, gtk, i3, dwm, and wayland in it

@jk @Vopo you'll hate me and all of linux for this but you listed like 3 different categories of things in there. there's x.org/x11/wayland is like a graphical API layer; gnome, unity, kde are desktop environments; i3 and dwm are window managers. i think.

@Gargron @Vopo this is pretty easy to visualise and understand since they're all graphical things, right? x lets you create windows on the screen and draw to them, desktop environments give you controls & OS-type onscreen features, and WMs let you organise the windows?? except they can also change the style of the windows too?? and if you ONLY have x installed it does function with its own basic kinda... well, wm? or DE? or??

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@jk @Gargron @Vopo DEs usually include a WM, like gnome's mutter, but you can replace it with something like i3. There's also compositors which somehow do some extra stuff that's extremely important like wobbly windows

@noiob @jk @gargron @Vopo wait ok so the distinction I’ve never gotten is DEs vs WMs. I just configured my .xinitrc to launch my WM (bspwm) when I type startx. does that mean I don’t have a DE? Or is xinit my DE? What does a DE do other than launch the WM?

@alice @noiob @jk @Vopo the DE is WM+start menu+toolbars+keyboard shortcuts+a load of other shit that's nice to have. a WM is just how windows are laid out.

@gargron @noiob @jk @Vopo but all those things you listed are separate programs in my setup. Start menu = dmenu, stars bar = polybar, keyboard shortcuts = sxhkd, etc. And they’re all configured and launched by shell scripts that get executed by bspwm. Does this mean bspwm is my DE? Or is my DE a big pile of random programs and scripts?

@alice @Gargron @noiob @Vopo also when i'm running xfce my windows look different than when i'm running i3, so i3 is a DE? orrrr, is my DE i3+i3status+dmenu??

@jk @Vopo @noiob @alice Your DE is a big pile of programs pre-configured to run together, yes.

@Gargron @alice @noiob @Vopo well thank god i didnt have to configure most of them

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