Overview

  • Attendance
  • Playdate Update
  • Linux
  • Next Week

Attendance

Officers:

  • Abu Shettima
  • Lavender Wilson
  • Matthew Williams
  • Paul Shriner

Members:

  • Chibuikem Asuzu
  • Jonothan Buckel
  • Kevin Kauffman
  • Maddox Miller
  • Michael Paterno

Playdate Update

Kevin made some changes to his PR; they were not discussed during the meeting, but you can view the PR here.

Linux

Overview

In the beginning, there was UNIX: it was strictly licensed and expensive, so people turned to free and open-source project, created and maintained by Linus Torvalds. Since then, it has grown to be the most widely used operating system in the world (it is the main OS servers run on).

Distributions

Different distributions (“distro"s) of linux are essentially slightly different flavors of linux. Each is built for a specific purpose; some are made for servers, some are made to be easy to use for a normal peron.

There are a few main families of linux that are the most popular: Debian (and/or Ubuntu), Fedora, and Arch.

Debian

Debian has a stable release cycle, meaning it gets big updates infrequently (typcially several months between). It is very old. It uses the apt package manager.

Arch

Arch is a rolling-release distro, meaning that you can access its updates as soon as they become available. It is cutting-edge, but can be unstable and you’ll have to set up and fix everything yourself. It uses the pacman package manager.

Fedora/RHEL

Fedora is also a stable release, but they are more frequent than Debian. It is an in-between of Arch and Debian, trying to balance new features with stability. If you find instructions for any RHEL distro, it includes Fedora. It uses the dnf package manager.

Which to Use?

In the beginning, you should go with something that’s popular and easy to use. Once you get more familiar with linux, you may want to check out the more difficult distros to use (ex. Arch, NixOS, Gentoo, and too many more…)

Desktop Environments

“DE” for short. This is a part of every distro, and many distros use the same pool of DEs.

DEs essentially change how your system looks and feels. They’ll change how your apps are displayed, how your title bars look, how your system menu works, and so many more things.

Some popular ones are GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, and XFCE.

KDE Plasma

Since Paul has KDE, so he showed us what it looks like. KDE is very similar to Windows layouts. It is extremely customizable, which a lot of Linux users like.

GNOME

Gnome is very sleek, modern, and simplified. It has much less customization than KDE, but it has a very nice-looking default setup that is easy to make simple modifications to. You can use extensions to change more significant things, such as adding a taskbar.

Cinnamon

Also very Windows-like, and was created by the Linux Mint team to be their own default DE after they decided they didn’t like where GNOME was going (at the time).

Using Linux

For getting software, you should typically go to the built-in software store first rather than going to a webpage and downloading a zip or .exe file. The next easiest method is using your package manager, which will install any available packages for you.

While you don’t have to, it’s a good idea to become friends with the terminal. A lot of things can be done from it, and knowing how to use it even a little can help you in so many scenarios (for example, if your desktop environment breaks and that’s all you have).

Drawbacks

There are certain things that are just not possible on Linux. For example:

  • Linux will never allow kernel-level anticheat
  • Gaming has come a long way, but there can still be problems
  • You will (almost certainly) encounter issues regarding drivers, devices, or some other obscure thing that you’ll have to learn and research yourself
  • While there are first-party or even open-source versions of popular software, there is some software that there is no Linux substitute for

Next Week

Since next Tuesday is election day, and most people will probably be busy in their hometowns voting, so we’ll be doing the meeting over Discord (at the same time as usual).

The meeting will be less focused/directed than usual.