What software have you found particularly frustrating or difficult to configure on Linux?
Multiple versions, paths, and installs of Python. Using pip makes it worse.
I have limited Python experience, but I always thought that’s what virtualenvs and requirements.txt files are for? When I used those, I found it easy enough to use.
Especially during the transition from 2 to 3. Let’s hope that’s all behind us.
Fortunately I haven’t had to open it in a very long time.
Similar here. I used to have 2 screens that if they turned off for powersaving only 1 of them would wake up. So I had a script on the desktop to do a reset and move them correctly.
#!/bin/bash xrandr --output HDMI2 --off xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --same-as HDMI1 xrandr --output HDMI1 --right-of HDMI2 exitWhy did we have to learn what modelines were to get a picture on screen?
Installing Fedora. I had almost nothing to configure, it worked out of the box. How frustrating! I had the whole day planned and now what? Enjoy my free time like a pleb !?!
(/s just in case anyone was wondering)
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Try Nobara. It’s based on Fedora but it’s got a whole bunch of gaming-related patches including all of the required additions for out-of-the-box HDR support.
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As this is for a HTPC, I would rather go for uBlue Bazzite instead of Nobara. Same Fedora base, super gaming oriented too, but atomic/immutable so 0 maintenance.
Plus, uBlue projects are not distros but an alternative build pipeline system for Fedora Atomic projects. That means that the projects scope is tiny and much easier to maintain, and that the real distro maintainers are still the Fedora team. From a user perspective, it’s much better in the long term than a single-person effort like Nobara.
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Sure you’re absolutely free to do as you please ;)
From personal experience tho, anything connected to the TV should Just WorkTM. Nothing more frustrating than just wanting to watch an episode or play a quick game before going to bed and having to spend this time doing updates and maintenance instead.
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Running Fedora with dual HDR monitors just fine, but it’s entirely possible that something is off that I’m not catching. They’re also running off my Nvidia GPU.
I’ll just add that they look the same as when I used to run Win10 on the same box.
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Oh, just FYI I don’t game, so if there are some HDR features for gaming you’re hoping for, I can’t speak to that.
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Do whatever works best for you.
I will say that after years and years of regularly switching workstation and laptop distros for a variety of reasons, after finally giving Fedora a shake, I’m done. I’ve installed it on both my primary laptop and desktops and can’t imagine switching again.
But I am still sticking with Debian as my primary server base.
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Xserver… Somehow trying to find the magic string of letters and numbers that made your screen work.
Modeline ftw.
Shudder. I had this weird brand laptop… Sotec IIRC and there just wasn’t a modline that ever got it all right.
Suspend with an Nvidia gpu
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That’s fair, I’ve found wayland to generally be pretty good with Linux now and you can pry hyprland from my cold dead hands
I still don’t fully understand how to gracefully have multiple desktop environments and switch between them. When I want to try something new to me like lxqt, I usually spin up a VM.
Normally, the process is:
- install the packages for the desktop environment
- log out (not just locking the screen)
- find a dropdown or cogwheel where you can select the other desktop environment
- log in
Having said that, I don’t know what you mean with “graceful”. Desktop environments may involve lots of packages, which may create configuration files in your home directory or get auto-started in your other DEs, so it can be messy.
Something minimal, like LXQt or the various window managers, isn’t going to cause much of a mess, though.I guess, creating a second user with a separate home-directory, like the other person suggested, would isolate that potential mess…
Just add a new user
Pretty much everything is frustrating to configure at first. Then I learn it and it’s not so bad. Then I don’t use it for a few years, and completely forget how! Back to step 1.
I learned this lesson pretty quick when working in IT.
It’s not always feasible to document everything as it happens, but I definitely learned to do so if I had the time and means to while I was doing the thing.
Just started at a new company with 0 documentation, they’re super psyched that I’ve actually been writing down all their processes/procedures/configurations etc. as they explain them to me/as I work with them.
I really should learn this habit.
If you want to get into doing it, I found searching through a lot of note taking applications until I found something I really liked helped me remember to go do it regularly.
For FOSS stuff a lot of people like Joplin, and I could certainly recommend it. Personally though, I really like Obsidian for its backlinking and graph view features, but it’s not open source.
Furthermore, just carrying around a notebook and a pen everywhere you go as a habit helps a lot. I got into the habit of doing this by maintaining a personal journal for some time. For writing effective notation on paper which can easily be digitized, I would recommend looking into “bullet journaling” methods, and again, finding a notebook and pen that you really quite like, helps a lot to make the experience enjoyable and develop it as a skill.
Thanks very much. I’ll take a look at your suggestions.
Initial thought was “I can’t think of anything”. Then I started scrolling through this thread showering upvoted on all of the repressed memories.
It used to be button 10 (also counting 4 scrollwheel directions and click) of my Elecom trackball. I had written a small C program reading the device node and writing the events just of that to stdout, then piping that to a tclsh script (so I could change it easily and it’s still super fast for gaming) which did something in X. Horrible. But then they added support for more buttons to everything (kernel, X) and now I can just map it in games, like any other.
I remember being stubborn and trying to setup eduroam at my uni library using only wpa_supplicant for a whole day. Hugely frustrating. Gave up and installed NetworkManager and it just fucking worked… my tech minimalism phase was extremely counterproductive lol
Probably vim. It works fine out of the box but it took me way too long to figure out things like why my terminal colors were never quite right out of the box (had to set it to 256 color mode or what have you). And once I wanted to use some a few plugins the configuration started getting a bit convoluted/confusing. Hoping I have time some day/remember to figure out how to disable that annoying visual paste mode or whatever it is called that sometimes makes using it over SSH a nightmare.
Trying to configure Sway in NixOS. I gave up and just use KDE Plasma. I do miss using Sway from when I used Arch, though.
Wild. I used sway for the first time with Nix since I could rollback a misconfiguration.
Yeah, I got stuck on secrets management. I just could not get network manager to keep my WiFi passwords. I’ll probably go back and try again at some point.
I still don’t properly grok Selinux at a fundamental and instinctual level. I understand the need for it, and I work with it to the best of my ability, but I wish there was a resource that could explain it from several different positions.
Irony: my main Linux workstation is OpenSuse
I still cannot connect to captive portals for public WiFis, eg on train or hotel and I have no idea where the config comes from.
DNS? Resolve.conf? Systemd network manager? WTF?
(Probably for the best though, so I use my phone 5G and not these suss open networks )
I use this project (https://github.com/FiloSottile/captive-browser) which works most of the time.
Most captive portals work by answering the DNS requests with the captive portal ip. This works only if the correct dns servers are configured and a lot of security features like dnssec, DOH, … are disabled.
More info from the project author: https://words.filippo.io/captive-browser/
So you run this to sign into the portal, is that right? Thanks
Edit: OK had a read, I will look into this. I don’t have chrome on my machine but will see if it works with chromium swapped in instead. :)
If you connect to the network and open firefox, it will display a toast to open the corresponding captive portals page. You can then login through that. Given that your VPN isn’t blocking unencrypted connections etc.
Extrapolation of partial knowledge warning
I assume the network advertises a captive portals url and identifies your based on you MAC address.
The config is server-side (router).
I get “limited connection” I think when I try connect or “no internet”.
I don’t make it to load the portal page…
so maybe I’m not recieving at IP from the network?
Configuring captive portal wifi without network manager or any aids beyond what’s provided by wpa-supplicant. Eventually I gave up, since it wasn’t really that important.
Adjusting freetype so that it works more-or-less the way I want it to, because the maintainers hate anyone who disagrees with their current hinting algorithm and make the setting as opaque as possible. I would prefer it if they allowed me to have hinting on some fonts and exclude only the ones that were designed to be pixel-aligned, but unless something’s changed recently, that option isn’t even offered.
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