What software have you found particularly frustrating or difficult to configure on Linux?
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
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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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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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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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.
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
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?
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.
Rootless podman, PostgreSQL, redis, nextcloud, nginx, iptables in one…
XDG portal filechooser for Firefox: the KDE implementation uses Dolphin, which is full of features and I use most of them; the default GTK one is mildly infuriating to use and looks ugly too, but getting the browser to use the portal I want was a nightmare - especially since GTK discontinued the GTK_USE_PORTAL envvar.
The related Firefox config entries make no sense either.Can you explain a bit more about this and how to configure it? When I use FF on gnome, the save dialogue just looks like other dialogues?
I think GNOME’s filechooser is the GTK one (never used it so I’m not sure), mine looks like this:
It’s entirely possible that Firefox changed and now uses XDG portals by default, I configured it like this a long time ago.
As for how to configure it, I honestly don’t know.
It was a combination of messing withwidget.use-xdg-desktop-portalon about:config, and changing XDG envvars and dotfiles; both by following several conflicting Reddit and bbs.archlinux.org posts.widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker=1 in about:config should be the only thing you need. @projectmoon@lemm.ee
Seems to be the only necessary thing in my case! Thanks.
Yeah I definitely have the default GTK chooser. Guess I have some config playing to do later.
When I was on Hyprland, I had to start Firefox with
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=kdewhile having both the KDE and GTK implementations of XDP.
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
Arch based distro (yes, even Manjaro).
I’ve been on arch for years, but have recently started pc gaming. Lutris has been surprisingly easy to get working. I have a nintendo switch already and decided I want to try to use the joycons for the computer, don’t want to buy gamepads but it gives and alternative to keyboard and mouse. Getting them consistently recognized by bluetooth has been a massive pain, but after searching I’ve figured out a package that I can install that fixes the issues. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone who found a solution to this issue without installing this specific package.
That package is pulseaudio-bluetooth, even though the nintendo joycons do not have an audio jack or capability to receive audio. I’ve had my audio set up and configured with alsa, and alsa does everything (relating to audio) that I need it to, but pulseaudio-bluetooth requires me to install pulseaudio (duh) and will not work unless I enable the pulseaudio service, which fucks up my alsa config. I’ve spent a while dicking around trying to get pulseaudio to pretend it doesn’t exist except for connecting joycons, but there’s always some nuisance popping up. I also tried using a different usb bluetooth controller and plugging them into different usb ports. Given up for the moment and will probably just buy another gamepad and hope it works better without needing pulseaudio-bluetooth.
In all honesty I still don’t really know what the hell I’m doing on arch, I originally installed it to learn this stuff better but all I’ve really learned is how to read documentation well enough to get things working by trial-and-error. I’ve had a stable system for like ten years now though and I’m too comfortable with it to warrant switching to a friendlier distro, but this specific issue is a pain in the ass.
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.
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.
it’s embarrassing but for me it’s thinkfan. Instead I wrote my own solution in bash.
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
