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.
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)
Have you any experience with HDR in Fedora? I’m getting ready to build a HTPC and I’m torn between fucking with Arch for everything, but getting bleeding edge support, or trying Fedora for the first time for easier system management. Since it’s an entertainment system, I’m not sure if I want to mess with all the Arch config requirements. But I do want solid HDR support.
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.
Oh thanks! I’ll check it out.
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.
From the little research I’ve done, I don’t think that I want an immutable OS. Sure, I only want to use it as a HTPC today, but what about tomorrow when I find some obscure thing I need to do that requires me to change some things?
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.
That’s a good point, and something I’ll think about before deciding.
Suspend with an Nvidia gpu
I gave up and went back to x11. The final straw was when system settings stopped opening, and I couldn’t figure out why.
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
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.
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.
Just add a new user
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…
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
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.
Nvidia drivers on Arch, KDE Plasma 6.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jellyseer in docker. It won’t accept my jellyfin login. It just spins and spins. But I plan to use it locally. And everyone says you have to sign in initially not local? I don’t know. I’m annoyed with it and gave up for now.
I think this means it can’t actually see your jellyfin instance, you need to use your computer’s local network ip instead of localhost if the two containers aren’t in the same pod via a docket compose file. I’ve had this issue before.
Nah. It’s on the same docker compose file through portainer. And I’ve been using the local ip. I never use local host for some reason lol
You probably need to use localhost lol or the name of container set in the docker compose file. Both might work, I forget
I’ll try name of container. I have tried localhost in my troubleshooting. It loads the login screen fine. But just spins for 3 minutes then errors out at some point just like the IP lol I’ll be working on it when I get home later after this flight and I’ll let you know if I solve my struggles lol
Wishing you luck, it’s so worth it once it works
Container IP sorted me. Out. Woo. Thank you 🙏
Selinux on arch linux
Recently? Email notifications for my crontab jobs. I learned that snapraid sync had been failing for 200 DAYS. I was thinking it’d be easy for some reason. It hasn’t been.
Overall though, Nextcloud was a nightmare and I just gave up.
In recent years I’ve found NextCloud to reasonable. A little delicate initially, but once you have it working, the upgrades are very easy.
I also realized that I just didn’t need all of the functionality and such. In reality I just need a file sharing system akin to Google drive.
