Mastodawn

Kroc Camen Jan 23

Welcome one and all to the big #Linux BS thread! I get that it's necessary to switch to Linux, I'm imploring you to do so, and I don't want to discourage anyone but I need to document the ways in which Linux is just not ready for 600 Million more users and I don't think it's any technical limitation so much as a lack of design self-awareness.

Case study 1: A basic 1GHz Intel netbook with 4GB RAM. I installed #Manjaro. Keys, touchpad, wifi and screen brightness work, very impressive. I also really like that Manjaro is not dumbed down and I was able to get plenty of information about the hardware.

But hibernate doesn't work. Clicking the button does nothing -- already a design flaw in that it can't even tell me *why* it isn't working. A quick Internet search lets me know that `systemctl hibernate` is the console command for invoking hibernate and should give me an error message. The swapfile size is not big enough, just 512MB for a machine with 4GB of RAM.

Can I resize the swapfile, using `dd` and a number of other `systemctl` commands? Yes! Should I have to? No! If I enable hibernation and it can't hibernate because the swapfile is too small then it should TELL ME and provide a GUI to fix it, and that's without considering that it should have set the swapfile size big enough during installation anyway!

But still, that's not enough. Despite having a hibernate feature, the installation didn't modify `initramfs` & GRUB to handle hibernation! Can I do this manually? Yes! Do / Should I have / want to? Absolutely not!

Now downloading #Kubuntu in hopes that its own features actually work out-of-the-box :|

#KDE #LinuxIsNotReadyYet

Kroc Camen Jan 23

There is a special place in hell for error messages that give a list of instructions to follow, rather than a button to actually just do the thing.

Why is this message appearing? What does any of this mean to someone who doesn't know what these things are? Wayland? KWin? Fctix? (I know what these are, but there's 600 million soon-to-be-deprecated Windows users who don't)

#Linux #KDE #Kubutnu #LinuxIsNotReadyYet

Kroc Camen Jan 23

#Kubuntu hibernate doesn't work out of the box, so this is likely more to do with #KDE in general. That said, I did find a "solution", or rather an install option that makes hibernate work as advertised. #Manjaro does give an option for "swap with hibernate" during partitioning. Why was this not exposed in Kubutnu?

Again, my complaint is not that hibernate doesn't work because I didn't RTFM and do the leet hax in the terminal, but that under default options, the hibernate feature is present but does not work when initiated and worse still, does not communicate why nor provide a graphical means of resolving. Even Windows has a GUI for managing the swap file.

If you've had a machine running #Linux for a while and you decide to utilise hibernate at that crucial moment and it doesn't work unless you reinstall your OS or re-partition your drive and rebuild the intramfs / grub, likely requiring a reboot anyway -- why is the feature even presented as available!??

#LinuxIsNotReadyYet

Kroc Camen Jan 23

Problem #2: I use #CloudFlare WARP (https://1.1.1.1) to avoid traffic blocking on public wifi spots as I move around a lot with a laptop. On Windows, I just download and install it.

CloudFlare provide APT or YUM packages for #Linux. You're on #Arch (#Manjaro)? Well, I hope you like the terminal!

I am more resourceful than most, for I suspect the majority of current Windows 10 users would be stumped at that point. I happen to know that I can enable the AUR repository for some more software and there is a build script provided there: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/cloudflare-warp-bin Note how in the first comment that it won't work until you use the terminal to enable the service.

Regardless, something is amiss, as even when I enable the service and reboot, it's not the same UI as on Windows and doesn't even seem to be the same program. It wants me to sign in to some corporate web interface and not just enable secure DNS tunneling via a simple toggle. Here, I am at a loss.

I have installed Linux 5 times now, but now I need to change to another distro that uses APT or YUM, but *also* has working hibernate!

Now, the current state of obtaining third-party software in #Linux is much like the warring states of feudal Japan with no clear Nobunaga (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oda_Nobunaga) yet to unite the Linux software ecosystem. I don't really have a recommendation here for Manjaro, or #KDE; this is a fundamental problem with the lack of binary stability in Linux software but a lot more consideration should be given to end users who just want to run software and less attention to warring factions trying to be the one true standard (Flatpack etc)

#LinuxIsNotReadyYet

AUR (en) - cloudflare-warp-bin

Sometimes you can't make this stuff up

Kroc Camen Jan 24

Installed #Debian (#KDE), hibernate works by default. Uses Kernel 6.1 and older software like Firefox ESR. I would recommend Debian if you want a super-stable KDE-based desktop, but I need something more up-to-date (but not bleeding-edge!) because as a developer I invariably end up needing to install a more recent version of a program over the LTS versions.

Now installing #Fedora 41 (KDE) because I read that it uses Kernel 6.11. This is the 7th time I've installed #Linux but I'm starting to narrow things down.

— edit: Fedora 41 does not support hibernate, lol 🙃

#LinuxIsNotReadyYet

Kroc Camen Jan 24

Time for #OpenSuSE Tumbleweed! https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/ The installer is quite involved but it does at least have an option to set the swap size to the RAM size! Does "for suspend" mean hibernate? I'm not sure, but we'll find out.

#linux #LinuxIsNotReadyYet

openSUSE Tumbleweed

Learn about the openSUSE distributions and download them for free

Get openSUSE

Kroc Camen Jan 27

Going to try #Debian testing; instructions say install stable and then switch to the testing branch...
WHY ISN'T THIS JUST A DROP-DOWN TO SELECT THE BRANCH YOU INSANE PEOPLE!?

#linux #LinuxIsNotReadyYet

Kroc Camen Jan 31

Following these instructions nuked the OS. No problem, installed #Debian Trixie from ISO instead (this makes the 12th time I've installed #Linux). I have KDE, hibernate, a recent enough kernel + software, and .deb compatibility -- hopefully I can stay here. #OpenSuSE Tumbleweed was excellent and I would have stuck with that but I couldn't install some 3rd party software because .deb is often the only choice.

#LinuxIsNotReadyYet

Kroc Camen Jan 31

BTB, I have uploaded my wallpaper to #KDE store: https://store.kde.org/p/2255425 Significantly more resolution choices are available at the original page: https://camendesign.com/art/tron-cubes-2019

Tron Cubes

My first 3D render done in 2004, updated and re-rendered for modern resolutions.Significantly more variations of display sizes are available at the URL from VGA to 8K; every single resolution was...

Kroc Camen Feb 3

There are lots of different #Linux package managers. This, in of itself, is fine but how do I communicate to users how to install software/?

Let's imagine there was a shared set of basic commands that would invoke the relevant package manager on the system, e.g. `software update`, `software install llvm`. Now a shell script doesn't have to check which package manger is used.

Is this too much to ask of linux distros/? Am I simply too naive to think this sort of beneficial cooperation is obvious/? I don't mind that package managers are different and do different things, I'm only concerned with how an end-user does the thing they want to do with the minimum of fuss. To most people, the specifics of package managers isn't their hobby.

P.S. I'm inventing "/?" to mean a rhetorical question because I can see questioning the Linux mainstay invites contentiousness

#LinuxIsNotReadyYet

Kroc Camen May 3

It would probably be wise to check the size of the EFI partition before writing to it but Linux is not that smart. Can you resize the EFI partition in Linux? No. No, you can’t. (I tried GParted and KDE Partition Manager!)

I had to return to Windows via the BIOS’ own boot manager and install Partition Wizard Free 9.1, a decade old version that was the last one that actually did anything at all in their free edition.

Now try imagine explaining this process to a Boomer or iPad-kid.

Kroc Camen May 14

Sure, I have a 1TB drive, but just cancel that multi-gigabyte download at 85% because the /tmp directory is arbitrarily capped at 9GB #linux

Kroc Camen May 25

Kroc Camen May 25

Despite the #Linux lack of self-awareness, I will defend that it has simply become a better platform for #gaming than #Windows because of the opportunity it represents to improve performance and hardware integration over Windows' endless bloat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q

Just as when Netbooks became a thing and Microsoft scrambled to replace Linux with shittier versions of Windows XP, they will do the same for handheld PCs but I don't see how the push to AI-in-your-face everything can possibly co-exist with a nag-free, boot-to-content, game-optimised experience. To nag is to be Windows, it can be no other way.

Windows Was The Problem All Along

YouTube

Kroc Camen May 30

There is nothing that motivates #Microsoft more than the thought of OEMs going with #Linux instead of #Windows: https://www.thurrott.com/games/321578/microsoft-gives-windows-based-gaming-handhelds-the-priority-over-its-own-xbox-model #gaming

Report: Microsoft Gives Windows-Based Gaming Handhelds the Priority Over its Own Xbox Model

Microsoft has reportedly deprioritized work on its own Xbox handheld to focus on improving Windows 11 for third-party gaming handhelds.

Thurrott.com

Kroc Camen Jun 8

Annnnnnd there it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3njzvmkEZGo Will this version of #Windows be OEM only? Highly likely for the time being. (gotta love how quickly he said about using the joysticks for the mouse in regular Windows and moved right on, lol. That's going to absolutely suck compared to #SteamDeck 's touchpads) #xbox #xboxally #handheldgaming

The First Xbox Handheld

YouTube

Kroc Camen Jun 2

Currently stuck between a rock (a broken #Linux install that requires changing distro, thanks #KDE Wallet, or just not using Linux until the fix arrives) and a hard place (#Windows software I can’t move to Linux because I can’t get Xen to work and I probably need the native Windows drivers to work; OpenCL, Vulkan etc). Going to try #CachyOS, I hear good things about it

Kroc Camen Jun 3

Gotta love when they rewrite software in *shiny new thing* and leave out the most basic functionality from the previous way things were done. How large are these downloads? What's the download speed? How long will this take? It could be 6 minutes or 6 hours, who knows but it's "friendlier"!

@kde #linux #kde #ui #ux

Kroc Camen Jun 15

Linux: "You should use Linux, it'll do everything Windows does!!"

Windows: "Great! Can I import my iTunes library with everything preserved?"

Linux: "Yes, just download this hand-written script someone wrote a decade ago, open a terminal, ..."

Windows: "That only works for RhythmBox or Amarok, what if I want to use Clementine or Strawberry?"

Linux: "Ok, so just edit the script code and adapt the SQL schema to..."

There are TENS OF MILLIONS of people using #iTunes and #Linux is obsessing over rewriting the same apps over and over again so that they can have less functionality and users can't theme them any more.

Kroc Camen Jun 15

Can I have separate a column layout for each playlist / view in #RhythmBox like #iTunes? No, of course not, this is a #GNOME app, we don't do that here!

I genuinely don't think Linux developers have a clue why iTunes was so popular and how it still beats everything else available on #Windows or #Linux. Like, I have a collection of podcasts for which the RSS feeds are either dead or the early episodes are no longer present in the feed. In iTunes I can take any file, change its media-type to a podcast to make it appear in the podcasts page, and attach it to any existing podcast feed as a historical item allowing me to preserve the feed as it was originally.

Kroc Camen Jun 15

OMG this is hilarious (read: terrible); in the @gnome #RhythmBox import window, if you click on any song, then there's NO WAY to deselect it, meaning you can no longer import all songs at once! And Ctrl+A doesn't work. #linux #ui #ux

Kroc Camen Jun 15

Did you even know that in the file info window in #iTunes you can use Ctrl+V to paste album art from the clipboard or from the filesystem? Did you know that you can have multiple pieces of art for a file?? @gnome #RhythmBox and @kde #Elisa can't even edit album art.

You can pseudo-trim songs in iTunes by setting custom start and end times; it doesn't alter the file, but start/end will be skipped when played, as well as on iPod. Per-file volume and equalizer adjustments? Separate per-file strings just for sorting Title / Artist / Album?

Also #podcast and audiobooks are managed with all the same above features. Did you know that Microsoft added podcasts to #Zune Player, but not Windows Media Player?

Each playlist can have its own columns and ordering. Album art can be inlined and scaled within.

Look at this, Linux developers. Linux has *nothing* to compete with this.

#linux #ui #ux #kde

Kroc Camen Jun 15

And the thing is that even though this is so maddening, it doesn’t make me want to go file some bugs because this isn’t a matter of buggy code, it’s total developer blindness of the blindingly obvious.

Any individual feature request bug I could file will be dismissed as unimportant; there is no bug you can file for a failure in the direction of an entire platform. What would I title the bug report, "Hire a UX person aware of reality"? If I tell them there are 10, maybe 100 million iTunes users and @kde should import from it out-of-the-box with feature parity, some fucking Bugzilla Nazi will say “That’s Windows, we’re not Windows and it’s not our problem.”

Kroc Camen Jun 16

Feature parity with commercial software should be the *bare minimum* that #Linux apps should be aiming for; that's the checklist that the project should be working through, not letting basic features languish in bug reports for 20 years

Kroc Camen Jul 7

#Windows auto-installs stuff you didn't ask for? Just this week #OpenSuSE has installed Jupyter(?), Java, Myrlyn(?) and bloody *Chromium* and if I remove them, they just install again at the next rolling release, and that's on top of #Firefox being the no.1 offender of reinstalling itself. Yes, I can block them from installing via the package manager or arcane incantation on the command line, but someone somewhere keeps adding dependencies to software I DONT WANT.

I'm tired of fighting my #Linux install. I've used Windows all week because it's actually less of a fight.

karlggest Jul 7

@Kroc
Use Leap.

Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸Jul 7

@Kroc It did what? 🤨 I never, ever heard something like that. Like, Myrlyn makes sense since it's a replacement of system tooling you most likely already had as it's part of YaST. But the other stuff only ever happens if it's either a dependency of something else, or you manually chose to install metapackages and those things just got added to them.

@Natanox @Kroc my money is on a metapackage too

Kroc Camen Jul 7

@drV @Natanox Indeed, this would explain it. Which one, I don't know. I installed Tumbleweed from ISO, nothing special. I just wish I didn't have to deal with this, I'm tired. I want to be creating, not spending my time trying to get the system under control. Win11 with AtlasOS to clean it up is a million times less work.

Eliot Lash Jun 16

@Kroc Good thread. I've been using Linux off and on for 25 years. I've gotten used to the many UX stumbling blocks but it doesn't mean I like them.

Latest rage-inducing event has been on my steam deck which I use as a secondary PC. There's a program called distrobox which allows you to install and run programs in a tenant OS, which is very necessary due to the immutable rootfs, it's the only way to install some software outside flatpaks...

Kroc Camen Jun 16

@Eliot_L The insanity is that there are multiple checkpoint, COW and transaction capable filesystems available -- there is zero need to use two partitions like it's 1998 and you're installing RedHat

Eliot Lash Jun 16

@Kroc yeah SteamOS is based on arch, but I think valve wants to ensure that updates always work so they just re-image the rootfs every system update. Also I think they envision SteamOS desktop mode as being used mostly for gaming and light desktop applications that can be installed from flatpak.

Bazzite solves this more elegantly using an overlay filesystem. If I was starting from scratch I might try installing bazzite on my deck but at this point, customizing my SteamOS install is a sunk cost.

Eliot Lash Jun 16

@Kroc So valve has decided to include it in their base image, which is helpful for new users but broke existing installs. The project documents the new install process but no instructions on how to upgrade. I asked for help on their official matrix server and the only "help" I got was someone telling me I should have used some other meta-management command when I was setting up my container in the first place. I spent countless hours configuring a dev env there and now it may be trashed. FFS 😡

@Kroc I’ve been having a blast with #catchyos. First gaming using proton and a 9070XT and then passing through the GPU, USB, NVME to a kvm guest to test out FSR4. Proton gaming basically just worked out of the box. Now I’ve reverted back to proton since the latest updates allows you to cram FSR4 into titles even if they don’t natively support it. zfs on root via the default installer, performance optimizations out the wazoo for zen5, the list goes on. Wish you luck!

Kroc Camen Jun 3

@choofa It was a blow-out for me unfortunately; didn't enable Windows in GRUB and the package manager and associated utils are very unpleasant. I can see the appeal for a single machine without dual-booting and less technical requirements (I develop software). I would try Bazzite but it doesn't support hibernate and I don't want to hack about. Hopefully an official SteamOS is coming soon!

Walrus 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿May 3

I'm 76, built my first computer in 1978, and what is a boomer? Going back to Windows is for the feeble yoof of today...

Kroc Camen May 3

@Walrus “boomer” is definitely a mindset :P it can be found on Facebook and various ‘entertainment’ news channels

Walrus 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿May 3

I dumped FaceBork a while back.

@Kroc You forgot the insane annoyance when using KDE while trying to connect to the Wifi and that .... KWallet thing wants to store all your pwd's just for the fun of it. But you decide to just ignore it, now it wont just connect. I switched back to the mobile UI gnome.

Michael Boelen Feb 3

@Kroc
According to the options provided by the distribution or the developer of the software.

Linux gives you multiple options, and yes sometimes that means an overwhelming amount to choose from (apt/rpm/dnf/AppImage/snap, flatpak/standalone binary/tarball). If you don't like options (as a user), then macOS or Windows might be a better fit. If you just want a car to move from A to B, then no one says you have to buy a Ferrari either. You buy the car that meets your needs.

Michael Boelen Feb 3

@Kroc
Your hashtag would indicate there is a point that Linux is ready for the masses. But unless users are open to the idea that they have to do some "digging" sometimes, it probably will never be a good match for them. The number of ways to install a package will only increase. A generic wrapper to install software is not a bad idea, but probably won't be happening if not all distributions adopt it.

Gary V. Vaughan Feb 4

@Kroc I'll just leave this here in case it piques your interest https://justine.lol/ape.html

Actually Portable Executable

Have you tried flatpaks via flathub?

Kroc Camen Jan 31

@sihaha Yes, but for example, Cloudflare Warp is only available as Debian / RHEL packages. It's a mess and entirely on them to provide something better, but that's all I have to work with.

Corb_The_Lesser Jan 27

@Kroc #Debian Testing isn't a release. Neither is Unstable. They're waystations in Debian's distribution creation process.

Debian doesn't promote or make Testing and Unstable available as alternative supported distribution releases, for experienced or for naive users, because they aren't. The approximate equivalent elsewhere in #Linux is Fedora's Rawhide. Including any of them in an evaluation of Linux as a Windows replacement is specious.

Pete Orrall Jan 24

@Kroc Why the hashtag that Linux isn't ready yet?

Kroc Camen Jan 24

@peteorrall Begin here! https://oldbytes.space/@Kroc/113876968054498047

Kroc Camen (@Kroc@oldbytes.space)

Welcome one and all to the big #Linux BS thread! I get that it's necessary to switch to Linux, I'm imploring you to do so, and I don't want to discourage anyone but I need to document the ways in which Linux is just not ready for 600 Million more users and I don't think it's any technical limitation so much as a lack of design self-awareness. Case study 1: A basic 1GHz Intel netbook with 4GB RAM. I installed #Manjaro. Keys, touchpad, wifi and screen brightness work, very impressive. I also really like that Manjaro is not dumbed down and I was able to get plenty of information about the hardware. But hibernate doesn't work. Clicking the button does nothing -- already a design flaw in that it can't even tell me *why* it isn't working. A quick Internet search lets me know that `systemctl hibernate` is the console command for invoking hibernate and should give me an error message. The swapfile size is not big enough, just 512MB for a machine with 4GB of RAM. Can I resize the swapfile, using `dd` and a number of other `systemctl` commands? Yes! Should I have to? No! If I enable hibernation and it can't hibernate because the swapfile is too small then it should TELL ME and provide a GUI to fix it, and that's without considering that it should have set the swapfile size big enough during installation anyway! But still, that's not enough. Despite having a hibernate feature, the installation didn't modify `initramfs` & GRUB to handle hibernation! Can I do this manually? Yes! Do / Should I have / want to? Absolutely not! Now downloading #Kubuntu in hopes that its own features actually work out-of-the-box :| #KDE #LinuxIsNotReadyYet

OldBytes Space - Mastodon

Michael Boelen Jan 24

@Kroc
Yes it is.

Kroc Camen Jan 25

@mboelen Nope -- unfortunate because Tumbleweed looks like a nice distro. I'll try Leap next but I don't hold out much hope, surely they use the same installer and config

Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸Jan 25

@Kroc @mboelen Leap is loosely based on SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) and uses quite a different config; quite a few people will criticize it being rather old using Gnome 45 and Pulseaudio, it's rock solid though.
The installer however is the same. That said, 90% of people should never need to see that thing given most people prefer to buy computers with an OS already installed.

Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸Jan 25

@mboelen @Kroc As long as Gnome and KDE, the two big environments, think it's acceptable to be as crashy as they are it is not ready, no.
I literally had a Gnome dev and board member recently telling me that, at least for them, the Wellbeing Feature im Gnome 48 was more important than finally starting to work on an extension API to remedy the phenomenal instability Gnome Extensions introduce.

The same Extensions companies like Slimbook build their OS around.

One can only hope for Cosmic…

karlggest Jan 24

@Kroc
Ready for what??

Kroc Camen Jan 24

@karlggestd 600 million Windows 10 users

karlggest Jan 25

@Kroc
Try to install Windows 10 and say to me why is better than any main "general" Linux, distro, including paid distros, did you try i.e. RHEL or SLE Desktop? 😀
You must try Leap instead Tumbleweed. Rhel and Fedora. Ubuntu, even Debian.

Kroc Camen Jan 25

@karlggestd Trust me, I'm trying. I've installed Linux 9 times so far and hibernate has worked only once, on Manjaro, and the funny thing is that hibernate not working has literally nothing to do with drivers and hardware and entirely with the configuration chosen by the distro's installer, literal self-sabotage.

karlggest Jan 25

@Kroc
0 RHEL, 0 SLE, 0 Fedora, 0 Leap...
And 0 Windows?

dotKnewt Jan 25

@Kroc I got the «swap with hibernate» option during installation of manjaro kde just yesterday. weird you didn’t get it..?

Kroc Camen Jan 25

@dodgybadger Yes, it works in Manjaro, I was just trying to find a Debian or RHEL/CentOS-based distro due to 3rd party software being packaged as such

dotKnewt Jan 25

@Kroc Oh, good. I prefer debian testing with either GNOME or KDE for desktop/laptop use. Went with manjaro this time as debian refused to boot on my desktop for some reason I really didn't want to figure out.

Really doesn't take long to miss the ease of .rpm or .deb packages

The Last Psion | Alex Jan 24

@Kroc Would Debian with distrobox on top work for you? Then you could have a stable Debian base and just spin up (for example) an Arch container with the dev tools you need.

Kroc Camen Jan 24

@thelastpsion That sounds like work that I neither want to do nor should be required to do to match basic Windows functionality! :D

The Last Psion | Alex Jan 24

@Kroc Heh, can't blame you.

Marcos Dione Jan 24

@Kroc as for the bleeding edge, isn't Fedora by definition that? Or is it CentOS now?

As for the hibernation, it must be a config issue; all distros bring more or less the same subsystems. Check `dmesg` to see if you can find any relevant message. See also: https://www.grulic.org.ar/~mdione/glob/posts/configuring-power-and-hardware-related-events/

Configuring power and hardware related events

A month ago I revived my old-laptop-as-server I have at home. I don't do much in it, just serve my photos, a map, provide a ssh trampoline for me and some friends and not much more. This time I decide

.:: Marcos Dione/StyXman's glob ::.

Kroc Camen Jan 24

@mdione I'm not familiar with #Linux to know :shrug: I'm just trying out whatever is available. As for hibernate, I'm not interested in fixes; I just want it to work when I install, as it has in Windows since Windows Me, 25 years ago. I got it to work on #Manjaro but, being Arch-based, it limited the ability for me to install 3rd party software provided only in Debian or Redhat-type packages.