What software have you found particularly frustrating or difficult to configure on Linux?
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.
X11. Luckily those days are over thanks to Wayland but, Jesus, are X.org config files a fucking, fiddly PITA to configure!
I use sway, and for the life of me can not get steam link to display my games. I have tried so many things. If I use flatpak steam it works, but it breaks remote play together, which works fine not flatpak! I can get them both to work with KDE Wayland as well. It’s frustrating but also not a huge deal.
I was trying to get wine to run something the other day and couldn’t figure it out.
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/
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?
I do construction work and travel every week. I’ve had this problem pop up in the last month when I connect to the hotel wifi. I just open Firefox and type in the default gateway IP and then it takes me to the login page. For whatever reason it stopped opening the page for me.
I’ve had to grapple with pipewire. My old pulseaudio config didn’t seem to work and I wanted to migrate to the pw config file format anyway, but I found the pw docs to be highly opaque. You get a thousand solutions for commands online, or tools you can do it visually in, but to apply that config you need to start the tool…
I’m a noob, granted, but there seemed to be a lot of assumed common knowledge that I just don’t have. And if I don’t even know what I’m missing, it’s hard to google for it.
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Setting up Nvidia runtime for rootless Docker containers in Linux.
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Resolving port :53 conflict between AdGuardHome (rootless) docker container and Systemd-Resolved.
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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?
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.
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
Isn’t it always postfix? Not because of the software, but because of other clients and other servers.
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 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.
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.
That’s great to hear. I’d miss the AUR, but I think I’ll just try Fedora out for this build. I want to play with the computer, not tinker with the OS.
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.
Yes, I’m going to use it as a couch console, web browser player for MLB games, and a streaming machine. I did a bunch of reading after posting my last comment and decided that I’ll just stick with Arch. Fedora sounds alluring for the simplicity, but I think I’ll miss the AUR and the rolling release cycle too much. I finally pulled the trigger this afternoon and bought the components after looking at them in my cart on Newegg for a week straight. It should be a pretty rad system
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.
Debian is about as perfect as you can get for a headless server.
You have me curious again after hearing you’ve tried everything. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl. It’s not like I can’t switch to Arch later. It’ll be just as much of a pain in the ass later as it will sooner, and I just might find a new favorite OS. LOL. Plus, I do dig Gnome, and I think it’s probably a better DE for a HTPC than KDE.
Setting up a matrix server was a god damn nightmare for me. I eventually got it working but I hit pretty much every conceivable obstacle along the way. Getting the config file just right, the networking, the federation, the coturn server, getting end users to understand they need to backup their keys…
I’m sure it’d be easier for a Linux pro but I was in way over my head. Only got it working through stubbornness and help from the community.
Matrix is pain…
With the more recent updates it is a lot more stable
Nvidia drivers on Arch, KDE Plasma 6.
Multiple versions, paths, and installs of Python. Using pip makes it worse.
Especially during the transition from 2 to 3. Let’s hope that’s all behind us.
pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv together solves this for me. Virtualenv with specific python versions that work together well with other tools like pip or poetry.
It boils down to something like
$ pyenv install 3.12.7 $ pyenv virtualenv 3.12.7 myenv $ pyenv activate myenvand at that point you can do regular python stuff like pip installing etc.
If you’re having to type out version numbers in your commands, something is broken.
I ended up having to roll my own shell script wrapper to bring some sanity to Python.
You misunderstand, the first two commands are just one time setup to install a specific python version and then to create an env using that version. After that all you need is `pyenv activate myenv´ to drop you into that env, which will use the correct python version and make sure everything is isolated from other environments you might have.
You can also just create an env with the system python version, but the question was specifically about managing multiple versions of python side by side and this makes that super easy.
You could also combine it with
direnvto automatically drop you into the correct environment based on the folder you are in, so you don’t have to type anything after the initial setup.The issue is more general. When dealing with, say,
apt, my experience is that nothing ever breaks and any false move is immediately recoverable. When dealing with Python, even seemingly trivial tasks inevitably turn into a broken mess of cryptic error messages and missing dependencies which requires hours of research to resolve. It’s a general complaint. The architecture seems fragile in some way. Of course, it’s possible it’s just because I am dumb and ignorant.When you come across some Python code for something written 5 years ago and they used four contributed packages that the programmers have changed the API on three times since then, you want to set up a virtual environment that contains those specific versions so you can at least see how it worked at that time. A small part of this headache comes from Python itself mutating, but the bulk of the problem is the imported user-contributed packages that multiply the functionality of Python.
To be sure, it would be nice if those programmers were all dedicated to updating their code, but with hundreds of thousands of packages that could be imported written by volunteers, you can’t afford to expect all of them them to stop innovating or even to continue maintaining past projects for your benefit.
If you have the itch to fix something old so it works in the latest versions of everything, you have that option… but it is really hard to do that if you cannot see it working as it was designed to work when it was built.
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.
You really don’t want to use pip. That’s how you download malicious code.
