Your Most Frustrating Configuration Experience?

Multiple versions, paths, and installs of Python. Using pip makes it worse.

https://xkcd.com/963/

Fortunately I haven't had to open it in a very long time.

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)

Xserver... Somehow trying to find the magic string of letters and numbers that made your screen work.

Suspend with an Nvidia gpu

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.

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

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.

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.

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 )

Isn't it always postfix? Not because of the software, but because of other clients and other servers.

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

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.

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.

Do VLANs with multiple wireless and wired clients using OPNSense and OpenWRT dummy APs count? Still haven’t quite figured it out.

Just recently XDG Portals to get video sharing working. It just kept using the GTK fallbacks instead of KDE as I configured it, but it used the correct ones when starting from the terminal.

Eventually I figured out I had set an env override for XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP="sway" in my user systemd environment, because that's what I used previously.

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.

Selinux on arch linux

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.

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.

hyprland but I'm a noob

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.

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.

The hell that was configuring XFree86

Nvidia drivers on Arch, KDE Plasma 6.

Trying to disable the lid close sensor on my laptop. My issue is twofold. It's a convertible (pavilion x360) and I'm using bunsenlabs Linux.

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.

Nextcloud requiring me to set the actual domain when I just want to run it locally was pretty frustrating

Cloud-init. The config yaml is rather straight forward, but I can't convince my VM to execute it, and it's driving me nuts.

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.

Setting up Alpine or Mutt with multiple SMTP accounts is an exercise in frustration.

Getting Keycloak and Headscale working together.

But I did it after three weeks.

I captured my efforts in a set of interdependent Ansible roles so I never have to do it again.

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.

1. Setting up Nvidia runtime for rootless Docker containers in Linux.

2. Resolving port :53 conflict between AdGuardHome (rootless) docker container and Systemd-Resolved.

X11. Luckily those days are over thanks to Wayland but, Jesus, are X.org config files a fucking, fiddly PITA to configure!

it's embarrassing but for me it's thinkfan. Instead I wrote my own solution in bash.

Motion on my RPI. I didn't want it to save videos or photos, so I turned it off in the config. But it still saved them. So I tried a few other places in the config to turn it off, but nothing worked and I'd run out of space within a day. So I changed the save directory to /dev/null.

Then I tried to upgrade the pi, and the new version of motion has a different config, incompatible with the old one. So I'm running the old one.

xorg.conf. The (wrong) example from Arch Wiki works but following the official documentation doesn't.

Caddy. The config and docs suck.

Eg. I thought I configured it to limit some sites to an allowlist of IPs. Turns out (months later) the config did nothing, but ran anyway.

Skyrim mods.

Btw, anyone got the new reshade working on wine?

hostapd. I have no idea how you’re supposed to figure out the 50 or so options OpenWrt outputs for an AX card that I just ended up copying. And why doesn’t it detect those on its own?

Rootless podman, PostgreSQL, redis, nextcloud, nginx, iptables in one....

I was trying to get wine to run something the other day and couldn't figure it out.

fucking jellyfin still doesnt reliably work for me. ugh.

I gave up trying to setup a Mastodon server in docker. Lemmy was pretty tricky at the time as the docs were wrong. My email server was a bit tricky, but I've not really done much to tinker with it in the proceeding 6 years, so was worth it.

Newb here who can't seem to fully grasp how permissions work and sometimes carelessly runs services as root. Help...

Arch based distro (yes, even Manjaro).