What's your self-induced pain points fellow linux users
What's your self-induced pain points fellow linux users


What's your self-induced pain points fellow linux users
I mean, I could just patch and do some housecleaning, and maybe adjust partitions.
OR I could reinstall fucking everything from scratch because it feels good.
I recognize this behavior in myself... please send help.
Good rule of thumb I've decided upon over the years for this:
"If the # of kernels present is greater than 3, reinstall for thee".
Figure 3 full kernel versions, excluding patches averages 12-18 months (based on kernel.org history). It's been a good metric to follow.
Automate everything and leverage container and VMs
Why? IDK
Because automation, containers, and VMs are fucking cool. I can run computers inside other computers. I can run tiny little computers that only do one thing. How fucking cool is that?
I have a cycle that goes like this:
Repeat every 6 months or so. I'm never happy with my current system.
I feel this in my soul. With a side of "modern memory-safe languages are great" vs "the consistency and efficiency of shared libraries is what makes distributions great even if they're written in C".
I host a lemmy instance.
Thank you for helping host a less awful internet :)
I host several masto instances
Not sure which is more painful
I was looking into it, but the more I learn about it the more I'm leaning towards something else - misskey, akkoma, etc. Same function, but, supposedly, fewer headaches hosting.
I spend hours writing a bash script to automate something I know I'm only going to do once.
Classic
I store a lot of things on external media.
I also use a lot of Flatpaks.
Kill me.
Global filesystem=host it is then
Flatpak apps should implement portals which allow a user to grant permission to a file or folder.
Some don't which sucks
I never really used Flatpaks until I got a Steam Deck and started doing a little game dev on it.
I now have an init script that I run after every SteamOS update to install paru and other libraries via pacman instead, lmao.
I ran out of fucks almost a decade ago, so I use basic-bitch Kubuntu and barely bother to customize it at all. (I turned on dark mode and picked a wallpaper, but that's about it.)
My self-induced pain point is that I get mildly annoyed about snaps once in a while, but not enough to be worth switching distros.
Same, except I just use vanilla Ubuntu. It's no longer the early '00s, you don't have to tinker with configs on off the shelf hardware.
I customised my keyboard layout so now when using Corporate Laptop i always type with errors
I can't live without the EurKey layout! Even had to get approval to add it to our systems at one megacorp I worked for.
EurKey
Interesting layout. What do you like about it?
The only rebind I use is tap
<caps lock>
to<esc>
and hold<caps lock>
to<ctrl>
and that is already enough to confuse me when using setups not configured that wayThe most annoying thing is ";" vs ".". I switched them because the dot is much more useful. So now i always type twice to find out which comes first 🙄
I have an HP printer
No ... your HP printer has you
In mother America, HP has YOU!
HP is so bad with drivers -.-
So do I, but it's close to 20 years old and has never had driver issues. Back then HP was one of the more supported OEMs for Linux printing.
Edit: I pulled up the cover and it turns out it will be exactly 20 years old in 3 days.
Trying to get a clean home directory by trying to get apps to follow xdg and put config files in .config
.
It's like herding cats, it's just awful.
My first Gentoo install took 3 weeks with all the reading required to do a secure boot UEFI install with a USB based key and boot configuration to ensure W10 could dual boot without problems WAY before that was easy and reliable with Anaconda on Fedora.
Now... Fedora is only writing the USB iso and like 2 clicks. It is easier and more reliable than Windows has ever been or even floppy disk DOS ever was. GNOME is a stupid simple desktop environment too.
I don't have a million "fancy" cloud features and the latest software support but I don't care. I'm happy and my computer does everything i want.
The only pain point i have is that KDE plasma 6.3 removed the option to toggle off the audio icon from programs that are playing audio. So stupid, why would i need to see constantly whats playing audio. I know what's playing audio because I told it to play audio
I have a similar Plasma 6.3 issue. I use a software KVM to control my work laptop. Now I get a pop-up notification when my controls are being captured and sent to the other computer. Yeah, I know I'm doing that, it's deliberate. I've been using a software KVM for 8 years. No way to turn it off that I can find that doesn't also turn off all pop-up notifications.
i self host
I just use Kubuntu and stop worrying.
Yep, it just works™
I hit the point where I just throw on Fedora and call it a day
I also have a LFS VM I look at every few months and wonder if I want to do something with it
I haven't had to compile a kernel in 20 years.
I don't have to.. I get to!
🙅 Write a script or shell alias for important or frequent tasks
👍 Pray it's in my ctrl-r history the next time I need it
Have Alt+F bound to wrap the current command-line in a function definition
I am inside neovim and I cannot quit
My Arch never break every time I update it, honestly it's pretty boring
Yes. I don't fear updates anymore but then i install everything, AUR, flapjacks, several DE's and break the system. I've come to realize that I like tinkering since DOS, I've accepted it and I shall be installing arch again this weekend
Security and convenience are on a balancing scale. More security, less convenience. More convenience, less security.
Everything in my life is less convenient but way more secure than most people's lives.
(I am not secure against corporate/nation-state level threats at all. I am merely more secure than the average person.)
Everything has an OTP code through Aegis and I do regular encrypted backups of my Aegis vault to other devices.
Most people cannot and will not live like this. To me, it's simple.
I LUKS encrypted my boot partition of my last install. It would take an extra 1-1:30 secs to boot when I got the password correct on the first attempt. Much longer if I got it wrong and had to reboot to try again.
I finally did it correctly this last build, but now I am using NixOS and refuse to add anything to the config or a flake if I just need it once a week or so. So I am constantly digging through my history to find the shell I created to do a specific task.
Been working with Linux every day for over a decade at my job. At home I run the most boring generic shit.
I check my backup notifications by looking in my junk mail for anything labeled "Spam Quarantine Notification" because I can't be arsed to fix the SMTP whitelist rules to allow local network relay.
Only 5 hours? That's quite fast! It took me years to configure my NixOS system. It's not even complete yet. It would be great if there were a GUI that took care of the entire thing, could lock dependencies (no, not flakes), add it to version control with signed commits and secrets, and the configuration could be shared across devices. That's all possible with manual labor but having that out of the box for GUI users would be amazing.
Anyway, I feel this post too much 😅
I mean the part with configuring Nix in a GUI is what Snowfall is trying to do and there are a lot of GUIs for Git as well.
It's nice that separate solutions exist but noone is going to understand what's going on, what version control is, what pinning is, and so on. And even if they did, finding separate solutions for them is a pain. An all in one solution would be the best.
I run gentoo. Going to be doing a manual kernel soon. Wish me luck.
@merari42 using flatpak Steam with the library on a non-home drive.
This sucks.
slaps flatseal at steam this bad boi can access so many directories (which when they are in /media or /mnt or /run are detected as disks)
How exactly?
This is exactly why I switched to the "native" client
I can't just let Plasma be.
My laptop will not allow my to login via GUI since upgrade to fedora 41/GNOME?/mutter47. Works with a New account. I have jet to fix it
At one point in college I decided to make myself take notes in ed for a semester for the lulz
How did it go? I use ed once in a while, but honestly just for fun, I wish I had time to learn it better.
It was fun, but vim ultimately made more sense and is what I used for note taking most of the time now.
Using runit instead of systemd, everything these days is made to work with it so redoing system services to work with runit is a headache, but the boot times make it worthwhile
Trying to get Heavy Gear 2 to work
Mostly stopped fucking around with stuff once I switched to fedora which seriously just works.
But then, every couple of months, I just feel the need to try something new. So I grab my 2nd laptop and start installing some esoteric distro, configure everything, even sign in to my online accounts, just to never touch that laptop again until I want to try the next weird distro.
I’m struggling to get TigerVNC to work on a machine it used to work on before I upgraded the distro and the VNC server software.
I’m struggling to get WireGuard to work when it worked fine in Windows before I switched my laptop to dual booting EndeavorOS and Kubuntu. I can’t get it to work on either. Works fine on my iPhone, too.
But neither of these is bad enough to go back to Windows.
Instead of compiling a kernel, try to make do with what your distro provides whenever there's an update. Yes, there's compilation, but it's all done automatically. Then come to realise that the last two updates have had a subtle problem that caused the graphics driver to have a debilitating stroke whenever you try to watch a video in VLC, and have the whole system to go unresponsive as a result. Everything else works fine. YouTube. Games. But a cat video downloaded from Discord because (foreshadowing) the video won't play in-browser for some reason? Too far, man. How dare.
Booting with another of those kernels is when you find out that's also broken despite having used it for a while previously. Learn that, by sheer luck, one still-good kernel is still installed.
Hope that someone with more brains and energy with a similar setup will be able to report the problem properly to wherever that needs to be reported so that the next update doesn't have the same problem. Things like this have been magically fixed before. You wait.
(Search the error message from the logs online. No close matches. Learn a bit, but the only advice was "try a different kernel". You already thought of that)
In the meantime, remove the problem kernels and update GRUB with boot USB on standby in case you hose the system. Manage not to need it.
Bootc looks very cool
Ive spent way too much time trying to compile and install coreboot