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Linux @lemmy.world racemaniac @startrek.website

Is it me or is (desktop) Linux still a terrible experience?

Every so often i start believing all the posts about how Linux really made a lot of progress, and the desktop experience is so much better now, and everything is supported, and i give it another try.

I've got a small intel 13th gen NUC i use as a small server, and for playing movies from. It runs windows 11, but as i want to run some docker containers on it, i thought, why not give Linux a try again, how bad can it be. (after all, i've got multiple raspberry pi's running, and a synology diskstation, and i'm no stranger to ssh'ing into them to manage some stuff)

Downloaded the latest Ubuntu Desktop (23.10), since it's still a highly recommended distro, and started my journey.

First obvious task: connect to my SMB shares on my synology to get access to any media. Tough luck, whatever tool Ubuntu uses for that always tries SMBv1 protocol first, which is disabled on my synology due to security reasons. If i enable it on my synology i get a nice warning that SMBv1 is vulnurable and has been used to perform ransomware attacks, so maybe i'd rather leave it disabled (although i assume that's mostly the case if the port were accessible from the internet, but still). Then i thought "it's probably some setting somewhere to change this", but after further googling, i found an issue that whatever ubuntu is using for SMB needs a patch to not default to SMBv1 to get a list of shares.... Yeah, great start for the oh so secure linux, i'd need to enable a protocol that got used in ransomware attacks over 6 years ago to get everything to work properly... (yeah, i ended up finding how to mount things manually, and then added it to my fstab as a workaround, but wtf)

Then, i installed Kodi, tried to play some content. Noticed that even though i enabled that setting on Kodi, it's not switching to the refreshrate of the video i'm playing. Googling further on that just felt like walking through a tarpit. From the dedicated librelec distro that runs just kodi that has special patches to resolve this, to discussions about X not supporting switching refreshrates, and Kodi having a standalone mode that doesn't use a window manager that should solve it but doesn't, and also finding people with similar woes about HDR. I guess the future of the desktop user is watching stuttering videos with bad color rendition? I'd give more details about what i found if there were any. Try googling it yourself, you'll find so little yet contradictory things...

Not being entirely defeated yet, i thought "i've got this nice GUI on my synology for managing docker containers & images, let's see if i can find something nice on ubuntu", and found dockstation as something i could try. Downloaded the .deb file (since ubuntu is a debian variant it seems), double clicked the file and ... "no app installed for this file"... google around a bit, after some misleading results regarding older ubuntu versions, i found the issue: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/install-deb-ubuntu-23-10-no-app-error

Of course Ubuntu just threw out the old installer for debian files, and didn't replace it yet. Wouldn't want a user to just be able to easily install files! what is this, windows?

For real, i see all the Linux love here, and for the headless servers i have here (the raspberries & the synology), i get it. But goddamn this desktop experience is so ridiculous, there has to be better than this right? I'm missing something, or doing something completely wrong, or... right?

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  • Downloaded the latest Ubuntu Desktop

    Theres your problem.

    • Came here to say this immediately after reading this.

      I get wanting a “homey” os, but you can accomplish this in many ways (plain ol debian is great!)

      • For someone that isn't up-to-date on what's popular and hip (and why), Ubu is still the defacto 'starting point' as it was recommended for yeaaaaars, and so bashing on someone because they went with what was very highly recommended and 'just install Ubuntu, dumbass'-like comments from the last decade+ ago, isn't helping anyone.

        There are a shitfuckton of distros. How is an inexperienced (or fuck, experienced) user supposed to know that, the differences between them all, or what works best for their use case? The community is so fragmented as they throw shit at each other (Arch! Pop_OS! Fedora! Debian! "anything with a gui is a loser!"; I've seen it all over the last like 15+ years) that someone asking a question (like this) gets shit on (like this) because 'new users should have immediate experience!' ('entry level job as a jr dev in Go; minimum 20 years experience' comes to mind), 'they are stupid for trying [distro], [my choice of niche distro] would have been way better]', etc... and it just drives people away.

        This isn't pointed directly at you/above comment, but it's the mentality, the whole 'what a dumbass for trying X' that hurts what is otherwise (from what I've seen over the years) a pretty helpful and kind community. But fuck me, someone needs to throw a site of like, top 10 starter/simple distros, with bullet points for/against each, and the community needs to embrace it and vote for replacements when one falls out of favor. Expecting new users to know about this or that or if they compiled that one themselves they'd be able to get the features they expect, is just so cringe. An echo chamber, and those that seek help get shit on.

        • I think your troubles might come from the assumptions you’re making of other people based off the assumptions you’ve gleamed from other people in your experience.

          My comment, to me, read “that’s your problem right there, hahaha. (Laughing about the commonality of the problem not at anyone) Try out Debian, Ubuntu is bloatware”

        • Thanks for the reply, i didn't really want to make this post, but i thought "it's 2023, how bad could it be switching to linux", and then this stuff happened. And of course it's downvoted because... the harsh truth isn't popular...

          And the even worse issue is that i'm a developer, i'm very technical, i don't mind looking up solutions, i don't mind using the command line, and i've got some headless linux servers here (and yeah, synology/raspberry pi is the 'easy' linux headless servers, but i know how to use them and have done things beyond beginner stuff on them).

          But these 3 issues right from the beginning were just... wow... a protocol that got breached 7 years ago being the default you can't change. The installer for a package type that many applications use to get installed on your OS suddenly going missing on the current "stable" version. And while i can right click on my desktop and change the refreshrate of my display via the display manager, having an app do the same probably requires some arcane knowledge even an experienced developer can't google. And HDR is another layer of hell that requires specific software, because why support a nice feature that has been introduced (googles it)... 20 years ago.... be supported by default by linux...

          I get multiple replies "you're expecting it to work like windows". If expecting a stable version to be stable, 7 year old vulnerabilities being closed, and 20 year old features working is expecting the windows experience... then yeah, the linux experience isn't for me. But if that's honestly what you guys are saying... i really don't think the issue is me...

          • i don't get your problem with smbv1 and your complaints about it tbh ... its deprecated in ubuntu since 20.04 - samba v1 is not the only way to access via ubuntu - and its by far not recommended. you might have configured it because out of the box its not the supported version

            your downvotes and the reactions you get is because of your atitude man ... there are plenty of people who would help ... but coming to a linux thread complaining how bad your experience is and complaining about how bad the comments are without doing your part is just a bad style

            i read a couple of followups - i do not see a single log output, just complaints

            the whole linux world is about configuring your system the way you(!) want it to have - thats the difference to windows, thats the difference to mac ... but if you don't want to do the config stuff, you go with a ready to use one ... ubuntu might be one of them

            you face samba issues - write an issue so somebody can help ... what have you already changed (because smbv1 is NOT the default version of ubuntu), what did you try to make it use smbv2/3 - what errors did you get? there are thousands of tutorials available for ubuntu - which one did you follow, did you do the config in the file manager (the default one or did you install a different one) .... etc

            your kodi issue about framerates is a kodi issue and a short search shows that this issue also happens on mac for example - which i somehow understand because changing framerates has affects to the change of the window server so someone must decide either take what kodi is saying to take or what is configured for the output device, so there might be a trickery in kodi to do it and that might be the issue. but it could also happen becuase of multiple displays - with differrent framerates - who knows .... and how shall we know to support you if you just spend your time complaining

            your docker issue with a downloaded deb package from the net .... wtf - first of all why not use something from the repositories .... getting out of just downloading something from someone and installing it should be prio 1 when changing to linux .... but how hard could it be to do a sudo apt install ./filename.deb

            do not tell me you spend 5min on the investigation ... you want to have an out of the box solution which you can complain about - that's not linux

            you want a os which lets you do whatever you like - thats linux .... you don't know how its done and you're not willing to learn but still want to do some crazy shit - that's not linux

      • Linux Mint is often suggested as a good transition distro for Windows users. They've got a Debian edition now, although I haven't actually tried it out.

        • Nice! I’ve heard good things about mint as well. Tan it on an old desktop a while back for a bit but just ended up switching to something even more bare bones/less graphically intensive.

          It’s a tough balance getting performance and visual usability to play nice without walking over each other

      • "Plain ol debian" is the kind of distro that will ship SMBv1 without SMBv2, because "stability" (to be clear, i dont know if they do, but its the kind of thing they would do)

        Debian loves to ship out of date garbage, because "out of date, but unchanging" is better than just shipping up to date stuff

    • Yeah, it's not as if memes like this are still all over here on the fediverse: https://lemmy.gockandgum.party/post/https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.gockandgum.party/4488?thread=0.16856.18063

      and everyone upvoting it and people getting the impression that starting on ubuntu is still a good idea.

      i've probably got nearly as many distro recommendations as i've got replies here, because as if you guys know which distro would support a whole 3 complicated usecases i gave (not use a vulnurable protocol, have an installer, and supporting some slightly advanced feature for applications to use).

      I gave ubuntu a try because i've seen regular posts here about ubuntu vs mint, and people being pretty balanced about both, maybe i missed all the posts that said "using ubuntu will cause you hours of pain avoiding vulnurabilities that are almost a decade old by now, with unstable 'stable' version etc...", but i do remember plenty of posts here being like "just start with ubuntu or mint, it'll be fine".

      • It's because old advice dies hard. Ubuntu had a good like 15 years of being the default choice, but now Canonical wants to IPO and they're going to wring as much revenue as they can from anything they can get their hands on. That inevitably leads to enshittification, and Ubuntu is going through that process right now.

      • once again ... UBUNTU DOES NOT USE SMBv1 as default !

        i don't and will never use UBUNTU ... but you're complaining about something you might have configured yourself!!!!!!!!

        your problems are for sure real - but don't tell ppl its because ubuntu is using a vulnarable protocol

        • Yeah, someone else totally didn't link the ticket (open since 2019) here about whatever ubuntu uses for its SMB share discovery defaulting to SMB1 and giving the exact error message i got when trying to see the SMB shares list of the server it discovered.

          So yeah, not all of ubuntu defaults to it, but discovery sure does, and it's embarrasing. I made this issue knowing full well that the things i complained about are 100% accurate.

          You can continue to live in your imaginary world where Ubuntu is better, but it simply isn't.

          • my whole point is, that your time spent on complaining would be better invested if you just write some questions which could be answered by the community rather than being sarcastically questioning the sanity of an operation system, just because you fail to use it

            Suggestions:

            • could somebody help me to install a deb file on ubuntu which i downloaded - the deb installer is not existing anymore

            would maybe lead to:

            • check out deb installer XYZ which you can find in the software center
            • install via the terminal using sudo apt install ./XYZ.deb

            Suggestion2:

            • the network discovery doesn't find my NAS, I'm using ubuntu XX.YY with the default filemanager (or something else) ... what could be the issue

            would maybe lead to:

            • try mounting it directly to a folder using: sudo mount -t cifs //[NAS_IP]/[Share_Name] [Mount_Point] -o username=[Your_Username],password=[Your_Password]
            • if it fails do dmesg | grep -i cifs and let me know the outcome

            we are pretty friendly usually ... but if you don't do your part - I for my part am not ... you sound a bit to lazy to me (in my imaginary world)

            • I figured out all the issues myself, as repeated here, i'm a professional developer with some headless raspberry pi's & synologies i know how to manage.

              This is a rant on the abysmal state of the linux desktop (stable OS just losing random crucial features, relying on a vulnurable protocol for basic functionality, supporting nice to have features such as HDR & variable refreshrate (which are both decades old) being an absolute nightmare).

              Hence the title being a complaint about the linux desktop being an absolute nightmare and total crap, and not "help me, i'm stuck". I was not stuck, i can figure out the workarounds, but i was appalled at what i saw, i expected issues & struggling, but this was way beyond & below what i could even imagine.

              Also evidenced by the dozen of distros i've had recommended so far, and conflicting advice (i absolutely do, and do not need wayland for variable refreshrates, depending on who you ask).

              This is just a nightmare ecosystem to participate in, and that's what i wanted to get across, and i think i succeeded pretty well :).

              • so if that's the grande finale of yours, trying to leave your comfort zone - and you consider that as satisfying ... well - i wish you all the best for your future endeavours

                there are plenty of options in linux - you just gave up because your desired usecase wasn't working out of the box ... and instead of risking to learn something you decided to spread negativity and even worse, you spread incorrect information to others ... hope you had your fun with that

                quote: "but this was way beyond & below what i could even imagine." - mate, you complained about not having a GUI for doing apt install XYZ.deb

                the whole eco system would be so much nicer, if people would resist to spread negativity and instead become a part of the solution rather than the problem ... you say, your an dev - you found some workarounds ... great, what blocks you of writing some guides to some of the issues you ran into - or even do some PRs to get rid of the problems you faced

                its so easy to expect that this wonderfull opensource world is doing everything what multi billion $ comanies are doing and then complain about whats not working (perfectly on first try) instead of apreciating the thousands and thousands of hours ppl are investing to get things going and having a chance of getting out of the walled gardens of windows/macOS - and if it comes to my experience - they did not only come close - they 100% replaced windows

102 comments