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Linux sucks.
Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:
1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.
2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.
3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?
4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).
5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!
---------------------------------
Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.
I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.
But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.51 -
Not sure what Linux Desktop to use? Use this handy guide:
- GNOME: when you want no tray icons, themes that break every minor GTK release, and extensions for basic features (that are buggy.)
- KDE: pretty go-Segmentation Fault
- DWM/Awesome/i3/etc.: when you feel like the time you spent learning Vim wasn't wasteful enough
- XFCE: when you want one update per decade and poor Systemd support.
- LXQt: the biggest positive is that it doesn't use GTK.
- Cinnamon: when you like GNOME 3 but you want a different menu
- Deepin: when you want a desktop with the build quality of an HP laptop.
Aren't sure whether to use Xorg or Wayland?
- Xorg: if you want to absurdly fuck up your touchscreen, pick this one.
- Wayland: if you want to screw up most of your apps, too bad; this won't work with your proprietary drivers. If only it did.
What distro to use?
- Ubuntu: if you want to break your system with PPAs, check out this one.
- Debian: when you want Ubuntu except with more out of date packages
- Redhat: when you want Debian except with more out of date packages
- ElementaryOS: wait, someone actually made a properly designed Linux UI?
- Arch Linux: the only thing that doesn't make me sick anymore.
- Slackware: "that exists still really?"
- Gentoo: when you hate systemd more than waiting 4 days to compile Firefox on every release.
... I love Linux. I do. But it is very taxing to get things comfortable for me anymore. I feel like the Linux Desktop is in a period of flux and it's painful to be a part of right now.25 -
Last half hour of last Friday my Cinnamon desktop started fucking up every time I booted after like 20 seconds of uptime.
Logs said something about xorg errors but after like 15 reboots I said fuck it.
Was quite nervous this morning because of that issue and possibly not being able to open a terminal for installing a different DE before everything started to get screwed again.
Booted up. No freezes. No errors. It just works.
I guess my computer needed weekend too 😋13 -
>X gets corrupted somehow
>"sudo apt-get remove xorg"
>begins uninstalling millions of packages
>a fullscreen warning flashes by: "Are you SUUUUUURE you wanna remove the kernel?"
>wasn't prompted to deny
>After process, get kernel panic
>reboot
>kernel panic within 10 seconds
Why must you do this to me, Debian?21 -
So I've been using Antergos Linux as a way to ease myself into Arch.
Gnome apparently has moved to Wayland so I thought "Oh I don't need the Xorg window server anymore, let's just delete the Pacman package for that..."
Oh. Oh crap.
That was a mistake.
...Gnome is gone.
.... Guess I got my excuse to install vanilla Arch.
6 -
Trying to install new proprietary graphics drivers on my desktop. Reboots. Black screen. SSHes into computer uninstalls new graphics driver and reinstalls Xorg.
[ Level up ]
Idiot running Linux -> Normal Linux user5 -
This freaking laptop.
The WiFi randomly stops working -- and by that, I mean the hardware is no longer detectable, let alone functional. It simply disappears on boot, even from dmesg.
The same happens with audio and bluetooth: on some boots they simply do not exist.
The power usage is also ridiculous: the battery dies in about two hours, and it gets soo hot. Toasty wrists unless I use my tiny bluetooth keyboard ☹ So I need to fiddle with powertop a bit more.
nVidia drivers are also a bloody pain, and having two graphics cards this is even more difficult to set up. I still haven't managed. (nvidia-driver, bumblebee, optimus, official driver messes, manual xorg configs, ...). So I have a beautiful 4k built-in display running at 4-18 fps, and a non-functional 4k external. That's fine for now, but >.>; frustrating.
In better news! I just managed to get the sound to work by backporting the new 4.19 kernel (yay!) -- I have never been so happy to hear an ad. but fixing the sound killed my bluetooth. (The `bluetooth` utility reports the adapter is present, but nothing else can seem to see it 🙄) So now I'm going to have burning hot wrists all day and want to cry because terrible sweaty awfulness.
Just. It's frustrating.
It's fast, though.
and ever so pretty.28 -
Fucking piece of shit xorg and amd drivers. Wasted so much time trying to fix screen tearing and nothing works, only managed to kill xorg altogether
Added a pic of the tearing
15 -
More often than not, I hear that the mission-critical stuff in Linux is done by paid people, the folks that work from 9 to 5 with a fixed time/resource schedule. Is software in Linux all like that? Say for example, Linux (kernel), systemd, Xorg, all the desktop environments, LibreOffice, Mozilla, Chromium and such.
The reason why I'm asking is because I kind of feel like the premise behind Linux "free, libre, *philanthropic*" and such is kinda wrong. Especially the latter. Do the people in the mission-critical stuff really care about its stability any more than commercial software devs do? Sure the projects driven by personal needs that are published are philanthropic in their nature, I'm having some of those too. But those are all non-critical and maintained as such. The stuff that's behind the steering wheel however? I'm not sure...
In essence, is the mission-critical part of the Linux ecosystem - however open-source it is - any different from other commercial software products QA-wise?3 -
Last night: Wow, I just finished that massive feature and I still get some time left! Why not play something?!
Oh crap, this game is so cool but my video card drivers needs an update (AMD Radeon on a Fedora system).
The proprietary drivers don't run on this version of Xorg server... Fine, let's search for some solutions online and... Hey! Found it! Let's see: downgrade Xorg, download the driver, patch it for your kernel version...
Did I just fucked my display? Oh yeah... Let's try to fix it........
Fuck...
5am: Finally got it all working perfectly again... Fuck this game, I hate it!3 -
After the base installation of arch linux..I am trying to install the display server,Nvidia driver.and i3 wm...but getting errors..
Shall I install Display server xorg after or before the installation of Nvidia drivers??
What is the proper way to configure xorg and Nvidia?
When I give the startx command it is showing black screen....
@deadlyRants18 -
Back when I lived in my university dorm I shared my room with internet admin. Usually I helped people with internet problems when he wasn't there and I've placed FAQ on the door how to fix common stuff with a little note, that I can help only with internet problems and only with those that aren't listed. It worked for most people, but one guy knocked and messaged me around 5 times a day to fix his system. So I've decided to finally do what he wants.
He: come on, I heard from XYZ that you are an admin in job and you fixed her computer.
Me: but I work only with servers
He: what's the difference? Just copy my photos to my external drive and install new system on my laptop, just like you do it in job.
Me: so this is that simple job?
He: yup, but I need a laptop tomorrow, because I have something to do at the evening.
Me: okay
I've used find to copy all the photos from his HDD and installed minimal Debian without xorg on the laptop. He hasn't come back after picking up his computer. And that's the way to get rid of leechers that whine for fixing everything because you are IT guy :D1 -
This is a rant thats been waiting a long time to be said...
About half a year ago I got a refurbished laptop, and decided to run manjaro on it (primarily because I didn't have the time to setup arch). I spent time configuring it, I tried out different things, and all in all I learnt tons about linux, and just random things about computers in general.
I dont regret this in the slightest!
Despite the many times where something went horribly wrong, like after I moved over to efi (without a hitch, actually!) I forgot to add to fstab my esp and f-ed the whole boot system. Or when, right in the beginning of this adventure, I tried to move over Xorg to my nvidia gpu and left optimus on. Big Mistake! But I learnt, and I came out a better sysadmin, a better dev than when I first went in.
And again, I dont regret it in the slightest!2 -
Argh! (I feel like I start a fair amount of my rants with a shout of fustration)
Tl;Dr How long do we need to wait for a new version of xorg!?
I've recently discovered that Nvidia driver 435.17 (for Linux of course) supports PRIME GPU offloading, which -for the unfamiliar- is where you're able render only specific things on a laptops discreet GPU (vs. all or nothing). This makes it significantly easier (and power efficient) to use the GPU in practice.
There used to be something called bumblebee (which was actually more power efficient), but it became so slow that one could actually get better performance out of Intel's integrated GPU than that of the Nvidia GPU.
This feature is also already included in the nouveau graphics driver, but (at least to my understanding) it doesn't have very good (or none) support for Turing GPUs, so here I am.
Now, being very excited for this feature, I wanted to use it. I have Arch, so I installed the nvidia-beta drivers, and compiled xorg-server from master, because there are certain commits that are necessary to make use of this feature.
But after following the Nvidia instructions, it doesn't work. Oops I realize, xrog probably didn't pick up the Nvidia card, let's restart xorg. and boom! Xorg doesn't boot, because obviously the modesetting driver isn't meant for the Nvidia card it's meant for the Intel one, but xorg is to stupid for that...
So here I am back to using optimus-manager and the ordinary versions of Nvidia and xorg because of some crap...
If you have some (good idea) of what to do to make it work, I'm welcome to hear it.6 -
I hate it that I'm still forced to use Ubuntu 16.04 and can't upgrade to bionic beaver.tried it on vm (for testing)loved new features and default gnome interface but even after switching to xorg most of my tool were still not running properly or crashing, most important factor is that there is still no official cuda support and installing gcc g++ 6 and symlinks are nerve racking. On top of that upgrading to 18.04 LTS on my main machine will leave me with broken packages and dependencies.
p.s. for people who are going to reply saying that these issue can be solved. Please try updating your work machine and spend hours fix these issues1 -
lol nvidia-bug-report.sh
it collected an xorg log that is not the current one.
For some reason, my arch openbox logs to $HOME/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log.
What a goddamn trainwreck. I'm not necessarily saying it's nvidia's fault. But it is a trainwreck.4 -
Holy mother of butts. Two weeks. Two weeks I've been on and off trying to get hardware rendering to work in xorg on a laptop with an integrated nvidia hybrid gpu.
I know the workarounds and it's what I've been using otherwise. Nouveau without power management or forced software rendering works fine. I also know it's a known issue, this is just me going "but what the hell, it HAS to be possible".
The kicker is that using nvidias official tools will immediately break it and overwrite your xorg.conf with an invalid configuration.
I've never bought an nvidia gpu but all my work laptops have had them. Every time i set one up I can't resist giving this another shot, but I always hit a brick wall where everything is set up right but launching X produces a black screen where I can't even launch a new tty or kill the current one. I assume it's the power management tripping over itself.
The first time I tried getting this to work was about 3 or 4 years ago on a different laptop and distro. It's not a stretch to say that it would be better if nvidia just took down their drivers for now to save everyone's time.5 -
First time installing a Linux distro as my main system. I chose arch and finally got xorg with lightdm and i3 working. I really live it so far.
Still no browser besides lynx though. Buy there's a more important thing I need to fix first. Gotta style that white console away😎
Also I corrupted windows while installing, so I'll have to reinstall that later ¯\_(ツ)_/¯2 -
Do you have a favorite status bar app? I have been using polybar since I switched to bspwm in December, and I've been really happy with all the customizations and plugins you can write for it, but I just wonder if anyone has been using any other bars that do something they really love.
8 -
So I'm now experiencing the worst case of "pacman -Syu breaks everything" I've ever had. For whatever reason, when I updated mesa, my entire GUI decided to go to shit. As I'm typing this, lightdm is crashing over and over again. My Xorg log file has no errors at all. Honestly have no fucking clue what's going on.5
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Yesterday I tried to install virtualbox to be able to run gitlab-runner with a Docker executor locally. I completely fucked up. After a reboot, I'm not able to run GDM/gnome/cinnamon(segfault), so I have to run Xorg as root without any window manager, and it sucks. I have to work all day with this shitty config.
Fuck myself, Fuck Arch, I'm switching to manjaro7 -
Updated to pop_os 19.04
Xorg stuck on a login loop.
Checked the basics, still failed.
Guess who has a fresh Pop_os 19.04 install?7 -
Was running personal laptop on 4.10 kernel (running Manjaro).
Was having problems for some reason with an audio program I'm using and so needed to run some older kernel that is real time for better latency.
Installed that kernel and booted with it.
Attempted to remove kernel 4.10, I don't need it anymore.
Rebooted, some kernel modules aren't loading. Xorg not creating a session.
I have no input working.
Not even wifi.
I can't detect USB devices.
Tried to fix it all night.. going through a ton of forums online...
Finally I give up. I didn't have access to anther computer to get a bootable USB image to. FUCK. IM NOT SMART ENOUFG FOR THIS SHIT.
I have 3 USB drive that I carry around all the time. Why don't I have a live image in one of them?
I went to sleep.
Next day I download Lubuntu (just to boot and backup some stuff before downloading and reinstalling Manjaro).
When I was burning the ISO to the USB, turns out I actually had a bootable Ubuntu on it the whole time.
I feel so stupid.
Last week I don't remember why, but I did sudo chmod 770 /
Which also broke my system.
Took me 3 hours to realize that this was the problem and make it work.
I love Linux. It keeps things interesting..3 -
So I have a lease car through work, but I forgot my fuel pass one day and I needed to fill up the tank. Then I had to send a letter with the receipt to declare the costs to this address... Wondering how that's gonna go lol
2 -
I think deja vu is even worse for me
*as a developer*, even if it wasn't true,
thinking 'I have a already done this
exact thing before' is such a downer
for productivity..
For some reason I just had it with Xorg,
I don't think I ever touched it before..2 -
Sircmpwn's sway wm, an i3 clone for Wayland, I love i3 but I'm also an advocate for the ditching of xorg. (Close to beta)
Honorable mention for anbox which tries to do a similar thing Google is doing to run Android apps natively in Linux. (Alpha)2 -
If you love pbcopy and pbpaste in MacOS, then I highly recommend setting these aliases in your shell config to get the same behavior in X.
alias pbcopy='xsel -b'
alias pbpaste='xsel -b -o' -
It's really strange to me that display servers/window managers (Xorg, Wayland, etc) aren't locked to given desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, Unity, Cinnamon, etc). It doesn't make sense to me that they are separate and not optimized together.2
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Remember the rant, where I said, that I installed KDE next ho unity?? 😂 😂. Well now my xorg is crashed :( gonna reinstall everything xD but this time, I start with KDE xD
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!rant
Experienced devs please tell help me.
Learning software development has been a challenge. Many times it's frustrating.
I also learn languages and I find them to share one trait with software development, which is complexity.
At first I looked at languages the way I'm currently doing with software. I'd look in a new language and after decided it's cool to learn it, I would stare at it for a few weeks trying to realize what the heck I was going to do. I wouldn't even know how to get started.
Eventually this stage goes away and I think that is about to happen with me with software.
But then a new challenge would come, which is me not making progress as I wanted. That's sort of happening with me by learning software as well, bit in language I now know how to deal with it.
That's because I work full time with something that isn't in my interests and when I arrive home Im tired and want to relax. So I decided my language learning had to go slower as long as I have this job, meaning no hours spent in front of books or a pc studying - that's what I could do with English, I was a teenager and had 12 hours a day to do whatever I wanted.
So I usually spent 5 minutes here and there learning something in my target language when I can, no frustration needed, my only rule is: practice everyday, even if I don't learn anything new.
With software, that doesn't apply though.
So, what I mean by tracing a parallel between these to fields is that I have a strong conviction is that once you get the principles on how a certain kind of learning works, you can apply it everywhere in the field. But with software it's been harder.
Anyways, I see that are some principles that apply, cause trying to learn software is changinge and teaching a lot of things like:
*you have to read a lot (of documentation) . At first I thought all documentation was painful to read and understand, but I found out some software are well documented and one can use those only to get used with it.
*immersion / discipline are important. I'm not very disciplined, I'm better with immersion but both are important if you need to acquire complex subjects/skills
*how to deal with complexity. I installed Arch Linux a few days ago. Just to install it I ended up reading more than 20 pages of documentation (install guide, Wpa supplicant, systemd, networkd, xorg, etc etc). Gradually I'm realizing that when you have to install/tweak something in that distro you necessarily spend a bunch of time trying to understand how it works, otherwise you don't get too far like in Ubuntu or Debian.
*and lastly the one that bothers me. Constantly getting frustrated and feeling crap about my poor skills. No matter how much I progress, it still seems like I'm stuck.
(that's when I ask your help/opinion :) )4 -
Fuck you Nvidia for breaking my xorg. It's not normal for an official driver to stop working after a routine upgrade on a distro like Debian...
Any suggested fix? Purging and reinstalling didn't help. Use noveau and wait for next version?2 -
Let's be real a second, hiDPI and multiple DPI display support on GNU/Linux (xorg) sucks.
It apparently has better support through Wayland but I hate gnome3 (does KDE implements Wayland? don't really care I don't like it too, way too heavy)2 -
Spent the entire weekend getting nothing done because my xorg won't work properly with my UK keyboard.
Turns out that the keymap was "gb" and not "uk", and because of the annoying utility used to set keymaps I didn't know...3 -
Okay, so because my desktop has an APU (AMD A8-3850) and a dedicated GPU (AMD R9 380) in it, and i'm finally getting a (small, probably 240GB because budget) SSD for it, what Linux distro should I use? I'm planning on doing libvirt passthrough for Windows using my APU because fuck running it as a main anymore, it breaks too often. As far as I can tell, my options are as such, family-wise:
- Debian kernel: amdgpu doesn't like that I have an APU and GPU and refuses to see a screen (yes, even after all the Xorg configs and xrandr bullshit and kernel flags and...)
- RHEL: a lot of Red Hat-based distros (mainly Fedora) have packages that are broken out-of-repo and out-of-box recently, but maybe it'll like my hardware? (It's been a few Fedora releases since I last tried it, is this fixed? CentOS has such old packages that it's not even worth bothering with for my needs.)
- Arch kernel: go fuck yourself, i don't wanna take 1000 hours to get it running for a week, nor would the updates be any better than Windows' current problem (or even more so, as slightly more often than not Windows' broken updates just add annoyances and don't hose the system.)
did I miss any?25 -
Okay, so debian is just fucked by default then.
Created a Debian 10 persistence stick, and I'm having the fucking xorg issues ("No screens detected", xrandr says the same) i've had every fucking time i've installed debian, except a simple round of dpkg-reconfigure isn't fixing it this time.
Suggestions?
Things tried:
- dpkg-reconfigure <every package even remotely related>
- X -configure
- installing all firmware from linux-firmware repo
- reinstalling everything remotely related (with both reinstall and purge/install)
- Wayland ("failed to create compositor backend")
- creating my own xorg configs and driver-radeon configs and all that shit with my screen explicitly defined
- remaking the stick with a redownloaded ISO
- actually installing it to a HDD first
- crying in frustration
- different monitors
- someone else's machine (both AMD GPUs, mine's an R9 380, his an RX 3-digit something-or-other)
- an NVIDIA card (other tester threw his old 1080TI in his PC, set up all the drivers and shit, and nothing fucking changed)
what is this, Fedora?3
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