this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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What software have you found particularly frustrating or difficult to configure on Linux?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Suspend with an Nvidia gpu

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

hyprland but I'm a noob

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In recent years I've found NextCloud to reasonable. A little delicate initially, but once you have it working, the upgrades are very easy.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Can you explain a bit more about this and how to configure it? When I use FF on gnome, the save dialogue just looks like other dialogues?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

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 myenv

and at that point you can do regular python stuff like pip installing etc.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Normally, the process is:

  • install the packages for the desktop environment
  • log out (not just locking the screen)
  • find a dropdown or cogwheel where you can select the other desktop environment
  • log in

Having said that, I don't know what you mean with "graceful". Desktop environments may involve lots of packages, which may create configuration files in your home directory or get auto-started in your other DEs, so it can be messy.
Something minimal, like LXQt or the various window managers, isn't going to cause much of a mess, though.

I guess, creating a second user with a separate home-directory, like the other person suggested, would isolate that potential mess...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Just add a new user

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Wild. I used sway for the first time with Nix since I could rollback a misconfiguration.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, I got stuck on secrets management. I just could not get network manager to keep my WiFi passwords. I'll probably go back and try again at some point.

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