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

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?

  • wreckedcarzz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      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”

    • racemaniac@startrek.websiteOPEnglish
      21·
      11 months ago

      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…

      • http_418@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        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

        • racemaniac@startrek.websiteOPEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          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

          Oh man, i love all the comments saying this, and now seeing this pop up: [https://startrek.website/post/5789855](https://startrek.website/post/5789855)

          Steam saying “if you want to install steam on ubuntu, just download our .deb package”.

          Yeah, obviously people moving to Linux will figure out they don’t need to download .deb packages if THE MAIN THING THAT USED TO KEEP THEM ON WINDOWS, NOW FINALLY AVAILABLE ON LINUX, AND MADE BY A HUGE TECH COMPANY USES A .DEB PACKAGE.

          And yeah, i can find command line ways of installing a package. But that pretty much defeats the entire point of a linux desktop you know, the entire thing i’m complaining here about. If your answer to me complaining that the linux desktop being a dud is “yeah, most things don’t work, just use the command line”, you’re completely confirming me in the message of my post.