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?
I’m not going to say using a different distro will fix all your problems but yeah, your experience is not normal. A lot of this is because Ubuntu is not highly recommended. It’s just popular, but there are a bunch of terrible decisions it makes that barely anybody recommends it.
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!
Checks out. Ubuntu is also one of the only modern distros that doesn’t come with Flatpak, which is a massive store of applications that’s quite easy to use and has a huge store of applications.
May I recommend something like PopOS instead? It’s based on Ubuntu so everything from there will work on it, including .deb files. It’s basically Ubuntu but with way, WAY saner defaults and a better beginner experience. I think your experience will be a lot better on a nicer distro.
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…
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
debian stable isn’t a good desktop distro, it’s super stable cause it’s meant for servers that have to stay up all the time
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.
Not really sure what to think when I see posts like this. Maybe there’s some people it’s just not for. I don’t want to be negative, but I think some folks just might not be open to it.
I’ve been using exclusively Linux for all my computing for over 3 years now. My high-end gaming PC, my work laptop that I service multiple IT clients with, my Steam Deck, my entire home lab, even my phone runs GrapheneOS. And I love all of it.
I use a bunch of different distros, Manjaro, Nobara, Ubuntu, Alma, Fedora, Mint, Lubuntu, with different desktop environments, apps, services like SMB, NFS, DHCP, Apache, TrueNAS, Jellyfin, various gaming servers for Minecraft, Arma 3, Valhiem, etc.
I play scores of different games, online Mutiplayer, single player, indie, AAA, retro titles. I do all my email, ticketing, business accounting, invoicing, banking, Discord, matrix, social media, personal email, browsing, printing, scanning, streaming and editing on Linux. There’s literally nothing I do in my personal or business computing that runs on Windows, not even in a VM.
I just don’t really know what to tell folks that claim that Linux just doesn’t work for desktop use. My systems are more stable than Windows, more customizable, easier to update, configure, and troubleshoot. They run faster, and are quicker to install.
I just switched my parents to Linux Mint this holiday season and they’ve had no problems, all their basic computing needs Linux handles perfectly and runs better on their super old hardware than Windows ever did.
My friends and I love our Steam Decks, use them all the time, both in gaming and in desktop mode, all Linux there too.
Idk, it has been amazing for me to be 100% free of Windows forever. I don’t miss it an all, I just wish I had converted sooner. And I’m not some Linux god who lives in the terminal all the time either, but the documentation and help from the community is endless and has helped me solve any issues I’ve had.
It’s not that i don’t believe you, but i just typed out the nice surprises i encountered while just trying some (imo basic) things on a fresh install.
the SMB thing, seriously… this is a vulnurability from 2017, and ubuntu not only defaults to this protocol, but doesn’t even have a way to disable it??
the refresh rate thingy, maybe a bit specific, but in windows it’s just a setting you enable in any app, and it works.
and the installer being “oops, we forgot to replace it”… if the ubuntu version was marked as “this is bleeding edge unstable”, i would have just taken the LTS version. but from all i can tell 23.10 is just the latest stable, that seems to be anything but stable?
This is not about “being open to it”, this is just 5 hours of googling, trying things, realizing that things that i expected to be pretty basic are just working sooo badly. and i know switching from windows would take some effort, but hours of struggling to have to end up working around a vulnurable protocol that i can’t disable, having to struggle with just getting some package installed (defeating the entire point of why these packages would be easier), and for now giving up on a nice playback feature.
And of course in this thread i’ve already had at least 3 different distros recommended with noone really knowing if the kodi usecase is supported by them because even people who use linux for everything have no way of figuring out which distro, if any, supports refreshrate switching…
you can be all “you have to be open to it”, as i’ve got multiple headless linux machines and even got some complicated stuff running on it requiring me to do some more advanced stuff via ssh and actually understanding some parts of linux. It’s not that i don’t want to learn, i wouldn’t even know how. Read the replies yourself, people are already “do you really need refresh rate switching?” (aka, we also don’t know how to figure out how to get this feature that just works in other OS’es to work in any linux distro).
I’m not expecting everything to just work, and don’t mind googling. but these were literally the 3 first things i tried on this linux, and each of them was hell… and googling for solutions was also hell with a lot of outdated advice, and regarding the refreshrates… not really much advice at all, even though htpc on linux is relatively popular & this is something that can be a known benefit to the playback quality.
And of course i’m getting downvoted for this post because posting the reality of trying desktop linux (as an experienced IT guy) is something that’s rather not seen?..
Everything I can find online for SMB version usage in Ubuntu’s file explorer seems to indicate that for the last several years mounting SMB shares defaults to version 2.0 and up already.
Idk if that’s true, I haven’t looked at the version of Samba for my own SMB shares, nothing is exposed to the web so not a huge concern for me. Regardless, sounds like a bug? Idk, you also could have tried installing a different file explorer to see if that was the issue I suppose.
I don’t understand the Kodi refresh rate issue. I’m not familiar with Kodi at all, is it supposed to set your monitor’s refresh rate to match the framerate of the video that is currently playing in Kodi?
Not sure about the installer problem you were having either. I just tested downloading the .deb package for DockerStation on my Ubuntu VM and it seems to work perfectly. Right clicked the .deb package > Open with other application > Open with the Ubuntu software install center app > Then click “install.” It installed just like any other repo package for me in about 60 seconds and it launched totally fine too.
Granted my VM is the LTS Jammy Jelly 22.04 version, but that shouldn’t matter. If it doesn’t work on the newer stable version of Ubuntu, then I would submit it as a bug report. Also, DockerStation has an AppImage package too, why didn’t you try running that if you had issues with the .deb package?
I think people are downvoting you largely because you’re using your personal experience to claim that the Linux desktop experience as a whole is terrible, which just isn’t true. At least that’s how I think it came across to many people. That’s why I listed my own personal experience, they aren’t objective data, whether good or bad.
It would have been better for you to either create a thread asking for help with those specific issues, or at least taken a more tempered approach.
Ultimately, I’m sorry your experience has been bad. I think Linux desktop just isn’t for some people, for various reasons, and that’s fine. If you’re still wanting to try it, I would suggest creating a live USB of a few other distros and testing out the same kinds of things. My personal favs are Linux Mint Cinnamon edition and Fedora KDE Plasma edition.
I wasn’t on the ubuntu machine anymore, so i couldn’t quickly find the link to the SMB issue, but you’re in luck, someone else in this thread already did (he linked it with (in capitals) WHAT THE HECK as link title): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/samba/+bug/1697817
And he understood my frustration that such a bug would be open for about 5 years now across multiple major versions. :) . Now i’ve manually mounted some of the shares, the file manager suddenly also uses a better version of SMB to fetch the shared folders and it suddenly works. But this should take googling & terminal work to just explore a network share from a desktop environment.
Right clicked the .deb package > Open with other application > Open with the Ubuntu software install center app
That’s because you’re so lucky to not be on a clean 23.10 install, since as i showed in the link i posted, it’s not there in a clean 23.10 install for some reason :). I found tons of links saying i should right click, and open it with an application that for some mysterious reason was missing on my ubuntu install :).
If you’re getting downvoted it’s probably because you sound a bit condescending.
Anyway, most of your issues are Ubuntu issues, not Linux issues. And as you may have learned, most Linux users don’t really go with Ubuntu anymore as a recommendation. Personally, I use Fedora with as many flatpaks as possible and have a great experience.
Clicking on a deb (or .rpm) to install something is a last resort imo. Install from the package manager first, flatpak or snap next.
Variable refresh rates aren’t something I care about so I don’t know 🤷🏻♂️ but sounds very firmware/hardware dependent. HDR is just not implemented fully yet, but being heavily worked on. Linux is in the middle of the final push to switch X to Wayland which will likely fix these kinds of issues once fully adopted.
I use Podman Desktop if I need a docker ui (flatpak) btw. Also available in other ways and OS.
Yes, it’s just you.
To be honest it seems like it’s a specific problem to you. I use Linux desktop for many years and for 3 years exclusively and it’s a much better experience for me than Windows (in every aspect).
I think it’s just a lack of experience on your side. You are comparing your years of experience on Windows with a OS you barely know.
Just because you are a “power user” on Windows doesn’t mean you can handle Linux the same way.
I can tell you i don’t need any windows experience to browse a discovered network share, enable a setting in an application and have it just work, and click an .msi file and expect windows to not have removed the handler for that file type.
I get it, you like linux, but blanket statements like this are just so unproductive. “and it’s a much better experience for me than Windows (in every aspect).”. Sorry, i just don’t believe you. I’m sure you’re happier with linux for many good reasons, but there have to be things that windows did better.
Just because you are a “power user” on Windows doesn’t mean you can handle Linux the same way.
I’m not expecting that, i just wrote this after 5 hours of frustration when trying to get imo pretty basic things to work. This is not just “i clicked or installed something and it didn’t work”. I’m a developer, i’ve got many docker packages running on my NAS, i know my way around a linux terminal. This is “they didn’t work, so i started googling, then 2 hours of frustration later i settled on not being able to just browse to my network share in the file manager and mount them somewhere via some fstab editing in the terminal”. and "ffs, i just wanted to try a docker gui, how hard could it be to install a deb package which the ubuntu site itself says “deb packages are the heart of ubuntu” (ubuntu must be stone dead if that’s the heart). And the refreshrate & HDR is nice to have i guess. But yeah, i want nice things, they don’t seem such unreasonable features to request. And i wouldn’t mind if i had to follow some complicated guide to get there. It’s just after hours of googling, i’m no closer then where i started.
What exactly would be the linux way? It’s a nice thing to repeat, but how would you describe the linux way in this context? I’m a new linux user, i want kodi to switch my display to the correct refreshrate when i play a movie. I want to follow the linux way, what is that way?
I think I’ve already informed you in another thread that .deb is not equivalent to .msi .
The former is a package of one component with its version and information about dependencies. The latter is an installer of something which is supposed to work right away.
I know it’s not literally the same, but it’s the exact same principle, ubuntu breaking installing deb packages would be equivalent to microsoft breaking installing msi packages. You do understand analogies i hope and realize that it’s often impossible to find 100% exact matches when you want to make a comparison.
That’s just not true. If you give your 90yo grandma a Windows computer she is gonna struggle hard.
You are a Windows user for now. You need to learn Linux as you learned Windows years ago.
Yeah, but unlike me she isn’t a professional developer that has some experience with headless linux systems.
And please, don’t avoid the real question: What exactly would be the linux way? It’s a nice thing to repeat, but how would you describe the linux way in this context? I’m a new linux user, i want kodi to switch my display to the correct refreshrate when i play a movie. I want to follow the linux way, what is that way?