racemaniac
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?
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.
Unlike on Windows, errors here are usually informative, and “something like …” is useless. We can’t trust you to determine if it’s vague or not.
Yeah, i’m a developer, the error i got was about as helpful as “nullreference exception”. I found the issue was the SMBv1 default by googling the exact error. Here it is for you “Failed to retrieve share list invalid argument”. Really helpful message :).
The article advises you to install GDebi from repositories (with a nice GUI) to do that. Have you done that?
Yes, and then got stuck since that tool failed to find something called gconf2 that is a dependency. Then i followed command line install instructions that also gave errors. Which the instructions found perfectly normal and expected, they said to then run an apt command to fix it, but then apt would just uninstall the application again (which i guess ‘fixes’ a botched installation).
But you find it normal that the application normally handling .deb files on linux just disappears on a popular beginner distro, and to install something i have to start googling and avoid all the links telling me to use the built in application that suddenly disappeared, to then find that one link that tells me “yeah, ubuntu made a huge mistake here, here’s how you fix it”.
Sorry, but this is just abysmal user experience. And yeah, i’m a developer, i can find my way around command line tools, but for something this basic? for real?
Your fault is treating it wrong. If others don’t need it and you need it, why cry that desktop Linux sucks? Maybe it sucks for you, well, sorry.
So i should expect every little thing to be a minor or major struggle, with the rich ecosystem of linux apps be so fragmented to mostly just work on the distro the developer uses, which you have to guess since they might still mention your distro on their website, even if they don’t really properly support it.
If treating it wrong means not making linux my hobby, and just wanting to use it like i can with my headless servers, then it’s indeed not for me. And yeah, i’ve head my moments of frustration with my synology/raspberries. But most of the things i want to do on them do work from the first try, and if a gui is offered, it just works. If that’s too high of an expectation, then you just come across as delusional for me. I don’t expect everything to be perfect, but for it to be this bad in 2023 just seems ridiculous. And maybe i just happened to land in a perfect storm of things that don’t work on ubuntu being the first things i try. But then being like “maybe linux isn’t for you”. I’m a professional developer running multiple headless linux machines and a dozen docker containers for various things. If it isn’t for me, who is it for O_O…
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 :).
I guess it kind of helps, but that means that the linux desktop will always be a shit experience, and i should just stick to my headless linux servers and find something else if i want a GUI… which is kind of sad…
And the strength you see in linux… ok, WSL in windows is probably a bit less efficient, but for most usages all those windows downsides are now moot with WSL & docker. if i want to install a web server and wordpress, it’s just as easy as any linux server. And installing programs like image editors, can’t say i’ve ever encountered issues doing that on windows.
Of course i know the main advantage of linux is no spyware crap, but it’s kind of sad if after all these years that’s pretty much still the only advantage. And i do use many open source apps in spite of free(mium) or cheap commercial/cloud alternatives existing that are more user friendly, if it gets the stuff i want done done, it’s good enough. But it seems i’m still not ready for the linux desktop experience, no matter how often it’s repeated on the fediverse here how good it is now…
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 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 :).