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?
Oh, .debs are great. When you install them using
apt, they work great, because they're provided by your distribution and designed for it. When you download them from somewhere on the internet and stick them into your system, they may or may not match with your system and they may or may not have been well packaged. They might break your system, or they might just not work. In general, I wouldn't recommend doing that as a new user. For Google Chrome? It's probably fine, Google pays enough attention to it that it'll work. I still think it's just a bad habit to teach.I am not the Linux community. The more I learn about how Ubuntu does things, the more I don't like it. That's fine -- you're welcome to think they are right and I am wrong.
I mean -- I'm not trying to say you did anything wrong or illogical in just looking for software and downloading the .deb that said it was for Ubuntu. I'm just saying that that's not the easiest way to do it.
Ha. This is fair. But, I mean, kind of, yes, that's exactly how it works. It's not like an "end user application" you can just pick up and start clicking stuff. Some people have been lying to you and telling you that it is, and now it sounds like you're discovering it's not and you're understandably unhappy about it. When I went to school, they spent a whole semester teaching us Unix before starting to teach any kind of computer science or programming applications, so we'd understand the environment and the tools in a lot of detail. Once I was familiar with it, it was fuckin magic, and still is. But yes, I think a lot of what Ubuntu in particular wants you to do, in service of making it "easier to learn" even though in reality it isn't, is more or less the opposite of what I would do.
First, I sincerely applaud you for your texts you posted on this topic, they are level-headed and stock-full of information, much better than I could have ever written them. Thank you!
Here I would like to differ, because I think it is important to explicitly tell and guide what is a good, reliable way of installing packages (using apt) and what not (directly installing untrusted packages of any kind or form from $randomSite)
I feel this is especially important for new users of Linux because I think they need strict and good guidelines to prevent future havock and disappointment by following extremely bad advice they have not yet the experience to spot as bad advice.
Yeah, that's fair. If the guy ever does get back to me I'll make a specific explicit point of that.
I really sympathize with the guy, both because I think the core of his complaint is pretty valid even if he's confused about some things, and because without even looking in detail I'm sure 100 different people have showed up to tell him how wrong he is and he's been arguing with 50 of them. He's probably just stormed away in frustration at this point but if we do wind up talking I'll make a little more targeted point about it.
Amendment to my previous comment: Actually, I looked back a little, and in one of my very first messages to him I covered this in I think a pretty crystal-clear manner, and he completely just failed to even acknowledge that part in his response. A lot of his comments continuing to be upset that he couldn't click on .debs came after that one.
Again, I get why he's too upset to be receptive to help in terms of understanding the system better. Usually, being upset is the death of being calmly receptive to new information; it just comes across as "telling him it's his fault." IDK what I could really do at that point though.
I already upvoted that post 😄 and I am still struggling to comprehend his overall and specific level of expertise to be able to address the different topics more accurate.
He'll probably come around again later somewhere as thoughts might need some time in the dark back of the skull to entangle to threads and ideas to experiment again. At least that's how it works for me, still drilling on Nix and the pros and cons of channels vs flakes, imperative vs descriptive, systemwide vs useronly, neofetch from deb or nix, ...
Yeah. He's just frustrated. These things happen.