9 ms·

All of this works oob on my Fedora system. We Linux users keep endlessly personalizing our systems, forking off into the sunset with ever more weird and over-o

All of this works oob on my Fedora system. We Linux users keep endlessly personalizing our systems, forking off into the sunset with ever more weird and over-optimized specialisations, and then we wonder why stuff bugs and why new users have a hard time. Look at Windows and OSX - and the numerous problems they have supporting just one system. And here we are with our 362894 million DEs and we want different initsystems and file systems and plugins and themes and god knows what, but we get so mad when this obvious mess does not work perfectly . Maybe stop for second and marvle at the fact that this thing can boot at all, given that no 2 people in the community can agree on how that even should be done. (To be read in a comedic tone, channeling my Lunduke here)

halikular 5y ago
Things work differently on Linux. The software is supposed to respect Unix philosophy and standards. So it should matter what combination of packages you run. They're not supposed to be tightly integrated, the gnome team seems to have forgotten all of this. As for managing displays, it has become much better with wayland and it's improving fast.
- kelnos 5y ago
  I think the problem is that making things look to the user as an integrated, polished experience is exceptionally hard when you have the loosest of loose coupling all over the place, and differing views as to how to get things done. Sure, you can put APIs and documented IPC interfaces between things, but that doesn't mean everything will match up in a usable way. So, eventually, you just decide: screw it, we'll own the entire stack, or at least gain enough influence over the people who make parts we don't control, such that everything works seamlessly for us. In part, this is why Apple can give their customers such a polished, "just works" experience. Buy all-Apple gear, and stay in their software ecosystem, and (modulo bugs) everything will work together seamlessly. I don't like this outcome by any means. And I still think that some desktop components certainly benefit from loose coupling and well-defined interfaces, and it's possible to avoid the "polish" downsides in some cases. But doing everything that way, while still being able to put everything together in a polished way, might actually be impossible.
  - indymike 5y ago
    Maybe the idea if a perfect,integrated experience doesn't matter as much as we think. The web's chaotic ux won. Games... roll this own up. Now electron is eating the engineered ui.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      It matters a lot for a desktop UX. People have no patience for a laptop that can't sleep when the lid shuts.
      - curt15 5y ago
        Or animations that stutter. Smartphones have been managing consistent 60fps animations for years now, and MacOS is similarly smooth.
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      > Maybe the idea if a perfect,integrated experience doesn't matter as much as we think. This is not an uncommon view. However I can’t help but be convinced it’s the main reason the year of Linux on the Desktop hasn’t happened yet. The user really does want their computer to seem like just one “thing,” at least in the way that it comes out of the box. When we visit websites it’s understood that these pages don’t interact with each other and weren’t designed to work together. The OS, on the other hand, is supposed to be a system per the name.
      - kaba0 5y ago
        Then how is it the browser with the absolute majority? https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are_at_least_10_different_microsoft_design/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...
        ironmagma 5y ago
        I'm not sure what you're asking. The browser is not an OS, so the websites are not supposed to form a system. People using Microsoft's default browser is yet more evidence that people generally stick with the OS defaults, because they are supposed to work.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  It isn't just GNOME, almost all Linux distributions rely on tightly-coupling a set of libraries and binaries. That's why you can't take a binary from one distro and reasonably expect it to work on another and it's why there are dozens of repos and thousands of package maintainers and shipping on Linux is a pain in the ass.
  - teitoklien 5y ago
    - flatpak And - appimage Both work out of the box on almost any distro, just fine
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    We manage it with Ardour just fine (except NixOS, which disables LD_LIBRARY_PATH). Once you understand what's required, it's not particularly hard.
  - dTal 5y ago
    Meh. I don't think it's technically difficult to just ship binaries that work on any distro, as it's incredibly common - Firefox, Blender, Arduino, Cura all manage it just fine. Mostly they just come as a tarball you unpack, occasionally you get an AppImage so you don't even need to do that. Technically it all works fine. But the Linux world still holds a cultural aversion to running mystery binaries, echoing from a time when the sense of battle against proprietary software was felt more keenly than it is today. Expecting people to run binaries they didn't compile was considered rude and antithetical to core values; distros being the only authorized exception. Even today, attempts to dislodge the distro as the official distributor of binaries are met with controversy and suspicion.
    - halikular 5y ago
      Yeah tarballs works fine. I know that at least AUR use mostly upstream unmodified tarballs.
    - aulin 5y ago
      I've been working with Linux since more than 20 years and I don't recall any cultural aversion against binaries, at least the ones shipped by your distribution. Compiling everything has always been a very niche hobby limited to mostly Gentoo and similar distribution users. What we've maybe always being diffident about is app bundles, big images of apps with all their dependencies most of which duplicates of already installed libraries. But I guess we're moving on from that with snap, flatpack and the likes gaining traction.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  One example of fragmentation: You: "it has become much better with wayland and is improving fast". Two comments above you: "wayland has been a steaming pile of crap since it still can't work in basic graphics modes 10+ years after being announced, to the fact that it has loads of quirks that vary from one environment to another."
  - kaba0 5y ago
    That’s not fragmentation, that’s just the usual die-hard linuxer that knows jackshit about actual technology, but has a huge ego going with it. The typical conservative mentality.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jrm4 5y ago
  Absolutely. This is why I'm absolutely hostile towards current-day Gnome. Even if they do make some incremental improvements, the reluctance to do so in a "share-it-back" way is the exact opposite of why I got into Linux in the first place. I quite literally wish it failure. (But KDE? I don't know, I don't use it much, but it seems like at least their stuff is mostly-compatible-if-you-work-it-a-bit, unlike Gnome's full on hostility to 'cross-compatibility.')
  - md8z 5y ago
    Please avoid such hostility, open source is a team sport and we are all on the same team, even projects that do things in ways that may be not immediately useful to you or I. That kind of hostility is what leads to open source people burning out. I am not sure why you think they don't have a "share-it-back" mentality or why you would wish any project failure. They use mostly the same set of open source licenses as KDE.
    - jrm4 5y ago
      No. You don't get to simply declare we're on the same team if you're obviously trying to score points for the other side. In this case "the other side" is exclusivity and Gnome keeps doing it. As a lawyer, I hate to inform you that the entire point of licenses is to put real teeth on ideas that people are likely to renege on. LIKE HERE.
      - md8z 5y ago
        I am not trying to score points for any side, all of these projects can and do share code when it's practical and useful to do so. There is no "exclusivity", I'm sure you know that most of these licenses in use are compatible with each other. The end result is that we are already unwittingly on the same team, it took me a while to realize it but that's the whole reason things like Github and such have taken off. I'd love to discuss your experiences with that as a lawyer if you have any interesting stories, but I would have to ask you to please avoid the hostilities, that doesn't help when trying to fix issues. We both have the same access to the same code.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  The Unix philosophy is in practice horseshit for anything that isn't semi-structured text processing, and for discoverability. Gimme a software with all the functions laid out in menus that I can explore !
- md8z 5y ago
  "They're not supposed to be tightly integrated, the gnome team seems to have forgotten all of this." That is a misconception that I've noticed, maybe it's because KDE uses different APIs for a lot of things, or maybe it's because of the way some distributions package it. But none of the Linux desktops are really that tightly coupled when you actually dig into it. For example managing the desktop settings is handled by its own daemon appropriately called "gnome-settings-daemon" that loads all its settings modules via a plugin system. KDE is structured similarly in that its code is split across a great number of small support libraries. If there is no secondary consumer of those APIs it's probably because nobody has bothered yet to make and test additional combinations of packages that actually work.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
100% agree. I tried running Pop OS as my main system a few years ago and got sucked into ricing, WMs, extensions and themes. Spent all my time customizing and fixing the bugs that arose, hated it and went back to Windows. Now I'm back on Pop but this time I know enough to not customize too hard and it works great. A DE/WM is meant to function as one cohesive piece even if its built out of many components, so if you take a functional DE and start poking around then of course it will break. Even the amount of customization I can do easily without breaking anything is far above what Mac/Windows offer.
- mastax 5y ago
  > 100% agree. I tried running Pop OS as my main system a few years ago and got sucked into ricing, WMs, extensions and themes. Spent all my time customizing and fixing the bugs that arose, hated it and went back to Windows. This is always my issue with Linux. Windows is boring and ugly - to the extent that I probably can't fix it - so I don't bother and I just get stuff done instead. But with Linux, I can imagine this perfectly configured workstation and I know it's possible because I've seen the things people do. So I spend hours tinkering until I break everything or get bored. Then I come back months later and the Nvidia kernel module fails to build after a kernel update or something and I have to start over from scratch. Not a recipe for productivity. This isn't a problem with Linux, per se, more of a personal failing. I think I've almost got it out of my system.
- kccqzy 5y ago
  It's actually the same thing on Mac or Windows. Younger me spent a lot of time poring over forum posts for tweaking macOS (those undocumented `defaults write` commands) to customize things. One day an OS update broke my highly custom /etc/sudoers and I lost sudo access. That's the moment when I realized I'd gone too far.
  - e_proxus 5y ago
    I do the same nowadays. I spend extra time learning the defaults (muscle memory etc.) in my OS and programs, which is about the same effort as customizing them (if not less). The difference is that when setting up a new environment it costs nothing. If I had tons of tweaks and custom scripts that would be a setup cost every time.
systemvoltage 5y ago
Haha, let’s not throw the baby with the bathwater though. Unix philosophy relies on good API between subsystems and enables the user to combine them as they see fit. The problem is that the interfaces are getting a bit rusty (no pun). macOS is totalitarian as UNIX is libertarian if I may have some fun with analogies. No top down direction but individualism is encouraged. There is something to be said about that! It’s a test bench for super cool ideas - e.g. suckless tools.
- md8z 5y ago
  I'm not sure what that has to do with the Unix philosophy, Windows also has a lot of APIs between subsystems.
StillBored 5y ago
None of this works on my fedora 35 system. Welcome to nouveau and a laptop. From display's that don't resume from power save mode, to odd bugs with monitors appearing to be "on and enabled" in the appropriate display settings but aren't actually displaying anything. IMHO wayland has been a steaming pile of crap since it still can't work in basic graphics modes 10+ years after being announced, to the fact that it has loads of quirks that vary from one environment to another. That said, intel graphics tend to work for me, but pretty much nothing else consistently in linux. Sincerely, sad user running X11 on recent laptop with hybrid graphics...
- MegaDeKay 5y ago
  I don't think Linux nor RedHat are to blame for your poor experience with nVidia graphics. The one-finger salute Linus gave nVidia years ago was well deserved. A lot of work has gone into reverse-engineering attempts to improve nouveau but there is still a long way to go despite their efforts.
  - ajvs 5y ago
    Exactly. Either use the proprietary driver for the GPU you bought, deal with the flaws in the FOSS reverse engineered driver, or get an AMD GPU since they actually release their own legit FOSS driver.
    - StillBored 5y ago
      Hey I get it, making shit work is hard. Its always more fun to do greenfield development on a new project. But basing the entire premise of that project on the faulty assumption that a certain set of GPU functions is stable and well supported across most of the devices in the field? That just shitty engineering. If nothing else the wayland guys could have created a llvmpipe style implementation 8+ years ago, so that wayland isn't a case of, does my hardware+drivers actually fit the narrow set of requirements to run this environment stably. Maybe simpleDRM will fix that, who knows. But what is apparent is that a significant portion of users, be they nivida users (and no the proprietary driver fedora wraps isn't better in this case, it just has different problems), users with the latest bleeding edge intel/amd hardware or users with slightly older hardware that wasn't part of the amdgpu test matrix, are being left to fend for themselves with X11. Ignoring that of course gnome is really the only thing that supported wayland until kwin started adding support. All the lightweight or non mainstream WM's are just running on X shims. So, almost 20 years later, https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html, (PS: don't click that directly from HN).
JHonaker 5y ago
Yea, I have absolutely no issues when running a mainstream distro with mostly default behavior (PopOS/Ubuntu). When I veered off into StumpWM land, I had a really strange issue that I had to debug. My laptop is pretty much always in "Nvidia graphics" mode to power the external monitor. When I tried to install Stump I didn't have it hooked up. My laptop screen was completely blank, but everything was functional. To make a long story short, it was completely unrelated to Stump. My Nvidia output was prioritized and the internal screen wasn't activated. I ended up learning a lot about udev, how to write udev rules (that ended up useful when trying to do something with a keyboard with a unicode symbol in its name that a program didn't like), and how to use xrandr. All in all, it was super satisfying to figure out, and I would say the frustration was worth it for me. I know exactly zero other people in my life that would say the same thing, but I also know zero other people that would try to install StumpWM.

halikular 5y ago

Things work differently on Linux. The software is supposed to respect Unix philosophy and standards. So it should matter what combination of packages you run. They're not supposed to be tightly integrated, the gnome team seems to have forgotten all of this. As for managing displays, it has become much better with wayland and it's improving fast.

kelnos 5y ago
I think the problem is that making things look to the user as an integrated, polished experience is exceptionally hard when you have the loosest of loose coupling all over the place, and differing views as to how to get things done. Sure, you can put APIs and documented IPC interfaces between things, but that doesn't mean everything will match up in a usable way. So, eventually, you just decide: screw it, we'll own the entire stack, or at least gain enough influence over the people who make parts we don't control, such that everything works seamlessly for us. In part, this is why Apple can give their customers such a polished, "just works" experience. Buy all-Apple gear, and stay in their software ecosystem, and (modulo bugs) everything will work together seamlessly. I don't like this outcome by any means. And I still think that some desktop components certainly benefit from loose coupling and well-defined interfaces, and it's possible to avoid the "polish" downsides in some cases. But doing everything that way, while still being able to put everything together in a polished way, might actually be impossible.
- indymike 5y ago
  Maybe the idea if a perfect,integrated experience doesn't matter as much as we think. The web's chaotic ux won. Games... roll this own up. Now electron is eating the engineered ui.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    It matters a lot for a desktop UX. People have no patience for a laptop that can't sleep when the lid shuts.
    - curt15 5y ago
      Or animations that stutter. Smartphones have been managing consistent 60fps animations for years now, and MacOS is similarly smooth.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    > Maybe the idea if a perfect,integrated experience doesn't matter as much as we think. This is not an uncommon view. However I can’t help but be convinced it’s the main reason the year of Linux on the Desktop hasn’t happened yet. The user really does want their computer to seem like just one “thing,” at least in the way that it comes out of the box. When we visit websites it’s understood that these pages don’t interact with each other and weren’t designed to work together. The OS, on the other hand, is supposed to be a system per the name.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Then how is it the browser with the absolute majority? https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are_at_least_10_different_microsoft_design/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...
      - ironmagma 5y ago
        I'm not sure what you're asking. The browser is not an OS, so the websites are not supposed to form a system. People using Microsoft's default browser is yet more evidence that people generally stick with the OS defaults, because they are supposed to work.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
It isn't just GNOME, almost all Linux distributions rely on tightly-coupling a set of libraries and binaries. That's why you can't take a binary from one distro and reasonably expect it to work on another and it's why there are dozens of repos and thousands of package maintainers and shipping on Linux is a pain in the ass.
- teitoklien 5y ago
  - flatpak And - appimage Both work out of the box on almost any distro, just fine
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  We manage it with Ardour just fine (except NixOS, which disables LD_LIBRARY_PATH). Once you understand what's required, it's not particularly hard.
- dTal 5y ago
  Meh. I don't think it's technically difficult to just ship binaries that work on any distro, as it's incredibly common - Firefox, Blender, Arduino, Cura all manage it just fine. Mostly they just come as a tarball you unpack, occasionally you get an AppImage so you don't even need to do that. Technically it all works fine. But the Linux world still holds a cultural aversion to running mystery binaries, echoing from a time when the sense of battle against proprietary software was felt more keenly than it is today. Expecting people to run binaries they didn't compile was considered rude and antithetical to core values; distros being the only authorized exception. Even today, attempts to dislodge the distro as the official distributor of binaries are met with controversy and suspicion.
  - halikular 5y ago
    Yeah tarballs works fine. I know that at least AUR use mostly upstream unmodified tarballs.
  - aulin 5y ago
    I've been working with Linux since more than 20 years and I don't recall any cultural aversion against binaries, at least the ones shipped by your distribution. Compiling everything has always been a very niche hobby limited to mostly Gentoo and similar distribution users. What we've maybe always being diffident about is app bundles, big images of apps with all their dependencies most of which duplicates of already installed libraries. But I guess we're moving on from that with snap, flatpack and the likes gaining traction.
FireBeyond 5y ago
One example of fragmentation: You: "it has become much better with wayland and is improving fast". Two comments above you: "wayland has been a steaming pile of crap since it still can't work in basic graphics modes 10+ years after being announced, to the fact that it has loads of quirks that vary from one environment to another."
- kaba0 5y ago
  That’s not fragmentation, that’s just the usual die-hard linuxer that knows jackshit about actual technology, but has a huge ego going with it. The typical conservative mentality.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jrm4 5y ago
Absolutely. This is why I'm absolutely hostile towards current-day Gnome. Even if they do make some incremental improvements, the reluctance to do so in a "share-it-back" way is the exact opposite of why I got into Linux in the first place. I quite literally wish it failure. (But KDE? I don't know, I don't use it much, but it seems like at least their stuff is mostly-compatible-if-you-work-it-a-bit, unlike Gnome's full on hostility to 'cross-compatibility.')
- md8z 5y ago
  Please avoid such hostility, open source is a team sport and we are all on the same team, even projects that do things in ways that may be not immediately useful to you or I. That kind of hostility is what leads to open source people burning out. I am not sure why you think they don't have a "share-it-back" mentality or why you would wish any project failure. They use mostly the same set of open source licenses as KDE.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    No. You don't get to simply declare we're on the same team if you're obviously trying to score points for the other side. In this case "the other side" is exclusivity and Gnome keeps doing it. As a lawyer, I hate to inform you that the entire point of licenses is to put real teeth on ideas that people are likely to renege on. LIKE HERE.
    - md8z 5y ago
      I am not trying to score points for any side, all of these projects can and do share code when it's practical and useful to do so. There is no "exclusivity", I'm sure you know that most of these licenses in use are compatible with each other. The end result is that we are already unwittingly on the same team, it took me a while to realize it but that's the whole reason things like Github and such have taken off. I'd love to discuss your experiences with that as a lawyer if you have any interesting stories, but I would have to ask you to please avoid the hostilities, that doesn't help when trying to fix issues. We both have the same access to the same code.
jcelerier 5y ago
The Unix philosophy is in practice horseshit for anything that isn't semi-structured text processing, and for discoverability. Gimme a software with all the functions laid out in menus that I can explore !
md8z 5y ago
"They're not supposed to be tightly integrated, the gnome team seems to have forgotten all of this." That is a misconception that I've noticed, maybe it's because KDE uses different APIs for a lot of things, or maybe it's because of the way some distributions package it. But none of the Linux desktops are really that tightly coupled when you actually dig into it. For example managing the desktop settings is handled by its own daemon appropriately called "gnome-settings-daemon" that loads all its settings modules via a plugin system. KDE is structured similarly in that its code is split across a great number of small support libraries. If there is no secondary consumer of those APIs it's probably because nobody has bothered yet to make and test additional combinations of packages that actually work.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

100% agree. I tried running Pop OS as my main system a few years ago and got sucked into ricing, WMs, extensions and themes. Spent all my time customizing and fixing the bugs that arose, hated it and went back to Windows. Now I'm back on Pop but this time I know enough to not customize too hard and it works great. A DE/WM is meant to function as one cohesive piece even if its built out of many components, so if you take a functional DE and start poking around then of course it will break. Even the amount of customization I can do easily without breaking anything is far above what Mac/Windows offer.

mastax 5y ago
> 100% agree. I tried running Pop OS as my main system a few years ago and got sucked into ricing, WMs, extensions and themes. Spent all my time customizing and fixing the bugs that arose, hated it and went back to Windows. This is always my issue with Linux. Windows is boring and ugly - to the extent that I probably can't fix it - so I don't bother and I just get stuff done instead. But with Linux, I can imagine this perfectly configured workstation and I know it's possible because I've seen the things people do. So I spend hours tinkering until I break everything or get bored. Then I come back months later and the Nvidia kernel module fails to build after a kernel update or something and I have to start over from scratch. Not a recipe for productivity. This isn't a problem with Linux, per se, more of a personal failing. I think I've almost got it out of my system.
kccqzy 5y ago
It's actually the same thing on Mac or Windows. Younger me spent a lot of time poring over forum posts for tweaking macOS (those undocumented `defaults write` commands) to customize things. One day an OS update broke my highly custom /etc/sudoers and I lost sudo access. That's the moment when I realized I'd gone too far.
- e_proxus 5y ago
  I do the same nowadays. I spend extra time learning the defaults (muscle memory etc.) in my OS and programs, which is about the same effort as customizing them (if not less). The difference is that when setting up a new environment it costs nothing. If I had tons of tweaks and custom scripts that would be a setup cost every time.

systemvoltage 5y ago

Haha, let’s not throw the baby with the bathwater though. Unix philosophy relies on good API between subsystems and enables the user to combine them as they see fit. The problem is that the interfaces are getting a bit rusty (no pun). macOS is totalitarian as UNIX is libertarian if I may have some fun with analogies. No top down direction but individualism is encouraged. There is something to be said about that! It’s a test bench for super cool ideas - e.g. suckless tools.

md8z 5y ago
I'm not sure what that has to do with the Unix philosophy, Windows also has a lot of APIs between subsystems.

StillBored 5y ago

None of this works on my fedora 35 system. Welcome to nouveau and a laptop. From display's that don't resume from power save mode, to odd bugs with monitors appearing to be "on and enabled" in the appropriate display settings but aren't actually displaying anything. IMHO wayland has been a steaming pile of crap since it still can't work in basic graphics modes 10+ years after being announced, to the fact that it has loads of quirks that vary from one environment to another. That said, intel graphics tend to work for me, but pretty much nothing else consistently in linux. Sincerely, sad user running X11 on recent laptop with hybrid graphics...

MegaDeKay 5y ago
I don't think Linux nor RedHat are to blame for your poor experience with nVidia graphics. The one-finger salute Linus gave nVidia years ago was well deserved. A lot of work has gone into reverse-engineering attempts to improve nouveau but there is still a long way to go despite their efforts.
- ajvs 5y ago
  Exactly. Either use the proprietary driver for the GPU you bought, deal with the flaws in the FOSS reverse engineered driver, or get an AMD GPU since they actually release their own legit FOSS driver.
  - StillBored 5y ago
    Hey I get it, making shit work is hard. Its always more fun to do greenfield development on a new project. But basing the entire premise of that project on the faulty assumption that a certain set of GPU functions is stable and well supported across most of the devices in the field? That just shitty engineering. If nothing else the wayland guys could have created a llvmpipe style implementation 8+ years ago, so that wayland isn't a case of, does my hardware+drivers actually fit the narrow set of requirements to run this environment stably. Maybe simpleDRM will fix that, who knows. But what is apparent is that a significant portion of users, be they nivida users (and no the proprietary driver fedora wraps isn't better in this case, it just has different problems), users with the latest bleeding edge intel/amd hardware or users with slightly older hardware that wasn't part of the amdgpu test matrix, are being left to fend for themselves with X11. Ignoring that of course gnome is really the only thing that supported wayland until kwin started adding support. All the lightweight or non mainstream WM's are just running on X shims. So, almost 20 years later, https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html, (PS: don't click that directly from HN).

JHonaker 5y ago

Yea, I have absolutely no issues when running a mainstream distro with mostly default behavior (PopOS/Ubuntu). When I veered off into StumpWM land, I had a really strange issue that I had to debug. My laptop is pretty much always in "Nvidia graphics" mode to power the external monitor. When I tried to install Stump I didn't have it hooked up. My laptop screen was completely blank, but everything was functional. To make a long story short, it was completely unrelated to Stump. My Nvidia output was prioritized and the internal screen wasn't activated. I ended up learning a lot about udev, how to write udev rules (that ended up useful when trying to do something with a keyboard with a unicode symbol in its name that a program didn't like), and how to use xrandr. All in all, it was super satisfying to figure out, and I would say the frustration was worth it for me. I know exactly zero other people in my life that would say the same thing, but I also know zero other people that would try to install StumpWM.