3 ms·

> require a bunch of tinkering to get some things to behave properly > the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatev

by Pooge 11mo ago

> require a bunch of tinkering to get some things to behave properly > the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatever, Wayland vs X11, etc Sounds like a problem with your distribution. I've been on openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and I've never had to tinker with any of those.

rkomorn 11mo ago
Ah yes. The Linux user is always holding it wrong. In my case it stems from having to deal with multiple distros (and multiple generations of distros, eg 3 LTS Ubuntus) professionally. In other cases, distros give a choice on which tools to use, usually because the new one is better (but also happens to come with its own new bugs). Unrelated, I love that any "why aren't you using Linux?" question is actually almost always just a thinly veiled "let me tell you why you're wrong" plant.
- Pooge 11mo ago
  > The Linux user is always holding it wrong That's actually the opposite of what I said. All those issues seem to come from the fact that the user didn't choose a distribution where it's "one-click install". If you came to me and said "I tried Arch Linux and my installation broke after every update", I think it's fair to say that it's something you should've expected before you installed the distribution. It's unfair to make the comparison for stability between Windows and Linux if your only example is Arch Linux. So yes, I maintain that the distribution choice is important and that if you constantly run into issues, it's probably a problem with your distribution (or your use thereof).
  - rkomorn 11mo ago
    "You chose the wrong distro" is very much in the "you're holding it wrong" vein, in my book. If there's one thing I'll admit to "doing it wrong" it's that I've been on a distro-hopping binge the past few years because I've (fortunately) not actually needed my laptop as a daily driver, so I've experienced a bunch of them and, so far, none of them have given me a compelling reason to stay. Many have been interesting (particularly NixOS and Bluefin), some have been easy until you decide you want to get away from defaults (Mint comes to mind). All of them have had some quirks/issues. I haven't tried a SUSE in probably 25 years so maybe that'll be my next hop. Mind you, I've had Linux devices for 30 years and I was also a FreeBSD-as-my-main-desktop user for about a decade, so it's not like I'm not into this kind of tech.
    - Pooge 11mo ago
      I see. Sorry if I came off as trying to invalidate your experience. That's not what I meant. I've tried about 4 or 5 distros before settling on openSUSE Tumbleweed (now on my 4th or so year). Linux Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu, Solus, Manjaro... Ironically, I find Tumbleweed (a rolling distro) more reliable than all the others I've tried. I can't say it's stable per se, but if something breaks you can rollback very easily. Doesn't break often, though.
subscribed 11mo ago
It was the same problems on the Fedora and Ubuntu since ever (I have Linux-based work laptop). Also on Fedora i had to upgrade very slowly, so they could release bugfixes - stable new releases were always crippling my ** Dell somehow. Easier to work on than Windows but my Linux pisses me off every day. Problems with docks, forgetting all monitor setups except for the last dock (I use three, two at the office, one at home), Zoom ALWAYS having problems with screensharing, Network Manager issues since forever (can't VPN like a human being, have to use vpnc like an animal), etc, etc.
badsectoracula 11mo ago
I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and while it is decently stable, it is far from perfect. For example i think the first issue any new user will face is with many codecs not being available in the official repository distros, making various sites (and video plays) unusable. The solution to that one is simple, add packman, which is a community repository that contains all codecs - but IIRC packman is not mentioned anywhere during the install, it is something you need to search for (it is in the wiki). However, packman very often conflicts with the official repos when it comes to updates, making all GUI-based ones (that do not seem to handle cross-repo conflicts like zypper) pretty much unusable as they always give up in the presence of a conflict. And unfortunately some comments i've seen (mainly on Reddit) from people working on the distro seem to indicate at least a minor hostility towards using packman, so i do not see this being solved any time soon. For an experienced Linux user this is a trivial issue, something that i doubt most (long time) openSUSE Tumbleweed users would even think about, but for someone new to Linux it can be a larger issue they wont find in distros like Debian (though they may find other issues :-P). There have been other issues i had with openSUSE Tumbleweed, like -e.g- at some point after an update every 3D game had some significant input lag regardless of vsync state. I never solved that one, i just rolled back updates (snapper is great for that, but again an advanced Linux user feature) until at some point -months later- the problem stopped happening. Though now i have another issue where the X server randomly starts not updating the screen for random numbers of milliseconds - essentially it feels as if the entire thing is stuttering - but weirdly enough there are no CPU or GPU usage spikes and it doesn't seem to be relevant to CPU/GPU usage at all. If anything, it does not happen at all if there is some OpenGL or Vulkan program running in a window (so it doesn't affect games at all, just regular desktop use) and sometimes i just end up running vkcube in another virtual desktop (it doesn't matter if the output is visible or not) to avoid it. My guess is that there is some sort of scheduling bug in the modesetting driver as i never had that issue with the amdgpu driver (my guess is the modesetting driver doesn't get as much testing as the amdgpu driver on AMD GPUs), but the amdgpu driver causes the X server to hang after i suspend and resume my desktop since i got a RX 7900 XTX (it did not happen with my RX 5700 XT, which was rock solid), so it is choice between the lesser evil.

by Pooge 11mo ago

rkomorn 11mo ago

Ah yes. The Linux user is always holding it wrong. In my case it stems from having to deal with multiple distros (and multiple generations of distros, eg 3 LTS Ubuntus) professionally. In other cases, distros give a choice on which tools to use, usually because the new one is better (but also happens to come with its own new bugs). Unrelated, I love that any "why aren't you using Linux?" question is actually almost always just a thinly veiled "let me tell you why you're wrong" plant.

Pooge 11mo ago
> The Linux user is always holding it wrong That's actually the opposite of what I said. All those issues seem to come from the fact that the user didn't choose a distribution where it's "one-click install". If you came to me and said "I tried Arch Linux and my installation broke after every update", I think it's fair to say that it's something you should've expected before you installed the distribution. It's unfair to make the comparison for stability between Windows and Linux if your only example is Arch Linux. So yes, I maintain that the distribution choice is important and that if you constantly run into issues, it's probably a problem with your distribution (or your use thereof).
- rkomorn 11mo ago
  "You chose the wrong distro" is very much in the "you're holding it wrong" vein, in my book. If there's one thing I'll admit to "doing it wrong" it's that I've been on a distro-hopping binge the past few years because I've (fortunately) not actually needed my laptop as a daily driver, so I've experienced a bunch of them and, so far, none of them have given me a compelling reason to stay. Many have been interesting (particularly NixOS and Bluefin), some have been easy until you decide you want to get away from defaults (Mint comes to mind). All of them have had some quirks/issues. I haven't tried a SUSE in probably 25 years so maybe that'll be my next hop. Mind you, I've had Linux devices for 30 years and I was also a FreeBSD-as-my-main-desktop user for about a decade, so it's not like I'm not into this kind of tech.
  - Pooge 11mo ago
    I see. Sorry if I came off as trying to invalidate your experience. That's not what I meant. I've tried about 4 or 5 distros before settling on openSUSE Tumbleweed (now on my 4th or so year). Linux Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu, Solus, Manjaro... Ironically, I find Tumbleweed (a rolling distro) more reliable than all the others I've tried. I can't say it's stable per se, but if something breaks you can rollback very easily. Doesn't break often, though.

subscribed 11mo ago

It was the same problems on the Fedora and Ubuntu since ever (I have Linux-based work laptop). Also on Fedora i had to upgrade very slowly, so they could release bugfixes - stable new releases were always crippling my ** Dell somehow. Easier to work on than Windows but my Linux pisses me off every day. Problems with docks, forgetting all monitor setups except for the last dock (I use three, two at the office, one at home), Zoom ALWAYS having problems with screensharing, Network Manager issues since forever (can't VPN like a human being, have to use vpnc like an animal), etc, etc.

badsectoracula 11mo ago

I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and while it is decently stable, it is far from perfect. For example i think the first issue any new user will face is with many codecs not being available in the official repository distros, making various sites (and video plays) unusable. The solution to that one is simple, add packman, which is a community repository that contains all codecs - but IIRC packman is not mentioned anywhere during the install, it is something you need to search for (it is in the wiki). However, packman very often conflicts with the official repos when it comes to updates, making all GUI-based ones (that do not seem to handle cross-repo conflicts like zypper) pretty much unusable as they always give up in the presence of a conflict. And unfortunately some comments i've seen (mainly on Reddit) from people working on the distro seem to indicate at least a minor hostility towards using packman, so i do not see this being solved any time soon. For an experienced Linux user this is a trivial issue, something that i doubt most (long time) openSUSE Tumbleweed users would even think about, but for someone new to Linux it can be a larger issue they wont find in distros like Debian (though they may find other issues :-P). There have been other issues i had with openSUSE Tumbleweed, like -e.g- at some point after an update every 3D game had some significant input lag regardless of vsync state. I never solved that one, i just rolled back updates (snapper is great for that, but again an advanced Linux user feature) until at some point -months later- the problem stopped happening. Though now i have another issue where the X server randomly starts not updating the screen for random numbers of milliseconds - essentially it feels as if the entire thing is stuttering - but weirdly enough there are no CPU or GPU usage spikes and it doesn't seem to be relevant to CPU/GPU usage at all. If anything, it does not happen at all if there is some OpenGL or Vulkan program running in a window (so it doesn't affect games at all, just regular desktop use) and sometimes i just end up running vkcube in another virtual desktop (it doesn't matter if the output is visible or not) to avoid it. My guess is that there is some sort of scheduling bug in the modesetting driver as i never had that issue with the amdgpu driver (my guess is the modesetting driver doesn't get as much testing as the amdgpu driver on AMD GPUs), but the amdgpu driver causes the X server to hang after i suspend and resume my desktop since i got a RX 7900 XTX (it did not happen with my RX 5700 XT, which was rock solid), so it is choice between the lesser evil.