What software have you found particularly frustrating or difficult to configure on Linux?
Multiple versions, paths, and installs of Python. Using pip makes it worse.
I have limited Python experience, but I always thought that’s what virtualenvs and requirements.txt files are for? When I used those, I found it easy enough to use.
pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv together solves this for me. Virtualenv with specific python versions that work together well with other tools like pip or poetry.
It boils down to something like
$ pyenv install 3.12.7 $ pyenv virtualenv 3.12.7 myenv $ pyenv activate myenvand at that point you can do regular python stuff like pip installing etc.
If you’re having to type out version numbers in your commands, something is broken.
I ended up having to roll my own shell script wrapper to bring some sanity to Python.
You misunderstand, the first two commands are just one time setup to install a specific python version and then to create an env using that version. After that all you need is `pyenv activate myenv´ to drop you into that env, which will use the correct python version and make sure everything is isolated from other environments you might have.
You can also just create an env with the system python version, but the question was specifically about managing multiple versions of python side by side and this makes that super easy.
You could also combine it with
direnvto automatically drop you into the correct environment based on the folder you are in, so you don’t have to type anything after the initial setup.The issue is more general. When dealing with, say,
apt, my experience is that nothing ever breaks and any false move is immediately recoverable. When dealing with Python, even seemingly trivial tasks inevitably turn into a broken mess of cryptic error messages and missing dependencies which requires hours of research to resolve. It’s a general complaint. The architecture seems fragile in some way. Of course, it’s possible it’s just because I am dumb and ignorant.
Especially during the transition from 2 to 3. Let’s hope that’s all behind us.
Xserver… Somehow trying to find the magic string of letters and numbers that made your screen work.
Modeline ftw.
I remember being stubborn and trying to setup eduroam at my uni library using only wpa_supplicant for a whole day. Hugely frustrating. Gave up and installed NetworkManager and it just fucking worked… my tech minimalism phase was extremely counterproductive lol
I still don’t properly grok Selinux at a fundamental and instinctual level. I understand the need for it, and I work with it to the best of my ability, but I wish there was a resource that could explain it from several different positions.
Irony: my main Linux workstation is OpenSuse
Pretty much everything is frustrating to configure at first. Then I learn it and it’s not so bad. Then I don’t use it for a few years, and completely forget how! Back to step 1.
I learned this lesson pretty quick when working in IT.
It’s not always feasible to document everything as it happens, but I definitely learned to do so if I had the time and means to while I was doing the thing.
Just started at a new company with 0 documentation, they’re super psyched that I’ve actually been writing down all their processes/procedures/configurations etc. as they explain them to me/as I work with them.
I really should learn this habit.
If you want to get into doing it, I found searching through a lot of note taking applications until I found something I really liked helped me remember to go do it regularly.
For FOSS stuff a lot of people like Joplin, and I could certainly recommend it. Personally though, I really like Obsidian for its backlinking and graph view features, but it’s not open source.
Furthermore, just carrying around a notebook and a pen everywhere you go as a habit helps a lot. I got into the habit of doing this by maintaining a personal journal for some time. For writing effective notation on paper which can easily be digitized, I would recommend looking into “bullet journaling” methods, and again, finding a notebook and pen that you really quite like, helps a lot to make the experience enjoyable and develop it as a skill.
Thanks very much. I’ll take a look at your suggestions.
Initial thought was “I can’t think of anything”. Then I started scrolling through this thread showering upvoted on all of the repressed memories.
Fortunately I haven’t had to open it in a very long time.
Similar here. I used to have 2 screens that if they turned off for powersaving only 1 of them would wake up. So I had a script on the desktop to do a reset and move them correctly.
#!/bin/bash xrandr --output HDMI2 --off xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --same-as HDMI1 xrandr --output HDMI1 --right-of HDMI2 exit
I still don’t fully understand how to gracefully have multiple desktop environments and switch between them. When I want to try something new to me like lxqt, I usually spin up a VM.
Normally, the process is:
- install the packages for the desktop environment
- log out (not just locking the screen)
- find a dropdown or cogwheel where you can select the other desktop environment
- log in
Having said that, I don’t know what you mean with “graceful”. Desktop environments may involve lots of packages, which may create configuration files in your home directory or get auto-started in your other DEs, so it can be messy.
Something minimal, like LXQt or the various window managers, isn’t going to cause much of a mess, though.I guess, creating a second user with a separate home-directory, like the other person suggested, would isolate that potential mess…
Just add a new user
Trying to configure Sway in NixOS. I gave up and just use KDE Plasma. I do miss using Sway from when I used Arch, though.
I use i3 - Sway is supposed to be 100% compatible with i3 - and I find the configuration file very straightforward. What’s different in the version in NixOS?
Wild. I used sway for the first time with Nix since I could rollback a misconfiguration.
Yeah, I got stuck on secrets management. I just could not get network manager to keep my WiFi passwords. I’ll probably go back and try again at some point.
Suspend with an Nvidia gpu
The hell that was configuring XFree86
It used to be button 10 (also counting 4 scrollwheel directions and click) of my Elecom trackball. I had written a small C program reading the device node and writing the events just of that to stdout, then piping that to a tclsh script (so I could change it easily and it’s still super fast for gaming) which did something in X. Horrible. But then they added support for more buttons to everything (kernel, X) and now I can just map it in games, like any other.
Just recently XDG Portals to get video sharing working. It just kept using the GTK fallbacks instead of KDE as I configured it, but it used the correct ones when starting from the terminal.
Eventually I figured out I had set an env override for
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP="sway"in my user systemd environment, because that’s what I used previously.I’ve been on arch for years, but have recently started pc gaming. Lutris has been surprisingly easy to get working. I have a nintendo switch already and decided I want to try to use the joycons for the computer, don’t want to buy gamepads but it gives and alternative to keyboard and mouse. Getting them consistently recognized by bluetooth has been a massive pain, but after searching I’ve figured out a package that I can install that fixes the issues. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone who found a solution to this issue without installing this specific package.
That package is pulseaudio-bluetooth, even though the nintendo joycons do not have an audio jack or capability to receive audio. I’ve had my audio set up and configured with alsa, and alsa does everything (relating to audio) that I need it to, but pulseaudio-bluetooth requires me to install pulseaudio (duh) and will not work unless I enable the pulseaudio service, which fucks up my alsa config. I’ve spent a while dicking around trying to get pulseaudio to pretend it doesn’t exist except for connecting joycons, but there’s always some nuisance popping up. I also tried using a different usb bluetooth controller and plugging them into different usb ports. Given up for the moment and will probably just buy another gamepad and hope it works better without needing pulseaudio-bluetooth.
In all honesty I still don’t really know what the hell I’m doing on arch, I originally installed it to learn this stuff better but all I’ve really learned is how to read documentation well enough to get things working by trial-and-error. I’ve had a stable system for like ten years now though and I’m too comfortable with it to warrant switching to a friendlier distro, but this specific issue is a pain in the ass.
hyprland but I’m a noob
Configuring captive portal wifi without network manager or any aids beyond what’s provided by wpa-supplicant. Eventually I gave up, since it wasn’t really that important.
Adjusting freetype so that it works more-or-less the way I want it to, because the maintainers hate anyone who disagrees with their current hinting algorithm and make the setting as opaque as possible. I would prefer it if they allowed me to have hinting on some fonts and exclude only the ones that were designed to be pixel-aligned, but unless something’s changed recently, that option isn’t even offered.
