What software have you found particularly frustrating or difficult to configure on Linux?
I gave up trying to setup a Mastodon server in docker. Lemmy was pretty tricky at the time as the docs were wrong. My email server was a bit tricky, but I’ve not really done much to tinker with it in the proceeding 6 years, so was worth it.
Installing Fedora. I had almost nothing to configure, it worked out of the box. How frustrating! I had the whole day planned and now what? Enjoy my free time like a pleb !?!
(/s just in case anyone was wondering)
Anything to do with dns
xorg.conf. The (wrong) example from Arch Wiki works but following the official documentation doesn’t.
Caddy. The config and docs suck.
Eg. I thought I configured it to limit some sites to an allowlist of IPs. Turns out (months later) the config did nothing, but ran anyway.
Huh, I found it to be so much easier to set up than nginx that I wrote the devs a little thank you message
hostapd. I have no idea how you’re supposed to figure out the 50 or so options OpenWrt outputs for an AX card that I just ended up copying. And why doesn’t it detect those on its own?
Do VLANs with multiple wireless and wired clients using OPNSense and OpenWRT dummy APs count? Still haven’t quite figured it out.
Me neither lol
Skyrim mods.
Btw, anyone got the new reshade working on wine?
For skyrim, I’m using vortex in lutris, and install the mods this way. This requires a more bit of actions but works fine.
Wabbajack still doesn’t work in wine?
Suspend with an Nvidia gpu
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.
hyprland but I’m a noob
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.XDG portal filechooser for Firefox: the KDE implementation uses Dolphin, which is full of features and I use most of them; the default GTK one is mildly infuriating to use and looks ugly too, but getting the browser to use the portal I want was a nightmare - especially since GTK discontinued the GTK_USE_PORTAL envvar.
The related Firefox config entries make no sense either.Can you explain a bit more about this and how to configure it? When I use FF on gnome, the save dialogue just looks like other dialogues?
I think GNOME’s filechooser is the GTK one (never used it so I’m not sure), mine looks like this:
It’s entirely possible that Firefox changed and now uses XDG portals by default, I configured it like this a long time ago.
As for how to configure it, I honestly don’t know.
It was a combination of messing withwidget.use-xdg-desktop-portalon about:config, and changing XDG envvars and dotfiles; both by following several conflicting Reddit and bbs.archlinux.org posts.widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker=1 in about:config should be the only thing you need. @projectmoon@lemm.ee
Yeah I definitely have the default GTK chooser. Guess I have some config playing to do later.
When I was on Hyprland, I had to start Firefox with
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=kdewhile having both the KDE and GTK implementations of XDP.Instructions for changing it here
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#XDG_Desktop_Portal_integration
Xserver… Somehow trying to find the magic string of letters and numbers that made your screen work.
Modeline ftw.
Recently? Email notifications for my crontab jobs. I learned that snapraid sync had been failing for 200 DAYS. I was thinking it’d be easy for some reason. It hasn’t been.
Overall though, Nextcloud was a nightmare and I just gave up.
In recent years I’ve found NextCloud to reasonable. A little delicate initially, but once you have it working, the upgrades are very easy.
I also realized that I just didn’t need all of the functionality and such. In reality I just need a file sharing system akin to Google drive.
