I don’t hate it…

I want a distro that’s hard to understand, hard to make work, hard to update and gives me superpowers like being able to move box to box by taking a file or two with me.

yeah ever since bookworm, they seemed to sort it out…

The NixOS, it callllssss usssssss

come in they ssssaid, itssss delcarativvvveee they ssssssaid.

Wait i just put an environment variable in conifguration.nix and moved home manager back out of my home folder to a central spot why does sddm take 5 minutes to give me Wayland now?

edit: OMG 6 hours later and I have it working. I have a configuration.nix that i re-grew with my 2025 backup and a configuration.nix.slow that is still broken if i switch it out. SDDM timeouts all over the place

the diff between them give 0 indication why sddm would fail.

I kinda want to go back through line by line and find out what did it, but I kinda also want to sleep, eat and go to work in a few hours :)

edit: edit: no rest for the wicked. I ran it through Meld, and there was very little there. Best I can tell, my home manager was synlinked to the wrong config in the store. I’m running it modular, so the nixos-rebuild “should” have moved its configs. The defunct home manager somehow broke QT6 and I lost my file/edit menus in qt apps, the fix for that was a template override env var in configuration.nix. When i fixed the borked home symlink, that failure stopped being a failure and the QT override somehow gave SDDM heartburn. I hadn’t seen it because I rarely change home manager, and whatever was wrong sat that way since 25.11.

Removing the line for QT to ignore the template stopped SDDM/Portal from loading and crashing for 5 minutes straight.

It depends.

A 2-5 year-old laptop, you want to web browse, maybe watch some videos, use google docs or open office, you probably never need a terminal

If it’s a really new laptop or you want to get the most out of video drivers and push it harder, you’ll probably need to be ready for some light terminal crap. Gets a little janky if you have a dual-video-card setup. Nothing hard to handle, but if you’re not looking to have to handle anything…

I think the numnber of available packages is better on the Debian side. Mint or Kubuntu run newer hotter stuff, debian runs older more stable stuff.

Yup, I know just where that happens. It’s probably a joy to work in your IT. They probably have a keyboard macro for “no”

Not accounting for any interesting custom choices you made under the hood, the default file browser for both os’s use libfuse3 for MTP. My point is, it shouldn’t have crashed, there are open issues in libfuse3 for possible crashes, so you might just have hit one at the wrong time, but at that, it REALLY shouldn’t have f’d over your journaling filesystem enough to keep you from logging in. A breaking read/write to fuse should not have been able to f your journal over beyond a simple automatic recovery. Most of the design choices in Linux over the last decade have been made specifically to prevent that kind of thing from happening on a healthy system. One can argue that one distro is more stable than another because they take, or refuse to take newer packages, but for your specific issue, they use the same piece of software under the hood.

The wipe and new OS might have just moved the problems to a less visible area.

My primary anger with Wayland is the security issues that broke AHK that they’re just now considering. There’s been lots of finger pointing over the years, but now that most OS’s are ditching X11 support all together, we’re going to see a lot more compatibility coming in the next year or two.

And everyone telling dear reader to change distros is doing it from a position of ignorance.

Even the least reliable of those distros should not be seeing anything but the keymap issue. MTP crash, unable to login afterward, That reeks of ram/disk issues.

Time->TLS errors aren’t handled well anywhere.

As critical as they are to 2fa and TLS, you’d think every OS out there would poke around a few time servers and scream bloody murder if the time was off.

Honestly, I think we, as a society, have leaned a little too hard into time as a precise critical failure point. It’s fine for things like GPS that actually require it. but our clocks don’t need to be precisely the same to tell how recent a request and response are and we can certainly make better hashing algos

Oddly enough, giving the general public exact error messages ends up costing you in support and reputation.

They obscure the messages because the inexperienced masses start digging up red herrings. Knowledge to someone with zero experience causes a lot of confusion.

The experienced and capable users look up the codes and think about it for a minute, check their vpn, maybe a health dashboard, maybe reboot.

Just about every complex machine out there give error codes instad of real messages, even when they have large displays capable of telling you exactly what the condition is.

yeah, back when I was maining windows, I went through a lot of trouble to install non-store versions.

Of course, some places lock down their employees too much for them to do that

Don’t be too mean, but make sure your admin feels the heat.

Linux is good enough for the desktop for a fuckton of businesses. gentle pressure may get us there in a generatiohn or two

They’re preparing to rent people desktop access over the internet. Gotta trim up that you don’t own shit store code.

That combination of errors sounds suspiciously like hardware problems.

MTP crash, unexpected but not overly so, it’s old code. Authentication issues post reboot on error is super sus.

Wayland can be a little slow, but it seems to be ok for all of my ancient candidates. Keymaps kind of expected, that’s the kind of stuff that wayland is actually not great at yet.

Put that all together, I’d say you have something going on with the box.

Until you roll back and shits broken now because the new kernel was a requirement on other shit that was in the update.

For my own shit, I’m running nixos, so when I roll back, every app that just got updated rolls back, perfect recovery, but that doesn’t work for most.

As far as the pop-os that broke the other day, I’m more than capable of depsolving and fixing it, but it’s not ideal.

Yeaaahhhh, i’m a disagree with this one a little.

It goes like that until the update changes the kernel version and breaks a video driver. I mean, it’s a lot rarer than it used to be, but our arcade box at work just got hit with it.

Windows usual fail mode (which is often) is update won’t process so it wastes an hour of your time a bunch of times and either justs starts working or requires you to dig into it and either run it manually, or clear up some cache.

Windows not booting into a gui on an update is pretty rare.

The problem I have is that the GUI tools are very specific to distros, dms, and releases. It’s a problem that arises from having so many choices.

CLI tools work long after they’re deprecated and very often cross distros.

Something as simple as getting your IP address can be in diferent areas, the settings->network panel isn’t even a safe bet. A lot of distros are now putting a network or wifi icon in your tray, but it doesn’t always look the same, can be hidden, isn’t in the same place.

Ifconfig and ip work on everything and can be installed on almost, if not every, platform.

If you do a web search for how to find your local network address in linux using the GUI, you’re given a choice of a bunch of different places to look and the reccomendations don’t line up word-for-word with what the current menus in KDE->settings look like. What’s more interesting is when I go into kde-settings and do manages to find Wi-Fi and internet instead of network connections, it doesn’t give me my ip, it’s all just blank.

If that documentation was awful, I’d REALLY like to see your take on NixOS :)

Hey I drove to the library, picked up all these things you needed, got dinner here ya go, free!

You drove? man that’s lazy…

He used AI to clean up translation and save time after he spent a fuck ton of time curating and delivering us a helpful product. Calling him out as lazy is an awful take.

Yup, if there was ever a decent use for AI, this is it. Lemmy can (and will) hate the shit out of it, but it took a little burden off the shoulders of someone doing us a great service.