What software have you found particularly frustrating or difficult to configure on Linux?

  • aStonedSanta@lemm.ee
    1·
    4 hours ago

    Jellyseer in docker. It won’t accept my jellyfin login. It just spins and spins. But I plan to use it locally. And everyone says you have to sign in initially not local? I don’t know. I’m annoyed with it and gave up for now.

  • notthebees@reddthat.com
    4·
    13 hours ago

    Trying to disable the lid close sensor on my laptop. My issue is twofold. It’s a convertible (pavilion x360) and I’m using bunsenlabs Linux.

  • TwistedTurtle@monero.town
    2·
    13 hours ago

    Setting up a matrix server was a god damn nightmare for me. I eventually got it working but I hit pretty much every conceivable obstacle along the way. Getting the config file just right, the networking, the federation, the coturn server, getting end users to understand they need to backup their keys…

    I’m sure it’d be easier for a Linux pro but I was in way over my head. Only got it working through stubbornness and help from the community.

    • DasFaultier@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      22 hours ago

      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.

    • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch
      61·
      22 hours ago

      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 myenv

      and at that point you can do regular python stuff like pip installing etc.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
        53·
        18 hours ago

        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.

        • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch
          2·
          14 hours ago

          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 direnv to 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.

          • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
            13·
            13 hours ago

            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.

            • jdnewmil@lemmy.ca
              2·
              10 hours ago

              When you come across some Python code for something written 5 years ago and they used four contributed packages that the programmers have changed the API on three times since then, you want to set up a virtual environment that contains those specific versions so you can at least see how it worked at that time. A small part of this headache comes from Python itself mutating, but the bulk of the problem is the imported user-contributed packages that multiply the functionality of Python.

              To be sure, it would be nice if those programmers were all dedicated to updating their code, but with hundreds of thousands of packages that could be imported written by volunteers, you can’t afford to expect all of them them to stop innovating or even to continue maintaining past projects for your benefit.

              If you have the itch to fix something old so it works in the latest versions of everything, you have that option… but it is really hard to do that if you cannot see it working as it was designed to work when it was built.

    • digdilem@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      Especially during the transition from 2 to 3. Let’s hope that’s all behind us.

      • flashgnash@lemm.ee
        1·
        6 hours ago

        That’s fair, I’ve found wayland to generally be pretty good with Linux now and you can pry hyprland from my cold dead hands

  • exu@feditown.comEnglish
    5·
    23 hours ago

    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.

  • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    20 hours ago

    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?

  • superweeniehutjrs@lemmy.world
    6·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      6·
      23 hours ago

      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…

  • Joelk111@lemmy.world
    3·
    22 hours ago

    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.

    • orcrist@lemm.ee
      31·
      22 hours ago

      In recent years I’ve found NextCloud to reasonable. A little delicate initially, but once you have it working, the upgrades are very easy.

      • Joelk111@lemmy.world
        1·
        19 hours ago

        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.

  • Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    22 hours ago

    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.

  • DasFaultier@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    23 hours ago

    Cloud-init. The config yaml is rather straight forward, but I can’t convince my VM to execute it, and it’s driving me nuts.

    • BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
      2·
      17 hours ago

      It was definitely a headache for me as well, but you need a guest agent (like vmwaretools or qemu-guest-agent), a cloud init ready template for the distro of your choice, a cloud init config file (network/user/vendor) and a custom SCSI/ide cloudinit cdrom mounted at boot on your VM. You also can find cloudinit logs on your VM to try and figure out what’s missing or what went wrong.