Hello everyone! I know that Linux GUI advanced in last few years but we still lack some good system configuration tools for advanced users or sysadmins. What utilities you miss on Linux? And is there any normal third party alternatives?
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I’m willing to entertain the possibility that the linux world may be lacking in some things, but I’m pretty sure “configuration tools for sysadmins” is not one of them.
I really miss Microsoft AD configuration GUI.
Wait, no, that sort of group you have to make through Entra, formerly Azure admin center, wait no they actually wanted a SharePoint site for the group, wait no you can’t do that through entra even though you can see the groups, you have to do that through O365 admin center, wait no you can only make a SharePoint aaand teams group there, you have to click more -> SharePoint admin center and then create a new group there, but not the default, you have to click “show more group types”, but where can you modify the members of this group? Oh you can just go back to O365 admin center to do that. Now you want to make some small access changes to the force-created email for the group? Oh well you have to go to Exchange admin center for that. Wait, not Outlook admin center? No they are named different things just to make it easy.
Now someone who made an event involving the group is on holiday so I have to remove it, I can do that from exchange admin center right? Well actually the easiest way to do that is to log into Exchange from a power shell terminal through the GUI pop-up and terminal commands. But wait, the search for the event actually doesn’t work there ever, even with the exact name? I guess I will give myself rights to the calendar, reboot Outlook, go to the calendar, remove the event, go back to the terminal, remove my rights to the calendar, restart outlook.
Actually, I don’t miss Microsoft sysadmin tools.
IrfanView. Nothing comes even close. I would probably move to Linux if not for that.
Irfanview!
It’s FAST, it’s SMALL, it’s PURE POWERRR
I never understood why there isn’t anything even remotely close to it in Linux. Kde has Gwenview which is awful slow, bloated yet barely has any features at all.
There is a way to run it through wine but that is awful. Cane e start a GoFundMe for the dev to make a Linux KDE release with Deb and rpm files? I’ll happily contribute.
For real! Every time I spend real periods of time with Linux (and a random year with a MacBook Pro a friend wanted to get rid of). It always hits a point where I need to view images and can’t find anything that matches IrfanView. I have tried XnView and it is way too much with regards to the UI and features I don’t need. The most frustrating thing (and this applies to most others I tried) is handling going through a folder of images that are different resolutions. IrfanView has the option to both scale the program’s window based around the image size, and also be set to scale images if the are larger than my display resolution.
It is a very weird combination of those two things that drives me nuts. There are settings in XnView that kind of work but break. Like it might adjust the image that is large, but then the program’s UI will not shrink to fit a small image (the window will just stay large and have large black borders). Or it will shrink the window to the width of a large image, but not scale and the height will still require scrolling up and down to see all of it. The funny part is that I don’t even look at my saved images all the time. But shit is like a hard slam on the breaks at high speed.
I did end up just dealing with the kind of weird clunkyness of running it via WINE while on the Mac as it was my only PC at the time. Which was still better than not having it for my use-case. Just weird how it has been the only image viewer (with mid-level editing options) that has “felt” correct ever since I first tried it out over like 17 years ago.
I’d like some kind of visual task scheduler instead of having to read up on how to do cron jobs every time.
People still use Cron?
Use systemd timers which are very easy to configure.
And do systemd timers come with a GUI?
You really won’t need one, but your username says you specialise in great suffering so you won’t want one.
Dystopia is having to learn a whole new system and manually punch in commands in VIM instead of just entering “0400” and clicking “Every day” in a GUI simply to run a scheduled backup because some cyberpunks think it’s cool to stare at the black and green terminal emulator into the early morning and think that everybody else enjoys doing the same so we really don’t need a GUI.
Buy yourself a Mac, fella. You’re not ready.
How’s your eyes, that green light given you glasses yet?
I’ve completely switched from cron to systemd timers for everything. I feel like they are a lot easier to remember and keep track of! Plus, getting logs for free is pretty nice as well
Setting per game frame limits and undervolting AMD GPUs is a lot more complicated than on Windows
This
LACT and Mangohud can do that pretty well
Something to help visualise BTRFS volumes & sub-volumes (ie, free-space, etc)
Maybe tangential but this reminded me of how much I hate setting up systemd timers/services. I refuse to accept that creating two files in two different directories and searching online for the default timer and service templates is an okay workflow over simply throwing a cron expression next to the command you want to run and being done with it. Is there really no way we can have a crontab-equivalent that virtually converts into a systemd backend when you don’t need the extra power? I feel like an old person that can’t accept change but it’s been a decade and I’m still angry.
This is a configuration declaration abstraction issue. Systemd timers and services are more like primitives.
In NixOS, we have an abstraction that allows simple declaration of a service and timer that runs some script.
As an example, I use this to export my paperless for backup daily in a way that is safe (paperless itself cannot run during that time, guaranteed by systemd) and simple:
(Even without NixOS domain knowledge you should be able to follow what’s going on here.)
All that’s needed in order to cause a systemd timer to be created for this service is to declare the
startAt = "daily";at the bottom.I love this, I have nixos on my server and it handles all the services this way
I did this for awhile…
https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron-next
If I remember whatever chef script I was blowing out mucked up something enough I ended up ditching it and manually rebuilding the timers as sysd units.
Even as someone who likes systemd since trying to teach init is pretty uniquely awful, I still have a load of one a year cron jobs I just use a BSD box for.
Pretty sure any one using YAST is confused right now
afterburner. i’m unable to oc my nvidia gpu :(
LACT. Though I don’t know if it can OC Nvidia, Nvidia support is quite new.
til about this one, nice. i wish discoverability for linux software was better.
Same here. I’m using CorrCTRL for my 6800XT and the VRAM OC is not working properly, will give LACT a try
Chances are that it doesn’t work there either. What actually does the OC is the kernel; the GUIs merely write the desired values into the correct files in
/sys.
I usually just feed my questions into three different LLMs plus ddg with site:reddit and then check consensus. As good as it gets.
But then last time I’ve managed to discover DeadBeeF through IRC.
yeah thats how i find them, we have good app stores on linux that could use some community curation though!
its common on linux for software to be abandoned, only for a fork to pop up elsewhere and it gets annoying.
I believe tuxclocker has NVIDIA plugins.
My Linux experience has been command line training. Now I avoid GUI stuff like the plague if I can help it.
A decent GUI LDAP client.
Yes, I know, I can use slapcat and all… But holy hell, I’m tired of writing basic LDAP files to populate a new domain. And, no, I really don’t want to spin up a webserver just to run a web based GUI that I NOW have to ensure is locked down.
oh… that look tits! Thank you!
Found this not so long ago and it literally made me sad I don’t manage an LDAP anymore!
Based on the docs, it should work with LDAP, but is focused on AD. I really only need it for initial create and whatnot, so I’m gonna give it a whirl, and hopefully, doesn’t let me down.
If not, I’ll need to git gud with go, and do some PR’s :)
7-Zip,on windows it was powerful and i loved it there is a port p7zip but it has not been updated since 2016.
Yes. But if you really need it, it works great under wine.
currently using Engrampa but thanks ig.
regedit.exe, my favorite GUI app 🤣
You can use regedit on Linux via wine!
You could try gconf
…what would that even do? Linux doesn’t have a registry, does it?
Wine as Windows layer has small registry for Windows apps
Oh, that makes sense
You can also open registries from windows install with it.
Given that windows administration is powershell these days they kind of are similar.
Windows is missing so much in their guis abilities (like copy text) that I wonder what there is you are missing.
Edit: Although this is not an admin function, one thing that bothers me about windows, A LOT is that the file explorer does not show free space while I am in the current directory. Dolphin will do it even for SMB shares. Also you can click the drop down and examine all drives right there instead of have to back to the left and ruining your view in explorer. And don’t get me started about how you can’t split views in Windows explorer. This is just one everyday task where windows GUI is lacking in features even though it is not an admin tool.
I’ve recently gotten into using cockpit. I just wish it was as expansive as openSUSE’s yast.
