Every so often i start believing all the posts about how Linux really made a lot of progress, and the desktop experience is so much better now, and everything is supported, and i give it another try.
I've got a small intel 13th gen NUC i use as a small server, and for playing movies from. It runs windows 11, but as i want to run some docker containers on it, i thought, why not give Linux a try again, how bad can it be. (after all, i've got multiple raspberry pi's running, and a synology diskstation, and i'm no stranger to ssh'ing into them to manage some stuff)
Downloaded the latest Ubuntu Desktop (23.10), since it's still a highly recommended distro, and started my journey.
First obvious task: connect to my SMB shares on my synology to get access to any media. Tough luck, whatever tool Ubuntu uses for that always tries SMBv1 protocol first, which is disabled on my synology due to security reasons. If i enable it on my synology i get a nice warning that SMBv1 is vulnurable and has been used to perform ransomware attacks, so maybe i'd rather leave it disabled (although i assume that's mostly the case if the port were accessible from the internet, but still). Then i thought "it's probably some setting somewhere to change this", but after further googling, i found an issue that whatever ubuntu is using for SMB needs a patch to not default to SMBv1 to get a list of shares.... Yeah, great start for the oh so secure linux, i'd need to enable a protocol that got used in ransomware attacks over 6 years ago to get everything to work properly... (yeah, i ended up finding how to mount things manually, and then added it to my fstab as a workaround, but wtf)
Then, i installed Kodi, tried to play some content. Noticed that even though i enabled that setting on Kodi, it's not switching to the refreshrate of the video i'm playing. Googling further on that just felt like walking through a tarpit. From the dedicated librelec distro that runs just kodi that has special patches to resolve this, to discussions about X not supporting switching refreshrates, and Kodi having a standalone mode that doesn't use a window manager that should solve it but doesn't, and also finding people with similar woes about HDR. I guess the future of the desktop user is watching stuttering videos with bad color rendition? I'd give more details about what i found if there were any. Try googling it yourself, you'll find so little yet contradictory things...
Not being entirely defeated yet, i thought "i've got this nice GUI on my synology for managing docker containers & images, let's see if i can find something nice on ubuntu", and found dockstation as something i could try. Downloaded the .deb file (since ubuntu is a debian variant it seems), double clicked the file and ... "no app installed for this file"... google around a bit, after some misleading results regarding older ubuntu versions, i found the issue: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/install-deb-ubuntu-23-10-no-app-error
Of course Ubuntu just threw out the old installer for debian files, and didn't replace it yet. Wouldn't want a user to just be able to easily install files! what is this, windows?
For real, i see all the Linux love here, and for the headless servers i have here (the raspberries & the synology), i get it. But goddamn this desktop experience is so ridiculous, there has to be better than this right? I'm missing something, or doing something completely wrong, or... right?
What was the error message? I want to investigate this a little bit.
Hm, yeah, I could see that, actually. I just didn't expect it to be running at 30Hz is part of where I was coming from, I assumed minimum 60Hz.
Yeah, I mean, all I can really tell you is what I said before -- this is a down side, yes. A lot of the people who build the technology aren't too invested in solving this type of problem, and in general there's no one with money at the center of it trying to ensure a good end-user experience, so you may have to just set 60Hz and hope for the best.
Hm, I was just indicating my personal opinion on it. I don't think recommending to anyone who doesn't have the knowledge to muck around with the command line to mess around with .debs they found on the internet is going to end well. I see some people on the internet (this is a good example) saying they recommend it for stuff like Google Chrome, but I just think that's a recipe for trouble.
For me, I would tell them to install Chromium through apt and explain that it's the same without some Google crap. I think people's natural tendency is going to be to try to install software on Linux by finding it on a web site, downloading it, and clicking it, and I think if you're teaching someone Linux, part of your job should be to educate them out of thinking that way. I get why the Ubuntu people would want to emphasize that in service of a good end user experience I guess, but I would not do it that way.
Not true. What I said was "I have no idea why Ubuntu removed that behavior, but I suspect that..." IDK, maybe you're right that they want users to be able to do that, and they just managed to cock it up in one particular version of Ubuntu. In which case, I actually fully agree with your assessment that that's a bad thing about Ubuntu (on top of me already thinking that it's a bad thing if they want users to be able to do that). All I really take away from that is "Oh no, maybe the people telling you Ubuntu isn't the right 'easy mode' distribution to use" are maybe onto something.
Let me use an analogy. Someone always eats at an Italian restaurant. Then, they go to a Mexican restaurant one day. They look at the menu and try to look for their chicken piccata. Then they ask where is the bread for the table. Someone says, well we can get chips if you want to start with chips, but they're not really bread. They say, no I want bread. You can see where the analogy is going. It's just a different restaurant.
Someone could say, well, you're just trying to gaslight me into saying that bread wasn't terrible. It was hard and stale and thin and there was no butter. It was salty and horrible, I barely wanted to eat it. I'm trying, right now, to get you to eat the salsa. I'm actually happy to talk with you about all kinds of bad things about Linux and the reasons behind them, but you have to understand why things are the way they are and the upsides before. Or, I mean, you can do whatever you want, but it'll lead you to a better experience (whether or not you keep it on the desktop, it'll probably help you with the headless servers in some regard).
failed to retrieve share list from server invalid argument
What the HECK man
I'm starting to agree with you on assessment of Ubuntu. I don't think "the desktop experience" is really a priority for a lot of the people who actually get the work done to make Linux, so this is likely to remain an issue to some degree with whatever distro you decided to choose, but I agree, this is pretty poor. The fact that it was persisting across multiple major versions would irritate me as well as it does the people in the bug reporting.
I mean, the main developers don't "work for you" in the same sense that people at Microsoft kind of do "work for you" in your position as the consumer. I think it may be that Ubuntu doesn't make much money and can't really fund the development to make their software meet the goals they set out (end user friendliness), and most of the core developers elsewhere who do real work don't care about it all that much.
Ah, i see you found the same ticket i did.
Sorry for not posting that link, but i'm now not on the ubuntu machine (for maybe obvious reasons), so i didn't have easy access to the exact error message & ticket ^^'...