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?
Everything I can find online for SMB version usage in Ubuntu's file explorer seems to indicate that for the last several years mounting SMB shares defaults to version 2.0 and up already.
Idk if that's true, I haven't looked at the version of Samba for my own SMB shares, nothing is exposed to the web so not a huge concern for me. Regardless, sounds like a bug? Idk, you also could have tried installing a different file explorer to see if that was the issue I suppose.
I don't understand the Kodi refresh rate issue. I'm not familiar with Kodi at all, is it supposed to set your monitor's refresh rate to match the framerate of the video that is currently playing in Kodi?
Not sure about the installer problem you were having either. I just tested downloading the .deb package for DockerStation on my Ubuntu VM and it seems to work perfectly. Right clicked the .deb package > Open with other application > Open with the Ubuntu software install center app > Then click "install." It installed just like any other repo package for me in about 60 seconds and it launched totally fine too.
Granted my VM is the LTS Jammy Jelly 22.04 version, but that shouldn't matter. If it doesn't work on the newer stable version of Ubuntu, then I would submit it as a bug report. Also, DockerStation has an AppImage package too, why didn't you try running that if you had issues with the .deb package?
I think people are downvoting you largely because you're using your personal experience to claim that the Linux desktop experience as a whole is terrible, which just isn't true. At least that's how I think it came across to many people. That's why I listed my own personal experience, they aren't objective data, whether good or bad.
It would have been better for you to either create a thread asking for help with those specific issues, or at least taken a more tempered approach.
Ultimately, I'm sorry your experience has been bad. I think Linux desktop just isn't for some people, for various reasons, and that's fine. If you're still wanting to try it, I would suggest creating a live USB of a few other distros and testing out the same kinds of things. My personal favs are Linux Mint Cinnamon edition and Fedora KDE Plasma edition.
I wasn't on the ubuntu machine anymore, so i couldn't quickly find the link to the SMB issue, but you're in luck, someone else in this thread already did (he linked it with (in capitals) WHAT THE HECK as link title): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/samba/+bug/1697817
And he understood my frustration that such a bug would be open for about 5 years now across multiple major versions. :) . Now i've manually mounted some of the shares, the file manager suddenly also uses a better version of SMB to fetch the shared folders and it suddenly works. But this should take googling & terminal work to just explore a network share from a desktop environment.
That's because you're so lucky to not be on a clean 23.10 install, since as i showed in the link i posted, it's not there in a clean 23.10 install for some reason :). I found tons of links saying i should right click, and open it with an application that for some mysterious reason was missing on my ubuntu install :).
Known Ubuntu bug looks like for the SMB problem.
I was able to replicate the .deb issue on a fresh 23.10 install VM a little while ago. Looks like it is a confirmed issue in 23.10 also.
The Appimage file for DockerStation worked fine though. I just had to install Fuse with apt and DockerStation opened right up without issue. Any reason you didn't use that version?
You didn't really respond to my other comments, so I don't really know where that leaves things. Like I said, I'm sorry your experience with Ubuntu has been bad, if you still want to give Linux a try on desktop, use Fedora KDE version or Linux Mint Cinnamon, both I've had great results with.
If not, then thanks for trying out desktop Linux.