Your favorite Linux mess-ups

The Water Cooler
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This thread will become kind of chatty. It is planned to be a bit therapeutic, too, since we all know that working with computers always leads into frustration, independent from the OS that you chose to use. So take a glass or cup of your favorite drink and join the discussion.

I use Linux for a while. Actually SuSE was my daily driver from 2003 to 2006. Then I switched to the Mac, but never lost contact to Linux. I owned a Netbook, had a file server and a Linux-driven HDD-VCR and in this very moment I have a Game Boy sized retro console in my pocket, powered by Linux. I convinced family and friends to use Linux for special use cases. My cousin created translations for GNOME 3 back then, another cousin is doing fun stuff I don’t understand with Raspberries. To make a long story short: Linux is part of my computing life.

You may ask, why did I switch to the Mac back then? There where two main reasons.

Reason one is that in the 2000s Wifi and ACPI was a mess. There where hardly laptops available that where just running out of the box and where not terribly outdated.

The second reason is a little bit more complex. While I was studying, I only had a small room. I wanted to use my dad’s old desktop as a general purpose PC for programming, listening to music, watching movies and TV, studying, general office tasks. So I added more RAM and a TV tuner with an MPEG2-Chip on it to keep CPU consumption low while having a TV window open and do some other tasks. So I checked compatibility lists for days and found a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 that I could use for both: Linux and Windows.

While under Windows the card just worked like every other WinTV card in it’s iconic WinTV software, my old friends GnomeTV and kdetv refused to work with the card. I had to switch to a full blown media center application like MythTV or use mplayer via command line to switch channels.

That was a quite a frustrating experience. You check hardware compatibility lists, build your computer carefully together for your use case and then everything works, except you can’t use a remote control but have to use command line arguments in order to zap through your channel list.

A few months ago I replaced my MacMini daily driver with a ThinkPad X13 Yoga, certified for Linux, btw. :slight_smile:

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2000s Wifi was a nightmare until NDISWrapper came along. Some didn’t like it, but I never had an issue with it.

For me it was the late 90s. Windows ME crashing continually until I got so fed up I went back to the shop I bought it from, demanded a refund and went looking for anything else… bought a copy of Red Hat. It was a choice between Red Hat and SuSE. Coming home excited to install this new operating system. Installed said operating system. Nothing worked. Reading the manual. “I have to compi… what now?” Then having to go round to my friends place with a bunch of blank single burn CDs and download all the individual driver sources for the hardware in my PC (Pretty sure it was AMD K6-2 system), go back to my house, copy all the source over, install all the development libraries, compile all the drivers… an absolute nightmare, but I learned a lot.

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In my native language there is a saying, “it is a dog who bites his own tail”. There isn’t cheap “linux” consumer hardware on the shelves so people don’t see it as an option, resellers don’t provide cheap “linux” consumer hardware because there isn’t a market big enough for it. To break the loop an intervention from above/outside is needed, like a law that forces resellers to provide hardware without pre-installed software and/or to provide the software on customer request.

I give an easy example: I went to a local hardware shop and asked the employee there for a printer that would be “linux” compatible. The guy looked at me like the question made no sense, outlandish. Not because all the printers there worked with “linux” but because nobody ever asked that question. So I grabbed the cheapest one from a pile.

If I had a more challenging environment to deal with, like a workplace with lots of different hardware, probably I would be forced to Windows only because of the unecessary complications.

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I am pretty sure you completely missed the point of the OP’s thread xD.

That being said, what you said might have made more sense 10 years ago. Nowadays, half of today’s kids don’t even know what a ‘printer’ is. The desktop market is stagnating and/or becoming niche, and everybody uses Linux without even realizing it (Android phones, smart TVs, STBs, sound systems, Wi-Fi routers, …) xD.

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Spending hours troubleshooting a previously-working vfio-pci setup from my last computer, before realizing that my motherboard has a firmware bug and my GPU will never connect to the VM properly.

I finally brought out the old computer to test on again and sure enough Windows XP saw the handed-over GTS 250 exposed from Linux on the first try.

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I saw whatever caused GNOME log-in to be inconsistent F38/39 come to openSUSE TW and Ubuntu shortly later in updates.

I gained FreeBSD experience and learned I can do similar scripting on Windows, so I guess it worked out :stuck_out_tongue:

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The point is “linux” is unconvenient. I don’t care what kids do in their bed rooms but as soon as they want a job I bet they must learn what a printer is and deal with cables.