Spend time setting up Hyprland just for an update to break your config and now you have to troubleshoot before you can be productive
16d 2h ago by lemmy.world/u/cannedtuna in linuxmemes
I'm not a computer guy. I'm a bicycle guy.
I build them up myself, buy cheap ones on ebay to fix and modify, know basically all there is to know about stem standards, drivetrain compatibility, etc.
I currently have 6 non-functional bikes in my garage.
The key is to call them all "pet projects" that are "still being worked on" and then not do anything with them for another month.
(Engineering/Tech guy here)
just a month?
Renew as needed :)
I just bought my fourth oneplus 6 phone. Two are non functional. Maybe this will be the one where I finally get linux running on my phone lol
I also have four non functional bikes
Hey, I am also trying to get OnePlus 6 for that purpose.
Or N900 for shits and giggles.
you can get em new in the box on ebay. the used ones can be sketch.
eBay is pretty useless where I am. At least with their filtering. If only they included shipping in price filter.
Otherwise, the average item is along the lines of $5 + $50 shipping.
yeah these ship from china so whatever that costs where you are.
Yeah, they are either shipped accross the world or some scumbag that tries to make easy money (ebay don't tax you on the money for the shipping)
I've seen "my other car is 10 motorcycles that don't run" stickers before and I felt personally attacked
Me but with cameras. I have 2, maybe 3 working ones. Lots and lots of bits of others.
N+1
Any functional bikes tho? [or should I guess lol]
Yes, 1.
Do you have at least one functioning one?
And also
Btw, downloading a CD (.iso) on the phone to boot it, because your Linux broke while you had no bootable thumbdrive around. Is something a lot of people here did sometime.
PSA: get a cheap thumb drive and install ventoy. You'll never regret it!
Plus you can technically still use it to store files if you make a directory in the ventoy dump partition.
I keep memtest86+, clonezilla, Ubuntu 24.04lts, gparted, and boot-repair on the drive.
maybe not ventoy specifically since it's full of binary blobs that are virtually unvettable
Eh, good enough. Your Linux install also has binary blobs.
That's a terrible reason to introduce even more.
I've got a binary blob right here 🥵
my blob is non binary
Yeah, I need to find a better way. Been trying to setup pxe boot in docker
Always been partial to this one
I never even thought of that - you then plug in your phone as a thumb drive? Makes sense.
I mean I'm not sure I could actually boot off of my phone as a USB drive. That would be an interesting concept.
Unlikely. The USB protocol requires one master and one or more slaves (or whatever less charged nomenclature you prefer). In all likelihood UEFI will blindly assume to be the master while Android and iOS require negotiation to figure out who's boss and what interface to present.
Although given UEFI it might be possible to patch that functionality in.
The USB protocol and UEFI aren't a problem, but Android/iOS might be. I've booted various PCs from a raspberry pi (USB-OTG), but the last time I tried to boot an iso from my android phone I couldn't get it to work. It's been a while so I can't remember exactly what the issue was.
My guess the issue is that phones don't just show up as simple drives, they rely on MTP support
That's what I was referring to with "which interface to present."
The problem isn't on the PC side, though. It's on the side of the device that has to choose between host or device. The PC is always a host, so special support in UEFI isn't needed.
Yeah, that sounds right.
i had this feature when i installed ubports (ubuntu touch) on my phone in 2021.
much before that in 2013 my phone's stock rom had a 'driver install' mode that presents an iso file in the system partition to the computer as a virtual cdrom, i could swap out that file with a linux iso and it would boot
It does, though with an app that exposes the iso.
Edit: Right, i thought it was EtchDroid. I think it was DriveDroid (with a broken cert)? There's also SimpleBoot now.
That looks like a program that is using your phone to write an ISO to a USB using your phone, not using your phone as a bootable source. But, still useful.
Edited, thanks.
There's a tool, whose name I forget, which is included in Kali NetHunter to do just that. It does whatever trickery is needed to present the phone/tablet as a bootable thumb drive. It requires root and, to my dismay when I needed it, I never owned a device that was rootable to fully use NetHunter. It could do a lot of other cool stuff via USB too; phone as a Bad USB, Rubber Ducky, automated Windows login bypasses, etc.
Been there, done that
I had that exact situation but simply went to the library to fix it. Modern phones scare me.
Just a couple days ago I needed a microsd to usb adapter. Couldn't find one, so I loaded the files to a memory with fat usb(I don't know what it's called) and usb c connections. Then connected the memory to my phone and on my phone I moved the files to the microsd card.
Not the same but similar vibes I think.
It's sad that several phones are removing the memory slot.
Fat USB is called USB A. The one you use for printers is USB B. Then there are mini-A, mini-B, micro-A, micro-B and USB 3.0 micro-B which are all different shapes physically. And USB A 3.0 has slightly different contacts from USB A 1.0/2.0
Anyway, that was when USB nomenclature was still simple. Don't google anything they did past version 3.0, for your own sanity. We're now down to mostly the USB C and A shapes, but USB 3.2 gen 1x1 is the same thing as USB 3.1 gen 1 is the same thing as USB 3.0.
USB 4 simplified things a bit, but now you can get things like Gen 4 asymmetric 3:1
What have we done...
It seems we need a new standard to prevent all this confusion....
Yes, "wantonly" is spelled correctly here. I looked at it and immediately it felt wrong so this is for any like me who's only ever heard it said.
Also, broke my Codium install today, no idea how but it won't load debug values now, woo.
Ngl I always assumed it had a racist origin
Surprisingly wanton and wonton are completely unrelated. Wanton comes from middle english wantowen, which is the prefix wan- (meaning ‘not’) and towen (meaning ‘educated’). So it literally means ‘uneducated’ or ‘undisciplined’.
Wantonly sounds like a place, like Wantonly Michigan or something like that.
I suppose they could rename Hell
But what will Hell be known for then?
Regularly freezing over?
My computer configuration is best described as a construction of duct tape and chewing gum holding a house of cards in place
Tbh my server is getting a bit that way too, which is slightly more concerning
If you water cool it you can call yourself a plumber too
So you're running McGyver-OS?
I have two live hdds resting on high density foam on top of my server. Will be three soon. I really should get a bigger case...
My partner would text me 'what did you do' when I had a day off and audiobookshelf stopped working. This is why I only tinker after midnight
Yeah… ive been meaning to get audiobookshelf setup, but it looked like a pain so it’s been sitting there untouched. That along with needing to migrate from Plex to Jellyfin, my projects pile up.
ABS is actually quite easy if you already have a library for audiobooks on Plex
Just install ABS on the same box and point it at the same folder and it will do most of the rest itself
Remote access is a bit of a pain though. I'm using tailscale for it. I wish there was a better, more universal (also free) 2fa solution out there but it just doesn't exist.
ABS is actually quite easy
Well yeah, you just depress the brake pedal
What? He is obviously talking about a broken piece of ABS plastic.
Does mTLS work with ABS? That's how I control access to many of my "exposed" services.
I got it up and running in about 10 minutes just yesterday, but that's probably because I had already spent a couple of days learning how to use quadlets and getting my remote access scheme figured out.
I just set it up with my Docker setup. Point it at the appropriate volumes and it pretty much goes. GUI tools for Docker help. I like Dockge.
Even with docker, things can get complicated. Like if you use *arr stack for your plex library, but you manually copied in some extra subtitle files, or tweaked the descriptions of some media. Now you have to find those customizations so you can migrate them to the jellyfin library
I also wait until my partner is asleep. It still doesn't make me 100% safe from the 'what did you do' texts, because sometimes I break things that I don't think to check. Worse, sometimes I break something so bad that I stay up until 6am trying to fix it, only to cook my brain and pass out without fully repairing what went wrong.
But it's still better than doing it during the day.
I only do networking after midnight. I have pulled 4+ hrs after breaking the network more than once.
This is me last Friday. Wanted SSO passkey so bad I pulled an all-nighter to make it work between 3 different machines.
I love passkey so I adamant on Pocket ID. End up hammering on it till 3AM with no success in sight, turns-out nothing is wrong with anything config-wise. I just wasn't aware the bridge network you create didn't enable ipv6 by default. Passed out at 5AM lol.
Now my sistet can't complaint about so many password to manage.
End up canceling going out with friends Saturday night cuz I was already sleeping soundly at 8 PM.
I haven't tried passkeys, I honestly probably have too many apps that don't support it. Hell I get annoyed by apps that don't have ldap integration. Looking at you paperless-ngx.
many apps that don't support it.
Yeah, that is one thing making it harder. I use traefik-forward-auth/tiny Auth for that and honestly I still can't make some apps work properly.
But at least the most used one are in place now and seems fine UX-wise (JF, vaultwarden, navidrome and frigate).
I'm doing this just because I want to stop relying on CF tunnel and just use my public ipv6, but I don't think I'm ready security-wise.
And cf tunnel and other overlay network solution like Tailscale have a penalty on performance for me because their closest server are on the neighboring country.
Sounds like a very similar situation to car mechanics
Except it doesn't hurt your back as much to fix.
Depends on if you've got a good chair.
There's the German saying, that the shoemaker always has the worst shoes.
Is Spain we say that the blacksmith uses wooden spoons.
Wouldn't that mean something else?
The saying literally translates to "in the house of a blacksmith there are wooden spoons". In Poland we say "the shoemaker walks in shoes with holes". They all just means that people who build things as their job don't have the time to build those things for themselves.
But why doesn't the blacksmith have spoons which are bent or something. Blacksmith using wooden spoons sound to me like a technician that doesn't use tech in his private life.
It just means he uses cheaper spoons made by someone else, not fancy metal spoons.
In America we say "never buy a mechanic's car."
I am a computer person. My philosophy is probably a common one, if it works don’t touch it.
I am an Arch user. My philosophy is probably just as common: if it works, I must fuck with it
The truthest truth, but also the hardest one to follow
It's a common philosophy practiced by everyone that says, "yeah, I probably shouldn't mess with this, it is working fine right now, but ... Maybe ...."
Well, we profess to follow it at least.
- We tried setting up hyprland with Arch
- Used an older guide, updated and translated it to the newest standard, learning about the unique scripting
- Get almost everything working
- Actually loved the feel of the ui and did get used to using terminal for almost everything
- Things started falling apart
- Steam started fucking up, everything was going horrible.
- joined the support discord, found problem doing good over more :)
- Update? Oo oki!
- Hyprland: hmm nice fully custom set up you have here, would be a shame if someone were to change all the ui script you literally just learned :)
- :(
- Back on KDE + Cachy OS as we didn’t want to fight with our computer anymore, it’s good, great even, but… missing the window management of Hyprland now.
- Don’t get us wrong, we’re very happy with KDE! It’s just… that window management 🥺
- if only we could get that in KDE
I like Niri a lot. Plus the maintainer isn't an asshole.
Haven’t heard of Niri, what’s that one all about?
It's a column-based tiling window manager, with scrolling!
That's why sway and river exist. They're actually stable.
Sway still struggling with screensharing (specifically window sharing) tho or atleast it was last time I yried it in february :(
Sway 1.12, released last week, added support for capturing individual windows.
Yay it worked, still not usable for me tho, since XWayland fucks up too many applications I need and moving windows with my mod key + left mouse does not count as a single input which then opens rofi which is bound to mod qq
I had that issue with the mod key launcher too, but instead of looking up a proper fix I turned my Capslock key into my launcher lol
For river, I had to do some kind of fix. I'll talk about it later. Reply if I forget.
Haven’t heard of them before tbh, from the replies Sway not be super stable. And river?
I have my (edit: RIVER) config for over a year and it's very reliable. It never broke on me apart from the misconfigurations which were my fault.
It also integrates well with Waybar and is compatible with other Wayland tools for wlroots.
But keep in mind that my config is relatively minimal.
Hyprland is cancer by cancer
This is why you keep 2 computers. One that is dull and as stock as you can. And then you have that beater box to get stupid with. Drive the sum biotch right into that kernal panic at 100mph just for fun.
So therapeutic some days......
Mac and a half a dozen server homelab. Plex was a homelab test that’s now “prod” (family won’t let me shut it off) so it’s in the prod environment outside of my homelab
My Mac is supposed to be the safe box too. I keep having to talk myself down from installing Asahi.
You and me both.
Haha I have an older m1 I’m about to put asahi on. Going to use it for small models
A good excuse to get another cheap box to crash and burn!
Any excuse to hoard more hardware these days
I feel this one
That's not how it works.
- Okay, let's read a chapter of this book about Software Design.
- I need to take notes
- Ugh, it sucks that I have to do three steps to open them
- Let's write a short fish script
- Actually is there a more elegant note taking app
- Research
- Setting up the most over engineered zettelkasten solution
- It's time for bed, you have two broken note taking apps, but still an open to do to read a chapter of that book
If you think that is a true story, you are absolutely right.
I feel seen.
Me too. Interest in comuters combined with ADHD leads to interesting side quests sometimes. They might not end up being productive, but I often learn a few things along the way.
That's continuing the tradition leve stuff right there.
Fastest I ever got a kernel panic was ~50mph. There are photos.
Nice!
Not as nice as you'd think. I was in a train crash.
my linux honeymoon has far gone. nowadays I just use fedora gnome and actually work on something that makes money.
This really is the journey, isn't it?
Tinkering is fun when your actual goal is to tinker.
But when your goal is to get work done then the machine is just a tool, and there is nothing more frustrating than a broken tool.
I'm still tinkering but insofar to keep myself from doing anything else with my computer, I got shit to do.
my linux honeymoon has far gone.
Reminded me of:
In the spring, we climbed the rolling hills
And talked about our budding plans
And we smiled
Our faces like a mirror showing us our secret sides
But then the fights, the sharp words splintering the night
How I couldn't be what you'd need
But oh how I could make you bleed
I tried to get on the Window Manager hype train — I know it is productive and shit and much more efficient than traditional desktops — but dropped it because it just needs to be configured endlessly and yet I still end up using the mouse when I am just laid back on my chair eating a banana. Installed KDE Plasma and stuck with it ever since. Everything doesn’t need to be text files and command line. A bit of user friendly GUI in life doesn’t hurt.
No shame in that. I love sway/i3 because it force me to keep my screen tidy, but you are right that it takes time to get a decent config file.
Not everything has to be a poweruser wet dream and most Linux distro allows you to do 95% of the stuff you need through the GUI, so more power to you to customize your experience.
That would be true if the GUI worked correctly.
However, more often than not, some inner thing breaks, which means that the GUI just throws an error screen and tells you "good luck". So you have to search for that text in Google, and it will send you to an obscure forum where a guy said in 2014 that the solution for that problem is to run some random command in the terminal.
For example the "app store" GUI for Kubuntu never worked for me. It always stalls at some point or another. Meanwhile, running sudo apt upgrade worked flawlessly. Both operations should be doing the exact same thing under the hood.
Two times already, a relative that uses Manjaro but has no idea about Linux came to me for help because the "app store GUI" (which is a different one than in KDE) one day stopped working. The issue was to run some random key-relayed command.
Years later, I found out that apparently the Manjaro maintainers let their certificates expire MORE THAN ONCE. Which has to be fixed manually by the end user apparently. And they apparently didn't think of adding a notification in the GUI telling you about this. Which is bonkers. Not everyone reads all the news articles relating to their OS.
That would be true if the GUI worked correctly.
The GUI works correctly for the vast majority of the time.
And MacOS and Windows also have GUI bugs, but we are so used to using these OSes that we know the workarounds.
The difference with Linux is that depending on your desktop environment, you will have to learn a new workflow. On Windows and MacOS, you one desktop environment and that's it.
However, more often than not, some inner thing breaks, which means that the GUI just throws an error screen and tells you "good luck". So you have to search for that text in Google, and it will send you to an obscure forum where a guy said in 2014 that the solution for that problem is to run some random command in the terminal.
Happens with Windows too where you get an error code and then you have to registry entries to fix a bug. Again, same kind of issues with a different workflow.
For example the "app store" GUI for Kubuntu never worked for me. It always stalls at some point or another. Meanwhile, running
sudo apt upgradeworked flawlessly. Both operations should be doing the exact same thing under the hood
I've had lots of issues with Windows store where a software wouldn't install correctly and I had no way to install what I needed to. At least, with Linux, you have multiple way to install a software. The app store is just a GUI over the package manager.
Two times already, a relative that uses Manjaro but has no idea about Linux came to me for help because the "app store GUI" (which is a different one than in KDE) one day stopped working. The issue was to run some random key-relayed command.
I do the IT for work (small company, 4 employees) and the number of time I had to un-break something in Windows for no apparent reason is high. Bugs happen in any OS. Linux is no different.
Years later, I found out that apparently the Manjaro maintainers let their certificates expire MORE THAN ONCE. Which has to be fixed manually by the end user apparently. And they apparently didn't think of adding a notification in the GUI telling you about this. Which is bonkers. Not everyone reads all the news articles relating to their OS.
That's dumb and I agree with you, but that's not a Linux issue though, that's a Manjaro maintainers issue.
Most issues are a maintainers issue. Rarely is the issue in Linux itself. Most of the issues are in userland.
Yes. All OS have bugs, and yes, we are used to doing workarounds for windows too. But most of the time, that workaround is fishing for a setting in an obscure menu with a Windows7 UI. But it is still a GUI. If you read the labels of the buttons you can navigate the menus to reach the button you want to press.
I have never ever had to edit the registry to fix an issue. I have maybe edited the registry 10 times in my whole life, most of the time it was to customize beyond what the GUI offers, not to fix a bug. That's on my PC, I don't work in IT for a company. Maybe company management requires more extensive use of the registry.
The whole point of my comment is not that Linux breaks constantly while windows doesn't. Of course it's going to break more often, since there is an uncountable different Linux configurations, it's incredibly more complex than having 2-3 versions of windows to maintain.
The point is that you can fix most issues on windows with the GUI, while on Linux you have to use the terminal most of the times.
We also know those windows workarounds because GUIs are way more discoverable than terminal commands.
GUIs act like trees. If you don't care about the "personalization" branch of the menus, you just don't click on it.
Terminals act like lists. You do ls /usr/bin you'll just get shown hundreds of binaries. Which are not categorized in any way. Only when you know which binary solves your issue you can read the man and get something that hopefully resembles a tree, with headings of different levels.
I have never ever had to edit the registry to fix an issue. I have maybe edited the registry 10 times in my whole life, most of the time it was to customize beyond what the GUI offers, not to fix a bug. That's on my PC, I don't work in IT for a company. Maybe company management requires more extensive use of the registry.
I have edited the registry a lot when I last used Windows when I used it last a few years ago, and even had to do it for the other employees while maintaining their PC.
The whole point of my comment is not that Linux breaks constantly while windows doesn't. Of course it's going to break more often, since there is an uncountable different Linux configurations, it's incredibly more complex than having 2-3 versions of windows to maintain.
The point is that you can fix most issues on windows with the GUI, while on Linux you have to use the terminal most of the times.
And you can do the same with the GUI on Linux. However, since the GUI is mostly just a wrapper around Linux CLI cmds, it's a lot faster to fix issues from the terminal.
Linux was used mostly by power users a few years ago, and they tend to use the CLI a lot more. Thus the knowledge they have and share is the one they know, the CLI. Hell, when I have to use Windows, I will use thr CLI unless I absolutely have to use the GUI.
And that's the knowledge that is usually shared because regardless of which distro/desktop environment you use, the CLI is consistent across the distro.
But Linux has come a long way and many issues can be corrected through the GUI
When I used to work at Microsoft I had an uncanny knack for making installs not work. Things that just simply worked for other people would die with errors and bluescreens. I started to think I emitted a weird bioelectric field or something. But this only happened at that company, and strangely only when I worked on the premises.
I don't know if it's been studied, but anecdotally, I've known a few such "bug attractors." As a software engineer, I am blessed that I know people that will turn my work into ashes in a matter of mere seconds - it's amazing.
If you really do have a knack for making computer software fail, a viable career in QA awaits you.
lol, as if anyone pays for QA anymore.
Strangely my knack seemed limited to making installs fail. I actually wrote some test automation software, including a language for specifying tests.
Ages ago in my help desk days, we had a remote user brick at least 3 laptops and 3 PocketPCs. They were fully dead, would not power on with different batteries/chargers. She used different outlets each time both in her house and at coffee shops. She left the company shortly after and I got promoted out of the role so I never figured out what happened.
I'm tellin' ya. It's a gift.
Sounds like a superpower to me. You haven't been around GitHub lately, have you? :)
Nah haven't worked there since 2005.
It is a gift! I have the same gift for printers. I enter a room with a printer and the printer decides to spontaneously combust (or at least the software equivalent of this). Weird aura? Maybe they feel my hate...
That reminds me of a job I had many years ago, where this big printer kept jamming and stopping. Whenever the inhouse support tech showed up it would start working. One time it unjammed and resumed printing when he walked into the computer room. Another time he was out front talking to the manager right after getting there, and we heard it start up. He could never get there when it wasn't working, to diagnose the problem. So finally he brought in a wallet size high-school photo of himself and taped it to the inside of the printer cover, so his face was looking at the print head. I swear on everything holy, that machine never glitched out again!
Creative problem solving! Printers are really wild.
I still remember the time I managed to unwillingly run two DE at the same time simultaneously. The screen was refreshing between gnome and kde at 50Hz. It was tripping.
These are the "I don't have epilepsy but I sure as hell don't want to find out right now that I have it" moments.
Gentoo Linux user here. Sometimes when I open my laptop's lid, the hard drive disconnects
you get that feature for free?
It comes with the price of tons of compile time for everything
No joke, I was getting tired of the constant breaking changes in Hyprland, so when I learned about the Lua update I just said fuck it and moved to Sway.
I wanted the "Debian Stable" of Wayland WMs and figured Sway was it.
I feel the same way about sway. This being said Niri + Noctalia is a really powerful stable setup (in my experience) that gives you all the fancy effects.
There is even a setup wizard so you don’t need to mess with config files as much.
Sway also uses less ram than both hyprland AND i3.
At least for me, Linux people are never content with their system.
There's always something new to try...
That's the fun of Linux : you can customize your experience instead of having to put up with Microsoft or Apple.
You choose a distribution that fits your preferences.
Time to flip a coin for KDE or Hyprland edition...
Might be worth doing a bit of research on the associations surrounding Hyprland https://drewdevault.com/blog/Hyprland-toxicity/
Just don't donate and disable the nag, it doesn't really matter, he gains nothing from you if you do this.
I'm afraid this is coming from Drew Devault
I keep spare computers around just in case I break something but still need to be productive
Two is one, and one is none
How many is a dozen?
I can't count that high
same, but at some point it feels like i have far too many. lol
First time using hyprland with cachyos: wow it's so productive, I love it!
After one month I log in after a yay and everything is broken. I waste a full day adapting the config from 0.44 to 0.45. Wow that was worth, I love it.
Another month passes, and again it's broken to 0.50
I just gave up
Can't they just put a discontinuation warning for a couple releases to let people adapt their config instead of suddenly having the surprise of booting to a broken wm?
Maybe try an atomic distro? It'll still break but you can roll back and deal with it later.
it's not really broken-broken to be unusable, just all the window management rules syntax that changed suddenly and you need to read 24 pages of documentation to guess what's changed and adapt the config.
honestly, after dealing with this 3 times in 3 months, i am no longer interested in this wm.
It's like if your friend rearranges your living room for pure fun when you come back tired from work. Funny prank done once in a lifetime, remove from existence the third time.
I don't want to fault you, I just want to point out that Hyprland is in version 0.x. It's essentially in development. Expecting software in alpha phase to be backwards compatible is a bit unrealistic :) If you enjoyed it that much, come back to it in a few years once it comes out of development phase (if ever...)
welcome to life as an AwesomeWM user. After a normal system upgrade -- oh look my Lua version is incompatible with the libraries I need, guess I need to build them from scratch and tell my WM to use them
This is precisely why I use NixOS. I have almost my entire configuration as "code" (data structures more like, but what's the difference any way?), such that when I break something, I can just undo my commits and go back to a working version (and the OS itself retrains several snapshots, so I can always pick the previous one.
And with LLMs the bar to do things, with my nix configuration (nixcfg), has lowered to the ground. Throw in a few videos from Vimjoyer and you got a stew going.
Urge to distro hop again…rising…
I've hopped from HoloISO to Nobora and EndeavourOS to OpenSUSE. Landed on NixOS on all my machines now and it's perfect. There's a bit of a learning curve even compared to other distros but once it clicks, you wonder why you weren't using it earlier.
Sorry to divert from the topic but
I have almost my entire configuration as "code" (data structures more like, but what's the difference any way?)
This is the first time I've seen someone make this distinction.
Configuration files are specifications, not code. Code means it needs to be compiled/interpreted.
To get started: Install NixOS, grab your /etc/nix/configuration.nix, and /etc/nix/hardware-configuration.nix (from the top of my head) and throw them in a git repo. nix-shell -p <application> if you quickly need a shell with a specific (temporary) program, like git (just for bootstrapping; add git to the configuration.nix if you wish to keep it.
Start with that, and slowly keep adding programs, configuration. If you eventually wish to add a second computer to the one configuration (so you can start reusing configuration), do that. Keep steps small.
Here you can dig through each step I take in my nixcfg - I started with just the configuration.nix, and share that between machines, but it turns out you're supposed to add the hardware-conguration.nix to the repo as well, so then I started to do that (with still a shared configuration.nix. Well, partially:
Read nixstory.md if you want to see a quick LLM-generated history of how my repo changed over time (based on my git history).
So it's kinda like klipper/mainsail but for an operating system?
In the sense that klipper does everything through configuration files: yes.
I've jumped in Nix/Guix many times and always jumped back out. Sometimes you just want to edit a system file without second guessing or rebuilding the system. Same battle as initRC vs SystemD. Sometimes you just want to tinker live, because there are bigger battles elsewhere and going down a productivity sink hole of immutability is not something you can easily explain away at 3am
I learned last week, after over 30 years of assembling my own computers, that there are (at least) two types of modular power cables for SATA drives. The way I learned this was to grab a cable that fit between my power supply, two hard drives, and a DVD burner, and turned my computer on. In the past, in my experience, if the cable had the right connectors, it would work. Apparently, there is no standardization for the power side pin-out, and some manufacturers (Corsair, at least) wired that end differently for some cables, and using the wrong cable will blow up any drive attached.
Or something like that, I dunno, I was too mad to look into it any further. Fortunately, I didn't lose anything irreplaceable, so all it cost me is money and embarrassment.
afaik there is no 'standard' for modular power supply cables. you have to make sure the ones you're using are for the specific psu you're using, and that can even vary between models from the same manufacturer.
Corsair specifically has type 4, type 5, etc so yea even the same brand’s cables aren’t safe to use across PSUs
I read about that a couple of years ago, I am speechless that such a thing is even allowed to exist.
As bad as proliferation of standards is, the only thing worse is no standard at all. That's how we got that. Everybody just did whatever they wanted.
Yup. My Arch+LUKS+KDE setup freezes on first boot half of the time and I can't be bothered to keep trying to fix it because it takes less than 5 minutes of my time per day and I run backups of the important stuff once or twice a week, and I'll likely distrohop within the next 12 months. Worst case scenario, I wipe the whole thing, archinstall from scratch, and restore from backup.
(well, worst case that doesn't result in physical/BIOS damage...)
Gentoo has the stability you seek
arch is perfectly stable, who knows what OP's issue is caused by, idk why you felt the need to suggest gentoo
No it's not. I've got arch up right now. I ran it for years. It's far from Debian. Packages are super new and plentiful
i've not had a problem with arch breaking due to updates for years - that's what I mean when I say stable, that's what really matters... op never mentioned that they even wanted stability, you just injected gentoo into this for no reason lol
Yeah... I don't think that's the right distro for me from what I heard of its complexity. Even manually-installed Arch is a stretch. I'm more likely to move to something like Kubuntu or openSUSE.
It is the most involved to setup. Suse has been doing surprisingly well though
Mine times out sometimes during boot due to an encrypted volume, but there seem to be no problems beyond that. Also I assume that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't switched to homed without need.
All in all I don't think I had any non-self-inflicted issues, and apart from this one, I fixed the rest within a day each.
i would just un-update it and only update when im ready to tweak the config
And this is my argument against auto update.
Auto update means stuff breaks when I'm not looking.
Better to have a managed update process where I sit down, do an update, verify things work.
I get business has a different risk model that drives auto update there. Tens/hundreds/thousands of machines represent a massive risk canvas, and support for things not working is already baked into IT services.
I do (most) of my autoupdates on Sunday at 4am, that way if things break it happens on an expected schedule. My manual updates like proxmox too, once I'm awake. Game servers are daily though, since stuff can break if client/server aren't on the same version.
I had Vaultwarden push an update a couple of years ago that broke it, and I had daily autoupdates on (watchtower) so for an hour I was panicking about what happened. That's how I switched to my mostly-weekly system, with critical vulnerability updates done manually on release.
Oh, well you see with Vaultwarden what you do is just don't update it until you're forced to because the clients stop being able to talk to it. ;)
@cannedtuna <laughs in nixos>
Lol just upgraded to 26.05 today, surprisingly smooth! This time...
I had to fix 3 errors in Hyprland and a warning in Foot after updating to 26.05 yesterday. I think there was more, but at least it works now.
how is this related to NixOS? Once you upgrade your hyprland version on NixOS (which you'll have to do eventually, at least for security fixes), you have to worry about the config breaking just the same
You can rollback and take care of it later when you have time spare.
yes but the problem is having to spend time to fix it in the first place. On a more stable de/compositor like Plasma or Sway, you won't have these problems
I mean, the top level comment refers to the title and not things breaking in general where OP complained about needing to troubleshoot right now before being able to be productive. Being able to postpone troubleshooting to when you can afford it is a massive benefit exactly for this reason where you need to get things done now or just want to do something else in the moment. For the same reason my root is on a ZFS pool with 2-way mirrored vdevs and I have (non-zfs) mirrored boot set up as well. No matter which of my drives fails I can take care of it later without any impact on my productivity or loss of data. I never used hyperland but heard of it stability issues ever so vaguely and while choosing different window manager (because that's what it is to ppl) may have solved this specific issue at the cost of sacrificing preferences the expectation for your system to never break is absurd. Things will always break at some point and it can come from any direction. Being able to hande the breakage gracefully is the key part.
Nobody expects things to never break, but stability is a spectrum and clearly hyprland is less stable than the average. That's the main conclusion I got from the post at least. And less stability means more time needed to fix. Nothing you can do about that aside from switching to a different DE
@hirihit640 depends what specifically broke OP’s config and whether the same config done declaratively with nix would have kept parity with the changes instead of breaking. I am not a hyprland user and was just being silly. Feel free to tell me what the breaking change was if you know.
I believe they are talking about this: https://dev.to/cypheroxide/why-i-left-hyprland-52fd
Verycomputer?
Wantonly?
Huh?
Since this is linux memes, I am on day 10 of my work being unable to fix windows 11 (and I am not doing it for them) while I continue to use my Linux machines for everything because they just work.
Wantonly
Normal word: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wantonly,https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wantonly
Verycomputer
It said "Very Computer", which is a humoristic way of saying highly computer-savvy
The Very Computer part made me pluck at the hemispheres of my face to insure they hadn't gone numb
Just because it's in a dictionary doesn't mean it's a normal word. Wantonly is a weird word. I keep reading want-only and an very confused.
If you read it as, want-only, I could see that. But wanton-ly doesn't seem that uncommon to me.
If the dictionary isn't good enough, would it help if I demonstrate usage?
Granted, the terms "wilfully" and "maliciously" are a little more popular, but it's not that far apart either:
Thanks, I knew the term wantonly but didn't know it was spelled that way.
Thanks!
The computer thing, meh. Just say it.
And by "be productive" you mean looking at cat pictures, right?
My rack is chained up in the garage and beaten into submission. I get an alert if something is down and an alert over a week if there's an upgrade. I put those alerts on silent so i only see them when i pull the shade down on the phone.
Computers are better seen and not heard.
I'm still on XFCE + Compiz because Wayfire doesn't support global hotkeys (more of wayland's fault) nor does it have 3d windows for the cube effect.
KDE wayland has global hotkeys, so does hyprland. seems like a skill issue for Wayfire.
It was one of the dumb "kick the can to downstream because muh security & effort" things which is why support for it really only came recently: https://dec05eba.com/2024/03/29/wayland-global-hotkeys-shortcut-is-mostly-useless/
I'm sure it will eventually get better, but like all of the things wrong with wayland can be summed up as "alpha protocol subject to change plz to not use (introduced: 7 years ago)" with "Options: alpha-protocol-kde, protocol-gnome-thing, protocol-whatshouldhavebeeninweston7yearsagoyoutwat (sway), protocol-hyprland-memelol-v2"
OK unc. Most people use Wayland now while you cling to your insecure outdated and entirely unmaintained x-server speaking about alpha this and that.
Yeah have fun with your shitty triple buffer and unsupported arbitrary monitor angles lol.
about alpha this and that.
Most of wayland's features like HDR weren't implemented until literally last year. I have forum threads 3 times older than this lemmy account on how slow wayland progress was.
Wake me up when Wayfire goes stable and I'll happily switch in superior XFCE performant style.
My cousin is 30 years a mechanic. The only reason his car works at all is because he retired at 48 (#union).
Yeah my cars all have problems but I know what they are so I can fix them later. I worry more about folks driving about with a failed wheel bearing and 0 brakes that they have no clue about..
I have computer networks like that ;-)
This logic can be applied to many hobbies, frankly.
This is the greatest truth of being a computer person. Our shit is also broken, just in ways you'd never heard of.
Man I posted this and now my servers down. Looks like maybe my NVMe drive failed. Can’t catch a break.
I would regard myself as Quite Computer, not Very, and yet, have still managed to bugger my Linux box by messing with the bootloader.
No drive or USB ports recognised on boot. No way to boot from iso. Yay me.
My server went from doesn't work and I don't know why to it does work and I don't know how
making an IT professional scratch their head and go "What the.. how..?!" is almost a badge of honor.
Guys and gals, please use Niri. It has animations, blur and wayland.
Never crashed in my one year of using it.
That's why, as a computer nerd, I use a non modified Linux Mint.
Not a developer or power user but the tinkering and unstable mindset fades away as one gets older.
My computer is just a bunch of duct taped config files I’ve forgotten about waiting to be invalidated by the next update
Not when tvey run debian. shit just works, nonstop all the time
Let me introduce you to my good friend Sid.
SID is also crazy stable. The only issue I had was that once or twice xdm broke but it's because it's barely supported anymore. I'm just to stubborn to switch to gdm.
IDK if I'd say crazy stable, but it is more stable than its reputation. I rolled with it for years and the worst that would happen is an update would uninstall gdm or gnome. A few months ago Wayland just got rocked on my system and I could only get into x11 desktops. Tried to get it to work again and waited for updates but never worked. Gave up and switched to Trixie and have a much smoother experience now.
...at the price of everything moving at snail's pace
How is that a bad thing? The vulnerabilities get fixed and the distro is stable.
I've recently moved everything over to CachyOS after a Windows 10 LTSC security update failed to install multiple times.
I'm actually really surprised by how well everything works, including my nvidia GPU, microphone, and drawing tablet. The only thing that's not working rn is my Canon printer but that might be more of my own skill issue with using CUPS and CAPT and can be remedied by emailing myself a PDF and printing from my phone.
I was fully expecting to fuck my shit up forever.
EDIT: To be clear, Windows would occasionally crash on me and take forever to start back up. Linux is running much better.
I recently had trouble with a very old Canon printer, I acquired. After some attempts that even involved tracking down original driver files from 13 years ago, I realized I just had to install 'gutenprint' and then add it throuoh my KDE menu. Just works now.
Bro, it's a printer. I call them a Schrödinger printer, both dead or alive until you try to use it.. in which case it'll likely be dead. Because it's a printer. And they're shit.
Read the changelog, might take 5 minutes to fix. Don't have time? Rollback.
It's not hard
Rollback means you still have to fix it later, and often it's longer than a 5 min fix. The post is about the cost/effort of tinkering vs just using a stable system and accepting the lack of certain features
/me ((Cries in Linux Nvidia driver upgrades.))
I am hoping that you put your config in a git repository so that you can revert it.
I am also hoping that I do that, but I still don't
People who know what they are doing use snapshots and backups so this doesn't happen.
I'm too lazy to set it up. I just fix stuff when it breaks,or leave it borked until it gets in the way
This literally made me switch to niri
It turns out that everyone else doesn't have a computer at all, and their life relies entirely on computers that have been built and maintained by others.
Me. Now digging through init=/bin/bash/ to fix my non booting zimaboard. All because I lost my root password and proceeded to continue to fuck up my media server
Crying in GPU and USB kybd/mse/snd ported into a PVE-housed Nobara43 VM right now.
Hyprland the "ironically" nazi desktop?
No, that is the ruby guy
I was wrong. I have no idea what these edgelords do, but thank you for the link.
I mean I did get them confused with DHH bc of the framework debacle, I meant that link as clarification. You were right in that I was thinking of "the ruby guy" lol
Yea, I wanted to try hyprland because of a video about omarchi, but it didn't take long before I heard about DHH's ideas.
Just use i3.
My issue is all my data and hard drives and trying to keep it all backed up and running out of space and then getting more drives and going oh no now which one is backed up and which isnt ?!!
Meanwhile my friends are like "I just put all my files in g drive"
What do modern devs need more than ttys for if they're just shipping ai generated code that nobody takes the time to review properly?
This is why you have a handfull of window managers configured and ready to go, always a fallback :)
Sounds horrible. My Debian sway config shields me from such a life :)
Absolute Linuxima
The cobbler's lids have the worst shoes
I've lost count of the number of problems I've had over the years that I couldn't find a single other person having or a solution for.
That hurts
Bullshit all of my computers work, maybe this guy just sucks.
-Average linux user