I’ve found that the silliest desktop problems are usually the hardest to solve, and the “serious” linux system errors are the easiest.
System doesn’t boot? Look at error message, boot from a rescue disk, mount root filesystem and fix what you did wrong.
Wrong mouse cursor theme in some Plasma applications, ignoring your settings? Some weird font rendering issue? Bang your head against a wall exploring various dotfiles and rc files in your home directory for two weeks, and eventually give up and nuke your profile and reconfigure your whole desktop from scratch.
I laughed so hard reading your comment. I totally agree.
Btw, QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR set to 0 breaks your Qt apps.
A couple of weeks ago I moved Firefox to one side. Window disappeared, but Firefox was still running “somewhere” on my desktop, but was not actually be rendered to the screen. Killing the process and relaunching just resulted in it be rendered to this weird black hole. Log out of gnome and log back in? Same! Reboot? Same!
Ended up deleting it’s config folder and re-attaching to Firefox sync in order to have it working again. No idea what went wrong, nor will I ever most likely.
There really should be a hotkey for “move window to primary display” or somesuch. The worst is when just the top “cleat” of the window is inaccessible, making it impossible to simply move the window yourself.
Alternately, a CLI tool to just trash a specific app’s window settings, or a system control panel that lets you browse these settings, would be incredible.
Hold down meta and you can drag the window from anywhere (on gnome at least thats a default)
In every GUI I’ve used, there are tiling or snapping hotkeys, something like Super + Arrow keys or something, that will usually put the window somewhere sane.
I feel like i had a disappearing window like that a lifetime ago and the fix was to change the resolution. I don’t know if that uncovered the void to the right or forced the window to reassign itself to usable space. But it worked then. Hell, it could have been windows for all I recall.
Yeah for some reason a single game ignores the system sound settings and goes straight to a line out. My system doesn’t see that the game is outputting sound and I can’t change it. (Arch with KDE)
Somewhat related on windows 11, for some reason teams volume will desync from system volume. I’ll put system volume to 0 and still be hearing teams. It’s the same audio device being selected. I don’t understand why it would ever work that way but here we are
Oh my god, you’ve put it into (really nice) words something I’ve felt since quite some time now. I’ve no trouble (in fact even joy) when something major is fucked up. But all this GUI shenanigans, I’ve usually no idea where to even begin. The lack of structure and hierarchy completely flummoxes me. Or maybe I just don’t have enough experience debugging userland stuff
Not fixed but there is an Arch problem that is and will always be the bane of mi existence.
For some reason when I click with the trackpad buttons the touchpad gets frozen for like a second (it’s like they are recognised by the system as keyboard buttons, I have enabled that option to temporarily disable it when using keyboard).
I’ve checked for hours and days the libinput documentation and some synaptics libraries, even legacy ones. It is to this day the only problem that has lead me to reinstall my system but the problem remains.
It’s not even like I have some niche setup, I mean, surely there must be thousands of Arch users running with a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7, and surely not every single one of them must be running it like this, right?
It has come to a point where I just gave up and got used to my system as is, but I’m sure I would be running fanfare if some day I am able to fix it.
I once broke my Ubuntu install by trying to convert it KDE Neon, that reinstalled half my packages and left it in an basically unusable state. I then un-broke the install while upgrading multiple Ubuntu releases, that reinstalled the other half as well. It actually worked, and I’m still using that install.
I screwed up permissions on an LXC container in Proxmox by converting it from unprivileged to privileged (against recommendations) and had to mount it offline and write a script with
findintochownvia the execute flag to change all the UIDs and GIDs from the shifted unprivileged ones to the standard host-level ones.Luckily this was in my own lab so it was a (mostly) harmless learning experience.
I have had an issue for years that I couldn’t pinpoint to a root cause (I’m strongly inclined to think it’s a kernel issue). I bought a CM Storm Quickfire TK keyboard with ABNT2 layout.
The issue is: every time I try to type any key that is not a letter or number one, the computer freezes for a full ten seconds before acknowledge the press and showing the character. Tried a bunch of Linux distros through the years and the issue persists. On Windows it works flawlessly.
Just give up trying to debug the problem, but I still have this hole in my heart where the cause of this issue lives.
If the keyboard has the same problem in multiple distros, surely the problem lives in the keyboard? Maybe you had a bad one.
Why does it work in Windows though?
This will feel extremely simple for some folks, but I was having a hell of a time getting Steam games that had previously worked through Proton running. I scoured the internet for solutions after trying to install proton-ge and testing multiple versions. Eventually someone had the galaxy brain idea to suggest installing WINE. For some reason, that fixed the problem real good.
I installed nixos on my laptop. That was four weeks ago. I am still configuring it.
It’s been a long time but generally network issues and reinstalling bootloaders or kernels. Fairly easy if you can chroot.
Full kernel corruption after a botched sudo full-upgrade.
I got the wonderful “bailing out you are on your own” shit as well.
Read a guide online about a hail mary ext file system journal recovery protocol, I ran it, like most things without reading too deeply.
Kernel was successfully repaired, Kubuntu kept on truckin’
Full kernel corruption
What does that even mean?
Was the file system on which your kernel resided corrupt, or did something go wrong with a kernel upgrade/installation?
What is this “bailing out you are on your own” shit ?
An error message you can get if you really manage to mess things up. I got it once a few years ago.
It’s not the biggest issue I managed to fix, but it was definitely the hardest to figure out a fix for:
Whenever I would boot up any game on my Linux machine I would have microstutters ever so often, and it was frequent and lengthy enough to be very annoying, and thus started my 2 month long quest to figure out what was going wrong.
To cut a long story short, the compositor I was using had suddenly decided to do a breaking update and change the names of the backends they were using.
At some point I’ve installed rust implementation of the coreutils from the AUR, they worked for a long while until some ssl vulnerability were discovered and everyone had to update the library. As you can imagine, without working coreutils system were hard to use. troubleshooting were also a pain in the ass because who could blame coreutils of all things? :P
I had to fix so many booting problems using live usb, grub, xorg, login managers, they’are all difficult
Back in the day, I upgraded a Slackware install from kernel 1.3 to 2.0. That was a fucking adventure.
You probably remember the libc5 to glibc swap. Bad times to DIY distros.
Yep. I remember at the time I saw a lot of advice saying “you know you might want to seriously consider just installing your distro from scratch with a newer version.” Tracking down all of the dependencies (some of which had to be installed as binaries) was a very manual process.
Edit: Oh and another fun aspect of that time period was that since downloads were so slow on a modem, if you wanted a newer version or to try out another distro, you would go and order a cdrom from a place like Walnut Creek.
Getting WiFi to work in 2003
NDISWrapper: we’re just gonna trick the Windows driver into thinking it’s running on Windows and intercept the system calls.
That was certainly an era.
God what a nightmare that was
For me, it was getting WiFi to work in 2023
That not a thing on Linux?
SFC /Scannow on Windows
so called free-thinking Microsoft help lines when presented with any problem whatsoever
Well, the command was designed to fix the most common Windows problems like corrupted files and weird settings. So of course help lines are going to ask to run it. It was made to automatically fix problems.
It also works amazingly well.
