What's your self-induced pain points fellow linux users

I mean, I could just patch and do some housecleaning, and maybe adjust partitions.

OR I could reinstall fucking everything from scratch because it feels good.

I host a lemmy instance.

I have a cycle that goes like this:

1. I just want a system that works. (Fedora)
2. The UNIX philosophy is cool. (OpenBSD)

Repeat every 6 months or so. I'm never happy with my current system.

I spend hours writing a bash script to automate something I know I'm only going to do once.

I store a lot of things on external media.

I also use a lot of Flatpaks.

Kill me.

I customised my keyboard layout so now when using Corporate Laptop i always type with errors

I ran out of fucks almost a decade ago, so I use basic-bitch Kubuntu and barely bother to customize it at all. (I turned on dark mode and picked a wallpaper, but that's about it.)

My self-induced pain point is that I get mildly annoyed about snaps once in a while, but not enough to be worth switching distros.

I have an HP printer

Trying to get a clean home directory by trying to get apps to follow xdg and put config files in .config.

My first Gentoo install took 3 weeks with all the reading required to do a secure boot UEFI install with a USB based key and boot configuration to ensure W10 could dual boot without problems WAY before that was easy and reliable with Anaconda on Fedora.

Now... Fedora is only writing the USB iso and like 2 clicks. It is easier and more reliable than Windows has ever been or even floppy disk DOS ever was. GNOME is a stupid simple desktop environment too.

i self host

I haven't had to compile a kernel in 20 years.

I hit the point where I just throw on Fedora and call it a day

I also have a LFS VM I look at every few months and wonder if I want to do something with it

I am inside neovim and I cannot quit

Only 5 hours? That's quite fast! It took me years to configure my NixOS system. It's not even complete yet. It would be great if there were a GUI that took care of the entire thing, could lock dependencies (no, not flakes), add it to version control with signed commits and secrets, and the configuration could be shared across devices. That's all possible with manual labor but having that out of the box for GUI users would be amazing.

Anyway, I feel this post too much 😅

Anti Commercial-AI license

I LUKS encrypted my boot partition of my last install. It would take an extra 1-1:30 secs to boot when I got the password correct on the first attempt. Much longer if I got it wrong and had to reboot to try again.

I finally did it correctly this last build, but now I am using NixOS and refuse to add anything to the config or a flake if I just need it once a week or so. So I am constantly digging through my history to find the shell I created to do a specific task.

Security and convenience are on a balancing scale. More security, less convenience. More convenience, less security.

Everything in my life is less convenient but way more secure than most people's lives.

(I am not secure against corporate/nation-state level threats at all. I am merely more secure than the average person.)

Everything has an OTP code through Aegis and I do regular encrypted backups of my Aegis vault to other devices.

Most people cannot and will not live like this. To me, it's simple.

🙅 Write a script or shell alias for important or frequent tasks
👍 Pray it's in my ctrl-r history the next time I need it

I check my backup notifications by looking in my junk mail for anything labeled "Spam Quarantine Notification" because I can't be arsed to fix the SMTP whitelist rules to allow local network relay.

Been working with Linux every day for over a decade at my job. At home I run the most boring generic shit.

My Arch never break every time I update it, honestly it's pretty boring

@merari42 using flatpak Steam with the library on a non-home drive.

This sucks.

My laptop will not allow my to login via GUI since upgrade to fedora 41/GNOME?/mutter47. Works with a New account. I have jet to fix it

I can't just let Plasma be.

At one point in college I decided to make myself take notes in ed for a semester for the lulz

Using runit instead of systemd, everything these days is made to work with it so redoing system services to work with runit is a headache, but the boot times make it worthwhile

Instead of compiling a kernel, try to make do with what your distro provides whenever there's an update. Yes, there's compilation, but it's all done automatically. Then come to realise that the last two updates have had a subtle problem that caused the graphics driver to have a debilitating stroke whenever you try to watch a video in VLC, and have the whole system to go unresponsive as a result. Everything else works fine. YouTube. Games. But a cat video downloaded from Discord because (foreshadowing) the video won't play in-browser for some reason? Too far, man. How dare.

Booting with another of those kernels is when you find out that's also broken despite having used it for a while previously. Learn that, by sheer luck, one still-good kernel is still installed.

Hope that someone with more brains and energy with a similar setup will be able to report the problem properly to wherever that needs to be reported so that the next update doesn't have the same problem. Things like this have been magically fixed before. You wait.

(Search the error message from the logs online. No close matches. Learn a bit, but the only advice was "try a different kernel". You already thought of that)

In the meantime, remove the problem kernels and update GRUB with boot USB on standby in case you hose the system. Manage not to need it.

Mostly stopped fucking around with stuff once I switched to fedora which seriously just works.

But then, every couple of months, I just feel the need to try something new. So I grab my 2nd laptop and start installing some esoteric distro, configure everything, even sign in to my online accounts, just to never touch that laptop again until I want to try the next weird distro.

I’m struggling to get TigerVNC to work on a machine it used to work on before I upgraded the distro and the VNC server software.

I’m struggling to get WireGuard to work when it worked fine in Windows before I switched my laptop to dual booting EndeavorOS and Kubuntu. I can’t get it to work on either. Works fine on my iPhone, too.

But neither of these is bad enough to go back to Windows.

Ive spent way too much time trying to compile and install coreboot

Bootc looks very cool