Find out about GNOME 40 which breaks the Dropbox app
Install Ubuntu 21.10 beta on new laptop
Suddenly and painfully realize it also uses GNOME40
And just like that, I'm back to square one with the Dropbox app. In that it works, but it either won't display the icon which makes it difficult to manage (Fedora 34) or won't update it (Ubuntu 21.10).
Dropbox is the bane of my existence but I can't do work without it.
Why do I like GNOME so much when it obviously hates me?
Steam - Synthetic Violence | XBOX Live - Cannonfuse | PSN - CastleBravo | Twitch - SoggybiscuitPA
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
Back when I was farting around with GNOME 40 I wanted to not be in the activities overview on login and discovered this thread with such helpful advice as "just never log out."
In Fedora, it allows Dropbox to appear, but the menu appears on the screen randomly and can’t be closed unless you actually click something in it. It also seems to break the keepassxc status icon as well.
In Ubuntu, the menu works without TopIconsFix, but also appears randomly on the screen, and you actually get 2 menus. One will drop down like normal but will not update unless you double click the Dropbox icon, which brings upon the randomly positioned menu.
Even using something like Cinnamon, the icon is also broken. I haven’t tried KDE (and I don’t like it very much), LxQT or XFCE.
Also apparently the author isn’t updating it very much now. An alternative is supposed to exist but I haven’t tried it yet.
Steam - Synthetic Violence | XBOX Live - Cannonfuse | PSN - CastleBravo | Twitch - SoggybiscuitPA
Valve will be putting a prominent Steam Deck compatibility rating on items in Steam. If you want your game to have that nice green tick, you need to get it validated.
Although this green tick isn't quite a "Will Work On Linux" badge (it's actually stricter because it has requirements like power usage, font readability on a small screen, etc) it's pretty close to one. If you're a desktop Linux user and you see that green tick, you can pretty confidently buy that game.
Honestly I've been confidently buying games and doing Humble Bundle for years now, the only exception being some really old games that require weird shit, games that require Cortana (looking at you, Phasmophobia), and games that use EAC (soon to be solved).
Even if the game doesn't work, I just get a refund. That's happened a couple times, maybe.
It's pretty rare that a game doesn't work in proton now.
This has been my approach until about 6 months ago, nowadays I just install it and then check protondb when it doesn't work, see if there's launch options I need, throw them in if so.
augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
edited October 2021
About a week ago on the Arch forum someone posted the flag needed to disable Ozone in Chrome so hardware video decode would work, which means I got to enjoy hardware video decode in Chrome for about a week before Google disabled the flag that allows you to disable Ozone.
I got Mint to boot into live mode (progress!), and the touchpad doesn't respond at all. Most likely a driver problem. Damnit.
I noticed there's a review from ten months ago reporting the same issue, in that above link.
"...major complaint is as of September 2020 I still cannot find a Debian based Linux distribution that runs properly and supports the touchpad. People on forums have talked about getting Manjaro or Fedora to work..."
I got a spare Bluetooth mouse paired and working via the command line, (ironically it functions better than in Windows as using it there causes the Wi-Fi to crap itself, hah); but then the Mint installer hangs
after trying to choose the correct KB layout (and 'top' shows 0% CPU activity from the process).
And I'm not really a fan of rpm-based distro's... And being forced to go with WSL just doesn't feel right either, I want to be running 'on the metal'... Any ideas?
Update: Latest version of Xubuntu has kernel v5.13 and everything now works wonderfully! Patience is a virtue! Very happy right now. I :heartbeat: open source.
Fuck Windows 10/11, fuck TPM, byeeeeeeee.
My understanding is that installing steam from the terminal triggered apt to uninstall his DE. Which is some seriously silly bullshit that should never happen.
I didn't hear anything said about losing half your drive space to disk encryption, which is one of the reasons I don't use it anymore.
He proposes that a normal user would report the problem, which is...incorrect. He then hails the person who did report the problem on Github as a "normal user."
Said "normal user" is a dev with 49 Github repos.
I love linux but this is the problem I keep running into, is the other folks who love it are out of fucking touch. Installing Steam shouldn't destroy your DE. Yes, updating packages would have fixed it. Yes, it asks Linus to do a very silly thing in order for him to break his DE, which should have brought some warning signs. But to me, the warning signs would indicate that I should use a different distro. There are so many out there, and so many of them are good, I'm not spending more than 5 minutes making your distro work for me, I want to get my games installing and running, get the fuck outta my way.
I guess Linus did catch some shit for playing Beat Saber on a windows box during this challenge, which he said was for exercise, but c'mon, it's Platinum rated for Proton and works in VR on linux, c'mon Linus.
Linus was very, very bad at Linux in a way I think was performative. No one who does a tech channel should look at a screen saying what that one did and then type YES DO AS I SAY. I haven't had 99% of the problems he does anytime I've used Linux. Getting Steam and Proton on my laptop was simple.
That said regardless of configuration Steam asking to uninstall your desktop in the first place means *someone* fucked up hard and the Linux community is really bad about support. Not helped by the driver war they have going on with Nvidia.
Yeah I am pretty leery of the upcoming videos in this series because ultimately Linus is interested in driving views and creating content and going for a month without issues doesn't do that.
augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
On one hand I think Pop!_OS is aimed at developers, who would hopefully be the kind of people to google that problem and find a safe solution.
On the other hand, shrugging and saying "The Steam packaging happened to be broken for some reason" because the distro your distro is based on massively fucked up the packaging of an extremely popular application is maybe the most Linux-ass thing ever.
On one hand I think Pop!_OS is aimed at developers, who would hopefully be the kind of people to google that problem and find a safe solution.
On the other hand, shrugging and saying "The Steam packaging happened to be broken for some reason" because the distro your distro is based on massively fucked up the packaging of an extremely popular application is maybe the most Linux-ass thing ever.
This is slowly becoming one of my biggest Linux security concerns. It's rare that the original application developer had anything to do with the actual binary on your system. There's a decent chance that the build was put together by a random community volunteer and maybe never actually audited by anyone else. Sometimes the maintainer ships something like Debian's Xchat package, which is a fork of a dead project with some (but not all) of the security patches from a different fork backported. (Use Hexchat, not Xchat).
When I use Fedora, I'm not just trusting the core Fedora team. I'm trusting the wider Fedora package maintenance community, too. And I guess it's like this in most distros? Effort is duplicated in every distro because desktop Linux can't collectively settle on something like Flatpak and put all the wood behind one arrow. Even with Flatpak you have issues. The community maintained Steam Flatpak actually requires you to disable a Steam security feature to get things working.
As an increasingly technologically paranoid person, the desktop Linux security story is pretty distressing.
I just can't do Linux for a Desktop machine. All day, every day, with no questions asked for just about any server need (outside of like a .NET build server that needs to handle WinForms shit), but no way, no how for my everyday driver. I did it about 10 years ago for a good year or so, and then went back to Windows. There was just too much little stuff that'd break here or there (admittedly, usually because I updated something) and then I'd be down a rabbit hole for an hour+ trying to figure out what I was missing. At one point in life that was fun; debugging can be entertaining. I just got to a point where I just wanted shit to (mostly) work, and I'm apparently lucky enough to keep my Windows installs in that state.
My amateur linux experience pretty much made me view it as akin to those jeep guys, who really love jeeps because they break just enough to keep them wrenching on their jeeps for fun.
I can kinda dig that. But yeah... I dislike Windows cause it forces updates (unless you know to edit policies and stay on top of those changes as they deprecate). It's rare for Windows to completely shit the bed -- though not rare enough that I will run frontline on the update schedules.
I've been using it at home and at work for almost 10 years now.
It has its problems at times but I found them to be far more seldom than the problems I'd have with Windows.
Moving our employees over to it 8 years ago dropped our support call volume like a rock. I go entire weeks without support calls with 100 employees in the org.
I feel like I have been protected by my knowledge of my ignorance. People run into a problem using Linux and they don't do two things that they'd probably do at least one of if they were using Windows
Just accept it and hope it goes away on its own
Uninstall and reinstall the offending application and hope it's OK this time
Instead they start googling and see stuff about fixing a problem that should only be attempted by Level VII or higher Linuxmancers. Then shit goes far, far wronger.
I feel like I have been protected by my knowledge of my ignorance. People run into a problem using Linux and they don't do two things that they'd probably do at least one of if they were using Windows
Just accept it and hope it goes away on its own
Uninstall and reinstall the offending application and hope it's OK this time
Instead they start googling and see stuff about fixing a problem that should only be attempted by Level VII or higher Linuxmancers. Then shit goes far, far wronger.
Google also often gives you complicated hackey answers from 5-10 years ago for shit that a simple update will fix.
Yes indeed "have you even tried looking for an answer" - well yes actually I did, and I found 671 answers, most of them without an obvious date reference.
99% of my searches for Linux issues basically come down to “how do I format this command in the terminal”.
Most issues have been fixable by a simple update. Even in my complicated setup, where I pass my primary GPU through to a Windows VM for gaming, has had zero issues once I got the setup figured out. Even kernel updates haven’t broken anything (yet).
Overall I’ve been nothing but happy. Far happier than when I was using Windows.
Steam - Synthetic Violence | XBOX Live - Cannonfuse | PSN - CastleBravo | Twitch - SoggybiscuitPA
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
I've been using Linux on and off since ~1997. Before the kernel (2.2.x, IIRC) even had proper USB 1.1 support and getting into a graphical X session and getting my internal modem to dial was akin to a form of digital sorcery. :snap: :biggrin:
(*Turns into a fine dusty mist*).
I can't setup a new system now without installing THE most important command, it's simply just an absolute necessity, even before Steam:
Get an immediately useful, succinct, human-readable summary of the most commonly used options of terminal commands by typing tldr foo for command foo:
v1m@V1m-RigII:~$ tldr foo
No tldr entry for foo
v1m@V1m-RigII:~$ tldr cp
cp
Copy files and directories.
- Copy a file to another location:
cp {{path/to/file.ext}} {{path/to/copy.ext}}
- Copy a file into another directory, keeping the filename:
cp {{path/to/file.ext}} {{path/to/target_parent_directory}}
- Recursively copy a directory's contents to another location (if the destination exists, the directory is copied inside it):
cp -r {{path/to/directory}} {{path/to/copy}}
- Copy a directory recursively, in verbose mode (shows files as they are copied):
cp -vr {{path/to/directory}} {{path/to/copy}}
- Copy text files to another location, in interactive mode (prompts user before overwriting):
cp -i {{*.txt}} {{path/to/target_directory}}
It's so useful that I don't know why it's not installed by default in basically every general purpose distro.
V1m on
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AkimboEGMr. FancypantsWears very fine pants indeedRegistered Userregular
Manpages are indeed sometimes too obscure for their own good. But then the other issue here is that there are just too many manpage alternatives. Bropages, tldr, cheat, manly. Rather than fragmeting the knowledgebase, the proper solution is to work on better manpages. Maybe a pipe dream, though, sadly.
AkimboEG on
Give me a kiss to build a dream on; And my imagination will thrive upon that kiss; Sweetheart, I ask no more than this; A kiss to build a dream on
Posts
Some very interesting comments in this interview.
Digging it so far.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
This soothes my fears about requiring signed kernels, etc.
And just like that, I'm back to square one with the Dropbox app. In that it works, but it either won't display the icon which makes it difficult to manage (Fedora 34) or won't update it (Ubuntu 21.10).
Dropbox is the bane of my existence but I can't do work without it.
Why do I like GNOME so much when it obviously hates me?
Tried that and no dice there as well.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1674/topiconsfix/
Partly.
In Fedora, it allows Dropbox to appear, but the menu appears on the screen randomly and can’t be closed unless you actually click something in it. It also seems to break the keepassxc status icon as well.
In Ubuntu, the menu works without TopIconsFix, but also appears randomly on the screen, and you actually get 2 menus. One will drop down like normal but will not update unless you double click the Dropbox icon, which brings upon the randomly positioned menu.
Even using something like Cinnamon, the icon is also broken. I haven’t tried KDE (and I don’t like it very much), LxQT or XFCE.
Also apparently the author isn’t updating it very much now. An alternative is supposed to exist but I haven’t tried it yet.
Valve will be putting a prominent Steam Deck compatibility rating on items in Steam. If you want your game to have that nice green tick, you need to get it validated.
Although this green tick isn't quite a "Will Work On Linux" badge (it's actually stricter because it has requirements like power usage, font readability on a small screen, etc) it's pretty close to one. If you're a desktop Linux user and you see that green tick, you can pretty confidently buy that game.
Even if the game doesn't work, I just get a refund. That's happened a couple times, maybe.
It's pretty rare that a game doesn't work in proton now.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
This has been my approach until about 6 months ago, nowadays I just install it and then check protondb when it doesn't work, see if there's launch options I need, throw them in if so.
Fuck Windows 10/11, fuck TPM, byeeeeeeee.
Running Fedora 34 with 5.14. Works great other than Dropbox being stupid.
What kind of trouble? The KDE flavor seems to be working fine for me. Though I'm still poking it and debating Mint edge instead.
I didn't hear anything said about losing half your drive space to disk encryption, which is one of the reasons I don't use it anymore.
He's deleted these tweets.
He proposes that a normal user would report the problem, which is...incorrect. He then hails the person who did report the problem on Github as a "normal user."
Said "normal user" is a dev with 49 Github repos.
I love linux but this is the problem I keep running into, is the other folks who love it are out of fucking touch. Installing Steam shouldn't destroy your DE. Yes, updating packages would have fixed it. Yes, it asks Linus to do a very silly thing in order for him to break his DE, which should have brought some warning signs. But to me, the warning signs would indicate that I should use a different distro. There are so many out there, and so many of them are good, I'm not spending more than 5 minutes making your distro work for me, I want to get my games installing and running, get the fuck outta my way.
I guess Linus did catch some shit for playing Beat Saber on a windows box during this challenge, which he said was for exercise, but c'mon, it's Platinum rated for Proton and works in VR on linux, c'mon Linus.
It's been a source of contention for me.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
That said regardless of configuration Steam asking to uninstall your desktop in the first place means *someone* fucked up hard and the Linux community is really bad about support. Not helped by the driver war they have going on with Nvidia.
On the other hand, shrugging and saying "The Steam packaging happened to be broken for some reason" because the distro your distro is based on massively fucked up the packaging of an extremely popular application is maybe the most Linux-ass thing ever.
This is slowly becoming one of my biggest Linux security concerns. It's rare that the original application developer had anything to do with the actual binary on your system. There's a decent chance that the build was put together by a random community volunteer and maybe never actually audited by anyone else. Sometimes the maintainer ships something like Debian's Xchat package, which is a fork of a dead project with some (but not all) of the security patches from a different fork backported. (Use Hexchat, not Xchat).
When I use Fedora, I'm not just trusting the core Fedora team. I'm trusting the wider Fedora package maintenance community, too. And I guess it's like this in most distros? Effort is duplicated in every distro because desktop Linux can't collectively settle on something like Flatpak and put all the wood behind one arrow. Even with Flatpak you have issues. The community maintained Steam Flatpak actually requires you to disable a Steam security feature to get things working.
As an increasingly technologically paranoid person, the desktop Linux security story is pretty distressing.
I can kinda dig that. But yeah... I dislike Windows cause it forces updates (unless you know to edit policies and stay on top of those changes as they deprecate). It's rare for Windows to completely shit the bed -- though not rare enough that I will run frontline on the update schedules.
I enjoy having Linux running on my home lab.
It has its problems at times but I found them to be far more seldom than the problems I'd have with Windows.
Moving our employees over to it 8 years ago dropped our support call volume like a rock. I go entire weeks without support calls with 100 employees in the org.
Instead they start googling and see stuff about fixing a problem that should only be attempted by Level VII or higher Linuxmancers. Then shit goes far, far wronger.
Google also often gives you complicated hackey answers from 5-10 years ago for shit that a simple update will fix.
Most issues have been fixable by a simple update. Even in my complicated setup, where I pass my primary GPU through to a Windows VM for gaming, has had zero issues once I got the setup figured out. Even kernel updates haven’t broken anything (yet).
Overall I’ve been nothing but happy. Far happier than when I was using Windows.
(*Turns into a fine dusty mist*).
I can't setup a new system now without installing THE most important command, it's simply just an absolute necessity, even before Steam:
Install tldr
Get an immediately useful, succinct, human-readable summary of the most commonly used options of terminal commands by typing tldr foo for command foo:
It's so useful that I don't know why it's not installed by default in basically every general purpose distro.