So, after EndeavourOS’s GRUB comitted suicide, me being too stupid to understand chroot despite wiki “tutorials” and the community rather trolling & gaslighting me instead of helping I decided to give Nobara a go. Usually I am a Plasma KDE guy, but thought since it’s been a long time I try it out, especially since you can have it in a more classic configuration those days again, even though I’d miss out of Wallpaper Engine.

Unfortunately my experience has been nothing but awful. A bunch of random bullet points of my experience:

  • I had real trouble connecting my BT headphones. At first it was “connected”, but not really. Tried a fresh pairing mode, but then it showed two headphones. Then it connected, but as soon as I tried to adjust the audio input / output settings it lost audio again and I had to repeat it yet again. Now it works, and I decided to never touch the audio settings ever again.
  • “Files” is constantly crashing. Using the search? Crash. Going backwards? Crash. Try to do “something”? Crash. Do nothing? Probably also crash (hyperbolic).
  • “Files” data transfer for copying & deleting files is slow as hell for whatever reason (on decent Samsung SSDs mind you).
  • “Files” cannot multitask. If you’re copying, scanning, deleting or whatever, it won’t do anything else until that process is done.
  • “Files” and other Gnome applications frequently bug out if you try too many things at once, freezing or crashing them.
  • “Files”, or even Gnome as a whole, is so incredibly scrapped for features to achieve its simplistic look, that it lacks actual functionality.
  • Gnome’s settings are also missing for everything, or hidden in a gazillion different config menus, some of which I already forgot how to access again.
  • Scaling scales not just the UI, but also 3D applications like games, reducing their actual resolution and making them blurry. The UI seemed to be blurry as well.
  • Mullvad VPN’s tray icon somehow turned into some three dots with a weird background.
  • In the tray menu there’s also a VPN toggle, which shows Mullvad, but being turned off. Turning it on disables my connection and I have to reconnect through Mullvad, which turns the toggle off again. No way to remove the redundant toggle as far as I can tell, but maybe it’s in some hidden settings menu that I have yet to find.
  • OpenRGB in this does not work with my NZXT Hue 2 Ambient. Keeps asking for resize zones, which according to a search should not be necessary, and wasn’t necessary with the one I used in EOS either. Selecting any color just turns the LEDs off.
  • Launching the Battle.net launcher through Lutris it also opens some ghost “OpenGL Renderer” application with it, taking up space on the task bar.
  • Battle.net launcher can’t be maximized without constantly resetting or displaying information beneath the task bar.
  • Can’t launch .sh files unless I explicitly right click & Run as program.
  • Unfortunately it then launches with an additional empty terminal window, yet again taking up space on the task bar.
  • Had to create a new FF profile because using my old one somehow was unusable in regards to its performance.
  • The weather location for the little clock thingy apparently can’t find anything, city or country, except some locations that aren’t near me.
  • Can’t remove my own review in the Software center for one of the apps that I did prematurely.
  • Tray area also has this little tiling menu. I tried tiling, hated it. Couldn’t find a way to remove that icon to save space on the task bar.
  • After a lot of apps started to hang I tried restarting, just to be left in a blackscreen and the PC not shutting down. Had to hard reset to restart.
  • No EurKey keyboard layout. There’s a ‘German (US)’ one that’s close but it’s missing symbols.
  • Maybe probably more things that I can’t recall right now.

And that’s just after a few hours of usage. I was making fun of the tiny issues in KDE before, but if I have to choose between that and this disaster then I’m probably going to switch to the KDE edition, if I cannot find solutions to all this. I really don’t understand how people can deal with it? Or am I somehow the only one?

  • DarkThoughts@kbin.socialOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    Found a solution to remove the tiling icon / menu thingy: Install “Extension Manager” and then disable the extension “Pop Shell”.

    Edit:
    And found a new problem:
    - Spellcheck options in Firefox are ALL the English languages, but none of the installed ones.

    Edit:

    • Steam can’t be closed properly as it ends up sitting unresponsive in the task bar and needs its task to be killed.

    Edit:
    I found out the Firefox spellcheck somehow fetches its dictionaries from “/usr/share/hunspell”. How do I make FF fetch the regular dictionaries I added to it through Firefox, or what is the proper way to find dictionaries for that folder (I assume I can just delete the excess English variants)?

    Edit:
    You can just remove the folder in about:config, however it now shows only the US spelling, despite having another language installed…

    Edit:
    Managed to get the other spellcheck dictionary to show up.

    • Evolution mail client fails at 2 factor authentication. Window just shows “OAuth2 secreot not found” and no matter how many times I try it does not send a verification request to my phone.

    Edit:

    • “Files” can’t jump to folders starting with letter X because it immediately uses the (still crashy) search function.
    • Can’t drag & drop files from my Firefox download manager (pop up, not extra window) onto a folder without having to manually tab to it. Tabbing starts AFTER the “Files” process though, so you have to tab all the way through. Under KDE I could just drag it onto the file manager in the panel, which would focus the file manager and then drop the files in or onto the folder I wanted.
    • “Archive Manager (also known as File Roller)” can’t even drag & drop files from an archive into a folder. I don’t even know how people can use Gnome with it lacking such basic functionalities. What the hell are you doing with your lives?!

    Edit:
    OpenRGB now suddenly works as intended. Not sure if there was an update for it or if that’s a temporary oddity but for now I’ll take it.

  • stevecrox@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    What is your goal?

    There are 3 main distributions

    • Arch which aims to take the latest cut of everything. If you have time to keep your desktop updated and need that extra 1fps in a game, its a great choice.
    • Debian aims for stability, this means your drivers and text editor might be … 2 years old! But if it works on install it will stay working
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux aims for stability but will try to backport drivers. I honestly believe its packaged to always pull in gtk. It aims to provide tools to encourage people into support contracts.

    Almost everything else is downstream of those with a twist. For example

    • Ubuntu is downstream Debian with 6 month release schedule, non-free enabled by default and other deviations to encourage people into support contracts.
    • Mint is downstream Ubuntu with the deviations removed.

    Stuff that isn’t downstream tends to have a highly specific purpose. Fedora started life as upstream RHEL, now it seems to be Red Hat’s research plaything (e.g. immutable sounds cool, lets try it in Fedora).

    My advice is go to one of the big 3, try them and only bother with one of the million down stream distributions if there is a Unique Selling Point for something you actually care about.

    • DarkThoughts@kbin.socialOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      My goal is to have a functional desktop with good gaming capabilities.
      EOS / Arch was that until it nuked itself, something that not even Manjaro managed to do, which, for all its bad reputation, had much less issues in a much longer time frame of use. It’s not really about having “that extra 1 FPS in a game”, but to ensure actual game compatibility, including for titles that aren’t 2 years old.

      • rocketeer8015@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        1 year ago

        Try opensuse tumbleweed. It is a bit like arch(rolling release and such) but has more testing and less breakage. It has pretty good KDE support, a very good configuration tool and is one of the most secure distros in its base installation. Also good for gaming imho.

        • DarkThoughts@kbin.socialOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          @FaeDrifter
          Tried to install it on my old laptop for testing and the installer just gives me this warning before installing:

          “Boot from mbr does not work together with btrfs filesystem ang gpt disk label without bios_grub partition. To fix this issue, - create a bios_grub partition, or - use any Ext filesystem for boot partition, or - do not install stage 1 to MBR.”

          I really have no idea what it wants. I used the guided partitioning so I would expect it to handle that for me? Also, why do they not have a working live environment to test it before installation? Honestly not a great start.

          Edit: Oof. So I just tried to install it on my desktop, first one failed tremendously and didn’t boot. Tried again and wiping the partitions proper instead of “on demand” of the garbage installer. Got a system, try to switch down to 1080p and it gives me this super stretched pancake resolution instead. Hell no.