Okay I think for first attempt getting Linux running I'm just going to sigh and install Ubuntu 23.04. If it works ok and I establish a /home on the other drive I'll consider pop!_os later as an experiment in learning (or living without) kernel signing.
My goals:
Fit on 37 GB spare partition
Get Vulkan running and execute one webgpu program in Rust
(win condition) Successfully support a sound card with 16 channels of IO
I guess I'm going with GNOME rather than KDE based on looking at the current state of both on Google Image Search (possibly not an accurate source) and feeling less repulsion when I look at GNOME. I don't understand why the titlebar and the "dock" with the launcher icons are 2 different things in GNOME now. Couldnt u just put the launcher icons in the titlebar I only ever run 3 apps anyway
Last time I ran desktop linux was 2016, I tried to use a late beta of KDE Plasma and it never worked right
@mcc the short version is: the top panel is for "system stuff"; the bottom panel ("dash") is for the favourite applications.
If you're using Ubuntu, the dash is always visible, AFAIK, but in stock GNOME the dash is only visible when you go into the Activities overview, where you can see all windows/workspaces.
Ok so installation of Ubuntu was smooth and it seems fine now I'm inside. I'm experiencing one problem, and it is totally baffling: Both in the installer and in the OS itself, a giant banner pops up about once every three minutes saying there is no Internet. This despite the installer downloading from the Internet fine, me running Firefox without problems, etc.
The fonts do look kinda... well, okay, really bad, especially in Firefox. The lowercase "i" looks strangely like an uppercase "I" much of the time. "Private WIndows".
Within half an hour of installing Linux the lack of visual differentiation between tabs in firefox is already annoying me and I'm already trying to figure out how to install Chrome
UPDATE: I seem to have solved two problems at once as the fonts look a lot nicer in Chrome than in Firefox. Somewhere, RMS just felt a deep pain in his heart and does not know why.
This said, the Chrome fonts also have a problem with i looking like I. lIsten.tIdal.com
Big thank you to everyone who recommended I install Gnome "dash-to-panel" my screen now looks extremely Normal. This looks like a computer screen to me
Minor complaints: I want to use the Compose key. In GNOME, if you go to the settings and look up the compose key, you will find a pane helpfully explaining that the compose key is set to the "layout default".
Thanks??! GNOME could you?! Could you possibly tell me what the default is!?
Anyway uhhh y'all have been very helpful so: Does anyone know, until I explicitly mapped the Compose key to the Left Super key, GNOME was doing a thing where tapping the Windows key would bring up a kind of Mac OS X Expose screen showing all the Windows. Now Compose is using that key. Anybody know what that shortcut is named. I bet I could map it to something else if I knew what it was named
ALTERNATELY can I just map left super to right alt entire, or something
OPINION: It is total garbage that (according to every tutorial?) the way to get grub to default to launching Windows automatically involves manually editing a file (grub.cfg) that begins with "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE"
Just total unearned confidence that just because I installed Linux on my desktop it must be because I prefer to use Linux on my desktop
UPDATE: It doesn't matter that grub is confusing to change the defaults on, because the moment I boot into Windows, it disables grub completely and I have to go into the BIOS boot select menu to get back into Linux.
Which…
was…
…exactly the behavior I wanted to start with.
…the two user-unfriendly OSes on my computers are fighting, and they're canceling each other out.
Extremely surprising outcome: Not only did GNOME mount my Windows/NTFS partition without me even asking it to, it mounted it readwrite, and I just opened up /Users and started mucking around with my files and it's just… letting me change things?? Bypassing any and all security?? Did I just fucking accidentally fucking rootkit my own machine by installing Linux?! "lol"
Do you ever post something about computer usability on Internet and immediately worry you have created a major opsec mistake by admitting that last thing out loud
Okay seriously everybody seems to think this is very funny but this is… bad? This is bad practice? Linux distros should not be mounting the entire drive readwrite including files that otherwise would require administrator permissions without at any point, such as during install, asking me if I wanted to do this? I wouldn't have even realized it had done it if I hadn't gone looking? Literally any piece of software on the Linux machine gets owned and it can virusify any part of Windows freely.
Like I want to be able to but ideally it should make me like… enter a password first. Also ideally this should be the default behavior it defaults to until I tell it "no it's okay give every linux app root access to the Windows drive"
OK so unrelated note, a question. I got the compose key working. Now I want to install my custom compose key mappings. I copied over the file from my copy of WinCompose and put it at ~/.XCompose. I logged out and back in.
It did nothing. Not one single app supports my custom compose mappings.
Does… anyone know how to make custom compose work on Ubuntu+Gnome? I'm having surprising troubles finding an answer on Google.
Day one Linux seems to be going okay with my two major issues being:
Getting apps to respect ~/.XCompose appears to be horrifically difficult, and for "snap" applications, may be impossible
Getting "click mouse button down to scroll" behavior like on Windows turns out to be horrifically difficult and may be impossible
I think I have the NVidia propreitary drivers working. Wayland works, but it causes Chrome menus to glitch out, so I guess I'm going back to Xorg for now
On an unrelated note, I was very annoyed to discover that on Linux mousewheel-clicking a tab in Chrome closes it, but now I'm back in Windows, and testing, mousewheel-clicking a tab in Chrome closes it.
…what?
Why would this be the default behavior? That's so weird
Does anyone know how to edit/view the shortcuts in the "dock" in Ubuntu Gnome? (I'm using "Dash to Dock" but I think that only changes how it appears). I want to change the args to one of the icons, but they're just sorta… they're just there, there's nothing like a "Properties" if you right click. It seems like there must be a dotfile or an XML or something somewhere GNOME is using to store what those icons are and what happens when you click them.
So I thought it was irritating the mount was at this arcane mountpoint and I didn't know it was there until I clicked file browser -> "Other Locations"
Nope, not exactly
The mountpoint didn't exist until I went into "Other Locations" in the Gnome filebrowser, at which point GNOME creates it
Ubuntu didn't create it! The Gnome filebrowser did!
Like, it feels much more normal to me that this thing occurs in response to a user action, but weird that the user does not realize they are taking an action (mounting a drive readwrite) by opening a folder
@mcc that whole UX was inspired by macOS.. Apple's Finder also has all the known-but-unmounted drives included in the sidebar and when you click one it gets mounted and an eject icon appears there. I don't remember which drives get auto mounted on login though in macOS, a Windows drive would probably alsoooo only get mounted in response to that user action..
@mcc@valpackett that's a limitation related to NTFS in Linux: there's no practical way to map Linux user IDs to Windows user GUIDs, so permissions are scarcely enforceable.
@oblomov@valpackett There is a practical way which I found on stack overflow, two days ago, in about thirty seconds, the first time I searched Google to see if there was a practical way to do it
@oblomov@valpackett meanwhile, even if it were true that Linux cannot map the permissions (which is not true) a reasonable coarse way to map the permissions would be, since in this scenario your only options are "root access" or "no access", to ask for a root password or sudo root password before proceeding,.which would give the user an opportunity to back out if they had not meant to take this action.
@oblomov@valpackett (such a UI also might provide an opportunity to ask the user whether they want to mount read only or read write; currently, since the UI doesn't even ask you if you want to mount the drive with root permissions, there appears to be no way to mount it read only even if you would prefer this.)
@mcc@valpackett I'm not disagreeing, but the whole GNOME shtick is to second-guess the user. I wouldn't be surprised if the mount-with-full-access, no question asked, is also “inspired” from macOS (what does Apple do when you mount an NTFS volume?)
My Linux install is getting closer to working well but one weird problem I have is every time I boot into Linux and then back into Windows the Windows clock seems to be set to like, a totally random time, many hours off. This collides with an interesting existing problem where when the Windows clock goes wrong it doesn't fix itself for weeks. I can force it to sync with NTP but I can't seem to, like, schedule NTP syncs to happen daily or at startup or whatevs. (I do not have Fast Startup on.)
@mcc make sure the Windows Time service is set to start automatically. (run services.msc -> right click Windows Time -> startup type Automatic). that's usually the reason for these types of issues.
Every time I boot to Windows during daylight savings time I have to switch automatic-time updating off and then on again to make it stop lying about the time.
It's been that way for years, through Win 10 and Win 11.
@mcc Agh! So it's not just me!? That one took me a while to figure out since I rarely run Windows on my work machine. It seemed like the Windows clock was just always wrong. So annoying!
@slembcke@mcc it's a fun one because it's existed forever and it's always a PITA. At some point I swear Ubuntu or whatever was sorting it out in the installer if it detected a Windows install but yeah...
@mcc@dotstdy@slembcke
I think that works as well, but usually those instructions for Windows come with diffuse warnings that some things might not work - however, I first saw this for Win7 (IIRC) and even if those warnings had merit back then, maybe nowadays it's fine.
OTOH, in that case, why would MS hide it in the registry?
@mcc@dotstdy@slembcke
true.. or in some bla.msc tool that looks like it hasn't changed since NT4 and can only be started by entering its exact name in the start menu search (or maybe through that weird god mode folder)
@mcc@dotstdy@slembcke
Anyway "properly supporting" would mean that Windows at least has a checkbox for this near the time/timezone settings, or ideally detects that the HW clock is running in UTC and just accepts and uses that instead of changing it back to the local timezone (which can probably cause issues with timestamp consistency when switching from/to DST)
@mcc Are you sure it's not just because Windows is using RTC in local time, while Linux defaults to having RTC in UTC? If you're dual-booting, the best solution is to tell Linux to use RTC in local time (there's a way to tell Windows RTC is in UTC, but it's unsupported, and has caused problems in the past, such as the machine freezing for an hour during DST transitions).
As for NTP in Windows, try running this from elevated command prompt:
@mcc it's mostly hard because applications (especially GTK. i still do not have working compose in GTK. i solved this by largely stopping using GTK) reinvent input methods for no good reason
@whitequark@mcc yup, one if the many reasons why I despise GTK. I think I mostly fixed by adding an environment variable to my session that forces GTK to use xim as input method, but my laptop is off so I can't check now.
@whitequark@mcc GTK reinvents a bunch of things for no reason. On Windows resizing and moving GTK windows totally ignores OS settings, which prevents things like tiling from working (something that even Electron apps get right).
@mcc@Migueldeicaza Not really a Linux thing though. That's how drives on all desktop OSes work. If you plug it in, it mounts it. If you duplicated your Windows partition onto a USB key, what would you expect it to do then? Should it attempt to detect that it's special somehow and reduce permissions? I think people would be annoyed if you needed special permissions to use USB drives.
@slembcke@mcc@Migueldeicaza In this case, Windows would keep enforcing permissions, and you'd need elevation to get access to things that are off-limits (also, because Windows uses SIDs instead of UID/GIDs, connecting the drive to a different Windows computer would not immediately give the user logged in there access to your home directory).
@jernej__s@mcc@Migueldeicaza Huh... really? I've had to pull the drive from my work machine multiple times due to botched updates, I guess I don't remember having to use elevated permissions to back it up. I suppose it's common enough I just don't remember clicking "allow".
@slembcke@mcc@Migueldeicaza Re work computer: if it's part of a domain, your SID is decided by domain controller, so as long as you're logged in with your domain account, you will get access to the home directory.
@mcc i feel like this isn't a Linux distro problem? it's perfectly reasonable to mount all of the drives in your PC read-write and the fact that it happens to include some other OS is kind of incidental?
I mean Windows will do this too if you give it an ext4 driver. it just doesn't ship with an ext4 driver by default.
@whitequark "it's perfectly reasonable to mount all of the drives in your PC read-write" I don't think I agree with this, especially when your fs driver does not appear to support such features as permissions
@feld Sorry. Let me clarify: There are established, well-developed models for both supporting ACL permissions and for mapping Linux users to Windows ones which I have been reading up on all afternoon. Ubuntu just chose not to enable this
@mcc some day you're going to come home and Linux will be sitting on your couch eating all your snacks. When confronted, Linux will accuse you of being rude and also a noob and then say "technically I'm in the right here because you didn't lock your door", and you'll say "Oh bullhockey! I did lock my door!" (you did!), and Linux will be like "ok but you didn't use a good enough lock so it doesn't count."
Add comment