For someone that isn’t up-to-date on what’s popular and hip (and why), Ubu is still the defacto ‘starting point’ as it was recommended for yeaaaaars, and so bashing on someone because they went with what was very highly recommended and ‘just install Ubuntu, dumbass’-like comments from the last decade+ ago, isn’t helping anyone.

There are a shitfuckton of distros. How is an inexperienced (or fuck, experienced) user supposed to know that, the differences between them all, or what works best for their use case? The community is so fragmented as they throw shit at each other (Arch! Pop_OS! Fedora! Debian! “anything with a gui is a loser!”; I’ve seen it all over the last like 15+ years) that someone asking a question (like this) gets shit on (like this) because ‘new users should have immediate experience!’ (‘entry level job as a jr dev in Go; minimum 20 years experience’ comes to mind), ‘they are stupid for trying [distro], [my choice of niche distro] would have been way better]’, etc… and it just drives people away.

This isn’t pointed directly at you/above comment, but it’s the mentality, the whole ‘what a dumbass for trying X’ that hurts what is otherwise (from what I’ve seen over the years) a pretty helpful and kind community. But fuck me, someone needs to throw a site of like, top 10 starter/simple distros, with bullet points for/against each, and the community needs to embrace it and vote for replacements when one falls out of favor. Expecting new users to know about this or that or if they compiled that one themselves they’d be able to get the features they expect, is just so cringe. An echo chamber, and those that seek help get shit on.

Linux Mint is often suggested as a good transition distro for Windows users. They’ve got a Debian edition now, although I haven’t actually tried it out.

“Plain ol debian” is the kind of distro that will ship SMBv1 without SMBv2, because “stability” (to be clear, i dont know if they do, but its the kind of thing they would do)

Debian loves to ship out of date garbage, because “out of date, but unchanging” is better than just shipping up to date stuff

It’s because old advice dies hard. Ubuntu had a good like 15 years of being the default choice, but now Canonical wants to IPO and they’re going to wring as much revenue as they can from anything they can get their hands on. That inevitably leads to enshittification, and Ubuntu is going through that process right now.

once again … UBUNTU DOES NOT USE SMBv1 as default !

i don’t and will never use UBUNTU … but you’re complaining about something you might have configured yourself!!!

your problems are for sure real - but don’t tell ppl its because ubuntu is using a vulnarable protocol

Everything I can find online for SMB version usage in Ubuntu’s file explorer seems to indicate that for the last several years mounting SMB shares defaults to version 2.0 and up already.

Idk if that’s true, I haven’t looked at the version of Samba for my own SMB shares, nothing is exposed to the web so not a huge concern for me. Regardless, sounds like a bug? Idk, you also could have tried installing a different file explorer to see if that was the issue I suppose.

I don’t understand the Kodi refresh rate issue. I’m not familiar with Kodi at all, is it supposed to set your monitor’s refresh rate to match the framerate of the video that is currently playing in Kodi?

Not sure about the installer problem you were having either. I just tested downloading the .deb package for DockerStation on my Ubuntu VM and it seems to work perfectly. Right clicked the .deb package > Open with other application > Open with the Ubuntu software install center app > Then click “install.” It installed just like any other repo package for me in about 60 seconds and it launched totally fine too.

Granted my VM is the LTS Jammy Jelly 22.04 version, but that shouldn’t matter. If it doesn’t work on the newer stable version of Ubuntu, then I would submit it as a bug report. Also, DockerStation has an AppImage package too, why didn’t you try running that if you had issues with the .deb package?

I think people are downvoting you largely because you’re using your personal experience to claim that the Linux desktop experience as a whole is terrible, which just isn’t true. At least that’s how I think it came across to many people. That’s why I listed my own personal experience, they aren’t objective data, whether good or bad.

It would have been better for you to either create a thread asking for help with those specific issues, or at least taken a more tempered approach.

Ultimately, I’m sorry your experience has been bad. I think Linux desktop just isn’t for some people, for various reasons, and that’s fine. If you’re still wanting to try it, I would suggest creating a live USB of a few other distros and testing out the same kinds of things. My personal favs are Linux Mint Cinnamon edition and Fedora KDE Plasma edition.

If you’re getting downvoted it’s probably because you sound a bit condescending.

Anyway, most of your issues are Ubuntu issues, not Linux issues. And as you may have learned, most Linux users don’t really go with Ubuntu anymore as a recommendation. Personally, I use Fedora with as many flatpaks as possible and have a great experience.

Clicking on a deb (or .rpm) to install something is a last resort imo. Install from the package manager first, flatpak or snap next.

Variable refresh rates aren’t something I care about so I don’t know 🤷🏻‍♂️ but sounds very firmware/hardware dependent. HDR is just not implemented fully yet, but being heavily worked on. Linux is in the middle of the final push to switch X to Wayland which will likely fix these kinds of issues once fully adopted.

I use Podman Desktop if I need a docker ui (flatpak) btw. Also available in other ways and OS.

I think I’ve already informed you in another thread that .deb is not equivalent to .msi .

The former is a package of one component with its version and information about dependencies. The latter is an installer of something which is supposed to work right away.

That’s just not true. If you give your 90yo grandma a Windows computer she is gonna struggle hard.

You are a Windows user for now. You need to learn Linux as you learned Windows years ago.

Same, switched to Mint years ago and never looked back. Ubuntu is only a bit less annoying than windows these days.

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That’s fair enough. I don’t know if I could wholeheartedly recommend the Linux desktop to just anybody, but I really have been enjoying fedora for a good few years now.

I work in parallel to the gaming industry (IHV) and VRR on Linux (under wayland) is something I’ve been pretty excited about. It’s been functional under KDE Plasma for some time now (and for Sway even longer). I’ve tested the previously mentioned mutter patch on fedora 38 and it worked surprisingly well, but I believe they’re still mulling over the UX (I.e. how this feature should be exposed to end users in the settings UI). Community driven UX design & consensus is hard.

As for the maturity of Wayland, you may find differences in implementation depending on the desktop environment. I believe KDE plasma’s inplementation is a bit further ahead than gnomes, and your experience with Wayland under such an environment should be fairly comprehensive, though I don’t expect you to have to test individual DEs, so don’t take my word for it.

I personally prefer gnome with a couple of shell extensions so I’ll have to wait for it to catch up, though in typical use, it seems to do pretty well.

Ahh the favourite pasttime of the linux community: blaming the user.

“The Linux community” in general understands that you are not “just dumb” or a “noob”, but you are unfamiliar with the way things are done in Linux, your Windows experience is useless for that, and you should be informed of that.

Now some Windows-savvy people thinking that not being able to navigate their junkyard is being a “noob” seem worse for me.

click on one of those, and i get some vague error, i no longer have the exact error text but it was something like

Unlike on Windows, errors here are usually informative, and “something like …” is useless. We can’t trust you to determine if it’s vague or not.

dude, CLICK THE LINK I GAVE, IT DOESN’T.

The article advises you to install GDebi from repositories (with a nice GUI) to do that. Have you done that?

and what do you mean install a package for another distribution.

You should install a package for Ubuntu on Ubuntu and a package for Debian on Debian. The package filename extension being .deb and its format being .deb doesn’t mean it’ll work on any system using .deb . Yes, it may.

Or do the developers of linux apps themselves have no clue how to support the most popular distro?

Developers usually care most about the distribution they themselves use.

And if something isn’t in the repositories of the most popular ones, it means the developer of the application doesn’t care to maintain it there and nobody else cares.

According to you that may be the case, but that’s not my fault then.

Your fault is treating it wrong. If others don’t need it and you need it, why cry that desktop Linux sucks? Maybe it sucks for you, well, sorry.

Yeah. That’s why I asked for some details. That said I think the underlying root of the complaint (“I did cool stuff on Windows, now I’m trying Linux and it can’t do my cool stuff, WTF I hate this”) is probably pretty valid. I think the solution is, either learn about the cool stuff Linux can do that Windows can’t, and start there instead of trying to duplicate your Windows setup, or just stick with what you’re already happy with.

If your screen is at 60hz and your source is at 24hz, some frames will last 2 frames, some will last 3 frames, it’s a subtle stutter you see when for example the image is panning (and linux defaulted to 30hz on my monitor, so 24fps on 30hz refreshrate the effect is even more noticable), so i prefer the system to just switch to the proper refresh rate. The monitor/projector support switching to exactly 24fps, in the infinite power of linux, how hard could this be, for real. I get this is “advanced” and “a nice windows feature”. But ffs, it’s switching your display output. I can right click on my linux desktop, go to the display settings, and select 24fps refresh rate, and it switches. How hard could it be to provide an api to let an application do the same…

If the community is like this on every nice to have feature that shouldn’t be that hard to support, linux probably also isn’t for me.

(reminds me of another subtle issue i noticed in Kodi. on the windows version i can use the back button on my mouse to go back to the previous screen, on the linux version that didn’t work. found an issue about it, where the replies were “we can’t map every specific input system you have by default” (but the windows version can). And even better “wtf is a back button on a mouse” (that guy apparently missed the last decade of computer mouse development). And even after multiple users mentioning “we just want the linux version to behave like the windows version”, but that question was just ignored in favor of “configure it yourself in the settings (even though the config didn’t allow to map that button”, and the ignorance of what even a back button on a mouse would be.

expecting the stable version of ubuntu to not just have thrown away its installer for one of the main ways of installing things on it

Not at all what I said. Distros are generally made as coherent wholes; the stuff that comes through apt install generally works great, and you never interact directly with a .deb. The whole model of “I found this thing on a web site and I want to download and run it on my system” is going to be a little more difficult on Linux. Since that’s the only way on Windows, since Windows doesn’t come prepackaged with thousands of different packages you can install through package management, it’ll seem to a Windows person like that’s “the way,” and when it’s not easy on Linux, it’ll seem to you like a deficiency in Linux.

and for it to have disabled a protocol that was used in ransomware attacks almost a decade ago is

You didn’t answer my question. What steps did you do that led you to conclude that SMB v1 was the issue? I actually agree with you that that’s pretty bad and needs to be fixed in Ubuntu if it’s true, but I’m not convinced based on your description that that was what was making it not work. It sounds like maybe it didn’t work, and when it wasn’t working you decided it was trying to speak SMB v1 and didn’t test your conclusion. No?

Regarding the refreshrate: this also connects to a projector, and i don’t think it’s able to wait for frames, it’ll just push out x frames per second, and if it doesn’t match your video source, you’ll see smooth motion isn’t quite that smooth. It may be an “advanced” usecase, but if supporting something like this is “expecting ubuntu to work like windows”, then yeah, maybe i better stick to windows… I had expected linux to also be good for htpc usage, but maybe not then.

Like I say, I’m not trying to tell you not to have that as a feature if you want it or that you’re wrong for wanting this to work. I’m just saying that this seems like getting pretty far into the weeds of weedy things to raise as criticisms.

Was the video quality noticeably off in any way? It might have been that there was a genuine issue, unrelated to the frame rate. Given the history of interlaced video and vsync in video games, I’d be pretty surprised if the average human could even tell the difference between 24Hz and 24Hz-sampled-at-60Hz even paying close attention.

But for real, i’ve got multiple headless linux machines here, i ssh in to them, got docker containers on them with some complicated usecases too, i know what to expect from linux and i don’t expect it to be like windows. But for the very first 3 things i try on a popular “beginners distro” to be this awful.

I’m gonna be a little harsh. Having several Linux machines doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing. You say stuff like:

Of course Ubuntu just threw out the old installer for debian files, and didn’t replace it yet. Wouldn’t want a user to just be able to easily install files! what is this, windows?

not fucking up something as major as a package installer in a “stable” version

Regarding the deb files not being the way to do it. I’m sure that’s why plenty of sites have install instructions for ubuntu be like “here, install this deb file”. You say this is not the way to do it, SO MANY APPS say it is. can this community please make up its mind??

You, just like the person who wrote this thing you linked to, seem to be under the impression that Ubuntu is supposed to install .debs you downloaded when you click on them, and that not doing that means they “removed” it. That’s wrong. I have no idea why Ubuntu removed that behavior, but I suspect that it’s because installing some .deb you downloaded from the internet is almost never the right thing to do. The underlying package management can definitely still do it. If you know enough for it to be a safe thing to do, you’ll be able to do it without the GUI, and understand the messages you might get back and be capable enough to get it done to the point that the .deb you downloaded might actually work. If you just want to download and double-click and don’t know how to use the relevant tools, then it’s extremely unlikely that what you were doing was ever going to get your software to install and run in the first place.

I know this is kind of gonna be offensive me saying this, or unhelpful, or “see this is why it’s not ready for the desktop!” But I’m honestly just trying to communicate, this is how it works. Linux is designed as more of an integrated whole; in a lot of respects, that’s a really good thing. It sure is a pain in the ass when you want to install certain types of third party software though, yes, definitely. Windows (of necessity) has pretty good support for installing third party apps as self-contained entities. Again, on Windows the whole model of how you install software is to download something from some random internet site, so it’s even a little hard to process the concept of doing it some other way, or why that way wouldn’t be simple.

If you want to say “this is a big problem, we need Flatpak and Docker to improve in X Y and Z way so they can be viable replacements for drop-in installation of third party software like on Windows,” that sounds great. But – again, I apologize about this for being a little harsh – if your whole model for solving this problem is that Ubuntu should install .debs when you double-click on them, I don’t think you know enough about it to say what needs to happen to make it better.