cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
I still have win on my laptop, but I barely use it. I decided to install CachyOS on my new desktop, and it works better than I expected) Still have some problems, though, and they mostly come down to my reluctance to do research. Here are the main ones: My azeron is not supported. There is antimicrox program recomended to map inputs, and it worked first time I configured it. But then I decided to change it a little, and changes will not apply, keeping my first configuration. After I leave computer unattended for several minutes, it won’t properly wake up. Strangely, it wakes up normally if I send it to sleep manually. Some programs (mainly Steam). Take unexpectedly long to startup after boot. What is worse, window system completely freezes while it starts up, the experience I last had with Windows))
Anyway, I’m happy and not going back
I’ve used a few different distros over the years: Debian, Ubuntu, Neon, openSUSE Leap
Never once has a major version upgrade ever gone 100% successfully. Even on a bog standard system with no 3rd party repos or niche hardware. I don’t know why it’s still so difficult
On my phone. I would love to be able to run a Linux system or at least a de-googled android. But some apps I need access to don’t seem to be working without Google services and stuff like that si I’m stuck using a stock Google (Pixel) android.
Beside that, everything is and has been working smoothly on my computers since I switched from Apple to Linux Mint, 5 or 6 years ago. My only regret is to not have switched way earlier.
I do miss Spotlight. All the alternatives I have tested fall short one way or the other but giving up on Spotlight is not that bad of a deal considering all what Free Software, GNU and Linux have offered me in exchange. I would not want to switch back.
I have not personally encountered a Google-based app I could not run within Sandboxing google play services on a GrapheneOS running Pixel phone. So, fwiw, it is working in my experience these last three-ish years.
It is interesting to me that at this point, because of Waydroid, the primary things keeping me from using a Linux phone are the same things keeping me from de-googling more of my current phone. When running LineageOS in the past, I couldn’t reliably use RCS. Plenty of apps have issues with google’s Play Integrity shenanigans.
Once I hit a point where Im ok with running a degoogled android, I’m basically ready for just going straight to Linux on phone.
Waydroid
I wouldn’t recommend using Waydroid, it basically runs Google Play services and other stuff as root on your machine.
Instead, it would be nice if we had seamless integration of virtual VMs including Android like Qubes OS does this.
Have you tried GrapheneOS (since you have a Pixel)? I put it on mine, and it works great. It treats Google services as just another app, so you can control what it has access to while also putting it into a sandbox. Plus, with the user profiles, I have further segregated Google away from my data. I have a profile solely dedicated to apps that require Google services, and so far, I’ve had only minor issues (which may just be how I’m setting my security, so it could just be a me issue).
Literally the only issues I have with Graphene are that my banking app won’t work and I can’t add my debit card to the wallet app. But my bank has a website, and I can still carry my card in my real wallet so I’m not really fussed.
KDE Plasma has a search feature similar to that of Spotlight. You could try it with Fedora KDE’s live ISO.
I will give it a look, thx for the tip :)
GNOME shell’s overview search does almost the same.
As much as if saddens me to write it: the enterprise bullshit.
I’m not allowed to use Linux at work because it’s more complicated than the out of the box experience of MacOS and windows in terms of remote management, encryption enforcement, company certificates and all this useless bullshit.
yeah corporate environments continue to be a pain point. IT wants centralised management a la intune/GPE, i want to be able to use proper terminal tools for automation.
last time it came to a head i moved into a vm and refused to come out for two years.
And I’m not sure why Linux doesn’t excel in a centrally managed environment, since it descends from an OS that was designed from the ground up to be used by many users in an enterprise environment.
Because Microsoft office
Office, teams, SSO, SharePoint… You get a very interesting package of features from Microsoft of you are a company. And most integrations with services exist for MS SSO, so its sadly easy.
Desktop management wasn’t, and isn’t, a priority. Managing fleets of servers has been the focus, and the Linux vendors make most of their money selling server distros.
It can be done, but it has to be built using the raw tools available. This is a strength and a weakness. Strength because it’s super flexible, and a weakness because random IT person has to know what they’re doing.
There are some projects like FreeIPA, Gnome FleetCommander, SaltStack, and Foreman which have parts. There’s nothing turn key like Intune or Jamf though. Plus this is all based on on-prem stuff. We’re not even touching on Entra replacements.
There are a few closer to turnkey solutions available now, scalefusion & 42gears to name a couple of providers.
Often times it’s more about visibility rather than absolute control - tools like osquery support Linux as well.
Interesting. I’ll check those out. 🙂
I’ve looked at osquery. It was all the rage for a minute in the monitoring industry when Facebook released it, and then it didn’t really go anywhere.
Really just needs one vendor to provide a unified way of configuring and managing a fleet of laptops/desktops. All of the bits exist, just needs someone to bring it all together
About 15 years ago I used to run my work desktop Windows in a VMware instance on Linux. We had Redhat and VMware licenses too use. I swear it ran faster than on bare metal for some reason. I used VMware’s virtual apps for Outlook and IE.
These days i just run what they hand me. No point getting on the bad side of the admins.
Some companies allow specific Linux distributions (like RHEL) only. Maybe that’s something for your case too? At least there is “Enterprise” in “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” ;-)
Devs not working together to make Wayland universally supported and bug free ASAP or fixing X11 ASAP. With Microslop Windoze being as horrible as it is we cannot permit ourselves to fight these silly internal battles; as long as someone is not bullying, raping, killing, or, you know, peddling crypto and cheering ICE, then give each other some slack.
As for daily usage I have no gripes. Linux works excellently. If I still gamed as much as I did back in the day then these shitty kernel anti-cheats would bother me,* now I simply don’t touch them.
*Not a Linux problem but an anti-cheat engineering skill issue. Looking at you EA; RIP Battlefield 1.
That’s the thing with Linux: Devs work on whatever the fuck they want, because they don’t work for a single corporation with an over-arching goal.
And a lot of them have very strong opinions about what’s better, which motivates them to work on it in their free time in the first place.
But all the big corporate support and big donor money goes towards Wayland now.
X11 is basically frozen in the state it’s in for the few people who still rely on it, and losing dev wo*manpower quickly.or fixing X11 ASAP
There was this one guy doing major work on X11, but while he did some good work he also submitted breaking changes, was then barred from submitting patches and in turn created an angry fork (XLibre) breaking even more important things (e.g. the whole Nvidia driver).
That’s why we can’t have nice things. He probably turned a lot of people away who could’ve helped the project (and it also didn’t help that he was an anti-vaxer that even pissed Linus Torvalds off with his nonsense).
Since most of the X11 devs are Wayland devs now it’s understandable they don’t want to ever go back to it anymore. They know the limitations and the horrible, ancient feature-creep of it. This talk from 2013 explains their motivations for abandoning it pretty well.
Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I’m using at the moment) demanding the root password to install the updates it’s blinking at me about in the tray all the time. In this context, demanding a password at all is rather silly (Windows doesn’t require your password to install updates in a single user environment, and it doesn’t even pop up a UAC prompt) and this is going to be yet another one of those things that prior Windows users will moan about, declaring that “Linux is complicated and hard” and drive them back to the comfort of the devil they know when they feel like their own computer is actively trying to stymie them at seemingly every turn.
My user account is a sudoer so there is absolutely no technical reason my own password shouldn’t work. And, in fact, if I run updates via apt in a terminal it does. But allowing updates to install from the desktop environment, something ostensibly ought to be a routine userspace kind of operation, requires everyone using the system who might want to do this to know the system-wide root password. This is a monumentally stupid idea.
I am well aware there are myriad ways around this but they all involve hand-editing config files and come with stern warnings about “this may break your system so proceed ‘carefully,’” as if anyone who is not already an experienced Linux nerd will know just what the hell “proceeding carefully” is supposed to look like.
The inevitable XKCD comic succinctly sums this up:
The UNIX permissions and administration model may have made great sense on glass teletypes in the '70s and when nobody knew any better, but it’s certainly long outmoded now. It’s going to make a lot of people very angry to read this, but that’s actually one of the few things that Windows does much better, at least starting from NT onwards.
While I have switched from Windows to Mint with most of my PCs, permissions are the single most annoying thing I still deal with on Linux. And have been over the last decade of trying out distros over the years. I truly detest the way permissions work and were the main reason it took me so long to switch. The current political world and tech company garbage is what did it.
Doesn’t Ubuntu disable the root user out of the box and expect these actions to be performed via sudo/polkit. There is clearly a precedent for not needing a root password and being able to use your own user’s password for these kinds of things. So it is a monumentally stupid idea to require the system-wide root password, but not one that is done by all of linux, and seems to be a decision made by your distro to not use the modern solution.
The fact is though, you’re right and the pain point is that distros are still doing things the silly way.
- Distros should be using sudo/polkit/anything other than root user password to do things like this
- Modifications to the sudoers file should be easier
- The distro setup process should just be able to have some prompts about smart default things (“Passwordless updates?”) even if they include strongly discouraging comments.
If I can
sudo apt installwithout requiring a password, I could generate a package that installs a custom sudoers config file that allows me to do anything, so “passwordless sudo, but just for apt” is potentially easily exploitable to gain full access. But that also still assumes A) you care and B) someone has access to your account anyway (at which point you may already have bigger problems)Hear me out: It still makes sense for servers, shared hosting, etc. So … where Linux has predominantly been the tool of choice.
It probably does. And in e.g. such a headless system, it makes sense as the default. Or more likely, whoever set that system up set it up in the way they want it to behave, hand-editing config files be damned because that certainly wouldn’t have been the only config file they had to edit.
From a home desktop computer perspective, however, it’s baffling. At minimum that should be one of the questions in the graphical installer: “Would you like Debian to make your routine installation of software updates annoying? Yes/no. You cannot change your choice on this later without doing a bunch of scary commandline shit.”
Oh I realize I didn’t mention this in my original comment at all. I agree with you 103%. I want to write a separate comment about this very thing, updating things in general on Linux. I have my dad daily driving Linux along with me, and he’s somewhere between a power user and a regular “need web, document editing and PDFs” type of guy, and there is such a wide spread of software from such a wide spread of “sanctioned” installation sources on Linux, that he never really knows how to update … Anything.
Here’s a random list of “ways to update a program” we have encountered in the last few weeks off the top of my head:
- Update via system package manager (with root password of course)
- Download a new .deb and install that
- Download a new .AppImage, replace links and startup scripts manually (bonus points if the new version is straight up broken, shout out to Nextcloud Desktop Client)
- Download archive of new files and replace all files in the “installation” directory manually
- Run a copied sequence of bash commands from the developers’ website
If anyone thinks of other ways to add to this list, feel free to post them, would give me a laugh for sure.
We are both definitely not going anywhere, but we have constant conversations about how it would be nearly impossible to daily drive Linux if you are not very technically inclined, and how these things make Linux very much “not ready for prime time”, because people are simply used to “X needs update! Do you want to update now? [Yes] [No] [Later]”, and the Update just … WORKING.
Couldn’t you just replace the old appimage but have the same file name?
Also: If I (or my aforementioned dad) install an AppImage, that is named “Nextcloud-DesktopClient-4.0.4.AppImage” that sets up its own startup shortcut and so on, and then I download an update (because the program literally asked me to download the new AppImage), and the new file is named “Nextcloud-DesktopClient-4.0.5.AppImage”, am I supposed to rename it to 4.0.4 manually? Rubs me the wrong way somehow. Or am I supposed to know to rename it to a version-agnostic filename before first opening it, so I don’t break things when it updates weeks down the line? My dad wouldn’t think of either of these options by the way.
You totally could, but like in my example in the parentheses, if stuff breaks, you have just killed your working version of a program, so I don’t have the balls to do that.
Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I’m using at the moment) demanding the root password
I run KDE Plasma on Debian. Discover (KDE’s GUI for package updates) has never demanded the root password.
I wonder why yours would do that. Maybe the difference is because my root account has password access disabled? If you’re already a sudoer, you might try that.
I’m not sure what app that is.
Software upgrades package on Fedora without requiring a password, so that future is a reality for some.
Reading up on PolKit and ACLs would probably be good.
I miss a task manager-like shortcut to come out to the desktop and easily kill processes freezing the PC.
At least KDE has a shortcut in the Window Management settings that kills any window you want with a single click. You just press the key combination (Meta+Ctrl+Esc by default) and your cursor turns into a skull. Then just left click the frozen window and it closes instantly. Never had it fail, you can even kill your Desktop if you miss lol
TIL Thanks!!!
You’re welcome, it’s a pretty handy feature.
FYI, on other DE’s you can just bind
xkillto whatever shorcut you want. I tried it recently and it works just fine on Wayland.
Totally. I’ve keybound
xkillor similar to recreate that experience.Correct me if I am wrong, if I switch away from a fullscreen application, I won’t have it available to be terminated using xkill, right?
In that case you would switch back… my thought is to add xkill or similar to a keybinding so it can be called without switching away from the thing.
And knowing what’s actually eating cpu cycles. Sometimes 4 threads are at 25% but usage should be like 4-5% per thread.
Ctrl+alt+t -> xkill -> click window you want to terminate
But yes I agree that seeing a better GUI of open programs and attached processes would be good to have.
I’m sorry what? Ctrl+Alt+t is bound to opening a terminal emulator (whichever I fancy ATM) on any system I use. I know it’s a Ubuntu binding but I got so used to it if I’m ever on a system that doesn’t have it I just hammer it 15 times till I gather that it’s not set up there so this would never work for me 😅
Yeah, i just mean open terminal then type xkill and click. I thought ctrl+alt+t was the default in ubuntu/mint
I had a problem with Unity games on Steam freezing the PC due to fractional scaling. In that case not even the terminal would show up. Also, if I switch away from a fullscreen application, I won’t have it available to be terminated using xkill, right?
If you can’t see the terminal, then that’s pretty bad so idk -> if everything goes unresponsive I just slap my monitor in impotent fury and reboot
If you can see the terminal but not the window, idk if xkill would work. Then you’d need to find the process id and kill it with pkill.
Like say you’re playing age of empires 2: pgrep aoe (should return all running processes called aoe with their pids > process: aoe2 pid: 69420 …or something like that) then: pkill 69420 > ded
Yeaaa…nope.
We definitely need a better UI with highest prio for this.
In case you haven’t tried it, you can run Steam games in native Wayland mode, and get a more stable experience. Especially with fractional scaling. There are two steps:
- Install a GE-Proton runner, and configure the game to use it.
- Set game launch options to,
env DISPLAY="" PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 %command%
I am on Mint. For now. Anyway I am quiet quitting Steam for GOG and Heroic had no problem running Unity games with fractional scaling.
A few select games, Notably Watch Dogs 2 and Fallout: New Vegas, probably because of Proton bugs, occasionally freeze my (Debian+i3wm) desktop. My computer is not frozen, but my desktop session is. I can take my smartphone and SSH into my desktop to kill the game’s process (or Steam, which will take the game with it when it dies).
I’ve come to enjoy this process because I feel like some kinda movie hacker.
How much ram you hauling? I’ve had similar issues when voices of the void sprung a memory leak in an earlier build, completely froze my desktop until I nuked it.
48G but that’s not it. I have plenty left over whenever it happens, and running out of memory has never frozen my desktop.
Shit that’s crazy. I guess the syslog might help but I know it won’t give you wine/proton logs, and I’ve not worked out how to get at those myself yet.
You should be able to switch tty to access the system directly from the pc. If you’re unaware… ctrl alt f3 will switch to another terminal where you can login and access things. Generally your default sessions is in f2 (ymmv) so ctrl alt f2 should return you to your desktop where you left off once you nuke the offending pid.
Yes, I am aware, but my keyboard can’t do that shortcut
PSA Don’t buy a 60% keyboard for use with Linux…
You can always come out of everything to a separate terminal, not sure how many users actually know that.
It’s not always helpful or even very friendly, but it can save butts.
Ctrl + Alt + F1 or …F6, sometimes even up to F8. Usually desktop is at F2. Sometimes it’s not. But you can check them any time.
There was one time years ago I was working on some unholy mess of mods for Transport Fever and the game kept crashing and bringing the whole X session down with it, and instead of just rebooting like a sane person I instead started a new X session on a new terminal session. I think I got up to 4 or 5 dead x sessions before I finally finished sorting out my mods and rebooted to clean it all up
IDK what desktop environment you’re using… or your specific scenario… but most DE should have something like that. KDE and Gnome have a version of “system monitor” which will work very much like task manager on windows.
https://apps.kde.org/plasma-systemmonitor/
https://apps.gnome.org/SystemMonitor/
Generally there are preinstalled and already assigned a hotkey.
Cinnamon
I believe cinnamon uses gnome system monitor by default so there should be a way to set a custom hotkey for it in settings.
I use Mission Center because I’m someone who prefers a GUI. Maybe that will help some here. :)
For me it’s that ‘can make it work’ != ‘want to spend hours researching to make it work’
If you have a well supported use case Linux is great, if you need to do some things that rely on proprietary drivers, old software, etc it’s a pain
I like the ux in some common windows utilities a lot more than I like their Linux alternatives. I prefer nano zip over the default app that came with my distro.
Default video settings caused going to console to be use a comically oversized font for my large monitor. I remembered how to change fonts sort of, but couldn’t for the life of me remember how to change the resolution. Internet searches had results of mixed quality. Pretty difficult to distinguish instructions for the old boot loader versus the current one. Set the res finally, but it didn’t work. One of the commands I tried did seem to work, but then it caused the advanced graphics to disappear and video transcode suffered. Finally I found the answer I should have used all along: sudo dpkg reconfigure (some package I can’t remember now)
And everything is like that. You want to do something, you better get educated. It’s great for hobbyists, but I find as I get older I just want it to look right and do the thing, so I choose windows from the grub menu and forget I even have it for weeks.
It’s great when everything is supported and works and you like the application and you’d spent sixteen hours theming your desktop and and and … but ain’t nobody got time fo dat
Bluetooth.
Its always been an issue and it remains an issue.
I had issues with Bluetooth on Windows. Been having none since I switched to Debian + KDE.
I had a ton of issues on Arch/Artix, but Debian + KDE works as expected OOTB in terms of functionality and UI.
It depends HEAVILY on your chipset. I have a costco HP i bought as a backup that works seamlessly. Literally seamless at all times. Its a commodity piece of hardware. Millions of these things made.
My bleeding edge, new machine, cuts out, audio stutters, sleep issues; you name it: looking at you mediatek.
If you’re technical, you might be able to change out the chipset as WiFi+Bluetooth is usually on an M.2 2230 E-key board on most machines. But agreed that it is very annoying and this isn’t feasible for most regular users
yeah, I have one of those bluetooth earbud pairs that can pair individually, and they connect just fine but only via a low quality audio sink mode, so it sounds like shit. Works perfectly well with my android phone, so it’s definitely some linux bullshit.
Yeah BT audio quality is not reliably good on devices that work smoothly on OS X.
I know there can be good setups, but it needs to consistently work in shared spaces, which is where i mostly use BT speakers.
I bought a cheap USB Bluetooth dongle decades ago and while the interface has changed in Mint over the years, I’ve always been able to use it to communicate with my ancient flip-phone to get pictures off it. In fact I was able to use it with some very rough and ready software to pull the texts off it at one point.
It probably also worked on Windows, because I’ve had both since before I switched.
The phone’s camera got water damaged a while back and now all the pictures from it - not that I take many - have a literal watermark on them, but the Bluetooth still works both ways.
Can’t vouch for whether it would work with more heavy duty hardware like a headset or speakers, but I guess it must be luck of the draw with a lot of these things.
TL;DR: I’d recommend getting a bluetooth dongle!
I’ve got an Asus bluetooth 4.0 dongle, and it works perfectly for bluetooth. PS5 controllers, Airpods Pros, they’ve all connected to it really nicely.
I used to have issues on Windows with bluetooth, but then I found out why. My Windows was using my motherboard BT instead of the dongle. I added a PS5 controller while that was in effect, and once I eventually got the bluetooth dongle (poor BT module in the motherboard sucked ass), I noticed I couldn’t remove the controller from the settings menu or through the old control panel way.
I had to turn on the BT module on my motherboard again, boot into Windows, remove the BT entries, then turn it back off. I’ve never had an issue in either Windows or Linux after that.
Ditto to this, I was having huge problems with the rpi4/5 modules, when I bought a dongle everything worked instantly.
Printing.
Windows drivers are so fancy, with previews and a billion options, while Linux gets a randomly ordered list of raw options in a drop-down menu and that’s it
Exhibit A:
The same, but in Windows:
My HP Deskjet 1110:
The only other option the driver provides is Color or Grayscale. It’s pretty clean.
I always liked the Linux ones over Windows. No random bullshit depending on who made the drivers, just a solid set of options.
Could do with being prettier through.
I think you’re essentially right but sometimes I look at the Linux panels and wish they looked a little less…burdened with aesthetic growing pains or like…aesthetic arrested development. They don’t have to be skeuomorphic or frutiger aero or like, keep up with the Joneses, but config menus in Linux are often one of those little reminders, no matter how trivial, that this isn’t a polished product but a humble labor of love. It’s endearing. But sometimes it feels like holding a toy from the CVS when you want a Transformers from Toys R Us lol.
This is heavily dependent on the printer driver used.
My bother does this until I install the CUPS PPD from brother.
Newer process are moving to a driverless IPP model, which should help with this.
Basically no support for CAD software. I started out on FreeCAD back in 2016 then switched to Fusion360 a few years later. I gave FreeCAD another go a little after it hit 1.0 but it still feels so clunky in comparison.
Even though I share most of my designs, I’m not interested in the free version of OnShape where there isn’t a choice in the matter.
I’m no professional so I could probably make due with FreeCAD but I’ll be keeping my dual boot since I have the option.
FreeCAD is straight up awful. I’m with ya 100%
Waiting for someone to develop a blender addon for a cad mode
Supposedly a solution for Blender exists but I tried to make it work and failed :( https://www.cadsketcher.com/
If I have to read about the topological naming problem one more time…
And 2D CAD! Just make an AutoCAD clone!
If you don’t mind using text-based interaction you could give OpenSCAD a try … it’s like TinkerCAD (solids and holes) but with code …
I might be biased here because I’m a programmer by trade but I didn’t find it too hard … also mostly need boxy shapes … but still, I think it’s neat …
Everything is working in my daily use. But there are still little things that pop up less regularly, mostly around hardware.
I’ve got a USB SSD that I can’t use, because I need to “unlock” it in a windows device first. I can’t even re-partition it in linux.
I can’t update the firmware on my monitor because it can’t simply be done with a USB stick and on screen menus, but actually requires a windows only application.
And when I first started daily driving linux, my Nvidia GPU was a regular source of frustration, but it’s resolved now
Every one of these problems are because of manufacturers artificially locking hardware down, but they’re still problems. One can only hope that a growing linux using consumer base will shift their priorities
I’m so curious about this: can you tell us the make/model of the USB SSD please? That seems so hostile!
It’s a Samsung Portable SSD T5 1TB
Do you think the USB SSD issue could be because of the partition format? Example, Windows NTFS support can be enabled on Linux so you can then mount it. You can check partition type using a tool like
fdisk -l. Perhaps that might help.Nope. If it were that, I’d still be able to trash the partition.
The issue is apparently because it’s encrypted at the drive level and can’t even mount in windows without their proprietary software unlocking it first
I think it’s a Self Encrypting Drive. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Self-encrypting_drives There are basically two standards out there, the most common should be OPAL:
Install sedutil https://github.com/Drive-Trust-Alliance/sedutil/wiki/Command-Syntax Check #sedutil-cli scan This should list your drive with the locked state. You can unlock it using this tool if you remember the password - or reset it using the PSID (long number a sticker on NVMes, here possibly internal so you’ll have to open the case or read it from Samsung Drive Magician?) with the aptly named “yesIreallywanttoERASEALLmydatausingthePSID”.
Also in Samsung Drive Magician there should be an option for “Secure Erase” - which does the same thing and removes the password protection. But not for some drives, had the issue with a EVO Pro 990 - but the OEM variant, which Drive Magician macically no longer recognizes as a Samsung drive and refuses to cooperate.
I’ve got a USB SSD that I can’t use, because I need to “unlock” it in a windows device first. I can’t even re-partition it in linux.
Is this Bitlocker FDE? Have you tried using Dislocker?
If that doesn’t work, I recommend building a gparted live USB. Once you’re up and the SSD is visible, create a new partition table
Complete this step with no other changes. This shouldn’t care if the partitions on the disk or encrypted, it will reset the partition table which will make the disk appear blank, as if it was never formatted. You should then be able to create any new partitions you want in the available space.
! THIS IS DESTRUCTIVE !
But if you couldn’t access the encrypted partition then the data was effectively destroyed already.
There’s no data on it, and I don’t care about the disk particularly. If I really need it at some point, I’ve got a dual boot windows PC in the lounge room that serves as a media PC for the family that I can use to unlock it.
I bring it up mostly because it’s indicative of the hardware pain points. It’s also typical of them in that it’s annoying, relatively minor, and generally the fault of proprietary locking down, rather than a true compatibility issue.
Unattended remote access under Wayland. I have multiple computers some headless and some with displays and I often like to remote into those from my other machines on my lan. With Xorg I used VNC. But with Wayland I have yet to find a reliable way to remote control a Wayland session without also sitting in front of the machine I’m trying to remote into.
I got this working for the time being by using rustdesk (even though rustdesk isn’t supported fully on Wayland but already works for me)
Since I already had tailscale,I can even connect to devices on different networks.
Setup one time password on rustdesk and it works eveytime.
I second this! RustDesk can have some issues at times (scrolling from Linux to another OS can be… finicky at times…) but it really works well enough to not have to worry about it too much.
On openSUSE Tumbleweed (and I assume any other KDE distro), you can install KRDP. I had it working, but the fact that Linux doesn’t let me easily change resolution through a GUI, I gave up on it and continued using RustDesk where I can at least get it to zoom in on the cursor!
Bluetooth is very buggy, but it’s not too much of a deal breaker.
