alt Hacker NewsBecause Linux is full of sharp edges which nobody seems to find it fit to fix.
I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.
Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.
This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.
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While I dont disagree, Mac and Windows also have their own sharp edges that for some reason no one finds fit to fix even though they get paid millions of dollars to maintain the software. The other day my mom told me her Bluetooth speaker no longer worked on her windows laptop. I was like, ok, lets try the normal troubleshooting steps. Turn it off and on again. Restart computer. Unpair and repair. But I couldn't unpair. It just said no.
I installed ChatGPT on her laptop and allowed it to run a certain subset of shell commands and it finally worked.
If im gonna have to muck around in the terminal to do the most basic of tasks, I may as well use Linux so I actually have a semblance of ownership on my computer.
Inversely, I've ran KDE on bleeding edge for three years now and have only ran into a handful of bugs, and nothing critical that required me to drop to a terminal to fix. The networking issue seems particularly specific and I have never seen this occur across any of my desktop or laptops.
> yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity
While I'm not deeply familiar with Red Hat/Fedora - I'm curious if you know what happened here? What changed to trigger this behavior?
Looking at a few search results - looks like an upgrade to 44 likely exposed/introduced a bug in power management that result in the Ethernet being turned off, and the kernel mode unloaded?
I'm guessing the intention behind the change was to enable more power saving.
But that is certainly a valid concern with most Linux distros - ocationally an improvement (higher resolution, faster, better color depth console or driver) will mess with bootloader, x/Wayland etc.
Still driver yank isn't unheard of with windows upgrades either. With MacOS I'm just going to assume any os upgrade is likely to cause some issues - even when Apple owns both the hw and os.
that's really ignoring two big points. 1. windows and macs don't "just work" either... they have their fair share of pain points that you have to accept and/or workaround. 2. linux is different than windows and is different than macos in the sense that you've spent a long time learning the quirks of windows and macos and have the fixes mostly ready. once you learn the quirks of linux it's basically the same.
After the learning curve of linux desktop(well kde) it's basically the same as macos for me and for most people that would use it. most of the computing is done in the browser and that's basically the same experience in any os.
Microsoft Windows is so bad that most consumers just throw away their old computers and buy new ones when Windows stops working. The more persistent ones will search through some forums for solution, or nowadays try to work through something with AI.
The thing you describe with NetworkManager is worse on Windows. I am uncertain how many different user interfaces there are for networking in Windows, and many simple actions take at least 3 screens, and still doesn't fix the problem.
Every time my connected monitor wakes up from sleep it steals audio back from my internal laptop speakers, the only way to fix it is (with the help of a chatbot to write a script) to permanently turn off the monitor speakers.
All of the rough edges with Linux that are legitimately worse are not things that are the fault of Linux. Tools and games and video streaming services which are either not tested or deliberately designed so they cannot function on Linux.
If you try again, be less ambitious. Don't try to get KDE or Gnome going.
Do a minimal install. Add just enough packages to get X working.
Configure a simple window manager like openbox or dwm.
I uninstall the networking managers. I wrote a simple bash menu program. In one terminal I used that to launch wpa_supplicant for the current network. In another window, I run dhcp. I have a workspace just for that.
When I stay in a hotel, I need to set up a new wpa supplicant profile, and that takes a few minutes. It's klunky. But system upgrades pass by without me noticing.
It's like running an old car with carburettors and simple electrics. You learn the machine once, there's hardly anything to go wrong.
I have used Windows for decades. Not once have I thought "I should make my own file manager."
I thought that after a few months of using Linux.
These sharp edges are a lot less annoying with agents to help solve the problem.
Gotta ask what hardware you are running. It makes a world of difference.
Anecdotally: I usually run Linux on my desktop and have a windows partition only for one game I play. When I booted into Windows, it didn't see either of my two wifi cards in the system. I ran a cable across the house, updated drivers, BIOS, and eventually saw in device manager > hidden devices that the OS thinks my card is unplugged.
It was there before.
In Linux it's there.
Next step is unseat/reseat the PCI device, check connections to the motherboard, and leave powered off for a few minutes. Hopefully windows will decide the device exists.
> ...most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection.
What are those correct settings? Do you need something particularly special done for your Ethernet connection to function? Given that you were there because you were troubleshooting a NetworkManager failure, I'd also wonder if NetworkManager changed in a way that made that "add interface wizard" not work correctly anymore.
> ...the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky...
As you've discovered, NetworkManager is intermittently horrifically flaky. Every time I think about how it's the default for most Linux distros, I get so angry.
I used to enthusiastically use it for everything until the maintainers released a version that would always attempt to set the interface MTU to 0 after bringing it up, which the OS would clamp to something else... 12xx or 14xx, I can't remember. [0] After that clownshow, I dropped NetworkManager forever and used the "legacy" tools that had been working reliably for ages and continue to work reliably.
In the case of wired Ethernet interfaces, all that needs to be done for pretty much every home user is to bring the interface up and start a DHCP client like 'dhcpcd'. In the case of WiFi ones, you bring the interface up and start wpa_supplicant which can be managed with something like wpa_gui. Not-coincidentally, the Linux distro I use supports using both of these with its network configuration-and-activation tooling.
[0] For those who don't know what MTU is, know that the effect of this misconfiguration is that your network communications will intermittently stop dead for no clear reason at all. Things have gotten quite a bit better since then, and you can run mixed-MTU networks if you're careful about it... but back then, this immediately launched you into flaky network purgatory.
Everything is full of sharp edges. It's just a matter of which ones are more painful to you.
The author's inability to uninstall or fully disable AI features is one for Mac OS. Window management is a common one for people used to other systems.
Windows has many, with (again) AI features that are hard to get rid of, and attempts to coerce users to create an online account being two of the most prominent lately.
So yeah, KDE's NetworkManager frontend is a little janky sometimes, and they should fix that. Is it worse than trying to coerce the user into using services they don't want to? For some people, probably. For me, no.