Quoting: Anza

Quoting: denyasisIf I may add to you list, there is also a prejudice (or preference?) against warnings.
We tend to ignore them for a variety of reasons ( it won't happen to me, it doesn't apply to me, I've done it before and nothing bad happened then, this is just for liability, they are too cautious... Etc)

I'll admit I'm guilty of that myself, borking my install more times than I can count because I wanted to try something different or new.

It's totally possible to bork install even when reading all the output. I think I did just that with Arch at some point. I don't remember borking the installation to point where I would actually reinstall with Gentoo though. Though with Gentoo installation is almost installing everything from scratch anyway, so understanding how system is built is kind of thing you have to learn or switch to another distribution.

With Windows though I just reboot in case of problems, I don't have wish to learn it deeper.

Of course but then it's usually down to actual issues with the packages. With Arch I can imagine that you could e.g install a new version of libxx that is not abi/api compatible with some binary that are needed but that package have not been updated yet so congrats you now hosed something.

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Quoting: Lightkey

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: LightkeyHe claimed that a normal user would have reported the bug instead and that a normal user indeed reported the bug on GitHub, which then turned out to be a well-versed developer himself.

Which if you dig deeper you'll see that the reddit poster quote mined to find that well-versed developer, in reality the bug had been reported to the Pop!_OS github by many people including both normal users and devs like the one the reddit post highlighted.

This is not to say that the Pop!_OS maintainer could be a bit more PR friendly in his approach here.

Thanks, so that is what he meant by taken out of context (and why he deleted the tweets).

Edit: Went back to reddit [External Link] and can't confirm that it was the reddit poster that specifically searched for that developer, nor that others reported it, unless you mean as comments in the GitHub issue opened by the one who the Pop!_OS developer linked to in his Twitter thread himself.

I was going by the words of the Pop maintainer (Jeremy) and he does not seam to have been completely honest if that is the case... I did check out the original poster of the issue and while he have 49 repos on Github he does so not as a programmer but as a Biochemist using R as a statistical tool, but I do see how he can be seen as a bit more experienced with things like Github than a normal user.

What bothers me a bit is that the System76 support page requires you to register before you can issue a ticket and that should be a big no no.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: slembckeHah! I used to think GDB was just the worst, but it's my go-to debugger now. With a few dozen lines of scripting you can at least soften the annoying parts (can't just click in an IDE to set breakpoints, etc), while greatly amplifying the parts where it excels.

I know you can script it. But I feel like scripting to improve out of the box debugger experience shows it has a long way to go to feel comfortable. And that's not a good thing if no one is trying to address that properly.

I don't think criticism of those who are used to MSVC debugger level of comfort is invalid. So I'm not even sure why it's still not addressed. Do gdb developers have such mentality? I.e. script it if you feel like it's not good enough already and we aren't going to improve the debugger itself? If so, it's a bad mentality.

Doesn't any of the 20 odd GDB frontends solve this? http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/GDB%20Front%20Ends [External Link]

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I've been thinking about this whole affair some more and have now changed my mind slightly. What I think that we saw here in the LTT video was prejudice and ignorant behaviour from a Windows user.

The Linux terminal are so powerful and honestly so easy to use that many of us Linux users prefer to do work here and when helping others we tend to show examples from the terminal since it's way easier than having to guide them through a locale and DE dependent GUI.

The problem however is that this have somehow been translated into "you have to use the terminal to get things done in Linux".

Another prejudice which I honestly don't really know where it comes from is the notion that "stuff never works in Linux", I've mostly heard this from Windows people like Linus and both him and Luke have said it numerous times on their WAN show when talking about their Linux Challenge. In particular it came up in this very video in where Linus tries to install Steam and the GUI complaints with a warning and refuses to install.

Now we all know that this was due to a bug in the Steam package by the Pop!_OS maintainers, yes they blame Launchpad here but there are automatic ways to detect errors like this so this should never have been put into the repo to begin with. But as any computer user have ever known, besides when it happens on a system where he or she is not a fan of, all software have bugs and computers have never been 100% reliable. If any claims otherwise then ask them if they have ever restarted to fix something.

And it's here where those two prejudices comes to play, when encountering this problem Linus does not see it as a real problem but one of "Linux always does this" and he says as much when he claims that "People always tell me that Linux works and then things like this happens and the exact same thing happened when I tried Ubuntu some years ago". Which of course is not true since Ubuntu never had this exact problem with it's Steam package ever but I digress.

So the "Linux always does this" prejudice leads him to the conclusion that the displayed Warning is just Linux being an asshole and he have to search out another way to really make it work at which time the second prejudice kicks in which is "so I have to use the terminal to make things work in Linux".

How do we get people out of these prejudices? Because that is what we have to do, solving any of this in a technical way is not sufficient (since it basically really are solved), e.g Pop!_OS will now refuse to uninstall essential packages even with the do as I say! prompt unless a special file is present on the filesystem but we all know that this will only lead to the "next Linus" to put that file there because "that is what you have to do to have Linux work".

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Quoting: LightkeyHe claimed that a normal user would have reported the bug instead and that a normal user indeed reported the bug on GitHub, which then turned out to be a well-versed developer himself.

Which if you dig deeper you'll see that the reddit poster quote mined to find that well-versed developer, in reality the bug had been reported to the Pop!_OS github by many people including both normal users and devs like the one the reddit post highlighted.

This is not to say that the Pop!_OS maintainer could be a bit more PR friendly in his approach here.

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Here's to hoping that they don't bring on the 100% Windows gaming experience :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReHafyiDTR0 [External Link]

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Quoting: x_wing

Quoting: dubigrasuYou mean the one with the mouse showing in one place and clicking in another? Yes, I had that one too on AMD, I'm not even surprised when it shows up, "oh, that thing again".
As for workarounds, yes, I also use various scripts to force my monitors to do what I want depending on the specific task. But they are simple tasks, and all this xrandr brouhaha should not be needed. Nvidia/Amd/whatever, is a hassle enough that I'm just better with a single monitor.

If xrandr can fix your issue, then the problem is your DE, not the driver. The weird issue to mention on the second guy is the offset of the screen.

Which only happened on the live cd though and not after he installed and used the proper everything so probably a problem with nouveau or the DE used for the live cd.

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Quoting: AsciiWolf

Quoting: scaineSo it's outdated and broken? That would be odd, since I'm using it every day.

It's hopefully not that broken since I helped fix the worst parts for 20.04, but it's still problematic and outdated when compared to the official deb package from Valve. For example the version in LTS 20.04 is from March 2020 and was never updated[1].

[1] https://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/multiverse/s/steam/steam_1.0.0.61-2ubuntu3/changelog [External Link]

Quoting: F.UltraNot to mention that the steam package is just a shim that downloads the real installer from Valve.

Except that it also has to handle dependencies (that change with time, especially with Pressure Vessel and VR stuff), ship udev rules for VR/controllers and do other things.

Yes I forgot about the udev rules for the controllers! I do think that the steam package should be redone completely as a pure shim that just downloads the valve-hosted .deb and run that.

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Quoting: scaine

Quoting: AsciiWolfSteam, for example. There were many problems with that package, I helped solve some of them (in collaboration with other Ubuntu community volunteers), but it was really pain in the arse and the package is still regularly broken and outdated.

So it's outdated and broken? That would be odd, since I'm using it every day.

Not to mention that the steam package is just a shim that downloads the real installer from Valve.

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Quoting: kaktuspalme

Quoting: F.UltraOr rather, not being able to uninstall the desktop would of course work but then we no longer can uninstall the desktop which removes the power that Linux gives you.

I agree, but in Linux we have the freedom to choose whichever distribution we like. But distributions focused on average users should be "non-breakable" and thus maybe even limit your freedom. Personally I wouldn't like to use such a distribution but I would recommend such a distribution for the average user.

Ah ok, yes you might be on to something here. A distro specifically for for Windows refugees!

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