What software have you found particularly frustrating or difficult to configure on Linux?

  • Wojwo@lemmy.ml
    4·
    54 minutes ago

    Xserver… Somehow trying to find the magic string of letters and numbers that made your screen work.

  • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    It used to be button 10 (also counting 4 scrollwheel directions and click) of my Elecom trackball. I had written a small C program reading the device node and writing the events just of that to stdout, then piping that to a tclsh script (so I could change it easily and it’s still super fast for gaming) which did something in X. Horrible. But then they added support for more buttons to everything (kernel, X) and now I can just map it in games, like any other.

  • thejevans@lemmy.ml
    4·
    2 hours ago

    Trying to configure Sway in NixOS. I gave up and just use KDE Plasma. I do miss using Sway from when I used Arch, though.

  • superweeniehutjrs@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 hours ago

    I still don’t fully understand how to gracefully have multiple desktop environments and switch between them. When I want to try something new to me like lxqt, I usually spin up a VM.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      2·
      20 minutes ago

      Normally, the process is:

      • install the packages for the desktop environment
      • log out (not just locking the screen)
      • find a dropdown or cogwheel where you can select the other desktop environment
      • log in

      Having said that, I don’t know what you mean with “graceful”. Desktop environments may involve lots of packages, which may create configuration files in your home directory or get auto-started in your other DEs, so it can be messy.
      Something minimal, like LXQt or the various window managers, isn’t going to cause much of a mess, though.

      I guess, creating a second user with a separate home-directory, like the other person suggested, would isolate that potential mess…