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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • If you’re using btrfs then you might need to rebalance it. I had the same problem, i.e. “no free space” while tools like df reporting that there should be available disk space, and it confused the hell out of me until I found the solution.

    See manual: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Balance.html

    This are the commands I run every now and then, especially if my drive has been close to full and I delete a bunch of files to make more space:

    sudo btrfs balance start -dusage=10 /
    sudo btrfs balance start -dusage=20 /
    sudo btrfs balance start -dusage=30 /
    

    The / at the end is the path, since it’s my root mount which uses btrfs. The example in the manual does 40 and 50 too, but higher numbers take longer time, even on an nvme ssd.



  • Maybe it’s changing now with Windows 10/11, but I think historically Windows has had just as difficult learning curve as Linux. People who have complained about Linux being more difficult than Windows just thought so because they had already spent years learning how to deal with Windows, while if they switched to Linux they would have to learn new things. If someone who has used MacOS 100% of their life were to begin using either Windows or Linux then I don’t think there would be much difference in difficulty.

    I’ve come across plenty of bugs and usability issues in Windows, and despite having 10+ years experience with the OS I sometimes found them very difficult to solve, often requiring copy-pasting cryptic texts into the command prompt and/or regedit. I also think troubleshooting on Windows is made worse thanks to them writing witty things like “oops, something went wrong!” instead of actually giving you a useful error message, some many issues are of course unfixable due to its proprietary nature. At best you get an error code which you can look up online, but the OS is not made to be debugged by the user.

    In the past Microsoft had really good support which you chat with, but the last time Windows refused to authenticate after an upgrade all the human support appears to have been replaced by automated troubleshooters. It got stuck in an endless loop of “run local troubleshooter” -> “you should try rebooting” -> “run online troubleshooter” -> “you should try rebooting” -> “back to the local troubleshooter again”. At work I still have a help-desk I can call with people who have taken countless hours of Microsoft trainings to get certifications.

    just so I wasn’t choosing between 100% and 200% scaling. That’s just beyond the average computer user.

    So if I understood you right, Fedora lets you choose either 100% or 200% scaling but you wanted more options than that? I.e. you wanted to overcome a limitation of the OS, rather than having to fix something which was broken? I don’t think the average computer user could do something similar in Windows. For example when I got my work computer with Windows 11, AFAIK there was no option to only show the task bar on one monitor, so it was always visible and taking space on all monitors. IIRC Microsoft added this feature last year, but I think it would’ve been extremely difficult for the average user to find a way to find a way to do it before that.

    Guesstimating 99% of the Windows users I know would just accept that kind of thing like “it’s annoying, but this is how computers are”. I have friends, family members and coworkers who use Windows, and I’ve found them all to be extremely forgiving towards computer issues.








  • Fortunately I dislike Windows so much that I’m willing to spend a few weekends helping someone switch to Linux, especially if it’s my wife :D I’m also realizing I might’ve skipped a step in the conversation since the person I replied to was talking about Ubuntu, and it’s possible that at least some of those problems were specific to Xfce. In my mind I reasoned “I used to think that Xubuntu would be a solid recommendation for a beginner since I had a good experience with it in the past”, and it sounded like others were saying similar things about Ubuntu. Since I discovered that Xubuntu now had a lot of non-trivial issues I had to deal with, I was kind of thinking that it might be the same for vanilla Ubuntu… Or not, it might still be easy to use and a plug-n-play experience for beginners :)


  • Small disclaimer: I’m not claiming all these issues can be said to be 100% Ubuntu’s fault, but if recommending a distro to someone who wants to try Linux for the first time they probably won’t care about anything other than the compound experience. I used Xubuntu for many years and remembered it as very stable and the vast majority of things being easy and working out of the box, which is why I was so surprised that I had to spend hours troubleshooting various things that I never had problems with previously.

    Some issues and annoyances I remember off the top of my head:

    Unable to wake computer after monitor turning off due to inactivity. Happened to all 3 computers which have very different hardware, which seemed a little strange to me. Did some troubleshooting on my wife’s desktop PC and IIRC it appeared to be the program which would ask for your password crashed, causing the computer to turn off the monitor signal again. Uninstalled the xfce4-screensaver package and disabled password on resume on her PC which fixed it there, but her netbook needs to have password and I think it still sometimes has this issue (she doesn’t use it very often). On the htpc I both uninstalled xfce4-screensaver and disabled all monitor power saving, but recently it has started turning off the monitor signal after inactivity anyway. At least it always wakes up from this state.

    However, the htpc sometimes fails to wake up the monitor/tv after hibernate. The computer wakes up but the monitor doesn’t, and the only solution I know is the following procedure: Wake the computer up, press ctrl-alt-f1 to switch to a different vtty, press the keyboard shortcut to hibernate the computer, wake it up again, press ctrl-alt-f6 to switch back to the graphical desktop. For some reason that works…

    Every time the htpc wakes up from hibernate there’s a notification saying something about the computer being reconnected to the network. There’s a button on the popup for “don’t notify me about this again” but it makes no difference, the popups keep coming. Can ofc. be disabled entirely from some other settings, but it’s not working as expected.

    Watching movies in Kodi doesn’t work. It starts playing it without sound, then it begins to stutter after about 10 seconds and it gets worse until Kodi freezes entirely. Haven’t had time to properly debug it, but it worked just fine on Arch (which I wouldn’t recommend to a beginner for other reasons :)) which the previous htpc had. Instead we use VLC for the time being.

    We watch various series on youtube and dropout.tv so we have a browser tab permanently open for each, often with longer episodes paused in the middle. About once per month there’s a popup telling us that we must close the web browser so that snap can update it. The popups don’t time out, and need to be clicked to go away. If you click to ignore it too many times it will forcibly close eventually. Occasionally this causes the web sites to forget what we were watching, and it can take a bit of time to find out where you were in a 3 hour D&D actual play. Probably snaps working as intended but both of us find it annoying.

    Over all our Brother laser jet + scanner is great with Linux, but I had to spend a few hours to get all features working on my wife’s PC while it was pretty much plug-n-play on my current install of Fedora KDE.

    Wife’s PC had issues with monitors losing their relative position and orientation. It might’ve been triggered when one of the cables glitched a bit, and it doesn’t happen now that they’re screwed in properly, but I think the OS ought to remember the configuration better. It also moved the monitors so they weren’t adjacent, which made the mouse pointer behave very weirdly when moved between then until she rearranged them in the settings.

    There were some other things that I’m not able to recall right now too, nothing too serious for someone with Linux experience. My wife used Ubuntu at university so she’s not computer illiterate, but I don’t think she would’ve had the time and energy to spend hours troubleshooting issues, searching online and digging around in config files, so she probably would’ve switched back to Windows since it mostly worked for her.


  • It used to be at least, but I’m not so sure that it still is. I’ve been using Linux full time for over a decade, mostly Xubuntu but also other distros and vanilla Ubuntu. Last year my wife decided that she wanted to ditch Windows for good so we installed Xubuntu on her pc, her netbook and our new htpc, and I was surprised that we ran into so many different issues. I could solve some of them but I think it would be much more difficult for a first time Linux user, and potentially give them a bad first impression of Linux OS:es.