Linux OS stuff Thread

Linux desktop environments have always felt clunky. Here we are, what, 20+ years later after they first started heralding Linux on the desktop and it's still a bitch to use.

Yea it's been a month or so, and I've had a few freezeups. The Dolphin file manager seems to be the usual culprit. There is some kind of watchdog that kills runaway processes but the hangup I get doesn't seem to trigger it.

It always recovers somehow, but it usually takes 10 minutes or so. I think it is some kind of race condition. Last time it happened I nuked a directory in one Dolphin window and refreshed another and it seemed to get very confused.

Hangs aside, the Dolphin stuff really struggles with NTFS drives. It gets very sluggish and unresponsive when it tries to recurse and count items and such.

Kinda makes me want to try another flavour. That and the snap thing. Snap is a sort of annoying graphical apt. It frequently attempts to update stuff you have running and pops up an annoying warning that you have x days to close it so it can update it. You have no way of forcing this update though so you have to close the thing and then wait ... an hour? A day? Who knows?

Also I figured out that gam_server has nothing to do with Valheim. I found this hilarious poorly written article about it:


All that aside, my directX stuff is coming along! Textures are messed up but solid shapes are drawing:

Kharzette said:

Snap is a sort of annoying graphical apt. It frequently attempts to update stuff you have running and pops up an annoying warning that you have x days to close it so it can update it. You have no way of forcing this update though so you have to close the thing and then wait ... an hour? A day? Who knows?

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Right, I've been using Ubuntu on a laptop and I get the exact same annoying behavior. I think even trying to update itself it'll complain about it being running and can't update. OKAY? Then shut yourself down and then perform the update. Why do I have to drop to a command prompt and kill the process manually? Shit like this is super annoying. Also, I thought 'apt' updated everything? Why is there now another software updater?

you can do "snap refresh" to force the snap packages to update. I quit using Ubuntu though because the snap package system frankly sucks and having to use two package managers to keep up to date is pretty crappy as well.

The Linux workstations are a lot closer to Windows these days. I use Fedora Workstation and run a service called auto-dnf (or something like that) and it basically checks for and installs updates once a week and reboots the system if any are applied.

Thanks for that command! Vastly reduces the annoyance.

alavaz said:

you can do "snap refresh" to force the snap packages to update. I quit using Ubuntu though because the snap package system frankly sucks and having to use two package managers to keep up to date is pretty crappy as well.

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few weeks ago, i went through 13ish days of getting this message every 3 hours, finally waited it out and it went away. so happy to find out how to get rid of it this time.

I've had it fail me a couple times when visual studio code had some kind of shell process stuck open.


Helps track those down so you can kill em.

Another fun tip I found recently. If a badly made program creates a window with the title bar off the top of the screen, you have no way to drag it into view. Windows you can fiddle with alt arrows or M and get a keyboard arrow controlled move to get it back, but for linux this works:


Then you click once on whatever bit of the window you can see and it moves it 100 right and 400 down.

I made a really stupid mistake. I added a windows steam library folder from a NTFS drive on my linux steam. Every time I'd boot into linux, it would fiddle with the files a little bit. Then when I'd go back to windows it would want to download THE ENTIRE GODDAMN GAME. I had conan exiles in there etc which is huge.

I'd remove it from the downloads library stuff in the client and it would just keep coming back, each time trashing my files before I could stop it. Eventually found this and it worked:


I had to download conan 3 times, which was extreme pain on my cans-and-string connexion.

I've been using Pop!OS on a cheap Dell OptiPlex micro I got off eBay. Great operating system. One of the few Linux distros I've used where everything just works, is fast, and looks great.

One thing I really need is a good fileman style gui file manipulator. Like a windows explorer kind of thing.

Kubuntu uses Dolphin, and it just gets painfully slow on big ntfs drives. It might be the underlying filesystem stuff causing it but either way I'd like to try some kind of alternative.

Kharzette said:

One thing I really need is a good fileman style gui file manipulator. Like a windows explorer kind of thing.

Kubuntu uses Dolphin, and it just gets painfully slow on big ntfs drives. It might be the underlying filesystem stuff causing it but either way I'd like to try some kind of alternative.

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i have be wanting to tryout krusader

At a glance, Krusader is really nice! Seems to load up my ntfs stuff quickly.

My last remaining persistent annoyance was my audio setting HDMI1 to default every damn time my monitors went to sleep. This fixes it:

Goatface said:

few weeks ago, i went through 13ish days of getting this message every 3 hours, finally waited it out and it went away. so happy to find out how to get rid of it this time.
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BTW this seems to have changed to cause the snap refresh to happen as soon as you close whatever the popup is about. Should have been like that from the start!

So I have this old serverish box that hadn't been on for years. I think I built it in the mid 2000's and it had a 4 drive raid5 array with 250 gig ide drives. Last week I decided to get it over onto one of my newer drives with snapraid for parity.

The C drive was failing and one of the raid drives had dropped out entirely, and there were errors here and there on some of the other drives. Took several days to copy it all off. Afterward I decided to put a newer OS on it to fool around with it. It is an AGP system and I had an all-in-wonder I wanted to mess around with.

The BIOS is way before the EFI days, so I spent a lot of time trying to get a USB stick to boot, but never had any luck. I finally tried a dvd boot as I found an old barely working dvd writer. Most of my ancient discs wouldn't boot, and some of the ones that would were 64 bit stuff like newer windows. I finally got a debian 6 disc to boot.

I updated from 6 all the way up to the latest 12 (bookworm). I wish I had chronicled this journey as it was fraught with peril and assgoblinry. It was almost like installing windows 3.1 and upgrading all the way to 11.

Some of the releases, like I think 7 to 8, just worked and I was shocked at how easy it was. Some had some incredibly gnarly circular dependency problems. At some point in there, there was a breaking change in libc, which damn near everything uses, and I had to do alot of nasty apt tricks, removing almost everything to get it to install. This also killed ssh access so I had to plug a keyboard in.

Somewhere in there the old DVD drive gave up the ghost entirely so there was no way out but forward.

Another funny thing happened. The first few hours while I was copying stuff off the raid I noticed the machine was really unstable. I thought it was just the drive errors but eventually figured out that one side of the cpu heatsink had a broken clamp. I put the machine on its side and looked for something heavy to hold it down.


Perfect fit!

I bought a new heatsink/fan and then discovered that the retaining bracket thing was also broken.

Anyway, I was using my crappy little netbook to burn a mini sd card for a la potato (le? la?) little computer I got and I couldn't get anything to work because the disc was full. I had screwed up the partitioning so I booted off flash to fix it.

I have a ventoy boot thumbdrive and I had a newer lubuntu on there I had tried to get on the pentium4 last week but never managed it. I booted that to fix the partitions and liked it so much that I ended up just installing it.

Grub was superbroken though. Five solid hours of assgoblinry later I figured it out. The machine is super old so at some point grub's video stuff changed. Has something to do with EFI (wtf is efi even?). The old vdeinfo listed alot of modes but the newer videoinfo listed nothing. This is at the grub command shell.

One odd thing is that vdeinfo's preferred mode was 1024x600 (my craptop's native res) but it wasn't listed in the mode list, so that was likely the problem. Eventually I found the commands to change the res from the grub command shell and it worked, but when I tried it in the config file it never would work.

Eventually I found that changing video modes would never work unless you ran vdeinfo first. I'm guessing that kicks it into old mode. So what I needed was some kind of scriptlike functionality that would run before grub starts.

There is such a thing, in /etc/grub.d/40_custom you can put commands as if you were at the grub shell, so:


Where 0x115 is the mode you want from the list out of vbeinfo.

That gets you into an actual mode so the theme stuff can work.

So I stumbled on a trick for kde shuffling windows offscreen where the title bar is above the monitor borders. I was using xdetool from a command prompt but turns out you can just hold left windowskey and left click and drag anywhere on the window to move it.

Also I figured out what was causing dual booting to sometimes leave an NTFS drive in read only mode. It is a windows power option called "fast startup". Kill that and the read only problem goes away.

Doesn't really count as linux- but not sure what other thread this should go in. quake 2 style game engine working in templeos. If you know how to make bsp maps they've been looking for people to make some assets for awhile.

Anyone use nixOS?

Mainly an Arch user at home but use Debian and Ubuntu for work environments. nixOS has some promise in deployment and configuration in that everything can be configured in a single (few?) configuration files. From packages, to settings and everything. Sounds too good to be true?