I’m really hoping this all forces Ubuntu out as the face of desktop Linux.
It’s been pretty low tier for years now, and Canonical just proves corporate backing doesn’t guarantee a good distro.
Snap is pretty garbage, default GNOME is horrendous, the repos break every other month, apt is still pretty lame despite being an user upgrade for apt-get, the packages are neither stable nor cutting edge, they change core OS backends like every update which breaks configs and makes documentation obsolete.
I’d like to suggest Fedora as the new goto, but I feel like it’s a bit too privacy and FOSS oriented which may scare away new users.
Debian is great but it doesn’t have latest packages which isn’t optimal as performance upgrades would take time to release or need to be manually installed.
Well, I’d prefer Canonical to fix their shit, instead of forcing immature products onto users. I’m not against snap per se, as there are valid reasons for sandboxing, especially for games (remember when Steam accidentally wiped some user’s home folders back in 2015? Sandboxing would have prevented that).
However, in its current state, snap causes just too much friction. For example Firefox can’t remember the last used directory for up/downloads, Steam snap will just create a new data directory (forgetting about the games already downloaded), there’s no way to allow additional folders (like /net from autofs) in snap apps etc. It’s just a myriad of issues which make working with the system unnecessarily complex and frustrating, and there seems to be little progress fixing those.
unfortunately, industry loves shit like Ubuntu and RHEL because of their corporate backing. comps love having the insurance of someone to blame or somebody to fix their shit when things hit the fan. I’ve worked for many comps who choose RHEL for that alone. Should we choose the OS built by a bunch of randos in their basement, or something backed by Red Hat where I can just pay them money to handle my support tickets faster if shit blows up? or who tf do I have my cyber liabilities insurance guys sue if the OS has a huge fuckin problem? I want a company behind that shit.
FluentReader not only looks pretty good, but also is capable of fetching the text from linked articles, avoiding needing to open a web browser (and also stripping all ads in the process)
I know it’s probably an odd choice, but ChromeOS. It has the potential to be not just a good starting point for new Linux users but also a distro that could allow Linux to be a lot more accessible to people who aren’t as technologically capable. The main problem is that, similar to android, Google prevents ChromeOS from being used as a proper Linux distro. Right now, it might be a good alternative to Windows and MacOS but as a Linux distro, it’s just not worth using. Especially considering that Linux already has some options available for running android apps, such as Waydroid, that work pretty well.
I really think Google has no idea what it wants ChromeOS to be anymore, they’re just kinda shoving in shoddy solutions to its problems so they can say “hey we can do that too!”
soon they’re gonna introduce Steam and I look forward to that being a big shitshow lol
Have they ever? ChromeOS’s original “app store” was just Chrome’s extension store. It’s been awhile since I’ve checked but Google doesn’t (or at least didn’t) officially support running android apps in ChromeOS Flex. Instead of focusing on getting more apps running on ChromeOS, they’re actively working on Google Play Games for Windows (which also hurts android). For which I think I saw that there are games that work in Google Play Games but they don’t work in ChromeOS for some reason. I’d imagine that there are a lot of other weird things but it’s been a while since I’ve actually used it.
It’s just one of those things where, ChromeOS has the potential to be a good competitor to Windows and MacOS (and maybe even a good Linux distro) but for some reason Google does nothing with it to make it worth using and actually seems to be actively harming it.
Google EOL’d my beloved Asus C302 Chromebook, and now it runs Fedora with KDE. I’m super happy with it ❤️
Now tentatively working on turning my 2009 Mac Mini into a Fedora server/homelab.
So far it’s running Fedora desktop/KDE, and I’m slowly trying to figure out how to get Docker to work so I can run stuff like Audiobookshelf. If I manage to get it working, I’ll try going full Fedora Server instead of the desktop version.
There’s so much waste everywhere, let alone in tech. Being able to both “recycle” old hardware, and find legitimate use for it, should be celebrated.
Now if only I knew what to do about my old phones … I’m pretty good at making them last, so my older ones are very old, and I can’t think of anything useful for them to do that whatever phone I currently have doesn’t do much better 🤔
Does it still get the error without the wifi adapter connected? The stack trace shows some network-related stuff (which doesn't necessarily mean that's where the issue arose, but it would be a little coincidence based on what you said).
That's the first thing I'd try, and if removing the adapter fixes it (long term) I wouldn't use the adapter anymore. Sometimes broken hardware breaks other hardware it's connected to.
If removing the adapter doesn't fix it, then the next thing I'd try is booting back into the known-good old old OS, maybe removing the NVidia card, basically simplify everything one step at a time until it stops happening, if you can.
Next chance I get I’m booting without the USB wifi adapter. I’m worried I may have broken something because it was mostly stable before :/ lol I actually don’t have the Nvidia card yet, I ordered a cheap Tesla K80 that’s arriving on Tuesday 😹 and it already brokey system :P
That’s a good idea, I have an Ubuntu partition that I should try.
Comm: wpa_supplicant being the wifi function makes me suspicious of your wifi hardware as well before I saw the rest of your post. I’ve had the best success with PCIe based wifi cards (if this is a desktop pc)
Agreed, this wifi stick was mega cheap on AliExpress so I went for it. I may take a look at the PCB in detail if removing it restores order to my PC. Yes, desktop PC (still hanging on to 2012 hardware woohoo!)
I don’t pretend to be an expert in this, and I also have no idea what the state machine looks like for unauthenticated WiFi, but my thinking on the call stack is either you were authenticated and the association with the AP dropped while sending a frame and puked, or it kicked it while attempting to authenticate to an AP, and I have no idea why a mutex would be taken, or to what, but it timed out apparently.
So why would this happen after a rebuild?
freak accident/timing thing.
I see multiple mt## modules loaded, and I’m suspecting while not looking it up that they are operating a MediaTek chip in that dongle, and are potentially conflicting.
lots of wifi devices I’ve seen recently have loaded firmware separately from driver from /use/lib(or lib64)/firmware and the version changed from before, and maybe needs updating now or you did it before or whatever.
I agree with others - I’d give you a fiver if it happens again without the adapter connected.
I think You’re right, it is a mediatek chip and I used to add the USB device id manually to load the module, but with nixos 23.11 it started working automatically. I’m also running a preemptable kernel… Probably related now that I think about it :P
I should track down the firmware, that was one of the things I was looking into when setting up the device id hack.
I think this happened once before after uptime of about a week… But I didn’t get any information from that crash. Also, I’m remembering that some configurations were failing to see this wifi device and falling back to wired so maybe this has been a hidden problem since the new nixos release…
Thanks to everyone for your thoughts, it’s very helpful.
For me personally: Something like Arch. I want to spend as little time as possible on installation and configuration, and I don’t want to have to read update notes or break my system. But I get that it’s great for some people, and their wiki is just next level!
In general: Ubuntu. It feels like I read something about Canonical causing trouble every other week, and don’t even get me started on snaps!
Just to share my experience, I used the archinstall script so I have btrfs snapshots and didnt have to put together everything myself. I almost update every day because it gives me a dopamine hit and nothing has broken in the last year and a half since I switched off Windows. I’ve had fewer issues than when I tried to Fedora with the Nvidia card I already owned. It could definitely be a case of ‘works on my machine’ but I think reports of Arch breakages are overblown.
I had to hold off on updating my Debian 12 server due to a severe bug just a month or two ago.
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