The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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I have a rant but I'm too exhausted to write up my normal turbo autismo screed. Here's the cliffnotes version of what I've subjected myself to for the last few days. Yeah yeah I know, this is stupidly long anyway, but I'm omitting like 80% of the bullshit I faced. This is just plot beats; nothing like @ProudSkibidiTolietAryan spending days at a time outlining his woes with kernel sources and smart TVs.

- Last week, I decided "hey, why not give Fedora a shot for home server crap? There's tons of virtualisation and containerisation stuff it ships with by default, so much so to where Red Hat actively atrophies the desktop experience to further the cause. Converted my old gaming PC into a home server, ran with Fedora Cinnamon and just unplugged the DisplayPort cables. It was surprisingly okay, and Cockpit was 100% a joy to work with.

- I got Jellyfin up and running via rootless Podman, it was pretty friggin sweet. systemd --user service was painless to set up, much to my own surprise, VAAPI transcoding worked like a dream, only real issue was metadata bullshit.

- Got sick of Fedora after spending 2-3 days bashing my head against a wall trying to cleanly integrate both Sonarr and Radarr and realised I did everything wrong because I was using standalone Podman containers and not Docker Compose. Podman Compose exists, but it's poorly fucking documented (a huge issue with Fedora that I'll rant about another time) and still fucking painful to use because Podman Compose ain't anywhere near 1:1 parity. It's like the uutils of containers, where it gets 70-80% of the way there but completely shits the bed on functionality you actually need.

- I could tolerate, even enjoy, learning about SELinux and firewalld. They're not entirely insurmountable. But Podman Compose + SELinux + firewalld is so far beyond my nonexistent pay grade that I refused to go any further. Oh sure, Docker Compose exists on Fedora... but if the only difference between Fedora and Ubuntu Server amounts to "SELinux and firewalld inflicting unnecessary amounts of pain," then I might as well jump over to Ubuntu Server.

- Did the jump to Ubuntu Server; installation was 100% clean and painless, genuinely surprised at how polished it is for a text console OS. Even gave me the option to set up SSH during install. Wonderful. Truly headless.

- Installed and enabled the services for Cockpit, so now the "killer feature" that made Fedora so appealing is 100% available on Ubuntu Server. Then I went through the song and dance of setting up Jellyfin, Radarr, Sonarr, and qBitTorrent within the same docker-compose.yml file. It wasn't clean, it wasn't "fun," but there was significantly less friction on Ubuntu Server than there was on Fedora. I got all that shit up and running after 4 hours, with at least 2.5 hours of that amounting to me misconfiguring the docker-compose file and not immediately catching it.

- Now the time comes to set up VPN connectivity. Then I hit a huge fucking brick wall: Proton VPN, my tried and true provider for both VPN and paid email (with aliasing to boot), fucking sucks with headless configurations. It spawns all these keyring python errors that don't ultimately impact me logging in and logging out, connecting, disconnecting, all that other stuff. But stuff like kill switches and port forwarding? Fucking nonexistent.

- There are workarounds with manual WireGuard or OpenVPN configurations... but then it occurs to me: I should've just fucking paid for Mullvad out the gate. Mullvad, insofar as being a standalone VPN and nothing more, is actually functional with CLI and GUI tools that aren't horrifically enshittified.

- I can't exactly cancel Proton because ironically, I leverage their email services far more aggressively than the VPN side. Simple Login alone makes Proton worth paying for, and I use that far more often than the VPN itself. There was a time when Proton VPN actually had a good CLI client because their Linux GUI was laughably nonexistent for years. The moment they got a Linux GUI up and running (a fucking horrible one relative to the Windows client they have), the CLI client went tits up and became horrible. That's the pulse I get from random Google searches.

- Jellyfin works, Radarr and Sonarr work, all my media plays just fine, hardware transcoding works once I worked out the render group permission issue preventing old AVI torrent files from playing. qBitTorrent was noticeably less smooth to get up and running, but the web interface works and now Radarr and Sonarr are properly integrated with qBitTorrent. That being said... I can't exactly torrent the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars series without triggering my ISP's copyright detection bullshit. A VPN is required, and the one that I've been buying into for literally 5 years at this point turns out to be really fucking horrible when I try to do anything headless.
 
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Dread First said:
Now the time comes to set up VPN connectivity. Then I hit a huge fucking brick wall: Proton VPN, my tried and true provider for both VPN and paid email (with aliasing to boot), fucking sucks with headless configurations. It spawns all these keyring python errors that don't ultimately impact me logging in and logging out, connecting, disconnecting, all that other stuff. But stuff like kill switches and port forwarding? Fucking nonexistent.
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Betonhaus said:
One thing you might experience with cockpit on Ubuntu is that the updates page doesn't work. CLI updates still works fine, but this link explains the problem and how to fix it
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Thanks dude! Tbh I thought something was a bit screwy, but I'm the type of weirdo who prefers manually triggering sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y or sudo dnf --refresh update -y instead of using GNOME Software, KDE Discover, or even setting up a cron job for it. Never thought to investigate further.
 
Dante Alighieri said:
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Funny thing, the maintainter himself also seems to have a recurring issue working with Proton. In the latest release, he has a "ranting section" with the biggest wall of text dedicated to them:
And keeping the best for last: PROTON!... Ah Proton... Proton Proton Proton...

First of all, let's start with Proton blocking their VPN servers data behind a login wall.
There is no reason for this. None. Zip. Zero. Nada.
You can literally connect to a VPN server with a free account.
And anyone with a paid account, including me, could just get that list and share it.
Absolute non-sense of a choice.

But, fine, let's see what's next...

I exchange with other Gluetun users trying to debug how to access this list, how to login programmatically to get that stupid list.
We all throw our keyboards at our monitor out of frustration because Proton's login system is an overly complex thing.
I decide to contact Proton support.

Ah, Proton "support"...
It's like subconsciously they want their users to run away.

I opened a support ticket explaining the situation, very politely of course, and simply asking for a tiny bit of guidance on helping out with the curl commands necessary to login and obtain a valid token.

Their answer? Polite "go away leave us alone" message:

Public access to the https://api.protonvpn.ch/vpn/logicals endpoint is no longer available due to internal changes and security reasons.
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WHAT SECURITY REASONS!??? You are making a fool of yourselves Proton!

Additionally, the setup in question is not officially supported on our end; therefore, I will be unable to provide any steps on how to achieve it, nor guarantee that it will work.
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DO YOU THINK I AM STUPID PROTON!??? AND THANKS FOR BEING SO HELPFUL YOU BUNCH OF 10-NEURONS SUPPORT!

We strongly recommend using the native Proton VPN apps on your devices or utilizing one of the downloaded configuration files if you wish to set up a manual connection https://account.protonvpn.com/downloads.
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You sweet sweet summer child... Really, are you pretending to be a child now? PROTONNNNNN you are just an embarassment to the tech scene.

Have a nice weekend!
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Yeah thanks for nothing and not even budging a tiny bit on anything.

I even then told them I would tell my users to avoid Proton like the plague because of this ridiculous behavior.
The answer? Basically same thing, reworded.

Guess what?

Well we figured out your authentication (#2878), you unhelpful spineless wonders, so have fun blocking your own users from using your own VPN servers data...

But wait.... this is not even over; A few days later, a Gluetun user notices paid servers are not part of the Gluetun servers data.

Because Proton decided to hide away paid servers data from free users. Mind blown 🤯 This is absolutely stupid to its finest extent.

Anyway, I signed in with a paid account, re-updated the servers data. Done. Now your list is public. Congratulations Proton for your security measures, completely useless.

In conclusion... Proton is unhelpful and takes security decisions that make absolutely no sense.

Please migrate away from Proton whenever you can.
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I've been running Linux on and off again since Ubuntu 7.10 and tried just about every distro since besides Gentoo and Slackware at one point or another. Ultimately I'm not a hobbyist and after the honeymoon period just want the damn thing to work and run things like my browser and steam without shitting the bed. I ironically like immutable distros and flatpaks at this point.
 
I recently switched back to KDE Plasma since for whatever reason a recent nvidia driver update causes XFCE to glitch out all the time. The X11 session for plasma still works thankfully.
 
Max Weber said:
Funny thing, the maintainter himself also seems to have a recurring issue working with Proton. In the latest release, he has a "ranting section" with the biggest wall of text dedicated to them:
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Honestly, I kind of understand it.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the shitty services that block VPN access were just hitting exactly that endpoint, with a free account, and are too lazy to monitor/update their scripts to use a paid account.
 
Lone Wandering Courier said:
I recently switched back to KDE Plasma since for whatever reason a recent nvidia driver update causes XFCE to glitch out all the time. The X11 session for plasma still works thankfully.
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If you are running arch make sure if your nvidia card is something like the 10 series you move over to the aur nvidia-58xxx package.

Nvidia dropped support upstream. So archea main package no longer has support. As of a week or two ago. Although hopefully because the 10 series is still pretty popular they will eventually make a package in the normal repo for it. It's kind of shitty if they just tell all the people using them they need to use the aur for drivers now.

It just happened. So I don't know what the plans are long term.
 
Dread First said:
a
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Trying to do le autismo auto torrenting media server bullshit is an exercise in pain
People call me too retarded to do networking but I just hate dealing with it so I got a laptop and a flash drive and manually put movies on my laptop hooked up to my tv
It's the caveman way of going about it but you'll save countless hours of your life
For vpns and email, you know the cybersec Rule: don't put all your eggs in 1 basket
Its convenient but you run into shit like youre running into now
 
Dread First said:
: I should've just fucking paid for Mullvad out the gate. Mullvad, insofar as being a standalone VPN and nothing more, is actually functional with CLI and GUI tools that aren't horrifically enshittified.
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Yes. This is the correct answer. Mullvad so far has been great for me. No matter how I decided to run it. It just works. I can set it up with wireguard configurations to use other tools. Or I can use their own CLI, which tends to work well enough that I stick with that for the most part.

Edit damn I completely forgot why I came here just now.


This seems like a great choice for a terminal editor. For people that are too normie to use vim or emacs, but still know how to use a terminal (somehow). Thinking about it, that might be a small group of people, that are technically competent enough to learn how a cli works, but that aren't willing to learn vim or emacs keybinds. But idk, I could be wrong about that.
 
wafflesies said:
Trying to do le autismo auto torrenting media server bullshit is an exercise in pain
People call me too retarded to do networking but I just hate dealing with it so I got a laptop and a flash drive and manually put movies on my laptop hooked up to my tv
It's the caveman way of going about it but you'll save countless hours of your life
For vpns and email, you know the cybersec Rule: don't put all your eggs in 1 basket
Its convenient but you run into shit like youre running into now
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Skill issue. Once it's set up it's easy to maintain. Though recyclarr is an important component that you forget is there.
 
prollyanotherlurker said:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dspEVA8eoUg
This seems like a great choice for a terminal editor. For people that are too normie to use vim or emacs, but still know how to use a terminal (somehow). Thinking about it, that might be a small group of people, that are technically competent enough to learn how a cli works, but that aren't willing to learn vim or emacs keybinds. But idk, I could be wrong about that.
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What's the point of using a terminal text editor like this? If Nano's keybinds are that hard to remember, just reconfigure the keybinds to what you will remember... This just looks like a GUI text editor retrofitted to be a terminal text editor. Why not just use any GUI text editor at that point? You've sacrificed any advantage of working in the terminal and lost any advantage of working in a GUI.
 
Fire in the Sky said:
What's the point of using a terminal text editor like this? If Nano's keybinds are that hard to remember, just reconfigure the keybinds to what you will remember... This just looks like a GUI text editor retrofitted to be a terminal text editor. Why not just use any GUI text editor at that point? You've sacrificed any advantage of working in the terminal and lost any advantage of working in a GUI.
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Emacs superiority rears its head yet again
 
Fire in the Sky said:
What's the point of using a terminal text editor like this? If Nano's keybinds are that hard to remember, just reconfigure the keybinds to what you will remember... This just looks like a GUI text editor retrofitted to be a terminal text editor. Why not just use any GUI text editor at that point? You've sacrificed any advantage of working in the terminal and lost any advantage of working in a GUI.
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A console text editor still does have it's own benefits.

One thing is a lot of the gui text editors are notoriously slow. Also a lot of them seem needlessly bloated, but that's less important overall.

The other is a console text editor doesn't require a gui to run obviously. Which is nice when you have some kind of environment that doesn't have a graphical session for one reason or another.

In my case I use neovim, and when I need to edit something I basically have the same experience whether its in a graphical environment or not. It doesn't feel like a hinderance.

But besides that. The fact that you bring up configuring nano, kind of answers why someone would use this. It's obviously for people that don't want to, or don't know how to configure this stuff themselves. In general that's what I see nano as. It's a console text editor for people that don't want to learn vim (or emacs because it can run in a console if you need to).
 
Dread First said:
- I could tolerate, even enjoy, learning about SELinux and firewalld. They're not entirely insurmountable. But Podman Compose + SELinux + firewalld is so far beyond my nonexistent pay grade that I refused to go any further. Oh sure, Docker Compose exists on Fedora... but if the only difference between Fedora and Ubuntu Server amounts to "SELinux and firewalld inflicting unnecessary amounts of pain," then I might as well jump over to Ubuntu Server.
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My biggest gripe regarding SELinux is it gets in the way of me using my computer the way I want to use it. If I want to be a retard, god damn it let me be a retard. When I was switching my rig over from Windows to Linux (Fedora with KDE specifically), I was moving my Virtual Machines over, and I wanted to put their drive files on a mounted hard drive. Yet every time I tried doing anything with it, SELinux would come down and stop it because it's not in the designated shitting street. Now, could this have been prevented, by whitelisting or whatever process for SELinux? Probably. However, I shouldn't have to deal with my paranoid neighbor telling me how to use my own yard because he doesn't like my son hosting a lemonade stand out front.
 
iScream into the void said:
My biggest gripe regarding SELinux is it gets in the way of me using my computer the way I want to use it. If I want to be a retard, god damn it let me be a retard. When I was switching my rig over from Windows to Linux (Fedora with KDE specifically), I was moving my Virtual Machines over, and I wanted to put their drive files on a mounted hard drive. Yet every time I tried doing anything with it, SELinux would come down and stop it because it's not in the designated shitting street. Now, could this have been prevented, by whitelisting or whatever process for SELinux? Probably. However, I shouldn't have to deal with my paranoid neighbor telling me how to use my own yard because he doesn't like my son hosting a lemonade stand out front.
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The logic is that SELinux is meant to enforce policy and then have a human do the troubleshooting. Works great at scale in enterprise, mission-critical, or production server environments where there are only so many man-hours to spare and infinitely more machines. If something goes haywire for whatever reason (especially off the clock or otherwise after hours), SELinux is meant to enforce the policy set by whoever's administrating that machine. Said administrator, whenever they come back into work, can then check journald or sestatus, work out what the problem is, and fix it accordingly. SELinux is also insanely vast in its scope, operating on a per-file basis rather than a per-application basis the way AppArmor does. If you're deploying anywhere between a dozen to some absurd amount like a thousand instances of Fedora CoreOS/IoT/Cloud/Atomic or RHEL proper, per-application mandatory access controls are untenable without going the Microsoft Intune route and having all the baggage that it comes with.

Were you ever on the receiving end of malfunctioning Intune updates at work that bork your Outlook, the transition from Adobe to Foxit/Nitro, or otherwise screw with in-house software? If so, do you remember the nightmarish amount of Teams calls and TeamViewer sessions where befuddled corporate IT guys try and ultimately fail to fix something before submitting escalation tickets on their side? I'll tell ya this much: it's fun for me since I get paid for doing nothing while it happens, but it's bad for the company since they're down one machine and wasting man-hours troubleshooting (and for me once it's fixed and I have to play catch-up). For all the venom and vitriol that I have toward SELinux, there's a rationale that absolutely makes sense. Once you get acclimated to always blaming SELinux first, and once you're familiar with the tooling, SELinux is... not easy to work with, but tolerable.

What I specifically take umbrage with is how SELinux is basically shoehorned into Fedora without any broader consideration for home desktop/workstation environments. I wouldn't mind SELinux if it had friendlier default settings more amenable to home users. Ironically, Fedora desktops are really generous with their default firewalld setup where you have tons of ports that are immediately accessible without doing the whole firewall-cmd song and dance. Why the fuck can't the geniuses at the Fedora release engineering committee actually work out SELinux defaults that are actually sensible? Y'know... like your VM transfer example with mounted hard drives? Or not needing to do restorecon shenanigans to get my hdajackretask configurations working so the speakers plugged into my rear green audio jack don't sound like they're playing through a damp and mouldy towel? I know the whole song and dance of Fedora being a RHEL testbed regardless of how many qualifiers, nuances, or whatever else you try to add to that statement... but we shouldn't forget that Fedora's primary audience when it first launched in 2003 was for the "Linux hobbyist."

Hey Fedora & Red Hat jack-offs who won't ever read this post: I'm a "Linux hobbyist" too, but even turbonerds like us have hard limits. We ain't jannies sweeping for free; don't treat us like a second batch of (unpaid) QA testers. Believe it or not, people like us actually try to live out of these fucking machines. But what do I know? I ain't a RHEL certified sysadmin who gave a bunch of boring talks at FOSDEM, let alone a sanctimonious developer who knows valid use cases better than the fucking users themselves.
 
Is there a Linux text editor (any, terminal or GUI, don't care) that can seamlessly search through (bonus for actual editting) idiotically huge text files? I'm talking 100 MB+. Notepad++ works very well for this on Windows, but the NP++ equivalents I tried on Linux all lack the ability to quickly seek through large files. vim itself also takes ages, but at least it doesn't actively freeze. Dedicated hex editors generally have this ability, but I don't really see why a text editor also couldn't.
 
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