Not trying to start flamewars, but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices. On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased. And spying. Really user hostile environment. No, thank you.
Because Linux is full of sharp edges which nobody seems to find it fit to fix.
I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.
Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.
This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.
> ...most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection.
What are those correct settings? Do you need something particularly special done for your Ethernet connection to function? Given that you were there because you were troubleshooting a NetworkManager failure, I'd also wonder if NetworkManager changed in a way that made that "add interface wizard" not work correctly anymore.
> ...the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky...
As you've discovered, NetworkManager is intermittently horrifically flaky. Every time I think about how it's the default for most Linux distros, I get so angry.
I used to enthusiastically use it for everything until the maintainers released a version that would always attempt to set the interface MTU to 0 after bringing it up, which the OS would clamp to something else... 12xx or 14xx, I can't remember. [0] After that clownshow, I dropped NetworkManager forever and used the "legacy" tools that had been working reliably for ages and continue to work reliably.
In the case of wired Ethernet interfaces, all that needs to be done for pretty much every home user is to bring the interface up and start a DHCP client like 'dhcpcd'. In the case of WiFi ones, you bring the interface up and start wpa_supplicant which can be managed with something like wpa_gui. Not-coincidentally, the Linux distro I use supports using both of these with its network configuration-and-activation tooling.
[0] For those who don't know what MTU is, know that the effect of this misconfiguration is that your network communications will intermittently stop dead for no clear reason at all. Things have gotten quite a bit better since then, and you can run mixed-MTU networks if you're careful about it... but back then, this immediately launched you into flaky network purgatory.
My network is extremely ordinary and doesn't need any special settings. PC is plugged into an unmanaged switch which is plugged into the router. Super standard stuff.
Specifically, on my machine interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on, and this is not represented by a corresponding checkbox in the wizard or when editing the interface. As a result I could ping other devices on the network and external IPs like 8.8.8.8, but not browse the web or do anything else that requires DNS resolution. One has to use nmcli to toggle that flag off.
> ...interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on...
By this, do you mean that interfaces created will get their IP addresses via DHCP, but will ignore DHCP-provided DNS & etc servers?
If so, given how incredibly insane that is to be a default, there's no way that the wizard is doing that. Given my past experience with NetworkManager, I expect NetworkManager made a batshit-crazy backwards-incompatible change and didn't bother to tell anyone. I know that that doesn't fix your problem, but maybe it will encourage you to find out how to stop using this fantastically complex network management software that you don't even need and is clearly maintained by a pack of ADHD-addled clowns.
EDIT: And no, I'm very aware that this does nothing but reinforce your point that some of the components that the major Linux distros are using are nothing but boxes of razor blades. I guess I'm just lucky that I came across Gentoo Linux a quarter-century ago.
vitro · · focus · HN ↗
cosmic_cheese · · focus · HN ↗
I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.
Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.
This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.
simoncion · · focus · HN ↗
What are those correct settings? Do you need something particularly special done for your Ethernet connection to function? Given that you were there because you were troubleshooting a NetworkManager failure, I'd also wonder if NetworkManager changed in a way that made that "add interface wizard" not work correctly anymore.
> ...the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky...
As you've discovered, NetworkManager is intermittently horrifically flaky. Every time I think about how it's the default for most Linux distros, I get so angry.
I used to enthusiastically use it for everything until the maintainers released a version that would always attempt to set the interface MTU to 0 after bringing it up, which the OS would clamp to something else... 12xx or 14xx, I can't remember. [0] After that clownshow, I dropped NetworkManager forever and used the "legacy" tools that had been working reliably for ages and continue to work reliably.
In the case of wired Ethernet interfaces, all that needs to be done for pretty much every home user is to bring the interface up and start a DHCP client like 'dhcpcd'. In the case of WiFi ones, you bring the interface up and start wpa_supplicant which can be managed with something like wpa_gui. Not-coincidentally, the Linux distro I use supports using both of these with its network configuration-and-activation tooling.
[0] For those who don't know what MTU is, know that the effect of this misconfiguration is that your network communications will intermittently stop dead for no clear reason at all. Things have gotten quite a bit better since then, and you can run mixed-MTU networks if you're careful about it... but back then, this immediately launched you into flaky network purgatory.
cosmic_cheese · · focus · HN ↗
Specifically, on my machine interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on, and this is not represented by a corresponding checkbox in the wizard or when editing the interface. As a result I could ping other devices on the network and external IPs like 8.8.8.8, but not browse the web or do anything else that requires DNS resolution. One has to use nmcli to toggle that flag off.
simoncion · · focus · HN ↗
By this, do you mean that interfaces created will get their IP addresses via DHCP, but will ignore DHCP-provided DNS & etc servers?
If so, given how incredibly insane that is to be a default, there's no way that the wizard is doing that. Given my past experience with NetworkManager, I expect NetworkManager made a batshit-crazy backwards-incompatible change and didn't bother to tell anyone. I know that that doesn't fix your problem, but maybe it will encourage you to find out how to stop using this fantastically complex network management software that you don't even need and is clearly maintained by a pack of ADHD-addled clowns.
EDIT: And no, I'm very aware that this does nothing but reinforce your point that some of the components that the major Linux distros are using are nothing but boxes of razor blades. I guess I'm just lucky that I came across Gentoo Linux a quarter-century ago.