[flukus]

I find they still fail a lot of the time. Some issue's I've come across recently:

* no UI scaling for hi res. Sure you can change it manually, but you have to be able to read the login screen to get that far.

* Can't change login screen resolution (haven't seen a way to do this on any distro I've tried).

* Default is to max resolution available (I'd say 1080p is a more sensible default, especially if there is no automatic scaling).

* Secondary drives require manual mounting (or doing it yourself at the command line).

[reitanqild]

>> But linux wasn't made to be easy to use, to be quick and easy to install, to install other software onto, etc

> Just for the record in case someone isn't aware: Modern Linuxes are often easier to install and install software onto ...

I think my "often" accounts for this.

Also you are now discussing something else (hi res) vs general ease of use.

[flukus]

> Also you are now discussing something else (hi res) vs general ease of use.

I'm discussing the challenges I've run into getting to a working installation, which is a lot more time and effort than running the installer, yet still part of the installation process.

[geocar]

I have all of these problems with Windows.

So many apps fail with HiDPi that I just use an external monitor.

Having to compress folders by selecting "send to" and digging around the tray for an eject button, is something I can't figure out how to solve so easily.

[averagewall]

You don't actually have to eject USB drives. Be default, windows doesn't cache writes to removable media.

[shakna]

> Can't change login screen resolution (haven't seen a way to do this on any distro I've tried).

Really? You mention in another thread, you used Ubuntu. So you apparently didn't notice this [0] or this [1]?

The issue with this and complexity, is that login screen resolution is often handled by GRUB, not Linux.

Edit: In future you can drop into a commandline via Ctrl+Alt+F1

> Secondary drives require manual mounting (or doing it yourself at the command line).

Install usbmount if its connected by usb, and it'll be automatic.

If it's an internal drive, try gnome-volume-manager and it's a tickbox away. (Which is on quite a few distros by default).

[0] https://askubuntu.com/questions/794074/login-screen-resoluti...

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/73804/wrong-login-screen-res...

[flukus]

> Really? You mention in another thread, you used Ubuntu. So you apparently didn't notice this [0] or this [1]?

Neither of those solutions are user friendly are they?. You think an average person knows what grub is? I did come across the second one actually, but I have no idea if the solution is still relevant or not. I haven't seen anything to indicate what login manager I'm even running, where is this information displayed?

I'm talking about kdm/gdm or whatever is installed these days.

> If it's an internal drive, try gnome-volume-manager and it's a tickbox away. (Which is on quite a few distros by default).

It's there and configured to mount at startup. I keep most of my steam games on there. But if I log in and start up steam all the games are missing. If I navigate to the drive through the file manager and then start steam then it will find them properly. I have no idea what's going on but it doesn't appear to be mounting the drive at startup.

[shakna]

> Neither of those solutions are user friendly are they?

Neither is Windows. [0]

Changing a login screen is a bit of a technical thing, for technical reasons. Maybe it could be better, but at the moment, everyone sucks equally.

> I haven't seen anything to indicate what login manager I'm even running, where is this information displayed?

Most distros use systemd nowadays, so this is something that is becoming easier:

    cat /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service | grep '/usr/bin'

Otherwise, it can vary system to system. Because things are very customisable.

> But if I log in and start up steam all the games are missing. If I navigate to the drive through the file manager and then start steam then it will find them properly.

The sure-fire fix for this is fstab, but that is a bit technical, I'll admit. I don't mind it much, because Windows can't mount my Linux drive, and OS X can have mounting issues as well when confronted with partitions it doesn't know.

I'm guessing the partition type is NTFS, so try ntfs-config.

[0] https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/ff...

[flukus]

Thanks. Systemd is one of those things that's changed since I last ran linux so I've got a bit of learning to do there. Turns out ubuntu gnome is running gdm, which isn't surprising.

> I'm guessing the partition type is NTFS, so try ntfs-config.

Ext4 actually, windows has never touched this machine :) I did the fstab thing (I think) on the last install but this is getting beyond my comfort zone.

> Neither is Windows. [0]

IME windows has always gone the other way, it will default to a lower resolution which is uglier but more usable. And the login menu is at the resolution of the last user. I did have an issue recently where windows 10 was constantly switching resolutions though, it was the first time I've been grateful for the dell/intel crapware that fixed it.

[shakna]

> Systemd is one of those things that's changed since I last ran linux so I've got a bit of learning to do there.

Not kidding. Its one of those things that can run half the system, so its unsurprising to not know much about it. However, at least we have a consistent way of managing things now.

> Ext4 actually, windows has never touched this machine :) I did the fstab thing (I think) on the last install but this is getting beyond my comfort zone.

Yeah, this might be getting difficult.

We used to have pysdm, but that's out of date now, and doesn't even support UUIDs, so it won't help.

I think gnome-disks (which is GUI-based), might have a chance at helping, but we're running into the technical side of Linux that I wish was easier to manage for the average person. (You can install gnome-disks with apt-get install gnome-disk-utility if it isn't already installed).

However, it might just have the same issues as the volume manager.

Wish I could help more, but I don't know enough about what's going wrong for you.

> And the login menu is at the resolution of the last user.

Thankfully, that's an easy thing to do with Linux, thanks to symbolic links. [0]

But I agree, defaulting to a lower res would be so very helpful in situations like this. Hopefully this story gets better soon.

[0] https://askubuntu.com/a/578153

[kevingadd]

Ubuntu's support for less-common screen resolutions is atrocious. Aside from its poor support for hi-dpi, if you try to install it when using low-res display hardware (like VirtualBox's emulated GPU) some of the important installer UI extends off the screen and cannot be seen or clicked.

[flukus]

The worst thing is that with Qt or Gtk there is zero excuse for this. Someone went out of there way to created a fixed width window.

[voidz]

Pure nonsense. Or did you try a distribution from 2002?

[flukus]

Ubuntu 17.04. Is that recent enough for you?

I've tried antergos, red hat and a couple of others, all with similar issues. Many I didn't get far with because I simply couldn't read the login screen. Antergos doesn't even have user switching working out of the box but it was the only one that supported my graphics card until very recently. I used the gnome variant of each.

[to3m]

This has always been my experience too. I've installed Linux irregularly numerous times over the years and it's never worked 100% properly on any PC I've tried it on. It suffers I guess from having to run on the same wide range of hardware as Windows does, but with a testing and driver development budget of around 50p and some bits of fluff... still, when it doesn't work, it's my time that gets sucked up trying to fix it, and I'm unapologetic about being unhappy about it.

Things are improving compared to the past, though, because my latest install (Ubuntu 16.04 on my desktop PC) required minimal setup effort and only suffers from these problems:

1. volume control keeps popping up for no reason, and the sound stutters each time that happens

2. using 2 x NVidia GPUs disables XRandR, so some things don't work when I've got a 3-monitor setup

3. for reasons unknown, I can't get 2560x1440 on my 27" monitor (yes, I know, you can change the timings using XRandR...)

4. any time I click and drag in Firefox, Firefox crashes instantly

5. something crashes on startup on every boot (and, yes, I dutifully submit the autogenerated bug report)

However LAN+wifi+3D work, and audio has proven sufficient for basic testing. Things could have been a lot worse.

(Somebody on reddit told me "You have broken hardware or you're too incompetent and shouldn't be anywhere near any computer whatsoever". Well, everything runs fine in Windows... so, ouch.)

[qplex]

So if your machine/os/whatever does not run properly you might either fix it yourself or pay somebody else to fix it.

But really, no need to complain about the nice things that you got for free.

[bitexploder]

Ubuntu 16.04 or Fedora are likely to work better than 17.04. Regardless there is still hardware that does not have the best compatibility. Ubuntu does handle individual high DPI displays well though.

[flukus]

I've got the new line of radeon graphics card. 16.04 only supported some <1080p resolution, 16.10 supported 1080 and 1080p landed in 17.04. Red hat was a similar story. HDMI sound doesn't work with any of them.

It was quite frustrating to read about ATI's new open source drivers, purchase that hardware explicitly because of that and still have it not work, but it's nice that it's improved so much too.

[bitexploder]

Ahh... yeah it is still easy to fall in the cracks. When you get a good system and everything works it is beautiful, when it doesn't, you will be spending quality time with kernel parameters and resources like the Arch Linux wiki. I had a miserable time troubleshooting i915 on my Dell XPS 13" (latest edition). Very frustrating to have an officially supported Dell laptop with Ubuntu that doesn't even work right out of the box.