Your Most Frustrating Configuration Experience?

Multiple versions, paths, and installs of Python. Using pip makes it worse.
- pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv together solves this for me. Virtualenv with specific python versions that work together well with other tools like pip or poetry.
  It boils down to something like
  
  $ pyenv install 3.12.7 $ pyenv virtualenv 3.12.7 myenv $ pyenv activate myenv
  and at that point you can do regular python stuff like pip installing etc.
  
  If you're having to type out version numbers in your commands, something is broken.
  I ended up having to roll my own shell script wrapper to bring some sanity to Python.
- I have limited Python experience, but I always thought that's what virtualenvs and requirements.txt files are for? When I used those, I found it easy enough to use.
- Especially during the transition from 2 to 3. Let's hope that's all behind us.
- You really don't want to use pip. That's how you download malicious code.

https://xkcd.com/963/
Fortunately I haven't had to open it in a very long time.
- Why did we have to learn what modelines were to get a picture on screen?
- Similar here. I used to have 2 screens that if they turned off for powersaving only 1 of them would wake up. So I had a script on the desktop to do a reset and move them correctly.
  
  #!/bin/bash xrandr --output HDMI2 --off xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --same-as HDMI1 xrandr --output HDMI1 --right-of HDMI2 exit

Installing Fedora. I had almost nothing to configure, it worked out of the box. How frustrating! I had the whole day planned and now what? Enjoy my free time like a pleb !?!
(/s just in case anyone was wondering)
- Have you any experience with HDR in Fedora? I’m getting ready to build a HTPC and I’m torn between fucking with Arch for everything, but getting bleeding edge support, or trying Fedora for the first time for easier system management. Since it’s an entertainment system, I’m not sure if I want to mess with all the Arch config requirements. But I do want solid HDR support.
  
  Try Nobara. It's based on Fedora but it's got a whole bunch of gaming-related patches including all of the required additions for out-of-the-box HDR support.
  
  Running Fedora with dual HDR monitors just fine, but it's entirely possible that something is off that I'm not catching. They're also running off my Nvidia GPU.
  I'll just add that they look the same as when I used to run Win10 on the same box.

Suspend with an Nvidia gpu
- I gave up and went back to x11. The final straw was when system settings stopped opening, and I couldn’t figure out why.
  
  That's fair, I've found wayland to generally be pretty good with Linux now and you can pry hyprland from my cold dead hands

Xserver... Somehow trying to find the magic string of letters and numbers that made your screen work.
- Modeline ftw.
  
  Shudder. I had this weird brand laptop... Sotec IIRC and there just wasn't a modline that ever got it all right.

I still don't fully understand how to gracefully have multiple desktop environments and switch between them. When I want to try something new to me like lxqt, I usually spin up a VM.
- Normally, the process is:
  install the packages for the desktop environment
  log out (not just locking the screen)
  find a dropdown or cogwheel where you can select the other desktop environment
  log in
  Having said that, I don't know what you mean with "graceful". Desktop environments may involve lots of packages, which may create configuration files in your home directory or get auto-started in your other DEs, so it can be messy.
  Something minimal, like LXQt or the various window managers, isn't going to cause much of a mess, though.
  I guess, creating a second user with a separate home-directory, like the other person suggested, would isolate that potential mess...
- Just add a new user
- Create a different user for each desktop environment.
  Put all the users in a group that has full write access to a shared folder you use for your files.
  Linux is a multi-user system, use that.

I remember being stubborn and trying to setup eduroam at my uni library using only wpa_supplicant for a whole day. Hugely frustrating. Gave up and installed NetworkManager and it just fucking worked... my tech minimalism phase was extremely counterproductive lol

I've had to grapple with pipewire. My old pulseaudio config didn't seem to work and I wanted to migrate to the pw config file format anyway, but I found the pw docs to be highly opaque. You get a thousand solutions for commands online, or tools you can do it visually in, but to apply that config you need to start the tool...
I'm a noob, granted, but there seemed to be a lot of assumed common knowledge that I just don't have. And if I don't even know what I'm missing, it's hard to google for it.

Setting up a matrix server was a god damn nightmare for me. I eventually got it working but I hit pretty much every conceivable obstacle along the way. Getting the config file just right, the networking, the federation, the coturn server, getting end users to understand they need to backup their keys....
I'm sure it'd be easier for a Linux pro but I was in way over my head. Only got it working through stubbornness and help from the community.
- Matrix is pain...
  With the more recent updates it is a lot more stable

I still cannot connect to captive portals for public WiFis, eg on train or hotel and I have no idea where the config comes from.
DNS? Resolve.conf? Systemd network manager? WTF?
(Probably for the best though, so I use my phone 5G and not these suss open networks )
- I use this project (https://github.com/FiloSottile/captive-browser) which works most of the time.
  Most captive portals work by answering the DNS requests with the captive portal ip. This works only if the correct dns servers are configured and a lot of security features like dnssec, DOH, ... are disabled.
  More info from the project author: https://words.filippo.io/captive-browser/
  
  So you run this to sign into the portal, is that right? Thanks
  Edit: OK had a read, I will look into this. I don't have chrome on my machine but will see if it works with chromium swapped in instead. :)
- If you connect to the network and open firefox, it will display a toast to open the corresponding captive portals page. You can then login through that. Given that your VPN isn't blocking unencrypted connections etc.
  Extrapolation of partial knowledge warning
  I assume the network advertises a captive portals url and identifies you based on your MAC address.
  The config is server-side (router).
  
  I get "limited connection" I think when I try connect or "no internet".
  I don't make it to load the portal page...
  so maybe I'm not recieving at IP from the network?

I still don’t properly grok Selinux at a fundamental and instinctual level. I understand the need for it, and I work with it to the best of my ability, but I wish there was a resource that could explain it from several different positions.
Irony: my main Linux workstation is OpenSuse

Configuring captive portal wifi without network manager or any aids beyond what's provided by wpa-supplicant. Eventually I gave up, since it wasn't really that important.
Adjusting freetype so that it works more-or-less the way I want it to, because the maintainers hate anyone who disagrees with their current hinting algorithm and make the setting as opaque as possible. I would prefer it if they allowed me to have hinting on some fonts and exclude only the ones that were designed to be pixel-aligned, but unless something's changed recently, that option isn't even offered.

Pretty much everything is frustrating to configure at first. Then I learn it and it's not so bad. Then I don't use it for a few years, and completely forget how! Back to step 1.
- I learned this lesson pretty quick when working in IT.
  It's not always feasible to document everything as it happens, but I definitely learned to do so if I had the time and means to while I was doing the thing.
  Just started at a new company with 0 documentation, they're super psyched that I've actually been writing down all their processes/procedures/configurations etc. as they explain them to me/as I work with them.
  
  I really should learn this habit.
- Initial thought was "I can't think of anything". Then I started scrolling through this thread showering upvoted on all of the repressed memories.

Isn't it always postfix? Not because of the software, but because of other clients and other servers.
- @deliriousowl @gwilikers I've been trying to setup a store and forward server with postfix and not having a lot of luck.

Do VLANs with multiple wireless and wired clients using OPNSense and OpenWRT dummy APs count? Still haven’t quite figured it out.
- Me neither lol

It used to be button 10 (also counting 4 scrollwheel directions and click) of my Elecom trackball. I had written a small C program reading the device node and writing the events just of that to stdout, then piping that to a tclsh script (so I could change it easily and it's still super fast for gaming) which did something in X. Horrible. But then they added support for more buttons to everything (kernel, X) and now I can just map it in games, like any other.

Just recently XDG Portals to get video sharing working. It just kept using the GTK fallbacks instead of KDE as I configured it, but it used the correct ones when starting from the terminal.
Eventually I figured out I had set an env override for XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP="sway" in my user systemd environment, because that's what I used previously.

Probably vim. It works fine out of the box but it took me way too long to figure out things like why my terminal colors were never quite right out of the box (had to set it to 256 color mode or what have you). And once I wanted to use some a few plugins the configuration started getting a bit convoluted/confusing. Hoping I have time some day/remember to figure out how to disable that annoying visual paste mode or whatever it is called that sometimes makes using it over SSH a nightmare.

Trying to configure Sway in NixOS. I gave up and just use KDE Plasma. I do miss using Sway from when I used Arch, though.
- I use i3 - Sway is supposed to be 100% compatible with i3 - and I find the configuration file very straightforward. What's different in the version in NixOS?
- Wild. I used sway for the first time with Nix since I could rollback a misconfiguration.
  
  Yeah, I got stuck on secrets management. I just could not get network manager to keep my WiFi passwords. I'll probably go back and try again at some point.

XDG portal filechooser for Firefox: the KDE implementation uses Dolphin, which is full of features and I use most of them; the default GTK one is mildly infuriating to use and looks ugly too, but getting the browser to use the portal I want was a nightmare - especially since GTK discontinued the GTK_USE_PORTAL envvar.
The related Firefox config entries make no sense either.
- Can you explain a bit more about this and how to configure it? When I use FF on gnome, the save dialogue just looks like other dialogues?
  
  I think GNOME's filechooser is the GTK one (never used it so I'm not sure), mine looks like this:
  It's entirely possible that Firefox changed and now uses XDG portals by default, I configured it like this a long time ago.
  As for how to configure it, I honestly don't know.
  It was a combination of messing with widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal on about:config, and changing XDG envvars and dotfiles; both by following several conflicting Reddit and bbs.archlinux.org posts.

hyprland but I'm a noob

Selinux on arch linux
- I thought this was pretty solid talk on SElinux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WOKRaM-HI4
  
  @rotopenguin @IceFoxX SELinux comes pre-installed on all Redhat derived systems and is an option in all Debian based systems, though I prefer AppArmor, it is just easier to configure and breaks fewer things.
- This.
  I tried it some time ago and I had to format the SSD because the operating system became unusable.

The hell that was configuring XFree86

Nvidia drivers on Arch, KDE Plasma 6.

Trying to disable the lid close sensor on my laptop. My issue is twofold. It's a convertible (pavilion x360) and I'm using bunsenlabs Linux.

I use sway, and for the life of me can not get steam link to display my games. I have tried so many things. If I use flatpak steam it works, but it breaks remote play together, which works fine not flatpak! I can get them both to work with KDE Wayland as well. It's frustrating but also not a huge deal.

I've been on arch for years, but have recently started pc gaming. Lutris has been surprisingly easy to get working. I have a nintendo switch already and decided I want to try to use the joycons for the computer, don't want to buy gamepads but it gives and alternative to keyboard and mouse. Getting them consistently recognized by bluetooth has been a massive pain, but after searching I've figured out a package that I can install that fixes the issues. In fact, I couldn't find anyone who found a solution to this issue without installing this specific package.
That package is pulseaudio-bluetooth, even though the nintendo joycons do not have an audio jack or capability to receive audio. I've had my audio set up and configured with alsa, and alsa does everything (relating to audio) that I need it to, but pulseaudio-bluetooth requires me to install pulseaudio (duh) and will not work unless I enable the pulseaudio service, which fucks up my alsa config. I've spent a while dicking around trying to get pulseaudio to pretend it doesn't exist except for connecting joycons, but there's always some nuisance popping up. I also tried using a different usb bluetooth controller and plugging them into different usb ports. Given up for the moment and will probably just buy another gamepad and hope it works better without needing pulseaudio-bluetooth.
In all honesty I still don't really know what the hell I'm doing on arch, I originally installed it to learn this stuff better but all I've really learned is how to read documentation well enough to get things working by trial-and-error. I've had a stable system for like ten years now though and I'm too comfortable with it to warrant switching to a friendlier distro, but this specific issue is a pain in the ass.

hostapd. I have no idea how you’re supposed to figure out the 50 or so options OpenWrt outputs for an AX card that I just ended up copying. And why doesn’t it detect those on its own?

Cloud-init. The config yaml is rather straight forward, but I can't convince my VM to execute it, and it's driving me nuts.
- It was definitely a headache for me as well, but you need a guest agent (like vmwaretools or qemu-guest-agent), a cloud init ready template for the distro of your choice, a cloud init config file (network/user/vendor) and a custom SCSI/ide cloudinit cdrom mounted at boot on your VM. You also can find cloudinit logs on your VM to try and figure out what's missing or what went wrong.

Setting up Nvidia runtime for rootless Docker containers in Linux.
Resolving port :53 conflict between AdGuardHome (rootless) docker container and Systemd-Resolved.

Jellyseer in docker. It won’t accept my jellyfin login. It just spins and spins. But I plan to use it locally. And everyone says you have to sign in initially not local? I don’t know. I’m annoyed with it and gave up for now.
- I think this means it can't actually see your jellyfin instance, you need to use your computer's local network ip instead of localhost if the two containers aren't in the same pod via a docket compose file. I've had this issue before.
  
  Nah. It’s on the same docker compose file through portainer. And I’ve been using the local ip. I never use local host for some reason lol

X11. Luckily those days are over thanks to Wayland but, Jesus, are X.org config files a fucking, fiddly PITA to configure!

Getting Keycloak and Headscale working together.
But I did it after three weeks.
I captured my efforts in a set of interdependent Ansible roles so I never have to do it again.

Nextcloud requiring me to set the actual domain when I just want to run it locally was pretty frustrating
- I don't know, I had Nextcloud for a year on a local network and I didn't have to set an address. The bigger problem was that some applications do not accept self-signed SSL, so I had to change their code, and I don't really know how to code for Android...

Setting up Alpine or Mutt with multiple SMTP accounts is an exercise in frustration.

Recently? Email notifications for my crontab jobs. I learned that snapraid sync had been failing for 200 DAYS. I was thinking it'd be easy for some reason. It hasn't been.
Overall though, Nextcloud was a nightmare and I just gave up.
- I also realized that I just didn't need all of the functionality and such. In reality I just need a file sharing system akin to Google drive.

Anything to do with dns

Skyrim mods.
Btw, anyone got the new reshade working on wine?
- For skyrim, I'm using vortex in lutris, and install the mods this way. This requires a more bit of actions but works fine.
  
  Wabbajack still doesn't work in wine?

Motion on my RPI. I didn't want it to save videos or photos, so I turned it off in the config. But it still saved them. So I tried a few other places in the config to turn it off, but nothing worked and I'd run out of space within a day. So I changed the save directory to /dev/null.
Then I tried to upgrade the pi, and the new version of motion has a different config, incompatible with the old one. So I'm running the old one.

xorg.conf. The (wrong) example from Arch Wiki works but following the official documentation doesn't.

Rootless podman, PostgreSQL, redis, nextcloud, nginx, iptables in one....

Caddy. The config and docs suck.
Eg. I thought I configured it to limit some sites to an allowlist of IPs. Turns out (months later) the config did nothing, but ran anyway.
- Huh, I found it to be so much easier to set up than nginx that I wrote the devs a little thank you message

it's embarrassing but for me it's thinkfan. Instead I wrote my own solution in bash.

I was trying to get wine to run something the other day and couldn't figure it out.

fucking jellyfin still doesnt reliably work for me. ugh.
- Surprised to see jellyfin here tbh. The docker image needed literally zero configuration to work perfectly for me.
  
  Same. Just...works?

I gave up trying to setup a Mastodon server in docker. Lemmy was pretty tricky at the time as the docs were wrong. My email server was a bit tricky, but I've not really done much to tinker with it in the proceeding 6 years, so was worth it.