Every so often i start believing all the posts about how Linux really made a lot of progress, and the desktop experience is so much better now, and everything is supported, and i give it another try.
I’ve got a small intel 13th gen NUC i use as a small server, and for playing movies from. It runs windows 11, but as i want to run some docker containers on it, i thought, why not give Linux a try again, how bad can it be. (after all, i’ve got multiple raspberry pi’s running, and a synology diskstation, and i’m no stranger to ssh’ing into them to manage some stuff)
Downloaded the latest Ubuntu Desktop (23.10), since it’s still a highly recommended distro, and started my journey.
First obvious task: connect to my SMB shares on my synology to get access to any media. Tough luck, whatever tool Ubuntu uses for that always tries SMBv1 protocol first, which is disabled on my synology due to security reasons. If i enable it on my synology i get a nice warning that SMBv1 is vulnurable and has been used to perform ransomware attacks, so maybe i’d rather leave it disabled (although i assume that’s mostly the case if the port were accessible from the internet, but still). Then i thought “it’s probably some setting somewhere to change this”, but after further googling, i found an issue that whatever ubuntu is using for SMB needs a patch to not default to SMBv1 to get a list of shares… Yeah, great start for the oh so secure linux, i’d need to enable a protocol that got used in ransomware attacks over 6 years ago to get everything to work properly… (yeah, i ended up finding how to mount things manually, and then added it to my fstab as a workaround, but wtf)
Then, i installed Kodi, tried to play some content. Noticed that even though i enabled that setting on Kodi, it’s not switching to the refreshrate of the video i’m playing. Googling further on that just felt like walking through a tarpit. From the dedicated librelec distro that runs just kodi that has special patches to resolve this, to discussions about X not supporting switching refreshrates, and Kodi having a standalone mode that doesn’t use a window manager that should solve it but doesn’t, and also finding people with similar woes about HDR. I guess the future of the desktop user is watching stuttering videos with bad color rendition? I’d give more details about what i found if there were any. Try googling it yourself, you’ll find so little yet contradictory things…
Not being entirely defeated yet, i thought “i’ve got this nice GUI on my synology for managing docker containers & images, let’s see if i can find something nice on ubuntu”, and found dockstation as something i could try. Downloaded the .deb file (since ubuntu is a debian variant it seems), double clicked the file and … “no app installed for this file”… google around a bit, after some misleading results regarding older ubuntu versions, i found the issue: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/install-deb-ubuntu-23-10-no-app-error
Of course Ubuntu just threw out the old installer for debian files, and didn’t replace it yet. Wouldn’t want a user to just be able to easily install files! what is this, windows?
For real, i see all the Linux love here, and for the headless servers i have here (the raspberries & the synology), i get it. But goddamn this desktop experience is so ridiculous, there has to be better than this right? I’m missing something, or doing something completely wrong, or… right?
“Plain ol debian” is the kind of distro that will ship SMBv1 without SMBv2, because “stability” (to be clear, i dont know if they do, but its the kind of thing they would do)
Debian loves to ship out of date garbage, because “out of date, but unchanging” is better than just shipping up to date stuff
debian stable isn’t a good desktop distro, it’s super stable cause it’s meant for servers that have to stay up all the time
“Stable” here means “unchanging” and not “crash proof” unfortunately. Shipping software that is already 1-2 years out of date for a server that I intend to stay up all the time means that by the time I get a chance to run updates, the software is even more out of date.
The OP’s SMB issue is exactly the kind of thing that would be WORSE on debian. “We’re going to stick with SMBv1 by default, because not changing it is more ‘stable’ even though it’s incredibly out of date”
And now you are stuck with this decision because you can’t afford downtime on your server to resolve it. Shipping drastically out of date software isn’t always a good thing either. Refusing to ship SMBv2 (again, I don’t know what version of SMB Debian ships, using this purely as an example of the type of thing they do) in the name of “stability” even though it solves a ton of problems with SMBv1 is not a good experience.
They try to backport security fixes, but there are times where those get missed, and it also means that they aren’t backporting bugfixes that they don’t find “critical” enough.
So yes, Debian is only good for the scenario where you would prefer to have the same bugs for a year on end because “unchanging” is more important than “up to date, and patched”