So, after EndeavourOS’s GRUB comitted suicide, me being too stupid to understand chroot despite wiki “tutorials” and the community rather trolling & gaslighting me instead of helping I decided to give Nobara a go. Usually I am a Plasma KDE guy, but thought since it’s been a long time I try it out, especially since you can have it in a more classic configuration those days again, even though I’d miss out of Wallpaper Engine.

Unfortunately my experience has been nothing but awful. A bunch of random bullet points of my experience:

  • I had real trouble connecting my BT headphones. At first it was “connected”, but not really. Tried a fresh pairing mode, but then it showed two headphones. Then it connected, but as soon as I tried to adjust the audio input / output settings it lost audio again and I had to repeat it yet again. Now it works, and I decided to never touch the audio settings ever again.
  • “Files” is constantly crashing. Using the search? Crash. Going backwards? Crash. Try to do “something”? Crash. Do nothing? Probably also crash (hyperbolic).
  • “Files” data transfer for copying & deleting files is slow as hell for whatever reason (on decent Samsung SSDs mind you).
  • “Files” cannot multitask. If you’re copying, scanning, deleting or whatever, it won’t do anything else until that process is done.
  • “Files” and other Gnome applications frequently bug out if you try too many things at once, freezing or crashing them.
  • “Files”, or even Gnome as a whole, is so incredibly scrapped for features to achieve its simplistic look, that it lacks actual functionality.
  • Gnome’s settings are also missing for everything, or hidden in a gazillion different config menus, some of which I already forgot how to access again.
  • Scaling scales not just the UI, but also 3D applications like games, reducing their actual resolution and making them blurry. The UI seemed to be blurry as well.
  • Mullvad VPN’s tray icon somehow turned into some three dots with a weird background.
  • In the tray menu there’s also a VPN toggle, which shows Mullvad, but being turned off. Turning it on disables my connection and I have to reconnect through Mullvad, which turns the toggle off again. No way to remove the redundant toggle as far as I can tell, but maybe it’s in some hidden settings menu that I have yet to find.
  • OpenRGB in this does not work with my NZXT Hue 2 Ambient. Keeps asking for resize zones, which according to a search should not be necessary, and wasn’t necessary with the one I used in EOS either. Selecting any color just turns the LEDs off.
  • Launching the Battle.net launcher through Lutris it also opens some ghost “OpenGL Renderer” application with it, taking up space on the task bar.
  • Battle.net launcher can’t be maximized without constantly resetting or displaying information beneath the task bar.
  • Can’t launch .sh files unless I explicitly right click & Run as program.
  • Unfortunately it then launches with an additional empty terminal window, yet again taking up space on the task bar.
  • Had to create a new FF profile because using my old one somehow was unusable in regards to its performance.
  • The weather location for the little clock thingy apparently can’t find anything, city or country, except some locations that aren’t near me.
  • Can’t remove my own review in the Software center for one of the apps that I did prematurely.
  • Tray area also has this little tiling menu. I tried tiling, hated it. Couldn’t find a way to remove that icon to save space on the task bar.
  • After a lot of apps started to hang I tried restarting, just to be left in a blackscreen and the PC not shutting down. Had to hard reset to restart.
  • No EurKey keyboard layout. There’s a ‘German (US)’ one that’s close but it’s missing symbols.
  • Maybe probably more things that I can’t recall right now.

And that’s just after a few hours of usage. I was making fun of the tiny issues in KDE before, but if I have to choose between that and this disaster then I’m probably going to switch to the KDE edition, if I cannot find solutions to all this. I really don’t understand how people can deal with it? Or am I somehow the only one?

  • DarkThoughts@kbin.socialOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    Found a solution to remove the tiling icon / menu thingy: Install “Extension Manager” and then disable the extension “Pop Shell”.

    Edit:
    And found a new problem:
    - Spellcheck options in Firefox are ALL the English languages, but none of the installed ones.

    Edit:

    • Steam can’t be closed properly as it ends up sitting unresponsive in the task bar and needs its task to be killed.

    Edit:
    I found out the Firefox spellcheck somehow fetches its dictionaries from “/usr/share/hunspell”. How do I make FF fetch the regular dictionaries I added to it through Firefox, or what is the proper way to find dictionaries for that folder (I assume I can just delete the excess English variants)?

    Edit:
    You can just remove the folder in about:config, however it now shows only the US spelling, despite having another language installed…

    Edit:
    Managed to get the other spellcheck dictionary to show up.

    • Evolution mail client fails at 2 factor authentication. Window just shows “OAuth2 secreot not found” and no matter how many times I try it does not send a verification request to my phone.

    Edit:

    • “Files” can’t jump to folders starting with letter X because it immediately uses the (still crashy) search function.
    • Can’t drag & drop files from my Firefox download manager (pop up, not extra window) onto a folder without having to manually tab to it. Tabbing starts AFTER the “Files” process though, so you have to tab all the way through. Under KDE I could just drag it onto the file manager in the panel, which would focus the file manager and then drop the files in or onto the folder I wanted.
    • “Archive Manager (also known as File Roller)” can’t even drag & drop files from an archive into a folder. I don’t even know how people can use Gnome with it lacking such basic functionalities. What the hell are you doing with your lives?!

    Edit:
    OpenRGB now suddenly works as intended. Not sure if there was an update for it or if that’s a temporary oddity but for now I’ll take it.