GoKawiilIn January I finally made good on my threat/promise to install Linux on my desktop. I wanted to see how far I could get using a Linux PC as my main computer without doing a bunch of research beforehand or troubleshooting afterwards. Since then I have booted into Windows exactly twice: once to scan a multipage document that wasn’t scanning right in Linux, and once to print a photo for my kids’ school on extremely short notice. There’s a reason it’s taken me three months to write the next installment in my Linux diary: nothing has gone horribly wrong.
It didn’t take long for my Linux install to stop feeling new and exciting and start feeling like, well, my computer. It’s not exactly like a less annoying version of Windows, though it is less annoying than Windows, but it’s been a much easier transition than I thought it would be. There are a few extra steps sometimes in finding and installing apps — usually it’s easier than in Windows, and occasionally it’s harder. And there are a few apps I still haven’t been able to replicate in Linux. I’ve also had a smattering of fun bugs, and a few genuinely frustrating moments, but the overall experience is a lot calmer and more robust than I expected. Even troubleshooting is (mostly) satisfying in a weird way.
Getting fiddly
Fortunately, everything that’s gone wrong so far has only gone slightly wrong, like a gaming mouse that only works in games, and most of it has been pretty funny, like a gaming mouse that only works in games. Some of it has to do with specific hardware I’m using, or specific choices I made. (Keeping my nemesis, the HP OfficeJet 8720 printer, for one.) Some of it has to do with the fact that I deliberately chose a relatively new rolling distribution based on Arch Linux rather than a more mainstream distribution with a predictable release cycle, like Ubuntu.
Here’s my favorite fix so far. CachyOS comes with Snapper, a built-in imaging service that stores snapshots of the OS before you install or update a program, so you can roll back if something goes wrong. It defaults to saving 50 snapshots, which are stored in the boot partition. When I installed CachyOS, I went with the recommended size for that partition, which was 2GB. That filled up pretty quickly, and after a few weeks Snapper started warning me that it had run out of space and wouldn’t be taking any more snapshots (It defaults to 50, but didn’t have room to store 50 snapshots). CachyOS has since changed its installer to default to a 4GB partition, but it was too late to help me. There was only one thing to do: boot back into the live image, shrink my rightmost partition by 2GB, and slide every volume on the disk to the right of the boot partition over by 2GB, one at a time, to make room to expand the boot partition. It’s silly that I had to do that but it was easy enough, and kinda satisfying in a tactile way.
When I say “slide every volume on the drive to the right” I’m not kidding.
In January, I noticed I couldn’t get an IP address from my router on my ethernet connection after waking from sleep unless I first connected to Wi-Fi. This drove me up the goddamn wall. Fortunately, I could keep using the computer while troubleshooting because I do have both Wi-Fi and ethernet, but I prefer ethernet, so I had to fix it. I learned the default driver that the Linux kernel uses for my particular ethernet card doesn’t always work well, so I installed a new driver. I turned off ipv6, then turned it back on again. I made sure my wired and wireless connections identified themselves as different devices to the router, though that didn’t help. I set a static IP on both the router and computer side. I extended my DHCP lease timeout. Finally I found the actual culprit.
Several years ago, in an effort to get my multigenerational Sonos speakers to play nicely with my Unifi router (it’s a whole thing), I followed some advice on a forum and enabled STP — an older port-scanning protocol — on my networking switch. This was fine for my Windows PC, but in Linux it made getting an IP address from the router take so long every time that the ethernet card gave up. Disabling it fixed the problem with my desktop and finally got the Era 100 in my kitchen showing up consistently in the Sonos app. Figuring out how to solve a problem on an OS I’d used for a few weeks fortuitously solved a problem I’d created trying to solve a different problem on a different OS a few years ago. We learn by doing!
My current gremlin is that the mic on my Logitech Brio webcam doesn’t always transmit sound. Sometimes nobody can hear me from the get-go; other times it stops working in between one meeting and the next, and lately it’s been cutting out mid-sentence. This is probably because I installed EasyEffects, but I’m not sure yet. I have another microphone — and also other computers, if really necessary. If I didn’t, I would probably be more annoyed. Maybe annoyed enough to fix it.
On the other hand, sometimes problems solve themselves if you wait. I wanted to find a way to add text extraction to the screenshot utility in KDE Plasma — a feature I missed from other operating systems. The solution was to wait a week until Cachy updated to Plasma 6.6, which added that feature. Score another point for laziness.
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