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.
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.
Instructions for changing it here
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.
Skyrim mods.
Btw, anyone got the new reshade working on wine?
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.
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)
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
In the past, Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) had a reputation of being hard to configure and maintain. Often, Linux admins would turn it off. But SELinux i...YouTube
This.
I tried it some time ago and I had to format the SSD because the operating system became unusable.
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.
\#!/bin/bash
xrandr --output HDMI2 --off
xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --same-as HDMI1
xrandr --output HDMI1 --right-of HDMI2
exit
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.
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 )
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.
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 use this project (github.com/FiloSottile/captive…) 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: words.filippo.io/captive-brows…
Captive portals are the worst. Flaky detection. The OS and browser try to detect these annoying network features but fail quite often, leaving you with broken connections.Filippo Valsorda
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. :)
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.
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.
If you want to get into doing it, I found searching through a lot of note taking applications until I found something I really liked helped me remember to go do it regularly.
For FOSS stuff a lot of people like Joplin, and I could certainly recommend it. Personally though, I really like Obsidian for its backlinking and graph view features, but it's not open source.
Furthermore, just carrying around a notebook and a pen everywhere you go as a habit helps a lot. I got into the habit of doing this by maintaining a personal journal for some time. For writing effective notation on paper which can easily be digitized, I would recommend looking into "bullet journaling" methods, and again, finding a notebook and pen that you really quite like, helps a lot to make the experience enjoyable and develop it as a skill.
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.
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