Sadly i recently learned VLC doesn’t just always work.

About a year ago i had an issue with playing FLAC files on VLC, where there would be short periods of no audio. I had recently made some upgrades to my audio hardware, so i was looking at my new hardware/cables/config… but in the end i realized it always happened at the same point in the same files, so a software issue was more likely:

https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/27696

Nice quote from this issue: VLC is broken since months Use their nightly version, it has a nice new interface too, and no bugs. I don’t get how they can keep a huge breaking bug like this in vlc from MONTHS.

And neither can i… until a year ago VLC was for me the pinnacle of “it just works”. Now after them leaving a bug causing audio playback issues into their stable version for months, they broke my trust in them… they’re probably still the best option out there, but now i’ll just say probably, not for sure, and there is room for improvement…

And if it were some obscure format, sure, but FLAC? …

That the ecosystem seems so complex that even developers don’t know how they should recommend their users should install an application. Haven’t encountered that yet on windows. And i’ve had plenty of people here tell me “yes, you CAN install deb packages, and many apps will GIVE you deb packages, and the ubuntu page says Debian packages is the very HEART of ubuntu. But you’d be insane to install something like that”. Does that sound like a good ecosystem, where people aknowledge that the best way to do stuff is ignore everything app developers & the makers of one of the largest distros say, and do the opposite and ignore apps that you can’t install in the way that i should magically know is the best way.

I stand by my words man, but you’re free to try to convince me :).

To install something you have to install it from the repository, and not download something from some webpage.

Ah yes, i should have known better than to rely on the documentation of the website of an application i should install. Do you guys really consider this a sane ecosystem? I google what kind of apps there are for what i want. I find the site of one i want to try, it says “here is a deb package for ubuntu”, and then hell ensues. And when i share this experience your reaction is “you should have known better” O_o… yeah no. This is just insanity. If according to you even the developers of applications fail to send their users in the right direction on how to get their application installed, there is probably little hope for a mere user like me.

I can tell you i don’t need any windows experience to browse a discovered network share, enable a setting in an application and have it just work, and click an .msi file and expect windows to not have removed the handler for that file type.

I get it, you like linux, but blanket statements like this are just so unproductive. “and it’s a much better experience for me than Windows (in every aspect).”. Sorry, i just don’t believe you. I’m sure you’re happier with linux for many good reasons, but there have to be things that windows did better.

Just because you are a “power user” on Windows doesn’t mean you can handle Linux the same way.

I’m not expecting that, i just wrote this after 5 hours of frustration when trying to get imo pretty basic things to work. This is not just “i clicked or installed something and it didn’t work”. I’m a developer, i’ve got many docker packages running on my NAS, i know my way around a linux terminal. This is “they didn’t work, so i started googling, then 2 hours of frustration later i settled on not being able to just browse to my network share in the file manager and mount them somewhere via some fstab editing in the terminal”. and "ffs, i just wanted to try a docker gui, how hard could it be to install a deb package which the ubuntu site itself says “deb packages are the heart of ubuntu” (ubuntu must be stone dead if that’s the heart). And the refreshrate & HDR is nice to have i guess. But yeah, i want nice things, they don’t seem such unreasonable features to request. And i wouldn’t mind if i had to follow some complicated guide to get there. It’s just after hours of googling, i’m no closer then where i started.

What exactly would be the linux way? It’s a nice thing to repeat, but how would you describe the linux way in this context? I’m a new linux user, i want kodi to switch my display to the correct refreshrate when i play a movie. I want to follow the linux way, what is that way?

Unlike on Windows, errors here are usually informative, and “something like …” is useless. We can’t trust you to determine if it’s vague or not.

Yeah, i’m a developer, the error i got was about as helpful as “nullreference exception”. I found the issue was the SMBv1 default by googling the exact error. Here it is for you “Failed to retrieve share list invalid argument”. Really helpful message :).

The article advises you to install GDebi from repositories (with a nice GUI) to do that. Have you done that?

Yes, and then got stuck since that tool failed to find something called gconf2 that is a dependency. Then i followed command line install instructions that also gave errors. Which the instructions found perfectly normal and expected, they said to then run an apt command to fix it, but then apt would just uninstall the application again (which i guess ‘fixes’ a botched installation).

But you find it normal that the application normally handling .deb files on linux just disappears on a popular beginner distro, and to install something i have to start googling and avoid all the links telling me to use the built in application that suddenly disappeared, to then find that one link that tells me “yeah, ubuntu made a huge mistake here, here’s how you fix it”.

Sorry, but this is just abysmal user experience. And yeah, i’m a developer, i can find my way around command line tools, but for something this basic? for real?

Your fault is treating it wrong. If others don’t need it and you need it, why cry that desktop Linux sucks? Maybe it sucks for you, well, sorry.

So i should expect every little thing to be a minor or major struggle, with the rich ecosystem of linux apps be so fragmented to mostly just work on the distro the developer uses, which you have to guess since they might still mention your distro on their website, even if they don’t really properly support it.

If treating it wrong means not making linux my hobby, and just wanting to use it like i can with my headless servers, then it’s indeed not for me. And yeah, i’ve head my moments of frustration with my synology/raspberries. But most of the things i want to do on them do work from the first try, and if a gui is offered, it just works. If that’s too high of an expectation, then you just come across as delusional for me. I don’t expect everything to be perfect, but for it to be this bad in 2023 just seems ridiculous. And maybe i just happened to land in a perfect storm of things that don’t work on ubuntu being the first things i try. But then being like “maybe linux isn’t for you”. I’m a professional developer running multiple headless linux machines and a dozen docker containers for various things. If it isn’t for me, who is it for O_O…

Ahh the favourite pasttime of the linux community: blaming the user.

See, i install ubuntu. It has this files application to brows your files in a gui. I click other sources, it detects my SMB shares, i click on one of those, and i get some vague error, i no longer have the exact error text but it was something like “item not found in list”. You feel that on a fresh desktop install clicking the files tab, and then clicking the discovered network share, and expect it being able to handle a protocol that got exploited in 2017 being disabled, and then throwing an error “item not found in list” is me just randomly clicking around expecting a windows experience and me not being able to read error messages? You’re so far off the mark that it’s not even funny anymore. Yeah, i’ve got a dozen containers on my synology with proper permission management and shared users between those containers, properly exposing some to the internet, and having set up watchtower to automatically update everything to keep it secure since i’m such a windows user that doesn’t know anything else…

Ubuntu does still have a GUI to install software from .deb packages, I think.

dude, CLICK THE LINK I GAVE, IT DOESN’T. and what do you mean install a package for another distribution. https://dockstation.io, see the link “download for ubuntu/debian”. I’m just doing what the first application i thought of trying tells me. Or do the developers of linux apps themselves have no clue how to support the most popular distro? According to you that may be the case, but that’s not my fault then.

And why did i google software? i entered “docker” in the package manager but didn’t find much, so i thought i’d give google a try. also to get some reviews/experience of people trying the applications, i could blindly try packages, but reading some user experiences makes the choice easier.