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?
I understand that 24/60 doesn't divide evenly. My point is just that televisions don't have this feature either. When I watch movies, even if the source is 24hz, my TV stays at 60hz.
Either way, there certainly is "an API" to do it. With
xrandryou can justxrandr --refresh 24and it would work. It's something that is absolutely doable. Whatever xrandr is doing clearly the X server is exposing ways to change it. So anyone saying "X can't do that" is probably wrong.I don't know much about Ubuntu other than everyone recommends it because it's overly simple and then inevitably things go wrong with it and it's impossible to fix because its overly simple. If I had to guess, this is something specific about Ubuntu and it using wayland by default. Wayland is the X replacement, so any fixes for Xorg refresh rate changing definitely don't apply.
Potential solution : if you log out, on the log in screen it should give you an option of which desktop environment to log into (a gear in the bottom right corner with an option for "Ubuntu on Xorg")...
It's possible that Ubuntu has removed this option recently. Wayland is the future, but it is different from X and not all software is ready for that change. My guess is that the checkbox in Kodi uses the Xorg APIs to change refresh rate, and Wayland doesn't use those APIs, so it just doesn't work. Wayland is in awkward teenage years where it's trying to pretend like it's ready to take on the world, but it's got a lot of rough edges still.
I would say that refresh rate changing doesn't really reflect on "linux on desktop" (a normal desktop use case doesn't have refresh rates changing regularly), but rather "linux as a HTPC/media center". And furthermore, most of your complaints are specific about Ubuntu. The biggest "Linux has issues" problem is that people are still using Ubuntu and picking a distro is way too much work, and the wayland transition is breaking some functionality of some software that hasn't updated yet.
I would like to point out that you have come into a Linux community and lead off with "this is a terrible experience" and then described quite a few issues that either "Ubuntu" (not "Linux") issues or otherwise somewhat non-standard uses. So if you're getting a weird mix of "defensive," "agreement that Ubuntu sucks, use something else," and "utter confusion about the use case" ... its probably the way the conversation started.
Also, this wouldn't be the first thread where someone shows up and complains purely on the basis of "linux isn't windows" so the community is already primed to be agitated about threads like this. Kneejerk reactions aren't the best, but I'm sure you weren't trying to come in here and coming across as aggressive either.
I knew i wouldn't come across too well XD. I might as well have posted this on the "off my chest" community. This was written in frustration so will be negative & harsh, but i'm technical enough to also know that at least 2 of the issues i mention are pretty unforgivable. But just browsing to an SMB share that is discover relying on a protocol that is deprecated and was exploited over 6 years ago by ransomware... Gotta love linux security focus. And that installer suddenly disappearing from ubuntu... nice way to ruin your user experience and make anything they google obsolete and unhelpful and make it hard to figure out how to install stuff when it's not in the default app manager.
And i love how the refreshrate issue is like a magnet for people here to be like "yeah, but do you really need that" (and while they're at it ignore the other 2 issues, since they're inconvient to address). But our eyes are really god at detecting disturbances in smooth motion. I can at least easily spot it, try it next time you watch something on your tv, whenever the camera pans, if the refreshrate & framerate don't perfectly divide, it's visible. It can not bother you, good for you, it does bother me. It's like if i say "you're now on manual breathing mode", and for the next 5 minutes you'll be very aware you're breathing. If the camera makes a nice large panning movement, and i point out how you can see the framerate not matching the refreshrate, you'll probably keep seeing it whenever the camera pans...
Refreshrate is the magnet probably because it feels like the only one that isn't covered by "yeah, ubuntu is shit. I agree." And I understand fully how much refresh matters. I use 144 and 240hz monitors because low refresh bothers me. It was intended as less of a "this shouldn't bother you" and more of a "this is an edge case feature that not even my blu ray player handles, and that's built for the specific purpose of watching videos." It's purely a use case I had never heard of before, so declaring Linux not ready for desktop over a completely niche feature feels unfair. (But again, I would check for Xorg vs Wayland)
Ubuntu has been moving more and more of their software away from deb packaging and towards "snaps" which are their own thing. And snaps are terrible. imo, Canonical is basically trying to figure out how to turn Ubuntu into a walled garden like Microsoft and Apple have.
So Ubuntu handling it's packaging poorly and having out of date software with poor configurations doesn't surprise me at all. I can't counter your argument there because I agree with you that Ubuntu isn't good for desktop. I'm not ignoring those issues, I'm agreeing (just about Ubuntu, and not necessarily Linux as a whole, which has a separate set of issues, like driving you towards Ubuntu in the first place)