Comment by nh2
21 hours ago
I'm using Linux on the desktop for 15 years and I still sometimes cannot connect to Wifi.
This is because the list of network refreshes (and disappears) before I can find and click the correct Wifi:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/issu...
This completely breaks the Linux experience for anybody living in a reasonably populous area. The issue has 3 upvotes.
I also put a 400 $ bounty on it, if anybody wants to give it a shot. (Given that AI is supposed to replace 90% of programmers last year, making the Wifi list stay visible should be easy, right?)
This worked fine 10 years ago.
Most of my gripes are around some UI garbage behaviour like that. I have a file manager on one PC (I think it's the Ubuntu one where some "GUI in Snap" stuff breaks the GUI) breaks the file picker dialogue, so that when pasting a directory path in to navigate there, at the exact instant you press Enter, it autocompletes the first file so that that gets selected, leading you to upload a file you didn't want to upload.
That said, all of that feels like really high quality compared to when once per year I click the Wifi menu on some Windows and it take 20 seconds to appear at all.
If you are sensitive to these issues, unfortunately you need to go with a mainstream linux distribution and use near-default settings.
It's great that you can customize everything and use your own window manager, compositor, etc ... but these issues are the price you pay. It is unfair to compare this to Windows, where you don't even have these customization options.
Specifically for the network manager applet, it is not fixed because it's not really used anymore. GNOME Shell has it's own network selection menu that does not use the applet. It is the default on most systems, so users don't face this issue by default.
I use ubuntu and the default remote desktop just stopped working since 24: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rdp-stopped-working-after-upg...
With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.
>With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.
I'd argue it's the opposite. Windows stuff randomly breaking on forced unattended updates is a common trope by now. If you try to search for solutions, you will find "Trusted Microsoft Computing Expert Gold Level Diamond Star" people on MS forums giving you advice ranging from "reinstall drivers, uninstall drivers, update bios, run virus scan, and defrag your ssd".
If you search for problems on linux, you will get much higher quality answers.
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>>With Linux, you just have to be prepared to hit a bug and find no help coming anytime.
Mate there are bugs in windows and macos that have been unfixed for years. This is not a good argument in my opinion.
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> find no help coming anytime
Well, see sibling thread: Looks like you just need to post your bounty in HN and somebody will do within a few hours. Somebody to that for Windows or macos.
Sometimes I feel the bounty topic isn't well served yet. On the GNOME bug tracker it doesn't seem to be very discoverable. Are there current good platforms to advertise bounties where people actually look?
Are you proposing that the linux community offers worse support than any kind of software support that you pay for? I've found strangers on the internet to be worlds better than anything I've ever gotten from a vendor.
I had one client who's explorer didn't load, we tried different file browsers, all that used explorer as backend failed to load, only double commander (forgot the exact name, it's a dual pan file browser like midnight commander) that worked. And we couldn't find any solution online, at the end he was stuck with it for over an year, as it was not possible to reinstall.
On Linux everything is mostly decoupled, so this is not working not going to break the other thing, and I can replace it with something else.
People forgets that you're not working with a black box, unlike Windows
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The default remote desktop client on Windows 11 can have his picture freeze. Mouse and keyboard input still goes through though. (Which is especially dangerous because enraged users will smash their keyboard.) Years without a fix from Microsoft. Just a registry hack as a workaround.
I've been recommending Mint/Cinnamon over Ubuntu for years now. Its wifi widget does not do this, nor does it use snap.
I jumped on the Linux bandwagon with my main work laptop last week, when my perfectly fine (I thought) Windows 11 installation nuked itself without warning (possibly related to merely opening Teams).
I somewhat randomly chose Mint, and a few oddities aside; it’s been a pretty good experience.
I was really surprised with how well polished Mint is. Everything worked out of the box very snappy.
Mint is my preferred OS for my homelab. Nice to have a decent GUI to plug into when using a KVM switch.
Mint is really polished
It takes skill to make a GUI that integrates dynamic information a good UX. For things like WiFi I discovered that modifying config files is an infinitely better experience than any GUI on Linux.
Also for some reason DE's sometimes fail to automatically connect to an AP when it's right there and I have to click for them to do it. This issue literally never happened to me when just using wpa_supplicant, for years whenever an AP is operational then so is the connection without fail.
PR on the way
PR created https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/-/merg...
Excellent, I will try it straight away. I'll pay out 75% if it works (as it fixes my immediate problem), and the remaining 25% if it gets merged. I'll email you after my test.
I think one possible complaint you might get in the review is that when refreshing is fully disabled in the menu, people won't see new networks come up (e.g. when they had just enabled Wifi, or unsuspended).
Maybe a good solution would be to to have one unclickable menu entry pop up labelled e.g. "Networks changed, re-open this menu" to solve that. Probably in nm-applet's main context menu of which the list is a child, instead of in the list itself, so that its appearance doesn't move around the networks on which the user is currently intending to click.
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Well, huge shoutout to you for following up on your word!
https://gitlab.gnome.org/rickyb/network-manager-applet/-/com...
Ashamed to admit that the power of monetary motivation got the best of me here. But it was also nice to apply myself.
Last time I tried Linux I was so done with Windows I installed Arch. Couldn't connect to Wifi. I figured it was Arch, so I installed Ubuntu. Literally the same problem. So I got a new USB wifi adaptor that said it supported Linux...same problem. I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol.
Perhaps you could have checked if the firmware was installed? Most distros have non free firmware in their packages, it just needs to be installed.
Or maybe the operating system should just work reliably for (at least) the basics? Or if it can’t, at least give an indication why?
Blaming a new user like this is one of the cultural reasons why the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ has always been n+1.
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I tried everything lol.
Last summer Manjaro released usual heavy update and suddenly wifi on my old spare mbp was gone. Luckily digging around I found that a firmware was available in aur so I had to just plug ethernet in, install the package and reboot the system. But then another smaller update out of blue made system unbootable so instead of doing "forensics" I went by the easiest way of reinstalling the system and wifi again was working out of the box.
Yeowch, for my old MBPs (Core 2 duo I want to say) I run Mint and have had no problems. Maybe just luck of the draw but I've been really impressed
Re: "I gave up and have been using a MacBook ever since lol."
I'm curious. What will you do when Apple too starts shoehorning AI into every part of MacOS and when Apple introduces increasingly unpalatable or government-mandated surveillance functionality like Microsoft is doing with Recall?
What will you do then?
Asahi linux to not waste hardware and then move away from apple products slowly. But in the meantime, their products are good and are Unix based so they're not a pain for development.
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Probably stop using technology. Might go back to bartending tbh.
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This is still a problem. There are a lot of, eg, realtek chipsets that don't work well or simply don't work on Linux.
Another issue is they advertise "Linux support," which actually translates to: minimally working driver source available for very out-of-date kernel. Good luck if you want to rely on upstreamed drivers or even run a recent kernel.
congratz to receiving the fix
Have you tried KDE Plasma? I have loved it since coming from GNOME. Install it atop Debian 13 and everything just works.
That sounds like a GNOME problem, not a Linux problem.
You should give KDE a go.
Also the latest KDE UI that inserts a tiny password input box below the SSID when you click the SSID, and doesn't scroll it into view, so you're left wondering what's going on
Really really bad WiFi connection UI all over