MudMan

That’d be me.

For the record, I disagree with nothing that Gerstmann is saying on this one, in case the more upbeat tone makes it more palatable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHrYhUOqZ7c

I just sound angrier because he’s checking it out and seeing it moving in the right direction while I’m trying to main. All the speedbumps are actually annoying if you’re not just tinkering for fun.

I absolutely don’t understand Calibre at all. That’s been my point all along.

I can tell you that I’ve actively tried to avoid Calibre when setting up a self-hosted ebook library and I’m currently chugging along with my Calibre-web install.

Turns out, somebody is forcing me to use Calibre, because I promise if I could have stuck with the half a dozen attempts at having a ebook library handle my pre-existing directory structure I wouldn’t have wasted a day having Calibre ingesting and duplicating it all, then manually checking that everything came over before feeling safe enough to delete the original repository.

Because that’s how it still works as of today, as it turns out.

And again, Calibre gets no more respect from me than… I don’t know, Canva. I owe neither of them anything and if I happen to have a bad time using any part of it I feel super happy and safe sharing that on whatever venue seems applicable with as much sarcasm as I see fit. Software is software and end user criticism is end user criticism. I’m being exceedingly articulate and respectful about it, by those standards, speaking with full understanding of what the bad version of this looks and feels like.

Hah. I’m old enough to watch the norms play Street Fighter II The World Warrior.

All my joints ache. Even the ones you didn’t know were joints.

Nope. The entire point is I don’t want an alternative, I want the one thing to work.

Hah. You get the “FOSS gets to be crap because you can’t do it yourself” cop out often, but rarely when you haven’t actually complained about it.

I mean, there are a ton of Calibre alternatives, the point everybody is making here is that a bunch of them don’t get enough support or stick to Calibre conventions anyway because Calibre is at the ground floor of the entire thing and has sort of metastasized into a de facto standard architecture. I don’t even know that you could make a commercial Kindle alternative and not at least support Calibre conventions at this point. It’s like trying to not use HDMI anymore, and for similar reasons.

Unless you’re Kovid Goyal (made me look that up and man, what a rough name to have in the 2020s), I don’t see how that connects to your response at all. And even if you were, honestly. I’ve seen some of the other stuff the guy has done and said. I’m not sure he’d take it as an insult and I don’t mean it as one. The man made the piece of software he needed the way he wanted, which is very much not universal. It just happens to now be the core of entire chunk of the ebook industry that isn’t made by Amazon.com Inc., much to my annoyance.

But since I’m at it, if your software is annoying people have no need to hide their anger or contempt for the ways in which it is annoying, even if it’s FOSS. If you put it out there don’t be mad when end users act like end users. People who stumble upon a piece of software and try to use don’t need to do an audit on your accounts and licenses to know if they are allowed to be mad at the stuff that’s annoying them. FOSS competes with commercial software in equal terms, as far as end users are concerned. Some of the ways it competes have to do with privacy, security, code access and lack of fees, but all the other ways, including UX, polish and feature set, still apply.

I know how flatpaks are updated, thanks a bunch. Not that it matters particularly on Bazzite these days, because Bazaar will do that for you on the gui, too. Gear Lever will handle your appimages, if you’re lucky. We could have a conversation about how much sense it makes to have updates happen in four different places and how much sense it makes to advise people to stop using their pre-bundled “update everything” script and start updating each of those separately to avoid a troublesome updated driver as a permanent solution.

In any case that’s not the only part of your software that comes with a system update. The list of end-of-life features and warnings I see reported on OS updates has been steadily growing as my install ages, which has been interesting to see simmer, given all the “it’s foolproof” talk about immutable/atomic distros on the internet. I have to assume some of those will get sorted out in future updates, but so far the list has been moving in the wrong direction.

Honestly, when I do have the time and motivation I will likely just rebase to a whole different branch and go from there depending on what fixes itself or breaks. I assume that will get rid of a bunch of stuff.

But that’s already waaay past what an average user should have to do to their OS. Especially in the time this install has been live without a rollback or rebase (and it’s had some, because it’s not the first time it breaks). I’m not even sure Bazzite shipped a broken update. It could just be an issue on KDE’s side. Or on Nvidia’s side. Who knows. Being able to roll back my system to a point where it worked is not a fix, it’s a troubleshooting step. Having to troubleshoot IS the problem in itself.

I mean, unless you broke something yourself, I suppose. But you’re also supposed to not be able to do that in an atomic distro, if you believe what people will tell you.

For the record, as I told someone else, I didn’t choose Bazzite because it was an atomic distro (in fact it’s kind of a pain in the ass that it is, KDE really doesn’t like it when you try to customize stuff in one of those and doesn’t handle it gracefully at all). I chose it because I had a hell of a time finding a distro that would pick up my sound hardware properly (sound on Linux is yet another rabbit hole) and still have proper HDR and VRR support with my display setup. The list of distros that did not do both of those things at once before I landed on Bazzite includes Manjaro, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora Workstation and a couple of others I didn’t test for long enough to remember.

That’s a lie. Manjaro aaaalmost got there. It worked for a while. I kinda forget what broke that made me try something else.

You can see how that entire ordeal is… not mainstream-friendly in aggregate, though, surely.

To boot into a semi-functional but not updated Bazzite, probably. Takes 5 to get to Windows, though.

To get my system up to full functionality and up to date… their history with massive, feature-breaking issues, and they do have one, is maybe a couple of weeks for a patch and then some time seeing what the fallout of the broken stuff is around your software in general.

Although that’s on a good day. Bluetooth has been entirely nonfunctional on this Bazzite install for months and going by how long ago people have been mentioning it with this specific hardware I don’t think that one is going away anytime soon.

Nah, hard disagree. Calibre has quirks because it’s old, but it also has quirks because it has quirks.

It’s not particularly disputed that a lot of how its original pre-web UX was designed and the weirdly rigid, stunted structure of how it wants its libraries organized are a side effect of it originally being a one person project that seemed mostly designed to the preferences of its maintainer. And then there’s all that baseline functionality from it being originally meant as a standalone app rather than a self-hosting thing layered on top of all the weird decisions.

I’ve been at this for a long time. I tried to use Calibre back when it was new, digital comic books were rars with jpegs in them and ebooks just sat in random directories as .txt files. It was weird then and it’s weird now. If anything, the crazy ecosystem built around it has made it less weird now that a bunch of stuff is hiding the rough edges behind more modern/reasonable design.

There’s a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.

A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it’s inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.

See also: Gnome.

It’s probably worse than it’s been, less bad than people around here think.

One thing MS does is they have a TON of silent channels and branches, so every release they do is a rolling release. As a result, when you see in the news that they fucked up again and messed up a bunch of something somewhere it tends to be relatively contained still. I think the latest was a bad patch breaking a bunch of stuff that required a couple of emergency patches and I think there may be more to go.

It’s 100% not good, and it almost certainly affected a lot of machines, but it probably got stopped from spreading further. If they had a signed driver update break their entire desktop interface in an update sent to every user they’d be (rightfully) crucified endlessly.

I get that there is a massive discrepancy of resources at play, but that doesn’t make it better from the end user perspective. I’ve been saying for years that the Linux community keeps saying that “you can choose the distro you like” is a feature, but it isn’t. Desktop Linux should be one thing. A couple, max. Contributions should be way more centralized and pool resources, like they are on the kernel. Distro choice is an anti-feature and a massive waste of resources.

If you just want to boot whatever you were running prior to the last update, yeah, it’s typically in the GRUB menu. If you updated more than once (which I believe I did) you need to go find the previous snapshot, but it’s not too much more hassle.

That doesn’t particularly fix anything, though, unless you’re cool with not updating indefinitely the thing you wanted to use or with updating everything else manually until the issue is fixed. If you want to be able to fix the update you still have to go into the logs and figure out what’s going on (since the failure isn’t universal and I know people are running these drivers without issues this must be possible). And of course all that assumes it was actually the update that broke something and the rollback actually fixes the issue.

Or, hear me out, I could reboot and choose Windows in GRUB instead, and that works for sure and I don’t have to think about it.

So Windows it is until I feel adventurous. I owe my Bazzite install zero extra time. If it can’t run as conveniently as clicking down one more time to select Windows then it’s not running.

As I said elsewhere, people really underestimate the level of stability it takes to be a mainstream option for a desktop OS.

Hey, good for them.

To be absolutely clear, I want to be on Linux full time. I’d love to dump Windows altogether.

But I am an adult with actual shit to do, so working most of the time isn’t good enough.

I have zero issues with corpos contributing to open source stuff. And I have zero issues with open source projects having for-profit offshoots. Blender works. Home Assistant works. SteamOS… mostly works, on its very narrow band of specifically selected hardware.

By all means, have Valve keep pumping money into the ecosystem. I’m all for it.

But yeah, the community is so weirdly out of touch and in so much denial about the obvious, ongoing support gaps having been fully resolved. Installing a OS on a clean drive and checking that most of your Steam library works isn’t even close to the level of reliability you need for mainstream use on desktop. Microsoft pushed what? Two bad updates that broke systems in the past six months? And they are out there making public commitments to “regain trust” while tech journalists talk about their unacceptable performance and inevitable demise.

If I judged Linux by that yardstick I would have nuked my Linux installs ages ago. If we want it to become a mainstream concern we need to understand why it isn’t and what needs to happen to get it there.

Hah. I spent more time writing this post in the gaps between waiting for work stuff to finish work stuffing. I can’t just… not sit down for work for an arbitrary amount of time because I’m busy arguing with the Linux Nvidia drivers.

I agree that’s the point of Bazzite, though. So if it doesn’t in fact “just work” for me, then what’s the point of it?

That hasn’t been the case since… what? Windows 7? All the Win 10/11 installs I have around the place are some version of the preinstalled OEM Windows setup or the initial install I made when I did it myself. There is no meaningful performance degradation on any of them that I can notice, and I believe there have been benchmarks done recently showing similar outcomes. Linux can’t afford to argue about Windows XP issues as if they were current. For the record, no, Windows won’t force you to reset mid-work to make an install anymore, either. It defaults to installing updates on reboot, just like Bazzite (you can turn it off on Bazzite and not on Windows, though).

Also, HDR is absolutely not “a feature only 1% uses”. The past four monitors I’ve purchased had HDR support, not because I wanted it, just because it came with them. My last laptop came with it out of the box. All the TVs I’ve purchased for myself and relatives for many years have it (not even sure if they make non-HDR TVs anymore, in fact). It’s supported by all current-gen consoles, now the Switch 2 has added support for it, too. It’s also supported by the Steam Deck, incidentally.

So no, not a niche feature anymore, by a long shot. It’s baseline compatibility for any display made this decade. And for a gaming computer it’s an absolute must, especially if you want to do TV out with it, which I do. As will the upcoming Steam Machine. Again, can’t SMASH WINDOWS for gaming if games outright look better on Windows than Linux when they come out of my screen. That’s not how that works.

Even if that wasn’t the case, though. My monitors are already HDR. This is about the OS being compatible with the hardware I already own. I’m not paying for features I can’t use because the software is incompatible with it for no good reason.

FWIW, Bazzite isn’t any better than Fedora, it’s just… Fedora. It has a couple of gaming-friendly features, including booting into a controller interface by default (which doesn’t work well on Nvidia cards, so meh) and specific compatibility for certain gaming hardware, particularly for handhelds and gaming laptops, which can be very useful if you’re on a portable gaming device that struggles under Windows but is not officially supported on SteamOS. You can rebase directly from it to the Fedora atomic distro matching your DE if you want (can’t rebase across DE’s, annoyingly).

That is absolutely not the issue.

This is a Nvidia driver update that broke my stuff. They’re already way too slow pulling those in, and they still have a nasty habit of breaking entire features. I can see other people online complaining that it busted sleep/wake for them (joke’s on them, it’s always been busted for me). The driver they’re pushing isn’t even to parity with the Windows driver at all. It’s just catching up to being slightly less out of date.

Yeah, I could and I probably will, but not today and not until I don’t have to do work.

That’s the “tweak Linux until it works” game I don’t have time to play right now. Even if it works first time, and there’s no guarantee that it will.

Also, the last working Nvidia drivers for me are absolutely ancient. And GPU drivers on a gaming distro aren’t a works/doesn’t work thing. There are entire features and per-game optimizations significantly impacting performance enabled on each version. You want to be on the latest drivers.

Have I? I tried so many so quickly I can’t even remember.

In any case I’m part of the problem now, because my dealbreaker was having to organize my library in the obtuse alien way Calibre wants instead of the nice, human-readable way I already had. I bit that bullet, so now I’m married to a Calibre format library and thus perpetuating the terrible standard.

Yeeeeeah, so “reinstall your OS from scratch” is a dealbreaker. You realize that if we’re on SMASHES WINDOWS territory you can’t ever, ever, EVER tell people to reinstall their OS from scratch, let alone what is, from a normie’s perspective, an entirely different OS. I’d argue that even the relatively simple rollback in Bazzite/Fedora atomic distros in general is a dealbreaker for most nromal users, at least with the current UX.

BTW, just to clarify how far from ready this is for mainstream adoption, Mint is a no-go because last I checked they still had no official HDR support (or VRR? Not sure about VRR, which is its own issue), so it’s just missing mandatory features for my gaming setup. Ubuntu has its own set of problems. Back when I was distro hopping for this setup Bazzite ended up being the only thing to simultaneously do surround sound out of the box (kinda, close enough) and VRR/HDR out of the box as well with embedded Nvidia drivers. Things may have changed, but I’m not distro hopping anymore.

I have a different thing with Cachy on it and it’s… fine? But the Arch-ness of it all rubs me personally the wrong way. Either way I’m not wiping my OS. If Fedora doesn’t work then it’s gonna be Windows because I have better things to do with my time.

So that’s how mainstream adoption works, for anybody keeping track.

Hah. Good to know. I haven’t refreshed that container in a while and the data keeps populating just fine, so I hadn’t considered it. Makes a lot of sense to consolidate all the media server options into one package, though. I’ll take a peek at the new one.

We used to go to arcades even when we had no money just to watch other people play over their shoulders.

It was like Twitch, but sweaty and with more mullets.