I’ve found that the silliest desktop problems are usually the hardest to solve, and the “serious” linux system errors are the easiest.
System doesn’t boot? Look at error message, boot from a rescue disk, mount root filesystem and fix what you did wrong.
Wrong mouse cursor theme in some Plasma applications, ignoring your settings? Some weird font rendering issue? Bang your head against a wall exploring various dotfiles and rc files in your home directory for two weeks, and eventually give up and nuke your profile and reconfigure your whole desktop from scratch.
A couple of weeks ago I moved Firefox to one side. Window disappeared, but Firefox was still running “somewhere” on my desktop, but was not actually be rendered to the screen. Killing the process and relaunching just resulted in it be rendered to this weird black hole. Log out of gnome and log back in? Same! Reboot? Same!
Ended up deleting it’s config folder and re-attaching to Firefox sync in order to have it working again. No idea what went wrong, nor will I ever most likely.
There really should be a hotkey for “move window to primary display” or somesuch. The worst is when just the top “cleat” of the window is inaccessible, making it impossible to simply move the window yourself.
Alternately, a CLI tool to just trash a specific app’s window settings, or a system control panel that lets you browse these settings, would be incredible.
In every GUI I’ve used, there are tiling or snapping hotkeys, something like Super + Arrow keys or something, that will usually put the window somewhere sane.
I feel like i had a disappearing window like that a lifetime ago and the fix was to change the resolution.
I don’t know if that uncovered the void to the right or forced the window to reassign itself to usable space. But it worked then. Hell, it could have been windows for all I recall.
Yeah for some reason a single game ignores the system sound settings and goes straight to a line out. My system doesn’t see that the game is outputting sound and I can’t change it. (Arch with KDE)
Somewhat related on windows 11, for some reason teams volume will desync from system volume. I’ll put system volume to 0 and still be hearing teams. It’s the same audio device being selected. I don’t understand why it would ever work that way but here we are
Oh my god, you’ve put it into (really nice) words something I’ve felt since quite some time now. I’ve no trouble (in fact even joy) when something major is fucked up. But all this GUI shenanigans, I’ve usually no idea where to even begin. The lack of structure and hierarchy completely flummoxes me. Or maybe I just don’t have enough experience debugging userland stuff
I’ve found that the silliest desktop problems are usually the hardest to solve, and the “serious” linux system errors are the easiest.
System doesn’t boot? Look at error message, boot from a rescue disk, mount root filesystem and fix what you did wrong.
Wrong mouse cursor theme in some Plasma applications, ignoring your settings? Some weird font rendering issue? Bang your head against a wall exploring various dotfiles and rc files in your home directory for two weeks, and eventually give up and nuke your profile and reconfigure your whole desktop from scratch.
I laughed so hard reading your comment. I totally agree.
A couple of weeks ago I moved Firefox to one side. Window disappeared, but Firefox was still running “somewhere” on my desktop, but was not actually be rendered to the screen. Killing the process and relaunching just resulted in it be rendered to this weird black hole. Log out of gnome and log back in? Same! Reboot? Same!
Ended up deleting it’s config folder and re-attaching to Firefox sync in order to have it working again. No idea what went wrong, nor will I ever most likely.
There really should be a hotkey for “move window to primary display” or somesuch. The worst is when just the top “cleat” of the window is inaccessible, making it impossible to simply move the window yourself.
Alternately, a CLI tool to just trash a specific app’s window settings, or a system control panel that lets you browse these settings, would be incredible.
In every GUI I’ve used, there are tiling or snapping hotkeys, something like Super + Arrow keys or something, that will usually put the window somewhere sane.
Hold down meta and you can drag the window from anywhere (on gnome at least thats a default)
I feel like i had a disappearing window like that a lifetime ago and the fix was to change the resolution. I don’t know if that uncovered the void to the right or forced the window to reassign itself to usable space. But it worked then. Hell, it could have been windows for all I recall.
Btw, QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR set to 0 breaks your Qt apps.
Yeah for some reason a single game ignores the system sound settings and goes straight to a line out. My system doesn’t see that the game is outputting sound and I can’t change it. (Arch with KDE)
Somewhat related on windows 11, for some reason teams volume will desync from system volume. I’ll put system volume to 0 and still be hearing teams. It’s the same audio device being selected. I don’t understand why it would ever work that way but here we are
Oh my god, you’ve put it into (really nice) words something I’ve felt since quite some time now. I’ve no trouble (in fact even joy) when something major is fucked up. But all this GUI shenanigans, I’ve usually no idea where to even begin. The lack of structure and hierarchy completely flummoxes me. Or maybe I just don’t have enough experience debugging userland stuff