rintintone's comments

Haha, I'm pretty sure I did. Wayland just seems to have invented new and wonderful ways for applications to crash the entire windowing system. As if Xorg weren't good enough at that already. Most of the rest of my problems are with the quality of software packaging. Sigh.

I had to fix three different things. When using the official package. Cgroups were broken (as you note); networking was broken so containers couldn't find each other (firewall on default settings broke it and the package didn't bother to un-break it on install—fix non-obvious if you're not deep into modern Linux firewalling); and I had to add flags to various container launches to get around selinux so they could once again see mounted host directories (again, not obvious selinux was at fault, and given the uid weirdness of Docker generally it could have been a bunch of things). Of course googling each of these led to a mix of solutions that did nothing, ones that just turned off all security, and, if one dug enough, the actual solutions, not well-marked as such.

In short, it was the quintessential "Linux UX".

Haven't liked Ubuntu since like... one of the 8 or 9 releases. Whenever the Pulseaudio switch happened and the distro stopped "Just Working". They've just gotten weirder and farther from what I want since then (yes I know all major distros use PulseAudio now—that's besides the point).

I default to Debian on the server but I just want a good base to run modern software development desktop software on. IDEs, docker, browsers, the occasional VM or image editor. That sort of thing. It's a hell of a gaming machine so being able to do some of that's a big bonus—waste of all this power when off the clock if I can't fire up games on it.

I'm most comfortable in Arch or Gentoo or Void or something along those lines, but that comfort's just because I'd rather be making something simple work than fixing something complex that's broken—either way it's fundamentally a waste of time, neither productive nor fun, and I'd prefer to avoid it these days.

The Suse suggestion in this thread's interesting. Kinda forgot it existed—haven't used it since 2004 or something. Might try that.

I really just want a distro that gives me a non-broken desktop on fairly boring, non-exotic hardware. I haven't really felt like I got that out of Linux in 20 years of trying off an on (more on than off) but it's 2020, right? Some of these companies make money from what they do. One of them must actually work. Win10's one of only three Windows I've hated and Apple's back on the "3x" side of its "1.5x-3x" markup range it swings between so I just want... peace, really.

How much more polished is CentOS than Fedora, in practice?

I'm about 8 hours into a new Fedora 32 workstation and I dunno if I can take much more of it. Wayland's super crashy (yes I'm on AMD, not Nvidia) as in the whole thing crashing, not just individual apps; some fairly fundamental official packages don't work out of the box (Docker—how do you screw that up so bad that it's simpler to get working on macOS?); and there's lots of general irritation (missing i686 libs for my off-hours gaming—how's there not just a metapackage to install those?)

Would CentOS save me? Or am I doomed to end up on spits Win10 and doing my real work in light, disposable Linux VMs?

I definitely feel vindicated in my long-standing feeling that every server-side software deployment story I've seen since that of my early Perl and PHP work has been way, way worse than those were. The best anything else has managed is "almost as simple to use and and reliable, but much more complex".

That’s easy: manage Jira (or whatever) for you so you have one less complex tool & workflow to know how to use.

If you end up having to apply for a normal job this just means you're positioned for "product manager" or something like that, rather than software developer. Most places, that's better, especially so far as long-term career goes. In terms both of pay and social standing. Congrats.