Gizmosmith

The Year of Linux on the Desktop is “Ha, Get Fucked”

People talk about usability, and in a lot of ways, Ubuntu is pretty close. It certainly beats Windows 10, at least for me, since you’re allowed to know what has gone wrong and fix it, instead of just rebooting whenever your computer gets infested with ghosts. I do complain about Ubuntu, but it’s usually because most things are decent, so the things that are bad are particularly egregious. And, after all, I did get what I paid for.

This time, though, I’m trying to work with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, and Raspbian. It has a little setup walkthrough that clearly took a serious blow to the head at some point, since it asks you to connect to WiFi, and then if you didn’t connect to a network, still asks if you want to download software. From what, I might ask, since there’s not a network connection?

Of course, the reason I didn’t connect to the network is that it’s hidden. Not a problem, I have the SSID on paper here… and no way to tell it to the Pi. There’s a network configurator, but it only lets you deal with unhidden networks, not enter your own SSIDs. Maybe this was done because “SSID” is one of those worrying “techie” terms, and this is supposed to be for somewhat less technical users? Protip: it’s not. It ships as a bare board in an antistatic bag, for fuck’s sake. Maybe this was not done because it’s somehow hard?

At any rate, the solution appears to be: manually edit wpasupplicant.conf. Manually edit a text file that only root can edit, in this, the Year of Our Lord 2019. I don’t have a problem with this. I have a PhD in making tiny robots go and have been using Linux for 15 years, because everything else is worse for my use cases. Normal humans, who are perhaps entering college and just want to check out Linux and maybe try writing a little Scratch or Python, they are going to have a problem with this.

Also, the same startup script asked me if my screen had black bars around the edges. It did, so I said yes (more fool me!). When I rebooted, the edges of the desktop (you know, where the UI goes) were mostly off the edge of the screen. Setting the hostname with the network config tool on the toolbar caused host name resolution errors every time I use sudo, apparently because sudo wanted “ouija1” but “ouija_1” got written into /etc/hosts. That’s not actually a valid hostname (my error), but it got written into /etc/hosts (an error by whoever wrote the alleged network config tool). Again, I know what /etc/hosts is, editing it isn’t an issue. I’m weird. For most people, this is an issue.

So in general, my experience with the Raspberry Pi and Raspbian is that it’s not ready for end users who want to use it to do things. If you want it in order to do things to it, rather than with it, and are already an experienced electronics enthusiast and Linux user, you’ll be fine.