edit: for anyone curious, the problem was Xorg wasnt loading or something (stuck on systemd ‘graphical interface target reached’ with no graphical interface). because of a typo in a config file.
edit: for anyone curious, the problem was Xorg wasnt loading or something (stuck on systemd ‘graphical interface target reached’ with no graphical interface). because of a typo in a config file.
I am new to desktop linux. It is a pain to not know certain troubleshooting steps as I do mostly for server linux.
For example, not knowing what the gui consists of, which applications are essential and which are not.
In that case I would like to recommend you install Arch at least once. Not to actually use in production, but it made a lot of things click for me that help me with server stuff too. Just follow along with the install guide on the wiki inside of a VM.
If you really want to know what applications are essential I’d install a window manager and not just install the gnome package. Though even just installing your favourite DE will work fine.
I’ve heard other people recommend Gentoo and Linux from scratch as well for this purpose since they go even deeper, but that may be too much to start off with and I haven’t done that myself
Thank you very much for this suggestion. i will spin up a vm on virtualbox asap to check this out. :)
I feel this, especially the GUI/Desktop essential stuff, and I have been daily driving Linux on desktop for about 8 years now.
Going from Debian with Mate to Arch with AwesomeWM (minimal tiled window manager), there is a lot you actually need to know and it’s convoluted how it interacts with each other, a lot of it is thru dbus but some things go thru env variables - .xprofile, .profile, bashrc/zshrc, pam_env.
Yesterday I found out I am actually not running any gui polkit agents - I had it installed (possibly for years) but the .deskop file had OnlyShowIn=Xfce so Dex didn’t autostart it.
Sometimes I do feel like I am just making my life harder for no reason but I love the minimal UI and kb navigation.
Thank you very much for this explanation. i will try to check out some books on the matter. I feel like we (as in the community around linux) need to have a chat about helping others and not judging. :) we have a great opportunity here to gather a lot more users from windows but we wont until we manage to actually welcome and not insult them all the time.