So, after EndeavourOSās GRUB comitted suicide, me being too stupid to understand chroot despite wiki ātutorialsā and the community rather trolling & gaslighting me instead of helping I decided to give Nobara a go. Usually I am a Plasma KDE guy, but thought since itās been a long time I try it out, especially since you can have it in a more classic configuration those days again, even though Iād miss out of Wallpaper Engine.
Unfortunately my experience has been nothing but awful. A bunch of random bullet points of my experience:
- I had real trouble connecting my BT headphones. At first it was āconnectedā, but not really. Tried a fresh pairing mode, but then it showed two headphones. Then it connected, but as soon as I tried to adjust the audio input / output settings it lost audio again and I had to repeat it yet again. Now it works, and I decided to never touch the audio settings ever again.
- āFilesā is constantly crashing. Using the search? Crash. Going backwards? Crash. Try to do āsomethingā? Crash. Do nothing? Probably also crash (hyperbolic).
- āFilesā data transfer for copying & deleting files is slow as hell for whatever reason (on decent Samsung SSDs mind you).
- āFilesā cannot multitask. If youāre copying, scanning, deleting or whatever, it wonāt do anything else until that process is done.
- āFilesā and other Gnome applications frequently bug out if you try too many things at once, freezing or crashing them.
- āFilesā, or even Gnome as a whole, is so incredibly scrapped for features to achieve its simplistic look, that it lacks actual functionality.
- Gnomeās settings are also missing for everything, or hidden in a gazillion different config menus, some of which I already forgot how to access again.
- Scaling scales not just the UI, but also 3D applications like games, reducing their actual resolution and making them blurry. The UI seemed to be blurry as well.
- Mullvad VPNās tray icon somehow turned into some three dots with a weird background.
- In the tray menu thereās also a VPN toggle, which shows Mullvad, but being turned off. Turning it on disables my connection and I have to reconnect through Mullvad, which turns the toggle off again. No way to remove the redundant toggle as far as I can tell, but maybe itās in some hidden settings menu that I have yet to find.
- OpenRGB in this does not work with my NZXT Hue 2 Ambient. Keeps asking for resize zones, which according to a search should not be necessary, and wasnāt necessary with the one I used in EOS either. Selecting any color just turns the LEDs off.
- Launching the Battle.net launcher through Lutris it also opens some ghost āOpenGL Rendererā application with it, taking up space on the task bar.
- Battle.net launcher canāt be maximized without constantly resetting or displaying information beneath the task bar.
- Canāt launch .sh files unless I explicitly right click & Run as program.
- Unfortunately it then launches with an additional empty terminal window, yet again taking up space on the task bar.
- Had to create a new FF profile because using my old one somehow was unusable in regards to its performance.
- The weather location for the little clock thingy apparently canāt find anything, city or country, except some locations that arenāt near me.
- Canāt remove my own review in the Software center for one of the apps that I did prematurely.
- Tray area also has this little tiling menu. I tried tiling, hated it. Couldnāt find a way to remove that icon to save space on the task bar.
- After a lot of apps started to hang I tried restarting, just to be left in a blackscreen and the PC not shutting down. Had to hard reset to restart.
- No EurKey keyboard layout. Thereās a āGerman (US)ā one thatās close but itās missing symbols.
- Maybe probably more things that I canāt recall right now.
And thatās just after a few hours of usage. I was making fun of the tiny issues in KDE before, but if I have to choose between that and this disaster then Iām probably going to switch to the KDE edition, if I cannot find solutions to all this. I really donāt understand how people can deal with it? Or am I somehow the only one?
Well the fact that you donāt understand the issue is part of it. See there are several ways disks can be partitioned and several ways a bios can go about finding kernels to boot on said disks, all of this applies to windows as well btw.
What you have is probably a mix of the two. Itās likely that one of your linux installs partitioned your disk as GPT while your your system still boots in bios legacy. The installer is now getting mixed signals, one one hand the bios is detected as legacy mode, on the other itās looking at a GPT partition table. Now technically you probably could write the bootloader just like in option 1., but if you ever change your bios to uefi mode, which is required for modern operating systems like windows you would end up with an non bootable system. And not just in a āoopsie, I need to boot a rescue disk and fix thisā-kind of way but a āwe need to nuke the entire partition table and start overā-kind of way.
So what the Suse installer is telling you is that you really should use a /boot partition if installing on a GPT partition table.
Btw if you check the correct option at install time(the one about using the entire harddrive) it should automatically create a MBR partitioned disk for you which avoids this issue as itās not a ungodly mix of 1. and 2.
This error isnāt a bug, itās a feature pointing out a serious problem with your machines setup(the one below the OS level). Yes you can probably ignore it, as other distros might or might not, but itās generally not a good idea. SuSE has a couple of these hang ups since it has an enterprise background and takes some things more serious than other distros. For example having closed ports for printers in the active on default firewall being one stellar example of this. It cause no end of issues for people struggling to setup their printers, that being said it is a security issue and opensuse decided it wasnāt going to sacrifice security of every system because some people want to use a printer.
Why is it telling ME that when I trusted the partitioning to the installer? I really donāt understand how that should be my fault for the partitioner to act faulty. And btw. thereās only two options: 1) to erase the disk if needed and 2) erase the entire disk anyway. I selected the second one because the first one didnāt even work at all, so from my perspective it should have not used any potential GPT partitions that the previous distro couldāve potentially created, but erased the entire thing and start from scratch with everything it would need, including a valid boot partition. If OpenSUSE, for some reason, requires me to wipe my drive clean BEFORE I even start the installer, then they should specify that beforehand - or provide a less antique installer that can actually do it itself.
Yeah that sounds weird. If you told it to erase the disk this issue shouldnāt have come up since creating a /boot partition should be the default anyway. Itās an interesting edge case, though probably not from the pov of a user just wanting to install the system.