I’ve mentioned before (probably too many times) that I switched over to Linux Mint several years ago and have been largely happy with it. Far more stable and problem-free than any version of Windows that I’ve used, completely free of forced upgrades and intrusive or proprietary horseshit. There was a learning curve, certainly, especially with getting the MIDI keyboard working on it, but once the initial problems were all sorted through, it worked fine.
Up until recently. A few months back, something went wonky, and while trying to get it corrected, I lost my ‘root’ privileges (that’s the main administrator account that’s allowed to do everything.) I had to reinstall to get those back, but it’s never been the same since, and some really funky shit has been going on recently.
I just had to add this, because as I finished typing that sentence, a popup appeared to tell me about the security updates that are available. Granted, that’s as intrusive as it gets, but the ironic part is, it appears that one of those updates is what fucked up the system big time, and I have yet to determine which one. The ability to roll back the system to a previous backup was screwed by the loss of root privileges and the subsequent reinstall, so no option to find the culprit that way. But yeah, thanks for the reminder.
The biggest issue was disk management. I maintain several hard drives on this desktop, mostly for backups of the digital image and video files, and have a memory card reader for three separate cameras and the 3D printer. The drives all of a sudden refused to ‘mount’ automatically (meaning they were not found until I went into a drive management program and reassigned the properties to them) and the memory cards simply will not be found when plugged in – same issue, even though I’ve set the parameters multiple times to automatically open them as they are found – they always have to be manually mounted. even then, permissions are often changed, so I cannot make alterations at times unless logged in as root – sometimes not even then (especially true with the card for the Canon 7D, which can only be erased in-camera now.) Whatever the fuck this change was, it’s inexcusable, and no solution that I’ve found yet on any forum has worked.
And just hours ago, I discovered that something in the audio system was seriously fucked as well, since if I attempted to record audio on Audacity while video was running in KdenLive (which is how I do voiceovers for video editing, just like dozens of times in the past,) it now introduces a wicked background crackle the moment that KdenLive starts playing – despite the fact that all audio from KdenLive is muted. How’s that happening? The microphone is a high-end USB model that doesn’t even go through the sound card, so there should be no crossover – but some software doodad is allowing interference.
I’m frustrated enough over all this horseshit that I’m about to switch to a different distro than Linux Mint, but it’s going to wait until after the holidays, because I have too many projects going on to reformat the entire system over it – I have audio, video, and photo editing programs, several different music programs, and several different 3D design and prep programs, to say nothing of the daily-use stuff. Much of it will have to be reinstalled and/or reformatted with my preferences, not something I’m looking forward to. I am certainly going to use a separate SSD to install the new distro onto, to avoid erasing all of the old stuff, but that also means transferring files could be a little tedious. We’ll see one of these days, I guess.
Anyway, rant over (for now.) But goddamn, has this wasted a shitload of time that could have been better spent elsewhere, and for no determinable reason. It’s like using Windows all over again.