Since the advent of the new world of Gnome, Ubuntu and other things with Nice Shiny Buttons, I find that much of my old GNU/Linux knowledge isn't applicable anymore.
I was never really a hacker, but I knew enough to fix things when they broke. Here are a couple of things I once knew well but now am unsure of if my knowledge is still applicable:
- How to recompile the kernel without breaking the system (if I need to try out some experimental driver, for example, or make some changes in the code)
- How to mount drives and media (now it's »magically« done and I don't know how to fix it when it breaks)
- How to connect bluetooth HID-devices
- What needs to be in my xinit/xsession for the system to work properly (now »gnome-session« is an inpenetrable fortress of mystery; I want to optimize my system a bit 'cause this is an old and slow computer)
- How to configure alsa-devices
- How to configure Xinput devices
- How to make my own keyboard layouts with xkb (and, prior to that, xmodmap)
It's not that the above things can't be done the old-fashioned-way. It's possible, but I'm afraid that it »overrides« something, that it goes against the way the system »expects it to be done«.
This is my usual Ubuntu experience (it has repeated itself a couple of times now):
- Install Ubuntu
- Rejoice, almost everything works!
- Enjoy everything working for a while
- I slowly start to break things, packages get accidentally uninstalled, misconfigured and so on, and I don't know how to fix it.
Versus my old Debian/Slackware experience usually was like this:
- Install Debian
- Argh, almost nothing works! (this one has really changed for me — things work on debian nicely at once now)
- I slowly get things to work, one by one
- Things never break and if they do, I usually see immediately what's wrong.
- I enjoy a working system until I die
Don't get me wrong, I like that everything works immediately with Ubuntu. I'm not asking for a revert to the old times when things where hard for newbies, and people generally gave up. What I am asking for, though, is that would someone please point me to gentle, easy-to-understand documentation on how this brave new world of GUI works? Because things still break. And I want to be able to pop the hood open and understand the engine.
This is, of course, especially important when non-geek friends want me to help them with their installations of Ubuntu. That kind of support becomes super-frustrating when I don't even know what's wrong, when the system has degenerated into what I perceive as an opaque layer of breakage.
I'm sure The Official Gnome Guys understand how everything works, but somehow this leap came so fast and I was left behind. Please, point me to simple »welcome to the new world« documentation that's somewhere between »This is a mouse, click-click« and »This is the new DBUS-compliant HAL-friendly Zeroconf-implementation API and here's how you include it in your #GTK .cs .exe:s on your DVD MP3 rumble-pack guitar«. The former's no news to me, and while I somewhat do understand the latter I need more overview; with regards to day-to-day personal system administration rather than development. The old world had nice little HOWTOs that explained everything for a wide audience of curious geeks.
The old GNU/Linux/X/wm system was transparent. The new KDE or Gnome worlds seem opaque to me. Help welcome!