You could then theoretically just use something as Void Linux with GlibC, or Gentoo with GlibC, or something like that. Even a minimal Arch Linux image.

CKAN (mod manager for kerbal space program) created a multi month long battle for me because it started making copies of the original game for mod installs with symlinks to the original game files rather than just copying it outright, this made it impossible to boot certain mods because part of their first time set up was overriding files. Eventually I realized what the problem was and just manually copied the files in to the folder before loading up the mods for the first time.

WHICH IS INFURIATING! The whole reason I made new game installs was so that shit could be overwritten without breaking the base instal! WHY THEY HELL WOULD IT DEFAULT TO SYMLINKS FOR THAT?

What in ln - s good name are you suggesting.
Any and all uses of ln - s /usr/lib/something.so.7 /usr/lib/something.so.6 is merely accidental!

Nothing theoretical about this, I've just stopped making images with alpine, 200MB of storage won't change anything (can be optimized really) and a lot less weird problems.

It will change everything if you don't have a big (in capacity, not in physical size, lol) disk. Even worse with the current crisis on hardware prices.

If it does reconfigure successfully, it just gives a blank screen, or takes me to the terminal login prompt instead of a GUI login prompt.

I tried other things and it fails after hours of downloading packages and building. Does it seem right to you? What do you think I might be missing?

I haven't tried to be honest, since it defeats the entire purpose of fucking around with Guix. I made a few posts on this, but I just fuck around with VMs when I haven't done a "technical" activity to avoid feeling like a useless jackass, and one of the distros I wanted to learn about is Guix.

If I want to run guix install lxqt I can. But why would I want to use Guix to have a user with a certain desktop environment? I want to be able to set up machines at the drop of a hat that are all the same all the time, and I want the machine to be all the same, not the user.

For anyone else reading, I stupidly deleted my comment where I asked more-or-less the following (sorry):

This might be a stupid question, as I am unfamiliar with GUIX/Nix and am unlikely to be able to help, but what happens when you try to run LXQt from the CLI?

Reminds me of when I abused LD_LIBRARY_PATH and installed a Linux from scratch distro on a headless test server that no one was using. I got it all the way to x11 forwarding a full i3 environment without super user privileges.

Not really, per gigabyte price is still very low for both ssds and hdds, and container images are layered, so if you make the containerfiles correctly additional size is minimal and comes to depencies and application itself.

Say this to, i.e., any Latin American, or Indian, or Southeast-Asian person, and they'll kill you lmao.

Actually, I'm Venezuelan, so I'm Latin American; so, sorry, loads his imaginary gun, it's nothing personal, just life's law... Pew pew!

As a lay-person, reading these memes and comments, and understanding nothing, is probably the biggest factor that's made me decide that, while I hate windows, I'll never feel comfortable using Linux. I mean, seriously, how much of the time are you frustratingly troubleshooting stuff? I just want something like Windows that won't shove ads and ai bullshit at me and won't brick my laptop after updates 😭

Well from a glance the config looks fine. I looked at the documentation but there's not a lot of information on what the lxqt service actually includes. My first guess as to why it drops you to a tty is that perhaps it doesn't include a display manager.

Edit: actually nevermind, you're appending to %desktop-services and i'm pretty sure that includes gdm. Maybe the problem lies in gdm trying to use wayland by default. There's an option to change that, i'll see if i can find it.

Fedora, I think?

We don't, blame Oracle it's their fault

How does Gentoo deal with this? Just curious, I'm looking to try it this weekend

thanks so much. The documentation that I've glanced just makes it seem so easy, "just replace X with Y and nothing more!"

Apparently sometimes you have to remove symlinks to make programs load.
I had a very weird bug that made a library fail to load even if the symlink was good.
I wrote a bug report to bugs.debian.org and they told me to remove the symlink. That fixed it, wtf

If it makes you feel any better, everytime I had to do this was because I was going out of my way to fix a linux game I compiled myself or some service I hacked together. I'm 99% sure you can have a hassle-free linux desktop experience if you follow the standard way your distro suggests of doing things. Have you tried testing the waters with a linux live usb stick yet?

I'm not sure if this will work, but what you can try is replacing the %desktop-services with this:

(modify-services %desktop-services
  (gdm-service-type config =>
                                   (gdm-configuration
                                     (inherit config)
                                     (wayland? #f))))

I'm not sure if wayland is actually the problem though, especially if gdm was working fine before you swapped to lxqt. Another thing i'm thinking of is maybe lxqt isn't properly exposing a session file to gdm, and perhaps gdm crashes because it doesn't find any sessions to start. I think i've seen other people adding this session file manually but i would have to look up how it's done. The thing is i don't use a DE myself, and i'm using greetd+gtkgreet as a display manager and it just launches me into a tty, and then my bash_profile has a snippet that checks which tty i'm and whether it's empty, and if it is it launches my wayland compositor of choice.

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I move my arm this way.

Doctor: Well, don't move your arm that way then.

Haha me neither... i have been daily driving linux 7 years now

well, for one, Gentoo builds it's packages from source when you install them, so you don't need a binary that targets your specific version of libraries because it was built with those library versions from that point in time. like with other distros, you have to choose the el9, el10, fc44, fc45 version or the one for "noble", "forky", "bookworm" or "trixie". on Gentoo, the application you install get's linked to the library version you have installed. (simplified)

for the second part, the "conflict with each other", Gentoo doesn't do it like NIX, where you have those unique paths like "/nix/store/ggl4fqsvvlyf1y3rl6mk72nf0dc8c8hr-system-path/bin/bash". but some packages (but not all) have "slots" that you can install in parallel. (e.g. rust, python, gentoo-kernel, wine, lua, ...)

usually the actual binary of those packages is named like the version, e.g. /usr/bin/python3.14 and /usr/bin/python (which is the thing that actually gets used via PATH) is a symlink that you can switch with Gentoo tooling (eselect).
another way it is done is: packages you install come preset with what dependency version they like to use and that version gets installed along the already installed version, if necessary. (e.g. they set RUST_MIN_VER="1.98.0" or PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_12")

when a dependency gets updated, sometimes the application also needs to get rebuilt to that updated library version. it happens automatically on dist-upgrade (@world update)

I'll give it a go at some point and get back to you in this thread and share what happened. Thanks for this advice anyway.

I use Linux Mint since last June and I rarely have to troubleshoot my PC and when I have to, it's obviously my fault for messing around.

Oh I haven't tried anything yet. I'm too scared I'll fuck it up 😅 Anything that has me loading boot screen and entering commands has me thinking I'll just absent mindedly type "delete system/32" somehow

thank you, that makes sense. have you used nix/nixOS before? I am currently using it and considering to switch (maybe to gentoo ^^)

Let's just say that Linux invites tinkering, and there are consequences. If you install a mainstream (fedora), reliable (fedora) distro, and just do normal stuff, it's unlikely you'll encounter more issues than Windows. Or even a tenth of the issues.

For me, the difference between Windows and Linux is that when I encounter a weird issue on Windows, I might decide to give up, while on Linux, I can always dig deeper if I have enough time

I think they meant creating the symlink in a local directory and using LD_PRELOAD

To flip that on it's head, if you do have computer issues, would you rather get help from someone who laughs at these silly memes or a huge ai powered bureaucracy that prioritises upselling and closing tickets?

I have a pair of old-ish but expensive Sony bluetooth over-the-ear headphones. On Windows, their microphone doesn't work. I've searched the web and apparently, that's just it, nothing I can do.

It is most commonly used to get an older archived program to load a newer library without recompiling the older program, so none of those objections apply, or are serious, because a dangling symlink (when the os moves to a newer library version) just keeps the one program from loading, reproducing (in a way) the error the symlink was introduced to fix.

The user can typically fix the same exact problem in that case. Honestly, those objections read like that meme, "No, not that way!"

I only tried nixOS once in a VM, so I probably know next to nothing about it and I am very happy with Gentoo which I run everywhere (desktops, laptop, VMs, NAS)

Fedora without codecs? That's the reason I don't suggest it to normal users.

I have been using Linux for 15 years and have never had to do this. As long as you choose a mature, stable distro (not arch or the newest fad) you will have a much easier time.

thanks for trying. I did that, I get to the login, and then I get a mouse and a black screen after the login still. I basically did (more or less):

  (services
   (append (list (service xfce-desktop-service-type)

                 ;; To configure OpenSSH, pass an 'openssh-configuration'
                 ;; record as a second argument to 'service' below.
                 (service openssh-service-type)
                 (set-xorg-configuration
                  (xorg-configuration (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout))))

           ;; This is the default list of services we
           ;; are appending to.
           %desktop-services))

  (services
   (append (list (service lxqt-desktop-service-type)

                 ;; To configure OpenSSH, pass an 'openssh-configuration'
                 ;; record as a second argument to 'service' below.
                 (service openssh-service-type)
                 (set-xorg-configuration
                  (xorg-configuration (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout))))

           ;; This is the default list of services we
           ;; are appending to.
           (modify-services %desktop-services
                        (gdm-service-type config =>
                                   (gdm-configuration
                                     (inherit config)
                                     (wayland? #f)
                                     )
                          )
              )

))

Yeah, venvs are the answer to “why is that folder 8gb?”

Containers are the answer to “why is my hard drive completely full”

They are both the answer to "why is my project not working here where it's working there" and "why do I need 17 copies of libc in their own little soft jails?"

Oh no, they have to run sudo dnf group install multimedia once in the terminal!

And add RPM Fusion. Which could give errors when updating to a new major release.

Never happened to me, I think I must have updated 6-8 years of releases with zero issues, even moved the SSD to a new laptop with no problems

Hmm, that does look correct and if it reconfigured without errors it's probably alright. Another thing you could try is run ls /var/log and see if there's an entry for gdm. If there is you could cat the log file and see what it says

It looks like there are some device failures and it's missing (EE) Failed to load module "qxl" (module does not exist, 0)

Full log : https://pastebin.com/9YDiEpiN

once again thanks for your time and efforts. I appreciate your help.

It happens if you update too early and the fusion repo isn't on par. But still stuff to troubleshoot for no reason, so no good for new users.

Linux Mint is still the distro I suggest which provides a check to enable codecs when installing, even if I'm a Fedora user.

what's the most mature, stable distro there is? One wherein I can stream and download torrents?

Hmm, i don't know if the qxl error is the cause of this, but i'm pretty sure that's related to the video settings for your VM. Maybe you could try one of the other options like virtio to see if that works?

will try, thanks again for the suggestion.

Derivatives are too risky