aarmenaa's Journal: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

So I'm amusing myself with desktop Linux distros again. So far I've only got Ubuntu and OpenSUSE installed in virtual machines, but I'm already getting that familiar sinking feeling. Both installed fine, they always have - Ubuntu's installer on their live CD is something to behold and I think just about anyone could muddle their way through that one with very minimal knowledge. OpenSUSE's installer is competent and downright easy for me, but has some oddly technical questions I wouldn't expect in a desktop oriented install (partitioning is far less user friendly in the OpenSUSE installer).

Post install the first thing I wanted to do was make sure that I was fully up to date, because I know the CD images get old quickly. Ubuntu did this flawlessly, though it's autoupdater started popping up those balloon notifications telling me I need to update...while I was updating. OpenSUSE started out fine, installed some updates, said it needed to restart, and then found more updates. And then things broke. Attempting to get any further updates failed with a cryptic error message:

kdesu(17907)/kdesu (kdelibs)
KDESu::KDEsuClient::command:
[/usr/src/packages/BUILD/kdelibs-4.0.4/kdesu/client.cpp : 196 ] no reply from daemon

An install less than 10 minutes old, throwing up messages like that? I was really hoping we were past this sort of thing by now. I don't know what caused it - I think the previous round of updates did include one for the package manager, but I'm not sure. It doesn't really matter. Even if that was the issue, it's inexcusable. The fix was simple, at least. You run the package manager on the command line to get your system fully up to date, then everything will (supposedly) work fine from then on. It's apparently a common problem, with plenty of bugs filed against it and lots of forum posts, many of which date back months.

This seems to happen pretty often with package managers. They update themselves, or something vaguely related, and then they're temporarily lobotomized until someone finds a fix for the self-inflicted retardation. It's these sort of details that start to add up after a while: applets that randomly stop working, won't respond to privilege elevation, crash randomly, and so on. They don't really do a whole lot - generally only one thing apiece, but they do important things: they change resolution, connect you to access points, change your UI appearance, set keyboard layouts, and so on. But the minute you need one it becomes extremely inconvenient for it to not work. And in the case of things like updaters, it's not just inconvenient - I'd consider that a serious security and stability issue.

I'll be trying some installs out on a real spare hard disk I have laying around sometime soon - I'm still poking around for more desktop-ish distros to trail in a VM first.