My Worst tech decisions as a Linux user (and in general): hardware & software !

Technology and hardware and software, it's all really, really cool. But when you're a Linux user, sometimes you have to be really picky about what you choose. And personally, I have fallen into a bunch of traps over the years buying tech or starting to use software that either brought no value to my life really or didn't integrate well with my Linux workflow and ecosystem. So, I thought I would take a tour of some of the worst tech decisions I made over the years including stuff that I still use today even though it's not always great. Some of those problems will be Linux related as stuff that doesn't integrate properly when you're a Linux user. Some will not be Linux related at all. Not everything in this list will be absolutely terrible. In a lot of cases, it's just me making a bad decision for my own use case, but that gives you a nice opportunity to let me know down in the comments what are the worst tech decisions that you made so we can all avoid the same mistakes. Just like it would be a mistake to not listen to the segue to our sponsor. So, this video is

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So, the first decision I regret making is going with the iPhone. Yes, I know, you all told me back when I made that video, when I said I was leaving Android, and you were right. Now, the reason I left Android in the first place was because I could not find an Android phone that I liked the hardware, I liked using, had the specs I wanted, but also could run a de-googled Android ROM. The intersection of those did not really exist at the time, or at least I couldn't find it. At the time, I used my phone to record those videos, and I needed a really competent camera. I also did not want a phone that was over 6 in or thereabouts in terms of screen size, and I wanted a solid battery life, and compatibility with de-googled ROMs. And at the time, unless you wanted a Pixel, which I did not want cuz they have a very bad track record for hardware reliability, I just couldn't find something. So, I kept my iPhone 13 Pro for years, thinking that it was fine, but it's not, really, as a Linux user. It's not a good phone for my use case. Trying to interface the iPhone with a Linux desktop to try and sync things up doesn't really work. Now, there are issues inherent to the iPhone itself. First, the reliability of the software is not great. It regularly has issues unlocking the phone. It will stay stuck on the wallpaper that is blurred from time to time, and I have to relock it and re-unlock it. Sometimes, it forgets that my SIM card is in there, so I have to reboot it for it to be detected again. That's an issue I also had with Samsung phones in the past, so that's not specifically iOS or iPhone, I guess, but it's still there. Performance is also now randomly worse than when I got it, because planned obsolescence and software updates from Apple will do that to your phone. And the privacy and openness advantages that the EU fought to bring to iOS have not materialized yet on the iPhone. I still don't have a real version of Firefox using the Firefox engine in there. I still don't have actual open source apps on the iPhone. I still don't really have alternative app stores. Those now sort of exist, but they bring you the apps you can already get from the regular App Store, not additional open source ones. There's no like F-Droid or Aurora for your iPhone, and that's not what was promised. On top of that, everything that you try to use for background sync with, for example, your Linux desktop is worse on iOS than on Android. If you rely on KDE Connect, it works not as well on the iPhone, and it doesn't have all the same features cuz Apple is more locked down. If you use anything to sync your photos in the background, sometimes it will only do it when charging or when leaving the app open. It can't actually do real true background sync in most cases, which again is worse than on Android, which is why I will be moving back to an Android phone. I will compromise on the hardware if I have to, but I will use something that runs a de-Googled phone. I talked about it in the Patreoncast of this week to my patrons and YouTube members. You can subscribe for a low price if you want to listen to that one, but the short thing is I want to move back to an OS that is actually open source, that I can control, and that has good apps. And if the hardware has to suffer for that to happen, I will take that compromise. It's not that important to me anymore. So, leave recommendations in the comments, I guess, for good phones that run good de-Googled ROMs. And to go with an iPhone, what is best than a nice pair of AirPods? Almost anything, I would wager, cuz these are not good. I've had those things for about 2 years, and the

battery life is already tanked. Basically, they last for an hour tops when they're fully charged, and the actual charging case doesn't hold much of a charge, either. The mics also do not work properly anymore. They produce an insane amount of fizzling noises that make recording a message basically impossible. So, this is me recording using the built-in microphones of those AirPods and as you can hear, there is something really wrong with the audio on those things. Like, the sound is just dismal, really bad. It also makes talking on the phone impossible, but who does that? Like, I'm 38 years old, I'm scared of phone calls. Text me. On top of that, they regularly fail to pair properly with the iPhone or with my Linux desktop. Often, only one of those AirPods will be connected even though both are fully charged, leading to a pretty bad audio experience. They charge through lightning as well, which sucks cuz that means one extra cable for just the phone and the AirPods when everything else I own is USB-C. They sometimes fail to pause audio when taking them out as well. So, when I put them back in my ears, the video I've been listening to is finished and the battery is now depleted. And let's not forget that as wireless devices, they're ranked as one of the highest risk for EMF exposure as well. Now, that's true of most wireless earbuds anyway. Still, pretty crappy technology, really unreliable, really not solidly built. I It's not like I drop them or walk on them regularly. They're really safe in that case. I never drop them on the floor and still they don't work properly now. Again, I'm sure you'll have much better products to recommend for wireless headphones that will pair nicely with a Linux desktop's Bluetooth uh or with any Android phone that I would replace my iPhone with. Leave those suggestions down in the comments. Now, a category of product I regret spending money in is the trap of fitness trackers and smartwatches. I used to own a Galaxy Watch Active 2, I think, a

while back, which I don't own anymore. I sold it. Uh that was back when I used a Samsung phone. And then I owned a Fitbit Inspire 3. These things at first were awesome, but then I realized that they just suck time and energy away from what's important in your day-to-day life. First, notifications. They piled in on those little devices. They kept buzzing on my wrist. So, I started configuring things to remove some of them and then basically disabling notifications altogether, thus removing one major selling point of these devices. No more buzzing, but still plenty of issues. But, at least I didn't feel the urge to look at my wrist when talking to someone, which is at least in France considered extremely rude. Other problems, charging yet another device every day sucks. Now, for the Fitbit, not as much of a problem. It like it lasts for 5 days or so. But, the watch required charging every day. And charging every day is annoying. Now, I already have to worry about charging my phone, my headphones, my laptop, my tablet, my controllers. I did not want yet another thing that I had to think about. Let's not forget my wireless keyboard and mouse, which also sometimes require to be charged. Oh, and also the lights for this, my microphone, uh a bunch of stuff. Then, there's the very point of these fitness tracking devices. It's just adding another way of measuring and comparing yourself to others. You forgot to do your daily walk? Let's have a nice little reminder to tell you that you're getting fatter and you should move more. Let's have graphs comparing your performance from today to your best-ever performance, so you can feel like you're inadequate even though you did work out. Let's have some more data to input manually, like what you ate, how much you drank. And also, don't forget to breathe. Now, look, I'm joking and I totally understand why certain people would want this. Maybe it motivates them. For me personally, it removed all motivation. It just became a nagging device that nagged me all the time even if I did my hard workout, which I don't do anymore, as you might have noticed, cuz I'm one Coke away from popping a shirt button. But, at the time, I did my workouts and then it still pestered me because oh, you only walked like 4,000 steps today, you should do 10,000. I worked out for an hour and a half. I think that will be enough. Thank you very much. It's a nagging device. And for me personally, it just basically destroyed any will I had to be productive, to work out, anything. So, I sold the smartwatch and I now only use the Fitbit to wake me up in the morning, which makes those purchases bad purchases cuz I lost money on this a lot. Now, in terms of software more than technology, one purchase I regret is DaVinci Resolve. It's increasingly becoming a burden on my workflow. The application itself, the

video editor, is really good. It's stable, it works really well, it's fast, it's getting interesting updates full of AI, unfortunately, but it lets me make my videos easily. It works. But every time I need to try something new, it drags me down again. Resolve basically locked me into using an Nvidia GPU on my system, which, as you might know, comes with a few trade-offs on Linux, at the very least. It could theoretically run on AMD GPUs, but it is not reliable in the slightest. I use very few animations and plugins, and even the few ones I use don't work. Every time I apply the simplest of transitions, it crashes because on Linux, for some reason, they decided that they will only work with Nvidia GPUs. I tried the native Mesa implementation of OpenCL, I tried ROCm, I tried other implementations, nothing works. Either Resolve doesn't start or it starts, but it crashes every time you apply any effect. Also, Resolve is a pain to install on Linux. It is the worst packaged application I've ever seen. It's using a. bin file for the install and it's installing in /opt, meaning you can't install it on any immutable distro if you wanted to. For that, you need to use a box container, DaVinci Box, which also means you have another entire OS to manage to get Resolve to run, because for additional things, Resolve needs additional packages. For example, the Reactor plugin system, which is very cool, because it lets you do a lot of pre-made animations without having to build them in Fusion, that requires a very old version of curl, which you then have to find a package for for, I think, the Fedora version that DaVinci Box uses. Those packages don't exist in the repos, they're too old, so you need to find an RPM, you need to download it to the container, and install it from the container. Not difficult, but annoying. On top of that, Resolve uses their own system libraries, which should be fine, except it doesn't ship with all the system libraries that it requires. So, the ones it ships with will try to call the system libraries that you have installed on your actual system, leading to mismatched versions after every update, and thus the program not starting. So, what you can do is move the libraries that Resolve ships with elsewhere, so it now only uses the system ones. But it is not designed for that, and this causes crashes. Resolve is typically the best scenario I've ever seen for Flatpak. Ship it as a Flatpak, ship it with all the OpenCL implementations you need, all the drivers you need to use, and it will work much, much better on Linux this way. This is why I'm looking to go back to Kdenlive or another open-source video editor, because I could then use it on my big desktop with an AMD GPU, and also it will mean I have one less piece of proprietary software that I depend upon. But now that I've learned how to use Resolve, and I set everything up, moving to another editor is extremely difficult, meaning it's going to take a while before I can actually do it. Other problems with Resolve, you can't really resize the window, because it's meant to be full screen, so if you start resizing it, it's going to crash. It doesn't have a title bar by default. It supposedly supports KD's global menu, but in practice, if you use that, uh Resolve will just never go back into focus. Resolve is just bad on Linux. Not counting the fact that many people can't even get the thing to work, even with an Nvidia GPU. So, yeah, it's just becoming a burden on my workflow because it prevents me from moving to other hardware I'd want to use. It prevents me from switching distros easily cuz I know the reinstall process will be a pain. So, yeah. That's a decision I regret making. Moving to Resolve should probably have stuck to Kdenlive. Another decision I regret making is using this specific keyboard. It's a Jelly Comb, whatever. I don't even know the model. It looks cool. It types pretty much like

a laptop keyboard, which for some reason I prefer to actual solid keyboards with nice keys because I'm an idiot and I'm used to using laptops. It's wireless. It uses Bluetooth. It has three pairing settings, which you can remember, which is very useful. And the battery lasts for a long time. So, that's good. But for some reason, I went for an Apple-like layout, which is good for a French keyboard layout cuz the keys are placed in a more natural way. And also, I like the placement of the at symbol and the hashtag symbol, which are kind of annoying to type on a French layout. The problem is, by default, every single Linux distro I've used seem to think that the greater and smaller than key should be inverted with the at and hashtag key. Meaning, when you type on one, you produce the opposite of what you want. I have to have a little script saved up that fixes it uh cuz if I don't save that script, I never remember how to actually fix it. This is a problem that exists on every single Linux distro I ever tried. Second problem, the numpad setting also sucks. It regularly flips back to making me type numbers when I type the IOP or KLM keys and the numpad doesn't work. Every reboot, I sort of need to reset that, and also just pressing the clear key, which is supposed to be the numpad key, doesn't always fix the issue. It is very frustrating. So, this is one case of stupid man purchases stupid product, which I really like typing on. It is a very nice keyboard to use, and the battery is good, but the layout is dumb. Also, this Bluetooth keyboard is not detected when I reboot my computer, and when I need to input my user password, it only pairs once I'm actually logged in. So, I do have to open up the laptop, type my password on the laptop's keyboard, which will not be set to the right keyboard layout, and then I can start using the keyboard. That's apparently a KDE or SDDM issue that they want to fix with Plasma login manager, but currently still an issue. Also, this is not the same layout as my laptop. So, when I switch between the two, I have to switch the layout that I use in Plasma, which is not difficult, but I always forget to do it. So, I start typing things and realize it's not the right key. Again, stupid man buys an unoptimized thing making his life harder. So, that one is on me. But this one has nothing to do with Linux, and it's not as much crappy technology as it is me buying something I probably just didn't need. That's the Nintendo Switch.

I felt like Mario Kart nights and Mario Party nights would be fun for my nieces and nephews and for my wife and I, and they are really fun. Except these happen like three times a year. That's not a problem. There are plenty of things that are cool to play on the Nintendo Switch. Uh so, I thought it's finally time to try Breath of the Wild or Metroid Prime or Luigi's Mansion or Mario Odyssey, and that's going to be cool. And you're all going to hate me very strongly, but I don't really like these games at all. Breath of the Wild is cool, but I did not enjoy my 10 hours or so in this game. I must have done like 10 shrines, and I was already bored by the time I finished the fifth. Weapon degradation, swapping gear all the time to avoid being struck by lightning, cooking food. That's just not for me. I love the openness and the fact that you design your own map, but that's about all I like in this game, which meant I stopped playing it. Mario Odyssey is cool, but it has zero story and that's something I absolutely need in my game to keep me engaged. Luigi's Mansion was fantastic, Metroid Prime was really cool, but these games I could have played on my Steam Deck cuz yes, I have a Steam Deck already and I can emulate games on this, Switch games. So, I really did not need to spend the money on a Nintendo Switch. At least I bought it before the price hike, which is something, but that's still something that just gathers dust next to my TV and that we literally never switch on. And another purchase I also regret to this day is an iPad Mini. This one I bought a while back. I think it was the first refresh of it when they

moved away from the home button. So, the first one that had the full-screen design. I wanted it to read books, to watch videos, to work on the go, and to just relax on the couch with a really portable device. Not a full-size tablet, something smaller that I could carry around with me without being a burden. And it did all of that, except I realized it sucked at all of these tasks and also I didn't really need it. When I'm traveling or going on vacation, the screen is too small to enjoyably watch anything. So, I generally just end up taking my laptop, which I would have taken anyway cuz when I go on vacation, I still tend to work just a little bit and so I bring my laptop for that. And for reading books, the screen is too bright. So, at night when my wife is sleeping, even at the lowest setting and in dark mode, it's still too bright. It wakes her up and it blasts my eyes with too much light. In the sun though, it is illegible unless you crank the brightness all the way up, meaning the battery will last for like 2 hours, which is not enough for when I'm sitting at a terrace drinking a coffee. 2 hours is too little unless I thought of charging it before, which I'd never do. And also, it's way too expensive to be taken with me at the beach, for example, cuz all that sand will absolutely destroy the screen. It already started doing so. So, I went back to paper books, which have the added benefit of smelling nice and feeling much nicer to hold and read anyway. For watching stuff on the couch, well, I never do it on the iPad cuz my couch faces my TV, so I just watch stuff on my TV, which is way bigger and has better image quality. And to finish on this device, it has that wobbly screen effect when you scroll that makes everything feel very cheap. And the performance of that device also isn't that good. So, the end result is probably that I just did not need a tablet. I purchased a device to try and create a use case instead of having the use case that needed the device. This is something I think a lot of us fall into. We see a cool new piece of gear. We think, "Oh, that will be cool. I could start doing this. " But you didn't do it before, so you don't need the product to start doing it. And generally, you just don't start doing it anyway. That was the thing for me for that iPad. And now I only use it to read comments during the live streams we make on my French Warhammer channel, which is not a great use of that sum of money. Also, it runs iOS, which has all the same problems as the iPhone does for background sync and integration with Linux. It's just not really suited for that. I don't really need to sync the tablet with my desktop, but every time I want to transfer something, it's annoying. So, as you can see, most of that stuff is stupid dude fell for the hype or bought something without taking the time to see if it could work or not. I think currently my worst regrets that is actually Linux

related, those are Resolve and the iPhone. Resolve is a great program, but it their Linux support is just really, really bad. They only officially support a few very old distros, so it's on me for trying to bypass that, but this made switching hardware or GPUs a real nightmare. And for the iPhone, it works, but it's just not up to snuff in terms of interoperability with Linux. Just because you have access to stuff that works with Linux, like using Nextcloud, using some background sync that doesn't work in the background, using KDE Connect, just because you have all of this doesn't mean they work as well as you want them to. Those are basically the sub-par versions of what you get on Android, which means it just was a bad decision. So now you can all call me an idiot for spending plenty of money into hardware or software that just was unfit for purpose or came with a lot of baggage. And if you're feeling a little bit more charitable, you can let me know down in the comments what are your worst tech decisions that you made, either in terms of compatibility with Linux or just in general, just like I did in this video. Don't let me humiliate myself alone, please. Anyway, approaches I don't regret is the laptop I used from our sponsor, Tuxedo Computers. Tuxedo makes hardware that sells with Linux pre-installed. The selling point is actually that all the hardware is extremely compatible with Linux, so you know that if you slap a Linux distro on it, it's just going to run. They actually contribute drivers to the Linux kernel to make sure that as many things as are supported. And of course, they also have repos if you want to add additional support for the little light bars or changing the color of the keyboard backlight and that kind of stuff. They have a big range of computers that should cover every price point or every need, and I only use their devices nowadays. Everything that you see from me is made on one of their laptops, that the laptop I was talking about in the video, and also I only game on one of their desktops, which I would love to move to if DaVinci Resolve ran properly on AMD GPUs. Anyway, the link to Tuxedo Computers is, as usual, down in the description. They're really good, check them out. So, this will conclude this video. Let me know what you thought about it in the comments. Do click all the YouTube buttons to tell me how you felt about it. Do subscribe to the channel if you feel it's worth it. And you also have plenty of links to support the show in a more direct manner down in the description. Thank you all for listening and all watching, and I guess you'll see me in the next one. Bye.