You know. It’s interesting. I’ve been trying out Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. It actually has been a joy and feels like what Windows 11 should have grown into, had Microsoft actually been designing software with the customer in mind.
…but then there have been times where things so easily critically break until you fix them. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll go mess with kernel code if I have to, so I’m comfortable, but… I just want my computer to work. Windows, for all its shittiness, still keeps working through it like a slow cargo train pushing through a park piled in millions of pancakes.
I had one event the other day where I was installing a Snap app for the first time. Decided rather than installing the Snap package manager because I wanted to avoid Canonical if possible, I’d just manually put it in /opt. Figured out how to edit the KDE “start” menu to add the app using the included GUI tool. Wanted to use the app’s icon. The snap app had an icon embedded in it that Dolphin file manager recognized and displayed.
So I went, “ok, sometimes applications can parse out images from binary files. I’ve seen this work for decades,” so I tell the menu editor to ingest the snap binary for the icon, to see if it will scrape the icon. No icon showed up, so I found a a svg online and assigned that to the icon.
Then I went and saved and launched another application.
GUI slowly started not working and eventually the entire OS locked, even the alt text consoles would not load. Ctrl+alt+backspace was dead, caps lock died, which was when I knew, “he’s dead, Jim.”
Tried rebooting, tried launching that program again, (bearing in mind, not the program I manually added to the “start” menu) and every time the whole OS freezes up. Tried launching apps in different order, launching from command line, etc. When the one app launched that wasn’t the one I created a launcher icon for, same thing. Freeze. (It is possible that the bug is in fact time-based or boot-sequence-based, and since I was trying to reproduce the bug rapidly, the other app had nothing to do with it.)
I go remove the start menu link, hoping that, what I assumed was part of Plasma was trying to load this binary as an icon even though it should have checked the file, recognized it as “no I can’t parse this,” and done nothing or displayed an error or parsed it and showed the icon. Especially after I assigned it another image. I just hoped whatever screwed up would be connected to the code executing that app launcher icon config, and deleting the config for that application would delete whatever mess that was created, and hopefully was created discretely.
Shit you not, the computer became rock solid stable again after that and one more reboot. Hasn’t glitched since.
It’s shit like that that makes me proooobably give up on this experiment and end up on a commercial OS like MacOS again despite the cost and downward trend they are also suffering in a lack of innovative energy.