I can’t believe after so many years, Linux desktop still sucks. I have to confess that, this was one of the biggest reasons I bought a PC and installed Linux, to kill boring stay-at-home time. So, I’m complaining.
Bluetooth
In year 2020, I think it is fair for me to have both my keyboard and mouse connected via Bluetooth. How hard can that be? Hell it was hard.
The first time booting into the OS, there is no problem; however as soon as I put the computer to sleep (suspend as named by Linux) mode, and when it wakes up, it refuses to connect, as if the kernel module were unloaded.
It turns out that I am not alone, there are many articles, Q&As around this issue, and a bug report that doesn’t seem to be prioritized.
Alright, but I don’t want to use a cable. I hate cables. I hate them. Luckily I got inspiration from this thread.
As always, nothing found on the Internet about how to fix a Linux issue would just work (TM). I had to make some change to adapt my hardware (?). I have no idea why. Here is my waking up hook script:
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#!/bin/sh
case $1 in
pre)
systemctl stop bluetooth
modprobe -r btusb
;;
post)
modprobe btusb
systemctl start bluetooth
;;
esac
Give it a name, chmod +x and put it under /lib/systemd/system-sleep. And… most of time it works, or I just need to sit back and wait for half a minute to let it think. I also find that first using a software on-screen keyboard to login via GDM could make the connection restored a bit faster. I have no idea why either, as most things under Linux are magical. Well, as long as it works.
Chrome
Again, sleep and wake-up under Linux is a disaster. I think I can understand this. As a server, Linux is rock solid and a server never needs to sleep. But this is a desktop, being able to sleep or suspend is pretty reasonable I would say.
After waking up from sleep, Chrome becomes completely unusable. The display is heavily distorted and gets blacked out.
Guess what, I’m not alone either! And guess what, nothing could fix my issue!! So, I ended up creating a bookmark (pointing to chrome://restart) to start chrome after coming back from sleep.
I tried both stable and beta version, the same result. Nothing works!
WiFi
I guess that was extremely strange and creepy. After waking up from sleep (??????/??), WiFi stopped working completely. I tried everything I could think of, driver, firmware, reboot, shutdown, etc. Of course nothing worked!! At the end I picked the USB key and decided to reinstall the OS. Ironically, even after booking into installer, there was still no WiFi and the kernel module simply refused to work. I almost went on wiping out the root partition, but for some reason I thought about giving it another try. I rebooted the computer, and guess what, it came back. I was speechless. Well, as long as it works.
Mouse
Anything could go wrong will go wrong, including mouse of course.
I guess I should blame myself for buying Logitech mouse because Logitech is famous for not doing great providing Linux driver. Well I guess even if it does GNU world would blame it for not making it “free”.
I have Logitech MX Master 3. It mostly works, but the scrolling is like shxx. It goes way too fast and completely out of control and doesn’t matter via Bluetooth or unifying connector. Luckily I found Solaar that works to some extent, at least most of the time for the scrolling problem. I say most of the time because sometimes when the computer reboots or wakes up from sleep, the scrolling could go nuts again. The solution is pretty, just run Solaar with under sudo, without taking any other action. Amazing!