I hear this is a good community, and I am definitely very pleased with seeing how well-put-together this distro seems to be, so I’m grateful to the people behind the project. However, I am personally very frustrated with the installer and will not attempt installing this distro or any Linux distro ever again (unless circumstances really force me to).
Background: computer scientist with some Linux experience (once managed to dual-boot Arch and Windows 7).
Reasoning: either the installer doesn’t work with my specific hardware or the Budgie version of the distro is broken. I have 2 separate drives and originally wanted to put root on one of them and home - on the other, encrypted. Partitioning, installation and so on went almost without a hitch, but I couldn’t even log into the resulting system. The home partition would seem to get decrypted correctly, but wouldn’t get picked up. No error messages that I could see. Just login manager → black screen → login manager. I didn’t even get to trying to set it up to work with the TPM chip.
Okay, I thought, maybe, encryption was the problem, and I shouldn’t go over my head during the first install. So I wiped both disks clean and installed the same setup but without encrypting home. This time I was able to get past the login screen, but the DE would just crash with some kind of an “oops, things aren’t working, sorry” and then the window for the after-install welcome manager would pop up.
Now, in my opinion, this is an unnecessary level of time-wasting and frustration for what should have been a clean-cut install. Installing without dual-booting and encryption should work from scratch and not leave the user with cryptic or non-existent error messages that they cannot debug. Maybe GUIs just aren’t my thing, but seriously, installing Arch via CLI to dual-boot with Windows was so much easier. And here I couldn’t even get to a working system, where I really needed to test the RGB keyboard, fan profiles and so on before fully committing to it. So right now I’m downloading a Windows ISO and will install that, as disabling telemetry and bloat under Windows seems easier than installing a barebone Linux these days, it seems. Which is super disappointing :-/
Sad to hear you had a bad experience!
And no, that’s not what users will get after a fresh installation by default. In general, the installer is working pretty stable for all provided Desktops, including Budgie.
Hard to tell what went wrong for you, without getting the installer logs to check the details.
Could be done something wrong in the manual partition part with mount points per example.
Or as you said, something related to the used hardware.
But even with all the endless testing we do before releasing any ISO there will always be things we can not test, or we do not know about.
In case you are willing to provide more info, I would be more than happy to research the issue.
Did you try and install another DE? And maybe with all partitions on the same drive?
Maybe it could eliminate some of the probables causes, idk. Throwing linux as a whole out of the windows (ahah) seems very extreme to me.
(And why not installing arch from the cli if that’s your thing?)
The install and boots are logged, you might want to look at them maybe.
I’ve installed endeavourOS with many versions of the calamares installer on various machines, from old to brand new ones, from crapy eepc laptop to bleding edge desktop and never experience such pain, i’m sorry for you.
I would totally try another DE or even other linux before going back to windows (if ever…)
I’m sure people here will be glad to help you if you wanna go the eOS way!
It’s not you. Many GNOME packages got updated just recently. mutter is the display manager for GNOME but is used by Budgie as well. It may be that Budgie needs to make a move to adapt to this new package.
It would’ve been more correct of me to provide specific details if I knew how. Sadly, I am somewhat limited by the live USB environment (and I’ve actually just lost the Windows ISO because of it, so I’m kind of stuck with a brick right now; I guess I will have to try installing KDE or Gnome and go from there). What kind of information would help and how could I obtain it?
If you have still your installation, you could try this:
From the login screen, press Ctrl-alt-F2 to get to tty, log in, if you have internet connection then sudo downgrade mutter and choose the next latest version from the list.
Thank you! I will try downgrading, as re-installing didn’t work (not the first time it didn’t, by the way, throughout today). Here’s the installation log if it helps. Very sad to be dealing with this, as installing an OS is nowhere near in terms of complexity to the quality-of-life configurations I require for my work Update: it helped. However, my Logitech mouse didn’t get picked up, and my touchpad is dead (and wouldn’t have been picked up anyway, most likely), so the DE was still unusable…
just did budgie install home encrypted on second drive could be you had the issue that you was not getting the passphrase prompt looking nicely or the kernel log was disturbing it as of the budgie mutter issue. For me it was starting budgie but totally screwed indeed..
this is how passphrase prompt could look like if journal spams it.. not easy to see that you have to insert it there..
i fixed install with this on my test:
Just did an install and add this: pacman -U --noconfirm https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/m/mutter/mutter-47rc-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
to user_commands.bash file in liveusers home:
Encryption didn’t work for me the first time, so I didn’t risk it. I also don’t really know how to set it up with TPM, and I haven’t booted into the system yet, as it is quite late before a working week, and I’m already exhausted.
I’m not very happy that I had to go with KDE, which has a lot of bloat and telemetry, but I find it more appealing visually and more stable than most other DEs…
Okay understand, log does look totally fine should work as it is, but encryption will work just fine too, in case you only encrypt /home it does ask late in the boot process to unlock the container the password prompt is in side the boot after inserting password it will proceed to load the Login manager for the Desktop.
If you do not want KDE i would suggest redoing the install when you have time check here in case to see if Budgie will work again if thats your Desktop of choice. I am sure the issue will get resolved over the next days.
Your Hardware should not cause any issue from what i see.
For now, thanks to not fully gave up, and stay you are already there!
