I creating my Meshtastic network and was having trouble setting a node with the right settings and wanted to plug in the unit into my Lenovo laptop running Fedora installed from the factory.
I click serial connection. The web app recognized the connection. Click connect. Failed. Tried different plugs and ports. Failed. Searched online and I need to do a bunch of things in terminal to get it to work properly.
Normally I would spend a few hours figuring it out. Instead…
Pulled out my 15 year old PC running win10. Plugged in, instantly worked.
I reeeeally want this to be my primary laptop, but man. I am just struggling on some basic things.
“Why is this thing coded for Windows and hostile to Linux giving me problems on Linux? Windows is better.”
Maybe you should direct your ire towards rhe shitty companies making their software stacks proprietary? And isn’t this like a one-time setup thing? You could have spun up a VM and been on your way.
After using Linux for a few years, I’ve noticed a pattern of people giving up and blaming the OS when it is invariably something trivial. I think these people should just use Windows and stop painting their own laziness as the operating system’s problem.
Windows is designed to “just work” at the cost of sucking up your data and violating your privacy and owning your computer. If the one-time set up of a meshtastic network justifies adopting all of that as your maim computer for some reason, I’m not even sure why you’re interested in Linux in the first place.
What they are talking about is an open source piece of software (Meshtastic) that’s using a well-known (if specific to Chromium) standard, WebUSB. It’s a genuine pain point, and stuff like this needs to work out of the box, no manually written udev rules required.
Ah, permissions chicanery. Had to deal with that with connecting a Switch 2 controller with a WebUSB enabler. To be fair, once you add the right udev rules (it is a bit of a pain, yes), it should work for any other devices of the same type (I think it’s any with the same USB ID so like same manufacturer and model? Don’t quote me on that though). Still, I wish Chromium (since Firefox as far as I know still doesn’t support WebUSB) could sort it out by itself (like just have an “allow” button rather than writing udev config files yourself) or at least be a bit more helpful in pointing you the right way with a helpful error message.
You do have to get used to weird edge cases like these throwing a spanner in the works, just like you have weird stuff on Windows (trying to get some older Android devices to communicate in fastboot mode in Windows makes me feel like Odysseus).
Asking around and screwing around usually gets you places though. Eventually you find something.
My PC just programmed all the units in my mesh in around 5 minutes. It would have likely taken longer trying to fix the USB connector. I should figure out how to fix this edge case so I don’t have to take my old PC out again.
I creating my Meshtastic network and was having trouble setting a node with the right settings and wanted to plug in the unit into my Lenovo laptop running Fedora installed from the factory.
I click serial connection. The web app recognized the connection. Click connect. Failed. Tried different plugs and ports. Failed. Searched online and I need to do a bunch of things in terminal to get it to work properly.
Normally I would spend a few hours figuring it out. Instead…
Pulled out my 15 year old PC running win10. Plugged in, instantly worked.
I reeeeally want this to be my primary laptop, but man. I am just struggling on some basic things.
“Why is this thing coded for Windows and hostile to Linux giving me problems on Linux? Windows is better.”
Maybe you should direct your ire towards rhe shitty companies making their software stacks proprietary? And isn’t this like a one-time setup thing? You could have spun up a VM and been on your way.
After using Linux for a few years, I’ve noticed a pattern of people giving up and blaming the OS when it is invariably something trivial. I think these people should just use Windows and stop painting their own laziness as the operating system’s problem.
Windows is designed to “just work” at the cost of sucking up your data and violating your privacy and owning your computer. If the one-time set up of a meshtastic network justifies adopting all of that as your maim computer for some reason, I’m not even sure why you’re interested in Linux in the first place.
What they are talking about is an open source piece of software (Meshtastic) that’s using a well-known (if specific to Chromium) standard, WebUSB. It’s a genuine pain point, and stuff like this needs to work out of the box, no manually written udev rules required.
it will never be your main mschine of you don’t use it as your main machine.
If it can’t do everything your main machine needs to do, it can’t possibly become your main machine.
But it CAN do it, it just needs a bit of work, be it by yourself oor by someone on the devs’ side
Counter argument. What is the goal of owning a computer in the first place? Needing to do “a bit of work” with the OS or actual work.
I don’t want to be a Linux developer. I want to do work. Sometimes I feel like I’m too much developer.
Ah, permissions chicanery. Had to deal with that with connecting a Switch 2 controller with a WebUSB enabler. To be fair, once you add the right udev rules (it is a bit of a pain, yes), it should work for any other devices of the same type (I think it’s any with the same USB ID so like same manufacturer and model? Don’t quote me on that though). Still, I wish Chromium (since Firefox as far as I know still doesn’t support WebUSB) could sort it out by itself (like just have an “allow” button rather than writing udev config files yourself) or at least be a bit more helpful in pointing you the right way with a helpful error message.
You do have to get used to weird edge cases like these throwing a spanner in the works, just like you have weird stuff on Windows (trying to get some older Android devices to communicate in fastboot mode in Windows makes me feel like Odysseus).
Asking around and screwing around usually gets you places though. Eventually you find something.
My PC just programmed all the units in my mesh in around 5 minutes. It would have likely taken longer trying to fix the USB connector. I should figure out how to fix this edge case so I don’t have to take my old PC out again.