Unordered list of things I don't understand about my computer

what.md

What?

I'm using Linux, Arch Linux to be exact. This may have been a bad decision considering how bad am I at computers, but there is no turning back I believe. I can't use windows, for me it's like holy water to a demon or sunlight to a vampire. And for macOS I don't have money.

But, since I'm pretty terrible at computers I don't understand a lot of things. Some things just seem broken, but I have no way of fixing them or even understanding what is happening. This file contains an unordered list of such things. I write this down so I can later refer and say "look! I'm terrible at computers and mine is kind of broken!".

wifi

To connect to wifi I use wifi-menu and there are several problems with this:

1. It requires privileges, ie I use sudo wifi-menu. This isn't usually a problem, but it's annoying and unnecessary.
2. It doesn't work. Or, for it to work I need to turn off the interface?... If I don't run sudo ip link set dev wlan0 down once before sudo wifi-menu, then connecting to wifi fails. But if I run sudo ip link set dev wlan0 down after sudo wifi-menu then subsequent sudo wifi-menu doesn't work either and I need to run sudo ip link set dev wlan0 up... And sometimes it just doesn't work whatever I do and I need to reboot.

bluetooth (headphones)

I have bluetooth headphones (Sony WH-1000XM3) and I use them a lot. But I also use them a lot with my phone. So I end up switching a lot between connecting headphones to my laptop and phone.

To connect headphones to my laptop I use bluetoothctl, again there are several problems with this:

1. It requires privileges, ie I use sudo bluetoothctl. This isn't usually a problem, but it's annoying and unnecessary. Turns out I'm dumb and it doesn't require privileges.

2. It doesn't work. At least not from the first try. So, I use connect AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA (with an actual address). bluetoothctl says it's connected, but headphones don't play the "connected or whatever" sound and headphones are not visible as an output device.

   To actually connect headphones I need to use connect AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA second time (sometimes even third). And only then it works.

   Another series of commands that seems to mostly work is

   scan on
   disconnect AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA
   connect AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA
   
   

   I have no idea why.

3. Btw I use bluetoothctl in the first place because the KDE bluetooth thing doesn't allow connecting to my headphones 🤷 As with bluetoothctl it says it's connected, but it isn't really connected...

telegram xdg-open

I use Telegram as my main messanger. And every update it's xdg-open brakes. Instead of opening telegram KDE just shows an error popup.

To fix this, I need to delete some .desktop file:

; rm ~/.local/share/applications/userapp-Telegram\\ Desktop-AAAAAA.desktop

Where AAAAAA changes every update (last time it was IIDZB1).

Ethernet

My laptop doesn't have an ethernet port, so I use usb-c<->usb-a+ethernet adaptor. It works fine... until I make the laptop sleep and then wakeup it again. Then it doesn't work. The "magical command to fix it" is sudo ip link set dev enp0s20f0u1u3 down && sudo ip link set dev enp0s20f0u1u3 up, as always, I don't understand why is this happening.

P.S.

I'll extend this list when I'll remember other things.