I’m a proud and happy Linux desktop user and rarely have significant issues like the one described here. I attribute that to using a “boring” distro (latest Ubuntu LTS’s only), and “boring” hardware (a Dell XPS 13 which is known to have good Ubuntu support). I just don’t have the spare hours to throw at getting basic system functionality to work, so I make software/hardware choices accordingly.
Occasionally I will have a Linux Evening, and I attribute it to the fact that I didn’t pay for my OS and can therefore only expect so much. After all, you only get what you pay for.
That being said, I will never leave Linux because using an open source operating system is completely worth the occasional hassles it brings me.
I have also a XPS13, it is quite good, and I never shutdown/reboot it. Only let it in sleep mode when needed. For months.
There is still a recurring issue that I was encountering, that is similar to the one reported by Fabien Sanglard. It is with the small usb-c to usb-3 thunderbolt accessory. It is working perfectly, and suddenly, after months, it will not work anymore with anyhting plugged to it, without reason.
In that case, in the syslog I can also see that the "memory space" is exhausting, with something "BAR" and it looks like that it is not able to allocate ports anymore.
Before, in such a case, I was forced to reboot and that was a lot of frustration for me, to lose all my contexts. And most often at the wrong time when you are in a hurry.
But, recently,in a Linux Evening, I found a command that "magically" resolve my issue when it is happening, without having to reboot:
for i in /sys/bus/pci/drivers/[uoex]hci_hcd/*:*; do [ -e "$i" ] || continue; echo "${i##*/}" > "${i%/*}/unbind"; echo "${i##*/}" > "${i%/*}/bind"; done
This will deinit/deallocate all the usb internal hubs (usb2/usb3/...) freeing the ports that were allocated (leaked?) for them. And then reset them. Then everything is working correctly again.
Even if it is not great to have this issue, this is the case when I like Linux, when there is always a way to fix your issues without having to reboot.
Occasionally I will have a Linux Evening, and I attribute it to the fact that I didn’t pay for my OS and can therefore only expect so much. After all, you only get what you pay for.
That being said, I will never leave Linux because using an open source operating system is completely worth the occasional hassles it brings me.