In all my years playing around with computers, I have given up many times on many difficult things. Usually I eventually figure it out. I haven't figured this one out yet, and I just gave up.
Nothing before has ever frustrated me as much as trying to get VNC working the way I want it to work with Ubuntu.
There is no problem getting VNC control over an existing X session. Piece of piss. This is useless. I want to login using VNC. Ideally I don't even want this box to be a sit down computer with a screen and keyboard anymore.
There are instructions detailing how to do so much in Linux all over the Internet, but they're all as bad as each other. Just the fact that every tutorial writer insists on inflicting their choice of text editor on their instructions is a red flag for trouble. If I'm writing a tutorial, I will assume you know how to edit text files rather than risking confusing somebody perfectly happy with emacs by throwing in words like vim. Frankly to send the uninitiated into any Linux text editor they haven't used before and then not give them further guidance is a big "fuck you". There isn't one unpretentious Linux text editor that i've ever been shown.
The frustrating thing is not that following one route fails, but that following one route after another route after another route all leads to failure. Half the time applications don't return the responses the tutorials insist they will. Other tutorials will completely forget to mention you might need to install some other packages before starting. By the time I was testing the first aborted attempt I didn't even have an Xvnc binary of any kind present! I literally hadn't installed the actual software, and the tutorial didn't tell me to!
For some reason it's far easier to find answers on closed source software than it is to find answers on open source software. Why? Just elitism I'm quite sure. If I can't figure this out I don't deserve to be using it. Go back to Windows little boy. In 3 years of spending significant portions of time in Excel/VBA i've never once failed to find a working solution to a problem.
Don't get me wrong. I absolutely love the fact that there is so much great free (as in beer and speech) software out there, but the community surrounding it is counter intuitive for users anywhere from newbie to tech savvy. Only the top 10% can use these tutorials, and chances are they don't need them anyway.
And, to cap it all off, somebody almost always insists that the best solution to a problem is to switch to the rival. Listen arsehole! There may be a rival. It may be great. It may be much better than what i'm trying to use, but at the end of the day, the software i'm trying to use doesn't just exist and not work, and all I asked was how to get it working! I'm not looking to start over at this point!
Okay now that I've got that out of my system i'm going to give it another go. Linux sucks.
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