cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
Audio. As much as windows has issues, it is not hard to get good latency. The same process is it less accessible to most users. A reliable gui is needed.
VST’s and their associated DRM is a blocker but not the fault of Linux. The same is true for hardware that can only be properly configured with a windows or Mac only tool. These problems need a critical mass of users, and a legal requirement to support Linux for mainstream products. (EU, I’m talking to you)
Are you using the realtime kernel?
No. This is a multi purpose pc. Gaming, audio, work, VM. On windows this is fine but not on Linux. Not sure an RT kernel is good for my use case.
Can’t say I’ve had any latency or artifacting on modern Linux… are you running Pipewire? JACK?
Using pipewire. It depends on which settings I use for the sample and bit rate. On windows I can use almost any combination, and baring a few older games, there is no stuttering or breakup. In Linux I find only specific sample and bit rates work well. The others cause stuttering and audio drops.
Also changing sample and bit rates is not straightforward. I’ve found utils that help but the only reliable way I’ve found is to edit the configs then restart the service.
I haven’t gotten my hands dirty with this stuff specifically, but maybe you need to adjust buffer sizes to properly handle the different bit rates. Do you mainly see issues with higher combinations? The sample rate * bit depth is the important number, here. If you consider the problematic ones from that perspective, is there a threshold where anything under works fine but anything above has issues that get worse depending on how far above the threshold it is?
I’m not certain, but I believe the audio buffer is handled via a callback function that gets called when the audio buffer is some % close to empty, and then the program refills the buffer, plus some other overhead. That data left in the buffer sets the deadline for refilling the buffer; miss that deadline and the audio cuts out. Meet the deadline and audio is seemless.
A too small buffer will require the callback be called more often, and then the overhead can add up to missing deadlines. Alternatively, the % when it does the callback might need to be adjusted.
Another consideration is if your DAC doesn’t support the chosen sample rate and bits per sample, then there is probably another buffer of the supported size and a conversion from one to the other (and its own callback when that buffer gets low). That said, I don’t know if it’ll even list unsupported combinations because I’m having trouble thinking of a valid use case. But it’s technically possible, so maybe it is like that.
Anyways, those are what I’d be checking to debug this. If it is a setup problem, it won’t likely ever go away on its own, unless better defaults get set for those bitrates, but the ideal values depend on your system’s performance, so if yours is on the weaker side, it might never change.
Most of what you said went a bit over my head. I have the Topping E2x2 audio interface. I did some testing of each setting combination on Windows. And it just works. I’m definitely using settings the hardware supports. Linux just doesn’t seem mature in this area.
Ok, I figured the hardware support bit would be a longshot anyways.
Whatever is going on, it is missing real-time deadlines for some reason. It could be the configuration results in too much work, or the audio work itself isn’t that bad but the priority is low enough that other less time-critical work is getting in the way.
But yeah, even if it is solvable, there should be good defaults to prevent it from happening in the first place. Annoying thing is that there might even be profiles where one would work for you, but they might be hidden deep in the terminal.
As someone with an Nvidia GPU on Wayland, unfortunately quite a few places.
Resuming from sleep requires power cycling the monitors.
Glitchy transparent artifacting down to the desktop if windows are overlapping next the task bar.
Widgets in the system tray (KDE Plasma - I have temperature readouts) disappear and reappear randomly, and sometimes switch which taskbar they live on.
VRR support is pretty bad, causing black screens when using full screen applications.
2D-heavy games are flooded with thousands of vulkan draw calls, leading to abysmal performance and massive current spikes (and therefore coil whine). This is mitigated per-game with dxvk settings - often removing the whine without improving performance.
HDR is … technically available.
Overall I’m happy, but I cannot recommend this experience to anyone I know because it would drive them insane.
I have an AMD card and resuming from sleep is still a mixed bag. Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes the monitors stay off even tho i manually power cycle them and lately, it just works.
Likewise. This is my only reoccurring issue I have had since switching, and it isn’t consistent enough to really be a problem.
I do notice that after sleep mode when things work fine I’ll get a notification my displays are detected. So I assume display detection is switched off during sleep mode, and maybe not always turning back on.
And oh god the scaling - forget the fact that running livecd or first start gives you resolution settings. Oh no. You must scale, and apply every login manually. And sometimes when you have an external display attached, the main panel will look like an old tube TV that needs a good smack. Until you assume it’s on the login screen, enter your password, and it’s fine.
I’ve had frustation with the lack of support for some HP laptops. I have a HP Dragonfly 13.5-inch G4 Notebook and I haven’t been able to get my sound to work despite finding others who have gotten it to work. None of the people who got it to work were using simple installation or sources to get the sound to work.
On a surface level, it works fine for me, i installed pop os a few months ago and i’m happy. There is a lot i haven’t really figured out yet, and i don’t know if i ever will or have to. There is an UEFI update that has been pending ever since i installed it. It says i may have to hit the power button multiple times to install it, no idea what that even means, and i don’t really want to read 2 pages of documentation to make it work. Most peripherals i have are straight up not supported on linux. They work, but i have to use windows to configure them. I tried to install a razer software for linux, but the hurdles i had to go through and the amount of: now go to this website to install this flatpak is kinda nuts, just for it not to work at the end. I still don’t really know what a flatpak is, so that doesn’t help. On one of my mice, the muddle mouse button just straight up doesn’t work on linux. Every other works, it works on windows, this just doesn’t.
The weirdest thing that sometimes happens is that i play a game and i think when i plug in my headset or mouse, something freaks out and i can still use M1 to shoot for example, but i can’t use M1 in the game menu. Or any menu at all. I can use M2 to put the PC to sleep and then it works again.
I tried to use Wine to try some windows programs to see if they work, but i don’t even know where to start, i installed them, and everything looks like it should just work (or not) but it just does nothing.
Your power button is the chunky button that powers the pc on and off. Typically you’d push and hold it for several seconds until your computer shuts off, ditto for starting again.
It probably looks like one of these and is on the front or top of your computer case near the front, odds aren’t has an LED.
It’s usually advised not to press it unless you have to, since apps like to close and save and stuff before they get shut down so the button doesn’t give your pc time or notice to do that.
Luckily in the “start menu” or whatever UI element where there are buttons for navigating the list of apps there is usually a built in button for shutting down the pc, saving the currently opened stuff to RAM and putting the pc into “sleep”, possibly a similar function called “hibernate” too. On Pop if you are using GNOME or (I think) Cosmic as your desktop, those elements aren’t the top bar in the upper right. Otherwise you should be able to simply search “shut down” in whatever search menu/launcher pops up if you hit the Alt key.
Your firmware update might ask you specifically to use the power button on the outside of your pc case, but it should prompt you on screen if that’s necessary.
I hope this helps! You probably wanna get any updates you’ve been putting off done, it could even help without mouse issue.
Can’t stream peacock to watch my motorsports. Resolved by unsubbing but I still wanna watch sometimes.
Peacock doesn’t work in the browser?
Probably not if you use Firefox.
Correctamundo. I use chrome to stream all those types of services. Waterfox for everything else. Even agent switcher doesn’t help.
I cannot for the life of me, get hibernate to work with nvidia
I can’t wake up from hibernation… the monitors don’t get signal again, so I have to restart.
I believe most people have kinda given up on hibernation :p
Linux kernel or distros?
Assuming distros, my pain point is that it is not popular. For Linux to actually take over, UI/UX for everything without a single touch of CLI (akin to Windows and Mac OS) needs to be normalised. And everything just needs to work (see LTT), be snappy/instant (looking at you file browsers, Firefox, etc.), and use established behavioural norms within Windows and Mac (looking at you middle click paste, and it not being a universal scroll) as basics. Just give any distro to any Asian population. They won’t even be able to figure out how to type their own language as if they are exiting Vim.
and use established behavioural norms within Windows and Mac
Even when they fucking suck some times?
Minor issue is the vulken shaders that load before I play a game. Most of the time it’s quick and only done after an update but some games do take a long time.
Also having issues where Wine freezes up when running applications. Sometimes for close to two minutes before responding. I haven’t looked into this one yet as it just happened recently.
Bazzite with Nvidia GPU of this matters.
Non pain point not having the system install updates during my “focus” time and bringing the system to a crawl until I let it finish.
With the advancements in wine and proton, I’ve found a lot of games do well with adding -dx11 or -dx12 in the launch options.
Maybe a ticket could be made about considering changing the default for one of those programs
My friends play the finals and arc raiders and i tried both games on linux and they worked fine. Suddenly after an update both of the games (same developer) just don’t load anymore. They work if i dorce dx11 on them, but run like shit.
Not my pain point, but my friend’s.
He recently installed linux mint to try, mainly because of the dubious quality of windows 11. After using it normally for many hours (maybe for 2 ~ 3 days), his system just froze, the audio entered a loop, and he was only able to shut the computer down pulling it from the plug.
I have no idea why this happens, this used to happen to me as well on arch, but then it just stopped (maybe some package update fixed it?).
I’ve seem people pointing to proprietary nvidia drivers causing it, but I never understood how the driver could freeze everything in the computer.
I’ve gotten such symptoms before when running out of RAM - I’m on Arch and never bothered setting anything up for that instance and I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think the system is struggling to recover memory or something before it resorts to killing processes, and would sometimes freeze for a minute like that.
That said, yeah… Kernel modules (which device drivers often are) are allowed to run at a higher level of privilege, with less oversight, more access to hardware and better performance, so if they misuse that privilege they can break things badly. And with proprietary drivers, you have no idea or control of what it’s actually doing, so you can only try to downgrade or wait and hope the company fixes it.
A device driver needs access to the system to control a device. There’s a couple ways of going about it, but GPUs are effectively required to use a kernel driver. A kernel driver runs as part of your system, and crashes have different effects from normal programs. If a normal program crashes, the system handles that, the program closes, too bad. If the kernel crashes, nothing can catch that, and your whole computer crashes.
That being said, with this little info on the crash there’s nothing anyone can do except speculate on the cause. It could be hardware, it could be the kernel. Whatever it is, you’d need more information (
journalctl -b -1after a crash and reboot) to diagnose this issue.Though important to note; if holding the power button for an extended period of time (30s) doesn’t shut down the computer, it is most likely a hardware fault.
4 seconds should be enough.
A driver can absolutely freeze the entire computer.
That said it’s not really likely to be Nvidia since so many people are using that one without issues.
Linux people just like to hate on Nvidia and blame them for every possible issue because they’re not open source.
The only actual Nvidia problem iv seen in 5 years is that monster hunter wild is broken on their newer drivers only on 5000 series cards because of nvidia’s own choices.
Which is also broken on windows. So it’s just a Nvidia problem.
Things have gotten A LOT better since I started using it, but here’s a list of things I hate after using Arch with KDE as my main OS for almost 7 years:
- Not having an archive manager as good as 7-zip was on Windows. Ark is a good replacement but it supports less formats, has less options when compressing, and most importantly if you close the archive while extracting it silently fails (reported in 2019, still not fixed)
- You can’t make an account without a password (yes, I know I can configure the sudoers file and polkit to skip password prompts, but that’s not user friendly). For the average user, having to type the password after login is incredibly annoying, I would like to have something like the UAC prompt in Windows
- Wayland: it was made mainstream waaaay too early, causing a lot of issues with both Qt and GTK applications, some of which persist to this day, especially with fractional scaling and HDR
- Developers seem to think that I enjoy using the terminal: I don’t, I hate it. Why isn’t there a GUI for pacman supports the AUR and doesn’t suck?
- Random broken commits being pushed to stable. I’m talking about “how the f did you not notice this?” kind of bugs, like how I had to rename files twice in Dolphin before it would actually rename them. It was fixed quickly but how did this get into stable in the first place?
- Flatpak having its old ass version of mesa in the runtime, causing all sorts of issues if you have a newly released GPU. I stopped using it because of this
7-zip does have a linux CLI, which works well.
The most basic command you need to use is
7zz x archive-nameto extract an archive. Building a GUI around it doesn’t seem like it would be too much trouble honestly, wonder if anyone has done that.Developers don’t think you enjoy using the terminal. It’s just the option that works with the most systems with the least explanation. They can just give you a command to copy/paste instead of a tutorial on what buttons to click, assuming you even have that.
There are GUIs for package managers. I haven’t used one, because I feel like there’s no need, but they do exist. I don’t know if they support the AUR and pacman though. That probably exists, but you’ll have to look it up.
reading all them pain points, I had to type this up. free advice, worth what you paid for it.
you know how in life you’re supposed to pick your side, your team, and stick to it? like, no tifosi is changing their allegiance because the rival got a fancier kit or a new power forward or whatever; in fact, you’ll root harder for your underdog darlings. you don’t become a nazi overnight because they’re flooding the aether or their spokes is a dead ringer for scarjo. etc.
here, you gotta do the opposite. you gotta anticipate where the major development effort goes to and go there now. you can’t cling to X11 and xfce4 and sysv init and whatever and then removed that you can’t nicely alt-tab out of games or have functioning HiDPI or you audio stack from 2006 is crapping out and such.
the largest linux hardware manufacturer at present is valve. they went with plasma, they went with wayland, they put in a lot of work to make it better, and with new steam hardware that’s likely to continue. in addition, there’s a smorgasbord of activity in that sector and that’s your best - and I contend, only - bet.
so that’s what you’ll run, and like it. I’ve ran close to everything prior to plasma and have occasional nostalgic flashbacks and miss a feature or two over here. but this is the thing with the most hands on and your best bet that someone already solved your issue or is aware of it and working on it.
Are you really complaining that community effort and team work are a bad thing…? I’m confused here, it sounds like you are. But that can’t be right.
Bluetooth headsets. Still can’t have sound and microphone at the same time, which isn’t great.
That’s a limitation of Bluetooth itself afaik, when bidirectional audio is active and the headset goes into “hands-free mode” you get a shit bitrate. Windows behaves the same, not sure about AirPods on Mac
That is true, but I think there are some newer protocols that support higher fidelity.
Also Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (for example) was shipped with pipewire instead of pulse audio which just made the handsfree profile (aka low fidelity bidirectional audio) work out of the box. Have been using it without significant problems since that release.
For me the thing that actually matters is Respondus not working on Linux. There’s no solution other than have a dedicated Windows laptop if I want to take tests for my college. Everything else has a workaround.
I’m not sure why but SDL wants to change to sdlcompat and this is a breaking change for another application I’m running and I don’t know why this package change is needed when I just keep hitting no each time and everything works as expected
This is why I think we shouldn’t recommend any (mutable) ArchLinux distro to gamers who come fresh from Windows. Including CachyOS.
Not implying you are one, IDK your experience level, but these kinds of prompts being shown to the user about packaging are a core feature of ArchLinux. This can happen anytime you update an Arch-based system.
it’s not the prompt that’s the issue, and yes I’ve seen it all the time
it’s not the prompt that’s the issue
No it’s not, it’s the underlying philosophy/expectation that you want to be aware of and in control of every single package/library that’s installed on your system.
And that is not true for the vast majority of people who are getting CachyOS as a recommendation when they search for a “Linux for gaming”.
I think CachyOS is great, and I use it myself, in spite of the ArchLinux base, but I know the pain it brings and have consciously accepted that, and I have fallback plans: I make sure it is easy to re-install my system without losing my home dir or game files. I could even pull in all the important stuff in my home dir from my dotfiles repo.
But this is something you have to want.
On the other hand, I did have to compile xpadneo from source on my wife’s Mint pc in order for her to be able to use an Xbox controller, because there is no
deborPPAof it. So far for Ubuntu-based distros being “GUI only”. On Arch, you could install it from AUR through a GUI.I use arch because in my experience noodling with debian/Ubuntu to get something to work is far more infuriating.
I have a very minimalist approach to how I install packages and typically don’t have any issues.
When I was googling around for why the electron application was no longer working I couldn’t drill it down to sdl compat because nothing hinted at sdl, it only mentioned OpenGL.
In fact I find it strange that an electron app would break over an sdl package, when others such as discord don’t.
The only real thing that’s consistently annoying for me is UI scaling on high-DPI displays. Between the DE, GTK, and QT all needing different settings that all act differently.
But I guess generally once you get it set it’s mostly fine.
