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.
For me it’s the fact that there’s no “perfect setup” for anything. This likely only applies to my specific machine (kids, don’t buy an asus rog strix, trust me) but I can never get the “ok this setup is perfect, everything works exactly how I like it, I can’t complain”
What I mean by this is for example KDE Plasma 6. All my apps and everything work on it. games work flawlessly, all my dev tools, great. so I should be happy right? no. workspaces suck on multi-monitor setups, no native auto tiling and the third party script that does it is kinda wonky. Ok fair enough lets use something else like say Niri or Sway or Hyprland whatever. cool I got my tiling, I have my vim nav, awesome right? no certain games don’t work with these WMs as they all have issues with mouse constraints on certain xwayland stuff that KDE has managed to solve.
OK fair enough lets try an x11 WM. nope can’t do it on my laptop as I have both an integrated AMD gpu and and discrete Nivida gpu therefore x11 can’t handle it as far as gaming goes.
There’s a few other things like that. Like I want to use something that isn’t packaged for whatever distro so you go with the app image of it but it’s pretty much useless since it won’t integrate with your system. i.e. the appimage of Tabby. Or waiting on a package to get approved but the maintainer drops out at the last minute so either you have to pick it up or wait on someone else to which essentially resets the process (yay nix pkgs).
Essentially with linux in most cases the focus always seems to be on fixing the complicated things while ignoring the easy user experience things. Like workspaces shouldn’t suck as much as they do on Plasma and the “fix” coming next month isn’t going to improve things that much. oh boy I can pin a single app on my second monitor…that doesn’t fix the dreadful workspace experience on Plasma. ALL they have to do is allow independant sets of workspaces per monitor. that’s it. that’s all I want. but the devs at KDE, just like their opinions on tiling, will say “well we don’t use workspaces like that so you won’t either”.
Printing.
Windows drivers are so fancy, with previews and a billion options, while Linux gets a randomly ordered list of raw options in a drop-down menu and that’s it
I always liked the Linux ones over Windows. No random bullshit depending on who made the drivers, just a solid set of options.
Could do with being prettier through.
I think you’re essentially right but sometimes I look at the Linux panels and wish they looked a little less…burdened with aesthetic growing pains or like…aesthetic arrested development. They don’t have to be skeuomorphic or frutiger aero or like, keep up with the Joneses, but config menus in Linux are often one of those little reminders, no matter how trivial, that this isn’t a polished product but a humble labor of love. It’s endearing. But sometimes it feels like holding a toy from the CVS when you want a Transformers from Toys R Us lol.
This is heavily dependent on the printer driver used.
My bother does this until I install the CUPS PPD from brother.
Newer process are moving to a driverless IPP model, which should help with this.
Exhibit A:
The same, but in Windows:
My HP Deskjet 1110:
The only other option the driver provides is Color or Grayscale. It’s pretty clean.
Backing up my BTRFS file system. I’m on day two of reading the docs, and I still feel like I have tenuous grasp of the ins and outs. To be clear I’ve used ext4 and timeshift for years with absolutely no problem at all. I’m just looking to make generic backups of my system once a month(most the time I do it manually), and I feel BTRFS is overkill for what I need. I also feel like I’m not far away from it “clicking”. Guess we’ll see, I still don’t ever see myself leaving Linux, but I may switch back to ext4.
I think the thing that’s shifting attitudes these days - aside from the fact that stability has long since arrived on the Linux desktop - is that Microsoft has taken a nosedive in terms of functionality at the same time, with little to indicate that the situation will improve on their end.
A fully stable desktop that never breaks is not really on the table, but Linux is by far the most stable and user-centred one, at this point.
Screen sharing is still touch and go in 2026 on arch
TigerVNC was a pain to set up on Fedora 43. Seems to be a documentation drift issue with online docs. Lesson learned rely on local doc.
ProtonVPN does not play nicely with my KVM network bridge interface. I have to down it in order to connect, and then when I up the network bridge again afterwards the VM doesnt seem to use it until a restart occurs.
I need to figure out how automatically to pull the port forwarded in my ProtonVPN session and have it update firewalld and qbittorrentd respectively
Permissions management. I recently tried creating a new exfat partition on my external HD using the default KDE Partition Manager. When finished, I found that only the current (admin) user had write access to the drive. I tried changing this using the Dophin file explorer. It appeared to let me change these permissions through the Properties menu and the drop downs within the Permissions tab, but nothing changed after hitting OK. I was eventually able to fix it using the chown command in the terminal, but I feel like I should have been able to set this when creating the partition as well as in the file explorer.
I’ve been using linux since ubuntu 5.04 so I dont need converting, but from business perspective we would need Office M365 desktop apps and MDM support. Also autodesk products. Personally I use M365 in browser, but feature parity is not up to 100%.
I think when all win32 apps work, there will no longer be any reason for windows.
Just slap a win7/win10 classic gui over it with some animations and we’re going finally decimate all the other options for good.
At that point isn’t Redox now functional enough for this?
Games with anti-cheat don’t work.
Secureboot doesn’t like GRUB.
Solidworks doesn’t run natively on linux, neither does my Sketchup Pro program.
SteamVR doesn’t run well on linux
What does work that I use regularly? My older DVD drives work fine, ripping my music and dvd/blu-rays works well and seamlessly with multiple instances of the programs running simultaneously. The typical FOSS stuff I use is a no-brainer, from Gimp to Blender to Libreoffice.
But for the stuff I work with most and the games I play most often? It just doesn’t work well or at all.
My concerns are mostly all unfair. Just want to acknowledge that right up front. Compared with macOS:
- Cider is an admirable but buggy solution for Apple Music (whose own web player is barely usable)
- I wish Alt+Tabbing had the option to bring to the fore all window instances for a given app like macOS’s Cmd+Tab; as it is I am always having to hunt down stray Firefox or Files windows, which get further buried down the Alt+Tab bar(in Cinnamon) when you minimize them.
- no OS does common alternate characters (dash and em-dash, accented characters, etc. all accessible with variations on the Alt key) or Japanese language input (Ctrl+space and then just start typing phonetically) as well as macOS does. The composition key is useful to a degree but it feels like second class citizen shit compared to the macOS implementations that make some typing and much language learning basically useless for me on my Linux devices.
Compared to Windows:
- pretty basic (and again Cinnamon centric) but Files / the file browser in other apps could use some love. Typing the first few letters of a file name in Files takes me there and highlights it which is great but if memory serves (not near machine now), I can’t just hit Enter from that point to open the thing. Equally annoying is when browsing for a file to open or save, there is often not a create folder option or button, and when there is, it isn’t tied to a keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+Shift+N or F12. I sincerely hate switching input methods when it isn’t called for, so having to grab my mouse just to click the new folder button and return to typing or worse, to leave that browser altogether to go to Files and create the folder because the button or command to do so didn’t exist in the browser window is a real drag.
In general:
- the least fair complaint of all because it seems especially like the answer is “well then why don’t you pitch in and help?” (The answer to which is, “I don’t have the skills, I’m sorry, I’ll be quiet”), is trying to replicate workflows in off-brand software. I love LibreOffice spiritually but trying to do some basic PowerPoint stuff recently, it really let me down. ONLYOFFICE was much more usable but it still has a lot of jank and, I suspect, a memory leak because the longer I use it, the slower and less stable it becomes. Krita seems more usable than GIMP, but neither is as usable as Affinity Photo, let alone Photoshop. Put another way, it’s tough to be constantly reminded you’re compromising in order to live a largely faster, stabler, freer computing experience. MacOS is a pile of shit these days but when compared to Windows (since I’m not gaming with it) I never feel like I’m compromising. It can do everything Windows can, and often better. If there isn’t Windows specific software, macOS may have competitive indie darling software to fill the void. Pixelmator for example (before being gobbled up) didn’t feel like it was a somewhat rudderless, good faith effort by a tired gaggle of volunteers…it felt premium. I’m still waiting for that experience on Linux.
My biggest problem with Linux is security. I want a relatively idiot proof setup like in Microsoft and Apple products. I do not to have to minutely setup the firewall or have to go into the terminal to run a virus scan.
Other than that I am not too demanding of my system I nearly never have a problem although recently the game A Hat in Time makes my pc kernal panic.
I have to turn on my screen before turning on the PC otherwise Linux doesn’t appear on the screen.
Also if the screen goes into standby In often have to restart my computer.
I have Nvidia so not sure if thats the reason
For some reason, my Vizio TV doesn’t get signal after my media pc goes to sleep and wakes up or the input changes and changes back. I have to completely reboot the computer every time.
CachyOS for what its worth.
- Ubuntu memory allocation and limits (I think). I haven’t dug too much into finding the root cause, but I have a recurring issue where the GUI freezes up, and it looks like it might be related to not handling well how much memory it needs for the task.
Maybe it thinks it has more memory available than it does, or the gc isn’t running efficiently, or it’s allocating to 100% without including a sensible safety gap, something like that. It’s a significantly low-level enough problem that I’m wary of tinkering with values I don’t fully understand even if I wanted to spend the probably large amount of time necessary to find root cause.
- The fact Ubuntu now withholds package updates unless you’re paying for their “maintenance and compliance subscription”, but that’s probably on me to change distros. I get that Ubuntu employees need money so they can eat, just like I do, but … The idea of paying for core package updates feels like a nightmare waiting to happen, for both Ubuntu developers managing package dependencies and end-user experience.
The fact Ubuntu now withholds package updates unless you’re paying for their “maintenance and compliance subscription”
Do you happen to use a very old version of Ubuntu? You might want to update the distribution. This might also fix the bug you mentioned.
Nah, it’s 24.04 LTS
Just a few odd chinese windows programs to flash random devkits. They run in WINE but can’t pass USB through to actually flash them. Keep an offline windows 10 laptop around for such scenarios. I don’t want that shit on my system in any form.
