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.
On bazzite
-
Can’t change my Plymouth boot screen
-
Can’t set animated icons in toolbar (KDE)
-
The screen transition I chose is glitchy
-
The translation tries VERY hard to be different from windows (idk what’s up with that as on other system it was normal(propably, I would need to make sure))
-
I don’t know how to run containers from within containers, but that’s a skill issue. (I wanted to build piefed from distrobox)
For the longest time I had to disable manually a module so my graphics tablet would work. It was fixed a month ago!
-
Mobile… I want a Linux phone 😭
No fingerprint login. Its frustrating that in all cases I can use my fingerprint instead of a password except when booting up my laptop.
Also, QOL and stability features would be nice. Buttons that dont work shouldn’t be visible, for example, and getting a useful error message from many apps can be a headache.
Recently, I had a problem where amy app using electron suddenly stopped working at all. When ran with the terminal, it showed 2 errors, neither of which told you how to fix the issue. Eventually I figured out that using flatseal to force all apps to use wayland fixed the issue and made things smoother as well.
Some permissions got messed up in my KDE install the other day after an update, I’m really not sure how. I tried to fix it by recursively changing ownership of /usr/ to root. Don’t do this. This kills the OS. It was technically repairable but like, I don’t wanna go through that rigamarole, I just nuked it and restored from a backup.
Sometimes I’m reminded that I often know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be safe.
On Bazzite.
Programs often take a concerningly-long time to load. Like 30 seconds+. But it’s intermittent. Haven’t been able to put together any patterns as to when this does or doesn’t happen.
About 1/3 of the time when I try to open a PDF file (which open in Firefox), they just… don’t. Plasma will just spin with the Firefox icon on the mouse cursor for like 10 seconds and then silently do nothing. No errors of any kind reported. No idea where I might look for logs or whatever to help diagnose the issue.
Dolphin is definitely lacking in the UX department for frequent actions I’m used to in Windows, like mounting SMV shares with non-default credentials (basically impossible in Dolphin, only doable in CLI), creating new folders (I’ve been spoiled by having a dedicated toolbar button), and working with elevated permissions (Windows will just seamlessly prompt you when additional permissions are needed, Dolphin will just error, sometimes with useless error messages, and make you go elevate your session separately).
Windows (the UI concept, not the OS) do not remember and restore to their prior locations, which Windows (the OS) always handled pretty seamlessly. I know I can supposedly make this happen via the “window rules” settings, but I haven’t been able to find ANY good resources on how that system actually works, and when I tried to just do it intuitively, I fucked up things like where the Application Menu and Open File dialogs appear. No, I don’t want to have to configure it specially for every app I might use, I want there to just be sensible defaults that I don’t have to fight against.
Those are the ones that’re coming to mind. All very nitpicky, but I’m largely a UI/UX designer at work, so I’m pretty sensitive to nitpicky things. No regrets, though.
New Bazsite user too.
The Firefox thing is not specific to opening a PDF. I get the same behavior you describe just when I open Firefox. It’s probably just first launch after a new boot for me but I’m not sure.
It’s definitely not just first open, for me. Every two weeks, I scan and organize receipts as PDFs for my own accounting, so I end up with many files open at once, all while my existing Firefox wibdows are already open.
The current Virtual Keyboard solution on KDE (
maliit) isn’t working quite as much as i’d like. It only works on GTK apps, and only sometimes shows. When it does, it won’t relaunch after dismissal untill you kill it. Add to that it’s not as feature-dense as its windows alternatives.I hear that they are working on their own
plasma-keyboard, and I hope that will fix most of these issues, but I haven’t had the tim to update my system.App stores are always terrible no matter which distro you use.
- Images don’t load
- Stuck waiting 30 seconds for a page in the app store to load (if it loads at all)
- last rating is 7 years old
- random utilities written 12 years ago are at the top of the page
- “featured” apps haven’t even been tested on that distro
Umm… not much to be honest. It’s overall pretty great. I switched my main rig fully to Linux about 2 years ago.
First year was Manjaro w/xfce which got a little janky around the edges, probably due to how they avoid using the AUR directly. Can’t remember specific problems that couldn’t be attributed to old RAM or my own tomfoolery.
Past year has been on EndeavorOS w/KDE Plasma. Took a little time on the Arch wiki to get my Mesa install fully operational, but wasn’t bad. And I think at one point yay tried to compile electron32 from scratch which was kind of insane (probably wasted 80 GB of download for that one night) but eventually I found forum posts saying it was fine to just remove. Besides that, it’s been fantastic. It’s rare now that I even find a game that doesn’t work well, and half the time I forget to even check protondb like I used to.
Oh here. I guess combining PDFs could be a better experience. Had to use pdfunite in the command line which worked well but felt a lot more awkward than just using Acrobat to drop in pages and rearrange them. But there’s probably a GUI utility I just didn’t find.
Ah, and printer support. Wifi printing worked once for no apparent reason then never again. But printers are terrible in Windows too so I blame the OEMs.
The 4 year upgrade cycle is too short on one hand. On the other, critical software like Firefox is too old even then so I have to use a flatpack for that which does not integrate well. I am using Debian 12. The other option is that Mozilla does have a debian repo but that is harder to setup.
The biggest difficulty is music production plugins. Some have a Linux version, some work via yabridge and wine (with some GUI bugs), and some don’t work at all.
On top of that, my initial attempt was using Mint with all of the audio optimisations (including kernel) but it was stuttery and slow. Unfortunately, oving to another distro is not painless when you have to move all the plugins too but CachyOS has been much better so far.
Native Linux audio plugins are frustratingly uncommon. I’m gradually trying to replace my Windows plugins with Linux native ones but it’s hard to do sometimes. My thing lately has been building my own replacements with plugdata.
You might enjoy this video/series: https://youtu.be/yawlonjLp4c
I’ve been trying to get my audio working the way I want (instead of everything just going to the default sink), and it’s been helpful.
I have the same problem with nixos. It’s partially solved but some plugin derivations are behind the times or something (or maybe I’m the problem and I can blame documentation :P)
I guess the biggest thing I’m missing right now is VR gaming.
But since my VR googles need WMR to work, I wouldn’t be any better off with Windows 11 either.
I’m looking forward to the Steam Frame, hopefully it’ll support SteamOS out of the box
I would be a lot more excited if I wasn’t worried it was going to cost +$1,099. I hope that I am wrong.
that is just for the memory
Same. Quest 2. Fedora 43. 5700X3D / 9070 XT. Steam Link can’t find AMD video decoder on the pc to run. ALVR has death wobble-like reprojection jitter. WiVrn works when Envision feels like it, which is never as it constantly errors out compiling due to some dependency I can’t find for the life of me.
I know compiling from source is preferred as “the linux way”, but I would like to spend more time actually using my pc than fixing it. There’s no reason the VR software needs to be recompiled just to change a setting. Maybe bake in the ability to change settings instead of hardcoding everything.
Wine would be super helpful if they can find way to make older (2019 and older) Quickbooks run reliably. Lots of small businesses locked into old platforms because the accountants or the people who do accounting themselves can’t learn how to use anything else, and the linux alternatives require a phd in linuxology to learn and don’t offer the easy business-in-a-box functionality.
Waydroid is neat, but poorly integrated in the desktop. It runs as a full screen app, and doesn’t task switch easily.
Please, Valve, make Steam a 64-bit native client! So few people use 32-bit systems that the few that do probably aren’t running Steam to save on memory.
Pipewire audio devices and webcam support needs to be smoother. I’ve never seen so much console shim hacks just to get a virtual webcam working.
I haven’t even begun to try my NXT Gladiator flight stick in linux… that might be a whole nother can of trouble to open.
I’m using Fedora KDE, and for the first time in my life, an upgrade (42 to 43) completely borked the system, in a way that I couldn’t boot to anything else other than a kernel panic.
I had to boot up a live USB, mount and chroot into the old system, and manually fix each duplicated / corrupted package. And it still caused every now and then some weird issue with dnf, so in the end I just reinstalled the entire OS.
I feel like updates “offered” via a nice and convenient gui shouldn’t really do this out of nowhere - and I wasn’t the only one to report this in the past half year.
I found on the 42->43 upgrade, Wine 32-bit was removed, and the upgrader errors out instead of fixing it. Wht I did to fix was immediately, manually (via dnf) uninstall wine*, then immediately run the upgrade again, and it fixed itself, finishing the upgrade with 64-bit Wine installed.
I don’t like that I get zero feedback when typing in my boot-time decryption password. Like, I can’t even tell if my keyboard is working. Did I press Enter or am I wasting my time staring at the prompt: “enter password for drive whatever (random guid)”.
I’ve literally sat there with my keyboard not even plugged in, not realizing it wasn’t dong anything because there’s no feedback. Like, can’t it show some asterisks? Or maybe “attempting decryption” after I press Enter, or anything? The only feedback is: it will either boot or say “invalid password” eventually.
It’s a minor frustration, but it’s every day that it bugs me.
(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. LUKS2 or whatever, using the built-in encryption when I first installed it on my laptop.)
If I had to name a thing … My only issue is the lack of support from organizations. Drivers, though It’s getting better for printers/scanners etc. but like HW identifiers from banks etc are still windows (and mac). And no, i’m not gonna install windows or anything wine-like for it. (so far I’ve been able to take the alternative route/work around it)
Probably the banks don’t even check HW identifiees, they see that you are using Linux and just decide to block you, at least, many reported that with many banks but it’s not a universal rule ofc
I use Linux daily for work and personal tasks, but I sometimes have to resort to either a Windows VM or Windows running natively for the following:
Hardware
- Gaming with the Oculus Rift S
- My third-party Xbox One wireless controller adapter for the non-bluetooth models
Software
- Microsoft Office. I absolutely need the documents, spreadsheets, and presentations I work on to be interoperable with Windows users who exclusively use Microsoft Office. I am no position to ask them to change what software they use. OnlyOffice is the closest to achieving interoperability and its UI is very similar, but it still falls short. Multiple animations on 1 slide don’t carry over, none of the macros my coworkers have made seem to work, slide formatting may look different, and transformed cells don’t seem to automatically update.
- Some games, such as Fortnite and CastleMinerZ either have bug-breaking issues or the publisher/anti-cheat sucks and blocks Linux. I don’t particularly care for these games, but I’m also not willing to give up game nights with lifelong friends over these. I’ll play them, suck at them, and have a good time. Then there are games such as Halo: MCC that mostly work, but then co-op campaign de-syncs.
- Original Xbox and Xbox 360 development and modification tools/programs don’t work. I can’t even FTP a file over from Fedora without it being unrecognized. I obviously don’t expect any of this to change.
And I desperately miss the native Stream Deck software. StreamController’s page-changing is very slow, in general is finicky, buggy, and less intuitive.
Unfortunately, the anti-cheat is a conscious decision by the developers to forego any sort of Linux compatibility. Anything that allows it to be run in Linux will likely result in the anti-cheat software being updated to block that workaround.
