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.
I still have win on my laptop, but I barely use it. I decided to install CachyOS on my new desktop, and it works better than I expected) Still have some problems, though, and they mostly come down to my reluctance to do research. Here are the main ones: My azeron is not supported. There is antimicrox program recomended to map inputs, and it worked first time I configured it. But then I decided to change it a little, and changes will not apply, keeping my first configuration. After I leave computer unattended for several minutes, it won’t properly wake up. Strangely, it wakes up normally if I send it to sleep manually. Some programs (mainly Steam). Take unexpectedly long to startup after boot. What is worse, window system completely freezes while it starts up, the experience I last had with Windows))
Anyway, I’m happy and not going back
I’ve used a few different distros over the years: Debian, Ubuntu, Neon, openSUSE Leap
Never once has a major version upgrade ever gone 100% successfully. Even on a bog standard system with no 3rd party repos or niche hardware. I don’t know why it’s still so difficult
When my PC goes into sleep or hibernate, my keyboard won’t work after it wakes up. I have to unplug and reconnect my keyboard every… single… time…
Except for this issue, my PC works perfectly fine and better than Windows in nearly every way.
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.
Energy management is the part that still complicates things most for me. Rfkill not being managed correctly. Machines that suspend but don’t hibernate, or that hibernate but don’t suspend. Laptops that de-suspend during transport. Batteries that overdrain during suspend. Bluetooth. And most annoying of all, NVidia (insert Torvalds iconic scene).
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
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.
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.
All my games work like shit :(
And it’s kindof my fault because my hardware is outdated but while on Windows Hogwarts Legacy worked, in pain but worked, and Fallout 76 was fully stable and smooth.
On linux (Nobara), Hogwarts CTD’s on startup (shaders or something fails) and I had to lower setting in fallout to get it stable enough to play.
Bit I just began my adventure with linux as main OS so there’s still a lot to learn. One of stabilising things for Fallout was, for example, forcing dx12. Without it it froze my whole os sometimes. :(
Oh and KDEConnect reports it crashed for some reason if it cannot immediately connect to my phone. Which was funny until notification spam.
Multi monitor still has some quirks from time to time. Don’t take me wrong, it’s already much better than just 2-3 years ago even, but…still has quirks. Specially with different DPI. Sometimes apps get very…wonky when moved from a monitor with a normal 100% scaling to one where it has 150% scaling or so. And on return, it’s already messed up. Some start already in the wrong scaling with super tiny text. Or text double the size. Let’s just say, sometimes scaling gets tricky.
There’s also still a lot of games that don’t like being moved to another monitor, and don’t even give an option for it. Even when pushed to the non-main monitor by OS key combo (meta-shift-left, for example), they tend to rearrange themselves again back to the main monitor when changing from title screen to in-game screen, and things like that. So…still slightly wonky. Light years ahead of where we were just 3 years ago…but still wonky sometimes.
Bluetooth is very buggy, but it’s not too much of a deal breaker.
I can’t figure out how to run game mods that are arbitrary .exe programs that are meant to hook into a running game. Specifically, otis_inf camera tools with, for example, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I’ve tried protontricks but its so damn complicated and poorly documented I don’t really know how.
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.
Is this feedback for devs?
My 144hz monitor randomly runs at 60hz with no way of changing it apart from restarting several times.
I have a TV connected in addition to my monitor (for lazy gaming or watching series), but this causes various small but annoying problems. I can’t unlock my PC without moving the mouse over to my monitor, which invariably spawns on the TV, and I have to guess how to move it over (left/right alignment is also inconsistent). It also turns the mouse pointer massive on the monitor, presumably because the TV has a higher resolution. Despite marking the monitor as the main display, more than half of my applications launch on the TV. Except the ones I actually want there, of course. If my tv is off before booting is complete, and I turn it on later, my background disappears, and sound is routed to the terrible built-in monitor speakers instead of either the tv audio I use while it’s on, or the actually good headphones I use when it’s not.
At some point my kernel randomly broke because the driver of my WiFi adapter was somehow incompatible. It was a massive pain to figure out the problem and fix it.
As a causal user these are definitely points that came out worse than the competition functionality-wise, and since most of the general public will not opt for a lesser experience for the sake of idealism, this type of issue probably prevents other people who just want to use their PCs from switching.
Edit: it was also a massive pain to set up a Korean keyboard layout, in Windows you just select it and you’re done. In Ubuntu, you do the same and nothing changes. I don’t even remember what it was that actually fixed it, but I tried a lot of guides that didn’t work.
I use Fedora on a laptop, NixOS on my PC and Debian for the servers. It is better than Windows in almost every way. Except:
When connecting a bluetooth headset to the Fedora laptop, lock it for a break and unlock it again, the headset won’t work. Only a few times bluetooth on and off helps, sometimes a whole restart. And connecting two devices the same time (like mouse + headset) can lead to both not working.
On NixOS/Hyprland Drag and Drop feels very wonky, for example re-arranging the toolbar in FreeCAD by drag and dropping the elements is more of a game of luck, if everything ends up in the place where it should be.
Getting the AMD-GPU to work with darktable always requires some time of tinkering, after setting up a new OS.
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”.
