What do you hate about linux?
We love to praise linux constantly and tell everyone to change to it (they should) but what are your biggest annoyances ?
Mine would be, installing software (made even more complex by flatpaks being added, among the 5 other ways there already were to install software) and probably wifi power management issues.
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audio - Most of the time it works, but there have been plenty of times that after an install, I have to go in and make a handfull of changes to get it working.
"you are using it wrong" developers - Lookin at you, Gnome, Mozilla and Pottering. Yes, you are donating your time, and I appreciate that, but don't be dismissive of people if they bring up valid issues. If you just don't want to fix problems, that's fine, but just be honest about that, instead of blaming the user.
sleep/hibernate - I've never depended on sleep or hibernate to work properly. I gave up on that years ago, and whenever I come back and try it again, I remember why I gave it up.
documentation - As a seasoned linux person, I love man-pages, but they are soooooo obtuse and hard to parse for newbies. I also hate it when the website has mountains of documentation, but they couldn't be bothered to put that into the man-pages.
video/wifi drivers - Yes, I know that this is mostly a problem because of the manufacturers. That doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
unsympathetic users - Just because it works for you, doesn't mean it works for other people. I can't wait for year-of-the-linux-desktop, but it just isn't there yet. As soon as you have to tell a non-tech to open a terminal, the vast majority of them are out. You and I know that 'editing /etc/somedir/somefile and running /usr/sbin/somecommand' is easy, but sooooo many of them don't know what that means, nor will they care. I hear that windows is pretty bad nowadays, but people will often stick with the devil they know.
Last point is the most important in my opinion
So much this!
Please, if I don't know how to build this from source, please tell me what I need to do.
Please say "open a terminal and type git clone [URL]" instead of "clone the repo." Anything to be more verbose. This might be my first time.
Agreed. Even something like: "Read up more on this here at someurl.com for more info". The assumption that everyone knows how your repo works, as well as the 3 different build-tools that you use, is quite a lot. I feel like a of the instructions are like how you draw an owl: https://kstarr.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/draw-the-owl-300x257.png
Great summary! Longtime Linux users and tech people in general tend to forget what it's like to be a layperson, and take for granted all the skills it takes to daily drive Linux without trouble.
The unsympathetic/pedantic users and obtuse man pages are why I've abandoned Linux attempts in the past. The reason I am trying to move to Linux now, isn't because those were fixed. It's because windows is becoming the more annoying option. I've prevented my computer from updating win 10 until I can leave the platform. But I'm not looking forward to dealing with Linux frustrations. Especially the fucking users. I hate asking Linux people for help. 95% chance I just get a pedantic dickwad.
I think things are getting better. I'm not going to lie and tell you that it's no longer a problem, but I think you can do a lot more with a little patience. I know there's a lot of different implementations, so you might need to experiment as well. Good luck!
You can ask me for help, im pretty nice :) not a linux pro tho
Lol thanks, I appreciate the gesture
You can ask me for help, im pretty nice :) not a linux pro tho
The audio stack is just just a nightmare, it's not even funny. Sometimes, at random, when my PC boots, it will output white noise at full volume through my headphones. The is fine if I turned it on and went to get something, make a coffee, whatever. I can still hear it in the other room though. If I'm sitting at my PC and I was just rebooting, wearing the headphones: that isn't ok. It damn near blows my eardrums out when it happens.
Great summary, too many Linux elitists like to claim Linux to be without flaws and every other OS to be the devil.
I'd love for Linux to become more mainstream. But as long as those elitist are pulling the strings, it will never become user friendly enough for a regular user.
"But I moved my granny to Linux and she can use it" is their argument. When in reality every time this granny had an issue, the Linux user came around to fix it. The majority of people do not have a tech savvy user in their direct circle capable of fixing Linux. So the only option they have is to bring it back to the store they bought it from.
Sleep and Audio are definitely my most annoying, and prominent, issues that I run into. Devices like USB audio interfaces I find tone temperamental. Oftentimes they will not be recognised on startup and I have to unplug them and replug them back in. I also gave up on hibernate, my PCs are now either on or off...
To be fair, my colleagues have audio issues on Windows more often than I do.
The classic "oh, windows reset all my audio configurations after an update... again..."
Idk man it all works for me.
The community's general overestimation of the average person's tech capabilities.
Not necessarily fair to pin this on Linux per se, but there's hardware that doesn't work well or at all still and alternative solutions still aren't there. So this would be mostly on companies making software for Windows but not for Linux, but it's still part of the Linux experience that I do not enjoy.
I have to troubleshoot things on Linux more than I did on Windows.
I disagree honestly
I think the biggest strength of Linux is that it gives people power over their own computing. That has and probably will be its best selling point.
I personally wish that there was something Linux based and Foss that is closer to Chrome OS/Android. I want to have a desktop experience that is hassle free and dead simple. Dahlia OS was promising for a while but it has now seemingly been abandoned.
You disagree with... the things I personally find annoying about Linux?
Terrible documentation that is written assuming far too much prior knowledge.
I'm pretty technologically literate but just don't have a lot of experience with Linux, in the last year of trying properly to switch over the most frustrating part is trying to fix problems or follow peoples "guides" to various things. There is plenty of information out there for sure but when I have to keep looking up a string of things to try and get to my desired end result then the original documentation I'm trying to follow is not adequate.
I can only imagine what it might be like for users who are less inclined to learn about this stuff and just want to use it / solve a problem.
I think that a lot can be said for well written documentation that describes necessary processes to get a desired result in a way that everyone can follow regardless of their prior experience or knowledge.
When I first got into tech, one of the first things I noticed was how deep the knowledge base was, layers upon layers of knowledge dependencies, and how poorly tech people explained things.
I remember learning about how to write clear, easy to follow manuals in IT classes when I was 13 in the late 90s. What ever happened to that skill, did it die along with physical manuals?
I think just the phrase "IT classes when I was 13" is enough to convey just how far outside the norm your experience was.
I have a CS degree from a top-10 university, and they taught me approximately fuck-all about writing good documentation. There was only one course on technical writing, and I don't remember it being very rigorous or difficult.
If anything, what few writing requirements we had in the rest of the curriculum were typically more similar to academic research papers than user manuals.
It did. The thick manuals of the 90s needed to actually document things.
Must have. I sure as hell didn't get that training in school a couple years ago. My teachers sure as hell didn't either
When I was running a Linux distro regularly (1995-2015), audio output would break every couple of upgrades.
It was frustrating, because I was pretty happy with the rest of the OS.
Ironically, it's only gotten better since 2015ish. For the most part I've used pulseaudio like most others, but I've also used jackd when I need to do audio stuff. After pipewire became usable it's more or less flawless for me.
Audio output doesn't "break," but it's easy for it to get redirected to the wrong device (e.g. by plugging something in, like headphones or an HDMI monitor, and the system trying to be "helpful" by automatically reconfiguring). With so many layers (OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, JACK, PipeWire) it's hard to figure out how to fix it.
After switching my gaming PC from Win 11 to Linux Mint earlier this year, audio is the only thing I consistently have issues with. I have the PC connected to my living room TV via HDMI via an Onkyo AVR. I have pipewire installed (correctly, I think).
Whenever audio starts, there's a couple second delay before I can hear it. Haven't been able to solve that so I just live with it.
The more annoying thing is after an update earlier this week, the audio output is now defaulting to "Dummy Output" instead of HDMI. I have to manually switch it via pipewire. It randomly switches back and I haven't figured it out either.
That can be because of a power saving feature - basically PulseAudio puts your sound card to sleep when nothing is playing, and then there's a bit of lag before it wakes up. In my case it was really annoying because I use the optical output, so when PulseAudio put the sound card to sleep, my receiver would also go to sleep after a bit, and resulted in quite a bit of a delay when it was time to get it come back up.
This fixed it for me (see part 4.8): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting
I tried this and it worked for about a day haha.
I've gone through a couple pulseaudio configuration tutorials, but nothing is working consistently. Seems to work fine after initial reboot, but almost every time after waking from sleep I have to reconfigure the audio outputs. I swear this all worked fine until I updated something last week.
It seems to go hand-in-hand with bluetooth breaking.
Bluetooth is still... not great.
I didn't even try Bluetooth. That would have been too frustrating.
That's exactly why I hopped back on windows for my desktop. I've put off fixing it for longer than I should.
I've amazingly not had a single audio problem, and i mess with inputs and outputs on the front and back panel often, as well as use usb audio devices. Mint and pulseaudio
I just find it annoying that I have to manually change audio output device every time I connect or disconnect HDMI to our TV. Annoying, but at least not difficult.
That's awesome! I'm not sure if/when I'll go back to Linux as a daily driver, but I that I have your experience.
This does need some attention from the Pipewire profiles perspective. It's mostly a hardware combo thing though. Even if you're using an audio code that has kernel support, the speaker configuration from manufacturers changes CONSTANTLY, really causing problems. They need to break this out into its audio profile IMO.
I hope image-based distro can solve this issue. In general I feel a lot of these breakages are caused by repeatedly migrating configuration files, yet fresh install usually fixes these issues.
I think one of the advantage of image based distros is that they are much more principled in migrating config files.
I don't like LibreOffice as the only open source Office software that seems to compete with Microsoft. It feels bloated and outdated and for years and years I have display problems with it. The community answers to problems are often written by arrogant pricks.
However, at the pace Microsoft Office is deteriorating with all that copilot crap LibreOffice begins to look better every day. They don't even have to do anything for it.
Have you tried OnlyOffice?
Isn't it Russian?
It's in english for me (hah! jk) Dunno about it's origins. I just installed the flatpack.
OnlyOffice is another shit clone of Office 2007. Fight me.
I am close to adopting LibreOffice but their excel equivalent lacks some table functions that I use almost any time I use Excel.
Have you tried Proton? It works like a charm for videogames.
I was able to get Office working without issue through Proton, but I couldn't get my reference manager to work with Office within Proton. Ultimately I ended up acquiescing to LibreOffice, and I've ended up liking it more than the bloated monstrosity that is M$ Office in the latest iterations.
I've also found SoftMaker Office to be great (faster than OnlyOffice and even better docx compatibility) but it doesn't respect Linux's cursor blinkrate when you build from source (it's supposed to respect the default, per the devs), and instead uses a really fast rate. I'm weird, but that issue is damning for me, and idk how/where to fix it. So, I stick with LibreOffice.
Snap. The very existence of it.
Suspend/sleep. I bought a specific laptop so it works, but these manufacturers need to let our developers know what the fuck is going on in the hardware
The sleep/hibernate is specifically designed to work only with windows, especially on modern hardware. It's a known problem and it's not easy to reliably get around it.
That stuff doesn't even work right on Windows anymore.
It's kind of sad, 10-15 years ago I'd say everyone (both Linux and Windows) more or less had the whole sleep/hibernate thing figured out. But it's all gone to shit in the past few years.
Presumably, it'll work in a few years. Which is when Microsoft will change it to something else.
The fact that there is NO agreed single package standard across distros.
This is probably the biggest barrier to mainstream linux adoption - devs have to choose between supporting 5+ package formats or just say "screw it" and make a windows/mac app instead.
This is my own opinion, but I think Flatpak and Flathub need to be universally adopted as a standard. It's already growing that way organically, even if major distro projects haven't recognized it yet.
With usage of Flatpak growing over time, I think we are heading towards that way.
This has its pros. If all agree to use, say, deb, then some of the users will complain, "I downloaded package XYZ from Arch and it doesn't work on Fedora!"
No, not really true, IMO.
If all distros come together and agree on a single package format (e.g. deb), then if arch makes a package available in .deb, it can be downloaded and installed on Ubuntu or Fedora, as it becomes an universal package format like flatpak.
Currently we have to compile the source code in such situations.
If flatpak is universal doesn't it solve the issue ? Is it the sandboxing people dont like?
My system is a mix of .Deb, manual compiled, and flatpaks. As im sure many are. Im not an organized person.
Yep, it's sandboxing that I don't like. They feel "tacked on" and don't integrate properly.
Same for my system which is also a mix of deb, flatpak and Snap.
The main complain of flatpak being size and performance in comparison to ‘native’ installations.
I recently began hating devices and how each distro does it slightly differently. /dev is the worst. I plug in a usb, look for it under /dev/usb, not there, oh it's /dev/serial I suppose that makes sense. Plug in a different usb, not in either, no by-path or by-id, oh, I can only find it by the bus... but that path changes each time I plug it in, and that's the only place I can find it. Permissions are black magic on devices. I've been root and can't open a cdrom, get permission denied. Other times I can give a user 777 and it seems like they have it all, but still can't open that drive. Everytime I reboot my coral usb changes bus paths and breaks my frigate docker, but I can't find any stable path to it. Fought for days trying to get proxmox to forward a cdrom drive to a container then a vm. Went through half a dozen tutorials and threads of people getting it working and I couldn't. Spin up my laptop and do it bare metal, and STILL can't get it to work. VLC can play the disk just fine, but not the docker container. Switch to ubuntu instead of my arch distro, and boom everything works.... most of the time. Other times I have to do a ritual of removing the database, logs, reboot, start the container, unplug usb, plug in usb, and then it works.
Just out of curiosity, what are you doing in 2025 with a CDROM drive?
Let me burn my CDs in peace!
I'm considering getting one again to rip audio cds.
I've got a bunch of old dvds and bluerays I'm ripping to my NAS. Automatic Ripping Machine works great... when it works. I've given up and now I'm using VLC.
Flatpaks apps & their runtimes is taking 20 gb, was 80 gb before I realize it and start cleaning up. That's annoying. But I also like Flatpak. I may just prioritize DNF first (I'm on Fedora) to minimize Flatpak bloats.
60 gb is very significant for me being in 256 gb ssd.
As someone who started getting into Linux on a Raspberry Pi (and now dual-booting Mint and Windows on the bigger machines), I still have no idea what Flatpak is. I always used to hit the terminal with "sudo apt install" and got what I needed. Except for the occasional proprietary software.
It's a separate package tool that works on every distribution. Usually Debian derivatives use
apt, Redhat ones usednfetc. Flatpaks work everywhere.And its sandboxed, with permissions.
What do you install for that much space to be taken up??
carelessly lots of stuff. kde & gnome developmnt runtimes. nvidia driver duplicates. Firefox, Librewolf & Ungoogled Chrome. full latex packages. Ardour and various syntesizer.
I eventually cleaned up most packages out of Flatpak to DNF, especially the one that require big runtime and gtk/qt apps or does't need sandboxing. I may also avoid electron apps since they also tend to be big lol.
Do
flatpak remove --unused, it will clear up unused dependencies.It never work. I've always done
flatpak remove --unusedevery once in a while. At one time I checked my root filesystem using gnome's disk analyzer to see what takes the most space, that is when I found out/var/lib/flatpak/repo/ate 80 gb of my disk.As per several suggestion from github issues & forums, I did
sudo flatpak repairand finally it did clean them up down to around 40-50. Several months later I kind of gone mad and delete everything in therepodirectory. I noticed my apps still works. Until few days later when I wanted to update, Flatpak complained and redownload most of the deleted stuff 🤣But after redownloading, it only took around 20 gb now, and after that Flatpak also pinned every package lmao so I have to unpin unimportant stuff any case they can be deleted using
flatpak remove --unusedand I seem to be not the only one, like this person has their Flatpak directories almost 100 gb https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=435450
I realize I may also just remove all latex stuff, I was only using it to graduate. I'd just typst now for smaller things.
The lack of a universal application installation method which 98% of developers use. Windows has .exe and it makes it so much easier for developers to release one application which is dead simple for users to install. No instruction manual with different methods per distro. Just double click. This results in less support for Linux in general. Fewer games and applications an drivers with fewer features.
Poor backwards compatibility. Yes it results in bloat, but it also makes it much cheaper to develop for and maintain applications, and this results in more developers for Windows. More hardware and driver support. More applications. More games.
It is no mystery to me why developers don't focus more on Linux support. It's more expensive. They tell us this. What is so frustrating is that Linux fans are so quick to blame developers instead of focusing inwards and making Linux a more supportive platform for said developers.
That's not true. .exe isn't an installation method, it's just a binary, the better equivalent would be .msi. Also you also have to consider (some) dependencies on Windows, e.g. you can't assume the required vcredist is available on the target.
Not super sure about this. I was able to run an over 10 year old binary only game when I last tried (UT 2k4 in 2016 or so) and it worked after providing a single missing library. Yes, it did require manual intervention, but I think the situation is much better on Windows where compatibility also isn't granted anymore.
10 year old binaries are only an achievement on Macs.
I have been able to run Lotus Organizer on Windows 11, 20-30 years old and only runs on a FAT formatted partition of maximum 4GB.
I think one could argue this but it's immaterial. My point remains the same. The lack of a universal installation method makes deployment expensive on Linux, and confusing for users.
I can run a 1998 copy of StarCraft designed for Windows 98 on Windows 11. It's true there are degrees of backwards compatibility here, but Windows is king. They invest a lot of dev time into ensuring applications remain operational for decades. Their API deprecation policies are legendary.
If you're fine with an executable just writing stuff to your system, then .sh is Linux' universal installer format.
I agree, Microsoft has invested a lot into backwards compatibility and some nifty tricks to deal with DLL hell which was a huge issue in the past and as a result, provide the best backwards compatibility, as long as you stay on x86-64. Nowadays, each .exe basically sees its own sets of dlls in the filesystem. I agree it's best there. My point was rather that it's not as bad on Linux as people make it out to be if the application was packaged correctly. Going forward, I think stuff like Valve's Linux Runtime can provide compatibility.
I would be, but it's not enforced. Few developers use it. Any method needs to have almost total universal adoption. Then libraries get built around that standard instead of the other way around.
That's fair. It's getting better. Linus Torvalds agrees with you. Valve might have to save us from this fragmentation.
Sometimes I dislike how most distros are against proprietary and closed source code. But then I remember all of the money those companies are making off of war, genocide, and slavery and I feel better about it.
Sometimes it's a legal thing. They are not allowed to distribute proprietary software in their repositories.
I've only ever had moral problems installing proprietary software on Linux. Haven't had technical problems for a long time, at least not since switching off of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu and GNOME
I'll be nice in case the developers are reading.
I just think they're both pretty misguided in their goals.
Ubuntu used to be Debian plus your laptop's Wi-Fi works out of the box. The hardware support has improved and now Debian in 2025 is better than Ubuntu, plus Debian never shows you terminal ads or prompts you to
snap installsomething that obviously isn't going to run well inside the default Snap sandbox.I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu to any new users now. I'd sit and install Debian stable with them, and if something is missing, I'd try Debian unstable or the proprietary repos.
No offense to on-the-ground Ubuntu devs, but Ubuntu really feels like Debian plus a billionaire's desire to make money reselling Debian.
GNOME... Wants the desktop to look like a phone. Got rid of the system tray and then you have to do a little dance t re-install it. I don't know why. I've had useful stuff in the system tray since Windows XP.
I think GNOME might have also spearheaded the trend of ruining SEO and documentation by naming apps what they do instead of with real names? Like "Movie player" or "Web Browser". I don't know if they did any studies or if it helps new users but it's real weird for advanced users. Most people know that "Chrome" is a brand of web browser, so why would you name your web browser "Web Browser" and make things weird? I like KDE's thinking. Pick a name and wedge a K into it. And then make an anime furry its mascot. Can't beat that!
There was a conspiracy theory years ago, because someone from Microsoft was making decisions at GNOME, that GNOME was going to be eaten inside-out by MS, like Nokia was. They were rolling .NET Mono stuff and some kind of object model... I don't think it got far but I don't care. I switched to xfce on my desktop and KDE looks great on the Steam Deck and laptop. KDE used to be heavy, but hardware got bigger.
I actually love the package managers on Linux. Apt would be better if you could install multiple versions side-by-side, but I get why that's hard. Whenever I use Windows it's like, gross, I have to use MSIs again? I can't just
apt install git curl wget screen lua? And on macOS I can install brew but a lot of apps use that funny pattern where you drag it into the Applications folder, and then you must remember to unmount the disk image, and also some apps aren't in the Applications folder.I actually love systemd and everyone can fight me on this. Systemd is really nice.
Same. I also have a hard time recommending Mint as an alternative because of major hardware support problems the last time I tried to test drive it (which was a few weeks ago). I always come back to Fedora, but OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is also wonderful, and I'd happily recommend either to newcomers. I did try CachyOS recently and stuck with it for a couple weeks, but recently went back to Fedora because of the constant AUR security issues.
I refer most new users to Bazzite if they just want to game and do normal things. For more technical users, I recommend flipping a coin over Fedora or Tumbleweed. Flatpak is the great uniting force in Linux right now, and I wish more developers would directly support it since community versions make me uncomfortable unless I thoroughly review them first, and I really don't enjoy that. The prevalence of Ubuntu-first packages is a major problem as Ubuntu rapidly enshittifies while Fedora and Arch communities are left to pick up the slack themselves. Pure Debian is fine, but release cycles are far too slow for my tastes.
Sleep seems to work nine times out of ten.
In that 1 time it hangs when resuming, so the computer is on but in a zombie state where it doesn't do anything (won't even power on USB devices).
Maybe my motherboard just sucks tho.
Also someone pretty please with a cherry on top make a VNC or RDP server that works on Plasma Wayland, I'm so sick of using Sunshine+Moonlight, it just isn't built for non-gaming usecases at all
Same problem here but it hangs when entering sleep! There were other people with this issue and apparently the manufacturer released a firmware update that might fix it... in the form of an exe file
Wait, does TigerVNC not work with Wayland?
Given this open issue on their repo, no, unless I'm missing some sort of experimental flag or build
The communal infighting.
Why has Wayland taken more than a decade to get to a somewhat acceptable state, but still lacking standardization?
Because it's a shitty protocol equally as bad as X, except in different. So we replaced horse shit with dog shit and some people insist on calling it progress.
While the rest of us is pissed that an actually good protocol won't happen for a long while because no one's gonna put the work in since everyone recently had to do work to support Wayland.
You got that totally wrong. In fact we replaced dog shit with horse shit.
/s
Games that just open on Windows require extra work to play on Linux. Sometimes it's just a few extra clicks, sometimes it takes a whole afternoon to figure it out, especially if you're like me and not very experienced with Linux.
I love gaming on my Linux machine, and for the most part it is a pleasant experience. By far the worst outcome is when an update breaks a game that was working perfectly fine. This seems to happen regularly, especially with online games.
I'm curious what games you're playing. Back when I started using linux regularly (~2017) this was absolutely the case, and even for a few years after proton first released it still was. But my experience now is games fall on either two extremes of working out of the box or being completly unplayable.
I just ran into a new crop of problems with Linux games.
Apparently Unity 5.4.0 has a bug where it will crash (or rather close the game) if Chrome is running. (Or any Electron app like oh, say … Steam) Kudos to Unity for fixing it, but shame a bunch of old Linux-native games will never get fixed.
https://discussions.unity.com/t/bug-in-unity-when-running-chrome-on-linux/646017
I'm curious what games you're playing. Back when I started using linux regularly (~2017) this was absolutely the case, and even for a few years after proton first released it still was. But my experience now is games fall on either two extremes of working out of the box or being completly unplayable.
Not a Linux thing directly but something that bothers me a lot: The complete lack of support from professional applications.
Wanna use this tool that cost hundreds of bucks on Linux? Lmao fuck you.
You’d think companies that actually make money could afford to support Linux and hobbyists doing FOSS stuff for funsies can only focus on the OS they use themselves but somehow we live in a world where the opposite is true.
This is what makes switching to Linux for me personally and probably a lot of other people completely unviable because it means having to give up on thousands of dollars of stuff for “freedom”.
And the onus is 100% on the companies developing software. They have to offer Linux versions first, so people can switch to Linux, giving them more Linux users. Doesn’t work the other way around.
Oh also psst don’t ever mention spending money on proprietary software around Linux people, they will have a heart attack.
This is the most important issue facing Linux adoption by far. I wish Valve or someone would step in and start improving Wine/Proton's general application support. A couple years ago someone made a fork of Wine that got Affinity running, but those improvements never made it back into the upstream project. Productivity software not being given serious consideration is a common problem with Wine/Proton as projects.
I mean the way i see it, not everything can be free. People are putting their time and lives into these programs. And not everyone donates even to projects they've used for decades.
You want to do some cool thing and you find instructions online.
But that shit only works when t every single aspect of the s is the exact same version.
Which will never be the case, so now you’re at co desperately trying to improvise the steps that, if you inherently knew how to do, you wouldn’t have needed instructions for in the first place.
The norms on where files belong are really dumb.
Similarly, programs being entitled to strew files all over kingdom come.
Ten different ways to install software and maybe one or two of them actually keep track of where all the files are and clean them up properly upon removal.
Having to install apps manually and figure out dependencies myself because a popular piece of software only officially supports Ubuntu and Debian. No normal human would ever do this. They would go back to Windows. Hell, I still haven't even gotten one piece of software to work on my new OpenSUSE system yet: Beyond Compare 4. [UPDATE: I got it from work. Either I was blind or they just added OpenSUSE instructions. ]
Why are there so many package managers with such different syntaxes? And why does one repo maintainer decide to call a package "package" and another calls it "package4"? Or some entirely different name! It's maddening. I've had to create empty proxy packages that translate package names just to install some RPM file. Again, the average person is not going to do this.
In KDE plasma, the first thing most people do is set up Wi-Fi on their computer, but you need to set up KWallet first or else the password gets stored in some other dimension. I accidentally typed my Wi-Fi password wrong, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to clear it out and make it ask me for the proper password when I try to connect. I even went into network manager and switched the network to say, "ask me every time". It wouldn't! It would just sit there and hang on "authenticating". I never did figure it out. I ended up forgetting to encrypt my system partition, so I simply reinstalled the OS.
And it's not only obscure software on obscure distros.
The Arduino IDE doesn't run on Fedora 42. It just doesn't work.
I personally don't need it, I use ESP-IDF on Platformio, but Arduino is an incredibly common piece of software and one I would have expected to work flawlessly on Linux.
It is not Linux itself but:
I dislike when something goes wrong with a program and the documentation is not clear on how to fix it. But I do not complain because it is understandable when developers write documentation they have to choose who's hand to hold, if they choose to help everyone then the documentation can get long and perhaps redundant.
When one is a beginner and installs a distribution for the first time one can get scared by the splash screen showing errors which are 99% of the time safe to ignore (e.g showing that a device was not found). I know its important for developers and advanced users to know all this info but it can make beginners feel so damn scared (like me).
Naming, like in the general sense, it seems like many software have some ridiculous names (dolphin, ncmpcpp, gimp, foot, gnome). Very subjective, I know, but in the end I love and hate these names.
Bluetooth... yeah.
For dolphin, if your talking about the emulator it is avalible for windows too and its called that since thats what the gamecube was called internally.
For gimp, yeah i hate the name too, its the "gnu imange manipulation program" and is also avalible for windows.
Those programs that look like random assortments of characters are generally libraries that other programs use to standarize functionality across programs. Don't want there to be 15 different ways for your computer to understand "write this file to this location" for example. You'll generally never need to know what they are or what they do.
Exactly. Anyway, I was referring to KDE's file manager(Dolphin).
Ah, I don't use KDE, that is a dumb name for a file manager.
I'm a perpetual child so I like Gimp. Lol
All the different window top bars/UI elements not lining up.. especially for stuff that has nothing up there.. extra annoying when disabling window decorations don't disable them
tbf if you look at most Windows apps, almost none are completely identical. especially modern electron wrappers
Tbf I didn't like it on windows either lol
And if I listed all the things I don't like about it the list would also be a lot longer than one (relatively mild) annoyance haha :3
That sounds like a KDE thing, specifically. This is pretty much not an issue in Gnome unless you're running something with X11 compatibility.
That kind of comment is what annoys me most about Linux. You explain your problem and then smart_linux_guru_89 gives you a lecture about how the kernel module of KDE desktop library layer is using an instance of the filesystem version in vim-enabled interface and you should edit the famously-known /etc/rcmpfs.conf file before recompiling with the correct flatpack in rust binary stack. And then they get mad wen you tell them you don't understand and they end up saying you should StIcK To wiNdOw$ if YoU dOn'T kNoW hOW tO UsE a COmpUTeR.
In other words, the community is the worst thing about linux. It's been that way for the 30 years I've been watching it.
Not what I'm saying at all. KDE has this as a known issue they aim to fix. Gnome only solved it with the move to Wayland and a lot of work on unification of the graphics libraries to render those things.
That's a strange conclusion to reach, considering that KDE's window manager / compositor draws uniform top (title) bars for all applications that allow it, while GNOME/Gtk has adopted client-side decorations where each app draws whatever it wants at the top of the window.
I think it's more likely that GP is either using GNOME apps that have different ideas about what to stuff into their title bars, or using some other desktop environment with a mix of apps built with different widget toolkits (or different versions of them).
The difference is: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libadwaita/
Even if you launch an app in compat-mode, the decorations are still rendered as if native. KDE still working this out.
Not a ding on KDE or anything, and there's plenty of hate for Adwaita, but it works.
I actually used GNOME for most of my linux time lol :3.. now im kinda jumping around between TWMs until COSMIC, I only tried KDE in VMs and it was very much not for me (and tbf I only like GNOME with a ton of extensions too)
vendor support
Hibernation should really soon work out of the box with Secure Boot on. Afaik chromeos was looking into that
Also paranoid people saying that e.g. all TPMs are made by the devil and will spy you to death lol
TPMs give a false sense of security. Hardware security is really hard.
The elitism
Middle click to free scroll not working in non-FF browsers
Chromium added it a while back, but you have to launch with
--enable-blink-features=MiddleClickAutoscrollTotal lack of stability, not in "crashing programs" but in the entire idea of "throw it all out and start over" that seems to 100% infest every single Linux developer every few years.
Not to mention the total loss of every single bit of UNIX philosophy over the years.
"Everything's a file." ? Not according to Linux, not any more.
All the various *ctls necessary to run and inspect your system have completely gotten out of control.
Totally agree. For some reason we have an aversion to learning from those that came before us. We have to learn the hard way and keep reinventing the wheel, often in worse ways. This post made me laugh because it is so accurate: https://feddit.online/post/929088
I first started with Linux in 1994, with Slackware.
However, I've preferred FreeBSD for years, now. The only reason I use linux at all is Steam. There's been work getting it working in FreeBSD, but not enough, and it basically only works on machines with an Nvidia GPU. And I've also been Team Red for literally decades.
Ah well.
Oh man, I loved the simplicity of FreeBSD. I was actually running it for a bit on my homelab. It was so nice and straightforward, wich suuuuuuch good documentation.
Yep. All the Linux fanboys always say "Arch wiki this" and "Arch wiki that" while the FreeBSD handbook has been the king of documentation for over 2 decades.
Smug and condescending users that started using Linux 2 months ago.
Arch Linux has been around longer than that (and so have their users!)
I hate that nobody recognizes Linux as a legit OS. But that is the same with many FOSS projects like LibreOffice. The format is not recognized in a lot of places, which is insane. Microsoft really have their marketing prefected
The problem with Libreoffice is that they are satisfied with being a second-rate clone of the baroque mess that is Office 2007.
Google Docs is the last thing to push the Word Processor forward, kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
I’m pretty sure there’s a viable solution in the git +markdown+latex space but no one has quite found it yet. LyX is close-ish but misses the mark.
I am very optimistic about typst, but I reckon that people find it immensely complex.. One command and people loose their mind
Typst is another one with potential, yep. Still early and it has a ways to go… we’ll see if it manages to take the crown from LaTeX.
I think functionally something like the LyX concept of “what you see is what you mean” is critical, as is the version control (where git is the best option / biggest player)
We have awesome distributed systems like Kubernetes (rke2, or k3s as easy distro examples) BUT no desktop usage.
I want a distributed desktop dang it. My phone, my smart tv (media PC), my gaming computer, my SOs gaming computer, my router, my home lab, etc, etc should theoretically all be one computer with multiple users, and multiple interfaces.
Same reason as the rest of the world: too complicated to use. Also pretty much all the DEs are ugly and dated, save for GNOME, in my opinion.
I don’t understand all the excitement about KDE…I tried it out on a VM and I was, at best, underwhelmed. It just felt too busy.
It's not pretty but it is familiar to Windows user and very powerful.
Libinput. I want to use wayland. I would use wayland. I will not use wayland because libinput is the antichrist.
Every now and then I update my system and go to move my cursor and say (aloud) "wow, this is ass!" And that's when I know that I'm in a wayland session or libinput has otherwise been selected as my touchpad's input driver. And it's not like other Linux things where I can just change some settings to tune it, noooo, because why would you need to do that?? Let's just make an input driver that shakes the cursor with my every heartbeat and a hardcoded acceleration profile that is simultaneously too sensitive to click small things and not sensitive enough to move a window across the screen without multiple touchpad strokes because that's perfect on every system and everyone should just be okay with that because it's the standard and good and I hate it hate hate hate hate
Hate hate hate hate hate
Hate
(I very much appreciate you, libinput developers, you do great work and I am grateful for it, and I just have some (kind of maybe very strong) suggestions about configurability in your design philosophy)
Having to use the terminal even once
I mean I agree, but I love how fast and to the point the terminal can be. But yeah it scares people so I get it. Imo they should learn to not be scared of it but we all say that...like trying to get a young American kid to drive a manual
No three finger drag on Wayland
Hyprland just added this fyi
Honestly, not much.
The first would be that the webcam in my work laptop goes in and out of working pretty regularly. It happens to the whole team so I know it’s not just mine. I end up using an external one pretty regularly. Mostly I’m annoyed at Dell for not providing proper driver support.
The second is that there are a very small number of applications that I occasionally use where I need to fire up a VM. But even that is more of I’m annoyed at the organization that forces me to use an obsolete proprietary file format once a quarter.
I hate that I've got to the point that if something goes wrong, I know it's 99.9% user error and can't blame anyone else.
Buy an Nvidia graphics, you can blame it then. Accidentally erased your disk with dd? Fuck Nvidia!
No it isn't.
Otherwise installing Linux as a regular user is also user error.
Linux needs a shared API framework for all desktop apps for them to succeed. It’s ridiculous that gnome apps and other apps look different and have different theming conventions. I’d love to get into theming and application building, but I’m so afraid that I’ll waste my time on something that won’t apply to everything. macOS solved application cohesion perfectly.
There's now game developers dropping native support for proton, because proton has a more uniform, stable and predictable API.
So while Linux in many ways becomes the better way to play Windows games, it's also better to play Windows games on Linux than Linux games on Linux.
I can see a future where more and more of Linux just becomes a wrapper around Proton.
Proton for everything would be pretty heavy though. I’m referring to user facing APIs that could be made consistent.
Proton is not that heavy. In many cases it's less heavy than Windows.
And sadly I cannot see a future where all of Linux rallies under the same APIs without giving in to the urge to forge.
My one major complaint is audio in general. I've had so many audio issues. If you need an eq or noise canceling it's a pain to get it working. There's always a bug somewhere, always a random distortion.
Voicemeeter is the only thing I miss about Windows. I really do.
I have an audio issue where it starts chopping if (I think, but could be CPU as well) the GPU struggles (think shader compilation). I've tried a couple of things to fix it, but haven't been successful yet. So far it's been my only major complaint.
A lot of the Linux community are the most obnoxious entitled scumbags I've ever met in my life.
The amount of people that get very demanding or hate developers (who are donating their time for free) when they don't cater their project towards that user's desires... it bothers me. It's even present in this very thread. It's an extremely popular viewpoint to have, and it seriously bugs me.
If you don't like how a project is run, don't use it. It's their project.
Booting problems. Every once in a while, I get GRUB for no reason. Can’t find a boot disk that existed yesterday. WTF? Effing hate that sh!t.
Finally heard about immutability features like VanillaOS and might move to that…
My system boots to an initrd prompt, and then I reset it and it shows the boot menu and then starts correctly after the timer counts down. I'm not sure how to fix it, and I don't reboot often enough to make it worth my time to figure out.
Ever clicked an icon in the taskbar and received a notification that the window was "ready" but it's still behind other windows? This shit drives me up the wall.
GNOME? It's an insane default but can be quickly fixed.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1007/window-is-ready-notification-remover/
That also happens to me on Windows 11 at work.
I hate being stuck in Dependency Hell thag happens sometimes when compiling programs, and other times when some vital hardware pieces like monitors, ethernet, sound don't appear to work.
It takes me an hour or more to get them working again, and makes me want to delete everything and reinstall the OS from scratch.
I miss executable files being as easy as on windows
Appimages are the equivalent and seamless in my experience
People having politics arguments on FOSS fora or mailing lists. We have a basic interest in open source in common, why are there additional purity tests being applied to people who don't act "sufficiently" left wing? Or, equally as often, why are you throwing around playground insults like a 14 year old and discussing conspiracy theories?
Basically people not behaving respectfully to others.
I don't know if I agree with the issue of installing software. Sure, there are a lot of ways to do it, but it's better than navigating to a website, downloading an executable, and having it install for you. There's too many points for error to cause issues. Plus, you have to do that for every update usually.
Is it perfect on Linux? No. It's better than Windows though.
Not gonna agree. Windows and Mac installs are LIGHTYEARS easier for a normal user.
How many normal people can manually compile a program, or decide between a .deb, flatpak, or snap? They would give up before even researching.
Also programs have been able to auto update for many many years now..
How often do you need to manually compile a program? 99.99% of the time you just tell you package manager to install a package and that's it. You don't need to decide anything. In the case you do need to manually compile, you probably have to for Windows as well, and it's for stuff that an average user won't even consider wanting anyway, so it isn't an issue.
A knowledgeable user needs to decide between what type of package to install, and how. A novice just needs to install it.
A lot of Linux software has really stupid names, and has since before Torvalds even started. GNU is a garbagepuke name for an operating system, and they've just kept doing that. Recursive actronyms like NANO and LAME, Gpackages and Krograms, and then so many bash built-ins and common shell programs have names like lsphw.
I once had this conversation:
"This distro comes with a kernel that's so new it breaks compatibility with [some piece of hardware]"
"use mainline"
"Yeah, okay, I have no idea how to do that in this distro."
Turns out "Mainline" is a kernel management tool. I thought the guy was telling me to use a mainline Linux kernel instead of a customized one, because A. the name of the app is poorly chosen, and B. he had the communication skills of a homeschooled zoomer.
I have spent way too much time fiddling with audio, both in PulseAudio and Pirewire. Granted, this sucks even more on Windows.
Weird how my absolute favorite thing about Linux is how easy and simple installing software is, at least on Arch. Never touched a flatpack or snap or whatever else they're called for my 13+ years if use.
No easy/simple kiosk mode. One of the very few things Windows does well, you can turn any computer into a kiosk in less than 5 minutes.
With Linux, you have to jank a bunch of stuff together and it's a huge pain.
https://porteus-kiosk.org/ looks like a distro that makes it easy.
I've messed with Porteus before, it's still janky, and locked down, not fully open source. Better than nothing, but still not as easy as Windows.
This is a good question. There's nothing I hate about Linux there are things I hate about some projects, and some communities, and some distributions.
Maybe zombie processes. I guess I dislike that Linux isn't a microkernel, but I doubt it'd have a huge impact because the kernel has been incredibly stable for my uses for years. I can't actually remember the last time I saw zombie processes, but it was within the past two years, and their existence is just a fundamental stupidity in Linux, and closely tied to the monolithic kernel architecture.
But, still... it'd be hard to stretch that to "hate."
CUPS is a terrible piece of software that almost everyone needs, and needs somebody to come along and do a pipewire on it. I guess I hate CUPS, but that's not Linux.
nuts could be much, much easier. It's designed for power users and is a PITA to configure. Quite capable, but could be a lot more simple for simple use cases.
I'm really reaching here. There's little in Linux + BSD userspace (or even GNU) that's not far worse on a Mac or in Windows; maybe I'd feel stronger if there was a better option.
I'm really, really hoping Redox makes it. I'd love to see an end-user oriented, non-research microkernel with broad hardware support - something good enough to run on modern bare hardware. Then I might jump ship, especially if I get to jettison systemd in the process.
Currently that it just shuts down hard when waking from sleep. I suspect its something to do with my monitor but haven't spent the time to work out why.
Linux is super cool when everything works out of the box. But once you need to make adjustments, you're in a world of pain.
I recently had the distinct displeasure of using visudo for the first time and was flabbergasted that this should be the recommended standard app for its purpose. An app which randomly turns mouse and keyboard inputs into random letters, doesn't have a visible command menu, doesn't allow you to click to place the text cursor, doesn't have an easy way of copy-pasting...WTF? 🤯
Now, I am actually a trained IT professional who has installed and managed a plethora of firewalls, virtual machines, file servers, VPNs, etc... but Linux has me stumped way too often when apps seem to lack the most basic attention to usability.
And the lack of standardization leads to absurd situations where to solve one problem you have to first dig into three different underlying subsystems and their peculiarities, spending hours on trial and error using scant & often outdated or non-applicable documentation (it's for another distro and two years old). 🙄
Is this the first time you've had the pleasure of using vi/vim? 😄 visudo is a command that locks the sudo file and just opens vi or vim. It's not a text editor in and of itself.
Vim is the source of the famous "how do you quit vim", meme. (:q , btw) The interface is completely nonintuitive and has modes. In "edit mode", all the buttons do different edits to text or move the cursor. That must have been your experience: trying to type in edit mode and getting garbage. You have to enter "insert mode" to type using the
Ikey. Commands to do things like save and quit are started by typing a colon in edit mode. You navigate in edit mode using HJKL as arrow keys.To avoid it, set your default editor to nano instead. Nano's hotkeys are nonsensical to people coming from Windows, but at least they're displayed on the screen at all times.
$ export EDITOR=nanoOh yes, nano is what I eventually resorted to despite the menacing warning in red not to stray from the visudo path.
I had actually used vim before when I tried out Linux 25 years ago or so. Didn't leave a favorable impression then, either. And no, it didn't convince me to switch to emacs. 😉Different taste of terrible, IIRC.
Vi/vim is honestly a horrendous tool. It's nice if you want to spend a few hours memorizing commands and learning how to use a text editor. Then you can do cool stuff.
But it very much shouldn't be the default tool for anything really.
In any OS published some time within the last two decades you'd expect a decent GUI settings tool to handle all that work for you and if you really need to sudo a text config file it should at least by default launch a GUI text editor for that purpose when running in a graphical shell.
vi/vim/nano/emacs are ok for CLI only setups, but there's no point to have any of that as defaults or even recommendations for graphical sessions.
Fedora Flatpaks needs to diaf. That is all.
non copyleft software in general1
Uh, um... I do not like how I have to install microsoft fonts seperately to have times new roman on my resume?
Bluetooth support can be a mix bag one point my keyboard constantly disconnects for every few minutes likely due to the hardware aggressively try to save power.
Suspending can be 50/50 especially on old hardware. Either you get it back up and running or you will have to forcibly shut it down since it refuses to accept any commands.
For some reason some Steam games invert my mouse wheel direction but don’t when ran in windows and I can’t figure out a per-application toggle for it.
Why things decided to try and undo 30 years of muscle memory I don’t know.
Thats bizarre, does it happen on every mouse you plug in?
You know what, I’ve not tried. But as it’s not all titles I concluded it was software rather than hardware. It’s a sensible shout sh and I’ll try one day when I find a minute to start messing about.
I don't dislike much about Linux and do realize that most issues stem from major software developers simply ignoring its existence. Here are a few I had to scratch my head for:
Touchpads on Linux are generally worse when it comes to palm rejection compared to Windows. Macbooks are on a completely different level.
Another thing missing is the scrolling acceleration, which is present on Windows and MacOS.
People who approve protocol proposals are very annoying and often stall critical protocols for years.
The trackpad experience on MacOS is one of the things that keeps me on MacOS. That and Preview.
Security should be the default, but instead a lot of security features are optional things we have dig through docs to set.
TPM support is getting more common, using it should be too. Detected during install? Set it up as part of LUKs during install, and enable a password, and provide option for TANG (both usage or deployment).
fscrypt should be enabled by default and keys set by logical differences of file types. (Yes on top of LUKS). Honestly setup following selinux profiles and per user is a reasonable default. Hardware wrapped keys should be default.
Encrypted memory an option for this CPU? Enable it. Features for multiple key memory encryption? Enable it. Encrypt on a per VM and per container level by default.
Each service should be containerized, connections made explicit (ideally with l7 rules, l4 at least). If a user want to tinker with have a dev mode that opens that service up, with expectation that it's temporary (track and warn user when active). Each service should run as it's own non root user.
Each application should containerized. Wayland should be default to minimize shared data. Access by apps should be explicit and user approved and user configurable. Application should never run as root and escalations should be temporary and explicitly approved by the user. Application to the network should be explicit per connection and l7 aware.
MACSec WPA3 pki should be available during install. Wireless WPA3 PKI option should be default on wireless setup. IPSec/Wire guard VPN/Tor should be available option by default on setup. Vlan tagging should be available options on setup.
FIPS or equivalents should be enforced by default. Old encryption methods/cipher/etc should require explicit approval by the user.
Selinux should enabled by default and selinux tagging should be exposed in user applications, so users can choose the security levels, privacy tags (medical or tax docs or etc), or pseudonym access they want.
Sudo should be setup by default for least privileged roles and not god mode access. The combination of those into a single user could look indistinguishable but it should be set and ready for adding users that are limited in scope.
Encrypted backups following the 321 rule (at least 3 backups, 2 different types of media, 1 off site) should be the default and configurable on install. Schedule and triggered backups should be frequently (ideally constantly backup, with snapshot ting being periodic).
Multiple factor logins should be the default. Support for smart card, key fob, OTP, biometric, plus password built-in and encouraged on install.
Number of known CVEs for hardware, packages, and configurations should be tracked and obviously available for privileged users. Hardware missing for full best practices (like TPM 2.0, memory encryption support, etc). Software source should be kept easily accessable to users for remove and modifications. Software should adhere to SLSA build practices, exception explicitly choosen the user.
Systems should be immutable with expectations being explicit to the user and triggering snapshot ting.
DNSSEC and DNSoTLS/DNSoHTTPS should be default and configurable on install.
NTS should be default for NTP configuration. Hardware time sources should be configurable on install.
Applications should be privacy preserving by default (not defaulting to Google for example).
These are just off the top of my head stuff, stuff I had to annoyingly learn and set up myself to harden systems instead of it just being part of sane defauls. CIS bench mark has more controls that should be set.
Poor VR support. I’d probably switch if it ever becomes stable.
There are always problems with the global menu widget on Plasma. And recently it has been refusing to work as a single button, instead I have to switch to showing all options as separate buttons which looks terrible with my panel setup.
Also applications making packages that could have easily been optional, required, just because users will think the app has broken functionality otherwise. KDE Plasma handles this best by replacing setting pages in the setting app with a note with instructions and showing normal warnings in other apps.
I hate that smb is still the standard lan filesharing protocol. I used nfs once and it kinda sucked. I just want smb but without mangled filenames. Basically I hate when I have a substandard experience because of Microsoft.
So your last words clearly concede that it’s microshaft’s fault.
Is it? Because they also blame NFS for being a suboptimale alternative.
Ah. Well I dunno, I’m not an expert. I only have my own experiences.
I love NFS. What made you dislike it? Just curious.
It works very well for me running arch on the desktop and unRAID on my NAS in the basement. NFS lets me blend my whole data pool into my file browser easily. Using the terminal on files on the NAS is chef's kiss
My only complaint is sometimes it takes some finicky bullshit to auto-mount all the time. But I think that's more of a problem with fstab. I don't even remember how I fixed it last time.
Time to back up my fstab file lmao
My opinion… try to set up kerberized NFS and check back.
What. A. Pain.
I haven't used it for years, but I thought it was a little inflexible and spooky to have it grant access based on IP addresses. I have static IPs on my LAN, but still. I also remember my system getting real fucky if the nfs share went down for some reason.
Mostly video related.
YouTube videos are hella pixelated and sometimes the audio de syncs.
Also the active blocking some companies do with DRM. Things like competitive online games and some streaming services like Peacock.
Just the absolute resistance a lot of developers have.
Lack of a single standard way of installing and removing software.
Some software on my computer comes from APT, some are installed using deb file, some from Flatpak, some from Snap, some are AppImages, some are installed by a random shell script, some are Progressive Web Apps and finally some have custom installers (like Jetbrains). If I want to uninstall an app, I often don't know where to even look.
All of that happens despite Linux Mint (the distro I'm using) have an app for installing software. It makes things a little easier, but still doesn't cover every possible option.
This is similar on mac and windows. Some software is available in the built-in package management (aka store). Some are installed from msi or dmg files. Some are portable executables. Some are PWA. Some are via command line utilities like homebrew and chocolatey.
No workstation OS has every possible option in one place.
I highly recommend bazzite or aurora if you want an actual solution, linux mint will probably never fix this
SO ANNOYING!! how do we see what's installed, and then remove it. It shouldn't be hard.
Multithreaded performance is awful. The system becomes completely unresponsive if a single process uses a lot of CPU despite another core being available. Copying a file in the background slows everything down to a crawl.
That and laptops. Will hibernation work this time? Will it wake up or do I need to forcefully restart it? Will my second monitor work after hot-plugging it? Will the battery last 2 or 6 hours this time?
You are still rolling the dice whenever you really need some specific specialized proprietary software. Especially if you need to get it running ASAP and without major issues. It might work out of the box with wine, or it might not. You just don't know and that
Gaming is better, but it's still gaming, just toys.
Nothing to hate... some forums have turned pretty caustic but other than that, the software and the community are awesome
Re Flatpaks, I did not like them so I do not use them.. not need to hate a thing I have barely any interaction with, choosing not to use them has not limited me at all
Never had wifi power management issues either (15 years on Linux)
I dont like how some devs make the non flatpak version basically invisible..
Unreproducible, random bugs that can be temporarily solved by repeating your actions a bunch of times until it works. Drives me nuts, and they show up all over the place.
I would love to figure out how to make the back and forward buttons on my super basic logitech mouse work. Last I looked, I had to install some mouse configuration app and do some manual stuff to program the buttons. I gave up.
What distro? Mine work out of the box without any configuring.
Mint. Mouse is a Logitech G305. I guess I'll have to give input remapper a shot again.
Same. I miss using the mouse as a browser back button.
After installing "Input Remapper," you continue to need only the same amount of effort as setting up the Logitech application, except without the nags to create an account for no useful reason.
Also, I think the back/forward buttons get mapped by default on some newer distros, since my Performance MX is Just Working and I only had to remap the buttons I already remap on other OSes.
I managed to get it working using Input Remapper this past weekend. So nice having this back - thank you!
Thanks for the follow-up! Glad to hear it worked for you. I only recently discovered it myself a few months ago and wondered where it had been all my life.
Bluetooth support that only sometimes works with my soundcore q30's.
Honestly, the fact I don't have as much time as I'd like to contribute workarounds.
Take yesterday, I got Magic and Mayhem (the classic) running via wine, but I had to create a new wine prefix to remove dpi scaling (because, Apparently, the winecfg graphic tab is global, and if dpi scaling is used it truncates the game's display). Still can't get the music working, but that's what MOC is for, and I did use an old cracked version.
I want to make a lutris install script for this, but I lack the time. That's my main dislike of Linux - I wish there was a solid indexed forum to share game workarounds that had a drop-down search by game.
The closest thing we have to this is probably protondb but I've never seen any super in-depth tweaks from users there. I'm also not 100% sure if they have non steam games posted there. If they do I imagine there's not exactly a ton of posted guides by users
I play a lot of abandonware titles, and there is a spot (90s and early 00s) that are a pain to run. I can normally figure it out on a spare day, but I know a lot of folks just give up.
Hey I play a lot from that era as well! I tend to try to find the ps1 versions so I can just use duckstation...or install win98 in a virtual machine. Runs games pretty well then with no compatibility problems.
I feel the same ! I wish I could dedicate time to help programmers out..its actually what made me even more interested in learning how. I want to contribute !
Oh! Came up with a new one, though it’s more of a unixism than a Linux specific thing.
I really wish that the core utils and other cli tools had a standard structured output option, like yaml, json, or toml so that it would be easier to parse rather than all of the random regular expressions needed when piping output around.
Edit: And it would be great if we also picked that same format for config files instead of all the bespoke stuff in /etc.
The community lmao
Seriously though. You are sadly totally right there. "Works on my machine, so it must be user error."
"First time doing this? It's an easy fix bro: [unironnically links Arch Wiki, not even a specific page]".
Or just: "Skill issue."
Making distro clones with premade software, wallpaper, etc.
Systemback is easy to use, but then complex to install for normal people (lack of instructions, have to manually make the partitions, needs 3 partitions but nothing states that in the software).
Post-Cubic customizations are easy for normal people to install but way more complex to set up (basically terminal only, need to know more abstract terminal commands for specific customizations like pinning an app to the bottom panel).
Basically, the classic Linux GUI problems.
People that argue over Gnome vs. KDE. Shut up and use whatever you like. No need to yuck other people's yum.
Electron apps (more like erection apps), I rather burn my computer quit civilization and live on a deserted island than using any apps that has electron as a dependency.
No SIGINFO. Barbaric.
I mean I wish games were just natively developed for it and besides that I have complaints about my distro. As much as I like it I wish it used kde instead of gnome as its supposed to emulate the windows look and feel and there are to many things missing with window management in gnome. I would also like appimage to keep settings in the image by default.
That's not a Linux thing, that's just developers choosing the wider audience available. With Proton extensions, they have no reason to not put in the minor amount of work to build a simple compatibility layers though.
Yeah I was trying to say I can't think of specific linux things just things around linux. So the games and my distro and one project. Its hard to think of a complaint for the larger entity.
You can probably switch to KDE without changing distros. Although, if you never done it before I recommend a full backup of anything you don't want to lose. That way if you endup nuking your system somehow you can just do a reinstall, possibly to a distros that does come with KDE.
I doubt it would nuke the system and I have thought about just adding it but the thing is the distro for me is all about one and done. Yeah I have added a few things to it but I would really like them to get more serious about the interface. The reason they don't is im sure because it uses ubuntu lts as a base and while they add things to it I think they are not looking to change it all that much. Its just a laziness chain.
For Ubuntu you just run
sudo apt install kde-plasma-desktop. Presumably it's the same for the derivative you're using.After that gnome will still be there, and you just toggle between the two at login.
yes i have used kdm and gdm in the past on systems. Im aware I could install it but I simply do not want to mess with my system more than necessary given its a minor concern. Its the same reason I use a distro that is out of box and based on lte ubuntu such that its behind it. I use it because I am up and running and going right after installation without making any changes much like windows which I replaced (actually better because of all the software it includes by default). Granted I made a few and even added compizconfig to get a bit of what I wanted which made me realize I should just add kde but again 100% don't want to deal with any issues it might bring up. most things I have added are 100% not going to cause and issue like nettools, imagemagik, and screensavers. compizconfig was a bit of a risk and im not sure if I would have done it but I was pretty frustrated atm. Maybe if I get frustrated enough again I will pull the trigger on kde.
Which distro? Chances are you can install KDE on it and then select the Plasma session next time you log in.
On Debian-based systems, the package you would want to install is probably task-kde-desktop. More info here: https://wiki.debian.org/KDE
yeah i aware I can install kde.
Systemd.
Only because I've used something else - anything else - as an integrator and packager, and everything else is more stable, more consistent, more reliable and more isolated.
This thing is looking for sploits.
I know this is petty, but title bars in apps. Please, remove it entirely. It's not necessary and it feels so 2007. I don't need to be reminded which application I'm using when I can use that screen real estate for other things.
If using kde you can make it toggleble and by drfault hidden thats what I used, before switching to niri. Also assign a key to close the window.
Is there an other way to drag and move the window if they are gone?
You can alt+drag windows, which is more convenient anyway since you don't need to aim for the titlebar, can hold it by any part of the window.
Yes, at least on Windows, the entire top frame of the window is draggable so long as it's not a button or a tab. You can also use
WinKey+Arrowto shove them to one side or another, and if all else fails, you can tap thealtkey to temporarily bring out the file menu and the title bar.I don’t hate anything whatsoever! It kicks ass in everything. I’m sure there are some things I’d like to see improved, I can’t think of at the moment but I know I’ve had minor frustrations. But nothing is perfect and Linux has been absolutely fantastic for me on all the systems I use it for.
Come back to Linux recently, with a mini pc and Ubuntu. So far it's Snaps (specifically not doing hw acceleration with anything moderately new) and Wayland not updating the mouse cursor when the CPU usage gets heavy.
While many Devs have been working tirelessly behind the scenes making everything just work, it feels like there's another group doing their best to break it all again...
You can do a "minimal" install in Ubuntu that won't install snapd or any snaps, but as long as you are using a Canonical distro it is very, very easy to accidentally reinstall them. If you absolutely need a Debian-based distro, I recommend going with pure Debian or Mint. Otherwise, try Fedora or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Politics. Let me grab some 🍿 for all the arguments about how "Linux is inherently political" and all that nonsense that I don't care about. I just want to use the damn thing, that's all.
Its users
Managing multiple harddrives- I'm used to running multiple harddrives to manage disk space, but everything in Linux installs into /home without giving me an option to install somewhere else. I can apparently set a hard drive to be an extension of a Linux folder, but then how do I know what physical drive a file is on?
Making shortcuts- was very easy to make a shortcut in Windows. My Linux distro (Mint) has a specific keyboard command for it, but nothing in the GUI/menus.
oh i was annoyed with this too! WHY can't i change where software installs??? I use a smaller boot drive and have extra large hard drives. it's also very confusing how you mount a drive inside your media folder so then it looks like the data is actually under your home folder on your boot drive...but it's not.
The fact that Kerberos and LDAP originated in the *NIX ecosystem and still don’t work worth a shit without Active Directory.
That’s the one good thing to come from Microsoft in 20 years. Maybe GitHub too although it’s getting enshittified now.
Excessive jargon, tends to push away people who didn't take classes in computer engineering or grow up using unix. Mounting of drives, incomprehensible error or status messages or even "sudo".