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.
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 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.I can’t cross play on Ghost of Tsushima.
I can’t get my MT7927 wifi chip to work
I still have issues with Snap… But I switched to an Arch distro to fix that problem
I have a pair of Bluetooth earbuds that I sometimes use with my laptop. The actual BT connection goes smoothly in the KDE ui, but they don’t show up as an audio device until I restart the audio service in the terminal.
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 use Rustdesk and remote into my work PC. The lag is horrible and my windows key and alt keys don’t translate into the remote desktop.
Same PC running win 11 is buttery smooth.
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 even 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, you cant even 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.)
Why duplicate this thread? There’s now at least 3 copies…
Fingerprint reader: that thing looks at me every day, obscenely suggesting I boot up Windows instead of Linux so I can stroke it gently and login conveniently.
Oh, also battery life. Windows always has managed to extract more uptime from a single charge in my laptop.
I installed
power-profiles-daemonon my laptop (and configured it in the settings) a while back and noticed a bit better battery life. Maybe it could also be the kernel? I updated mine a while back and there was also an improvement.What are you using for power management on Linux? I forgot what I switched to but switching from the default (I think it was CPU power deamon) to something more granular literally doubled my uptime.
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.
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
Daily usage? I have some audio issues. It “feels” like the whatever resets/reinitializes. Really quickly though, playback isn’t being interrupted. Sometimes it switches to a dead output channel though and I have to reset it to the actually connected output. Too lazy to diagnose it.
As a longer standing point of annoyance, I find it very difficult to quickly go UI -> package name -> bug tracker -> bug report. For understandable reasons devs don’t exactly advertise their bug trackers, they’re always a bit obfuscated and have some barriers.
Color management continues to not work correctly, although that may be due to some x11 wayland conflict. I have a dark color theme preference and certain applications that aren’t directly available as package, but e.g. via flatpack don’t integrate well. Gnome calendar is something I can name, without wanting to blame the devs of that piece of software in particular. They’re doing their best, it’s not a priority, maybe not even an issue on their preferred config.
I also have some freeze crashes, although that’s more recent, might be a harddrive/hardware issue that throws off something very low level. But the reboot is so quick I barely mind that.
The only two issues I have at the moment are that Nemo is not a reliable file browser. It crashes almost daily. Some of its behavior is also frustrating when I go up a directory and it reshuffles my view and loses where I was. I deal with copious files and directories so this can be painful sometimes. Maybe need to play with Dolphin more or find another manager. Open to suggestions. I miss the expected behavior of the file manager in windows, but I don’t miss windows at all.
That second issue is not having an easy method to manage my iPhone with Linux. Pulling images is awkward and always requires fiddling. No iTunes of course for backup and updates. I don’t like OTA updates. So I keep a W10 VM (with no route out) for that stuff.
Otherwise, Linux works for everything else perfectly fine.
Edit: Mint btw. I do love how Linux makes the OS a tool for me rather than a tool for them.
Perhaps for the phone you could try something like KDE Connect. You have to be on the same wifi, but once connected, you can do things like remote input, sharing the clipboard, sending sms, sending files, and you can browse files from the PC.
Some things I have listed here may differ as I am on an Android
I am currently using dolphin, and I would highly recommend. I tried xfe before. It’s highly customizable, but opening files was king of annoying (you had to manually input the path of the application)
E: more information
Thanks! I did see a couple of tools like KDEC, but my main system is wired only. I suppose I could pop in a WiFi card and give that a whirl. If I can do some of those things that’d be nice. To move a file from Signal off my phone I had to use VLC. It worked, but yeesh.
Appreciate the input!
