It’s the little things that make me not fully jump to linux
This isn’t really meant to be a hate post or “linux sucks” kind of thing, in fact I like Linux (EndeavourOS being my distro of choice). This post is more about the little things that nobody really talks about when comparing OS’s, but then you face them and they can be a dealbreaker or a pain in the neck.
This weekend I decided to try running CachyOS in my gaming desktop. For quick context, my desktop is dedicated to gaming, everything else I do on my laptop. The desktop is plugged to a 1080p 60hz monitor and a 4k 120hz TV (hz relevant for later), uses sunshine for streaming, and also Virtual Desktop for my meta quest.
So, I grab the USB and plug it into the PC. Turn it on and here comes the first issue: the background image appears and nothing else.
Well, my first suspicion due to a similar issue I had with ubuntu a decade ago, must be the Nvidia GPU causing issues. Without investigating further, I restarted the PC and used the legacy mode. The resolution was extremely low in my monitor, but it was manageable. Installed the thing and restarted.
Once the PC is back on, the login screen appears. I input the pass, enter and…. Exact same issue. Background image, no UI whatsoever.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time here, investigating the error. Checking the drivers, etc.
But long story short: the actual problem was that my monitor was the second screen, the TV was the primary. The desktop was outputting to both screens. The UI was on the TV.
I curse myself for not remembering that this may have been it, but in my defense:
1- the terminal commands that appear when turning on the OS appeared in my monitor
2- the legacy mode worked on my monitor
3- on windows, the OS is smart enough to figure out which screen is turned on, so I was used to it automatically outputting to the correct screen
Well, once I fixed that, here came the second (small) issue:
Scaling is broken.
Windows used to have this problem but nowadays, when you change screen Windows does a good job scaling things, despite some issues with some apps. At the very least, you won’t get blurry windows.
On KDE… Yeah. Blurry all around. I don’t have a habit of swapping screens mid session, so I could live with it.
Then came the third issue:
KDE is limited by the lower highest possible framerate in both screens. Meaning, on my TV, I was stuck with the 60hz because of my monitor
From what I found out, this is not exclusive to KDE and seems to be a problem with Nvidia. Regardless, for me it was a dealbreaker. In my case, Windows can use the respective framerate of each screen, while Linux can’t.
As I said, this is where I threw the towel and went back to windows. Which is really a pity because I really don’t like where Windows 11 is going, but it’s something I can live with as long it doesn’t get in the way between me and gaming.
Meanwhile Linux, because of these little things, introduced more issues than rewards for my use case, thus why I can’t jump to it on my desktop.
I am going to HARD disagree with this statement. I have a Windows laptop for work and that thing has no clue which screens are turned on any given day. I occasionally have it think I have a third monitor plugged in that it uses as the primary and just does not exist. Switching desks in the office is insanely frustrating because I have to fix the display settings every single time.
Your problems with Nvidia track with my experience. Nvidia does not provide drivers for Linux (last I knew) so they are not plug and play.
Nvidia does provide drivers for Linux, they're just not in the kernel. They're precompiled, proprietary binaries. The kernel does have some support for Nvidia GPUs, but not a lot of the advanced features that Nvidia keeps in their proprietary drivers.
This is also changing with Nova, a new FOSS Nvidia driver written in Rust by Nvidia engineers that was recently accepted into the kernel. It's not yet production ready.
I also experienced this, I think it has to do with the monitors themselves. At least in my home, it can tell which one is turned on
I always have to fiddle with the useless joystick interface on my screens to get my work laptop W11 thing to work with them. Least plug and play experience ever.
Eh. I've had that issue with windows, but it's like a 1/10 thing and often a system or environment config that mostly stems from work settings. I've never had a personal windows laptop have those issues except with very edge case stuff.
I daily drive Linux, so I'm not exactly unbiased, but... It seems like you're assuming the problems are deep, and so they appear so. At least with the monitor selection one, that could happen with any OS, and most people wouldn't jump to "driver issues" on another OS.
For what it's worth, I have a 144hz monitor at 1440 and two 60hz monitors at 1080 and I don't have any issues with scaling or refresh rates. It's definitely not an Nvidia limitation. It's possible that's an Xorg limitation, though I'm fairly sure KDE uses Wayland by default these days.
Funny thing on this, I did have monitor issues that ended up being down to driver issues after two hours of debugging. For my work windows laptop.
Yeah, I feel like the debugging and "it just works" experiences are really not very different anymore. They're just different processes and tools and things that one may be more or less familiar with, and that makes it feel easier or harder.
i had that monitor juggling with both macos and windows last week.
OP got off light with the linux issues, really. I tried to full time it (i still need adobe stuff) and i spent so much time getting the magic trackpad to work properly.
Yeah it was using wayland in my case. Idk for sure if it’s fixable or not on Nvidia, I’m just parroting what I read
One point I didn’t mention in the post was that I don’t mean to say/imply none of these issues are fixable, I’m sure they are. But they’re things that work out of the box with Windows, while on Linux they don’t. I’m no stranger to tinkering and troubleshooting, but in this case I wasn’t willing to spend more time to fix them
Honestly, much of this may just be due to using a niche distro. A lot more users have used Fedora or Ubuntu or Debian, so problems with those distros tend to get ironed out much quicker than weird quirks with niche distros. I used to distro hop a lot, but to be honest, most Linux distro are 90% the same anyway for day to day use. I'd just pick the DE you like, then pick your favorite package manager and use the most popular distro that uses that combination.
Just boosting this comment. Unless you’d like to run a Linux box as a hobby, making a boring choice re. your distro is the correct call. It’s totally fine to colour outside the lines if you wish, but the training wheels are absolutely off at that point, and everything is liable to break.
I've been using Linux as my only operating system for 12 years. This year, I bought a new Linux gaming laptop (without OS preinstalled), I installed Bazzite with KDE and I had the exact problem you're describing: I booted into an empty desktop with no task bar and had to figure out a way with the command line to make stuff appear so that I could begin using my computer. It took me several hours and I had more than a decade of experience with this kind of stuff. Afterwards, I was kicking myself for not choosing Fedora to come preinstalled on the laptop, which would have avoided me the hassle.
I also have the scaling problem on my desktop using GNOME desktop environment. I have two monitors which need different zoom levels. So I set the zoom level on the primary monitor (that I game on) to 150%. When I then start a game, the game sees some weird crooked resolution like 1706x960. There are only two ways to avoid this and make the game see my monitor's full resolution: either use Valve's gamescope (which currently has a bug that prevents it from detecting controller input!) or to manually reset the zoom level before starting the game. I spent a day coding my own Python script that accesses GNOME's API to reset the zoom level automatically when the game starts and returns it after it exists.
A lot of these problems are just regular computer problems. For sure I have had my pains on Windows with different scaling levels and totally blurry output before as well. When you're tech savvy enough to use Linux in the first place, you probably have a setup that's more complicated than "single 16:9 monitor, and that's it". Still, it's frustrating when you have to figure this nonsense out all by yourself. These issues just highlight the need for more offline community work. Nobody wants to struggle with stuff like this for days and describe their problems on a forum just for the replies to be "lol RTFM" or "did you try turning it off and on again"? We need friends who are genuinely invested on solving these more difficult problems together with us, locally.
macOS is the only desktop os that I have used that does monitor configuration well. Windows has done every thing you mentioned to me except the framerate bug. And while we are talking about framerate, why on earth does windows default to 60hz if a higher refresh rate is available? That is inexcusable.
To share a similar anecdote, take a look at clamshell mode for the various OSs. This is when you have a laptop closed but still outputting to an external monitor. On macOS, setting this up is as simple as plugging in a monitor and closing the laptop. On windows, for some reason they make you dig through the power options menu. I think laptop manufacturers fix this with their modified windows images, so some people don’t have to configure it. But since it isn’t the default, most corporate laptops don’t have it set up correctly. And if you actually use the power levels in windows, you have to set it up separately for each power level. WTF?
Also windows still handles display scaling worse than what is possible. I would run into huge blurry apps that don’t support scaling every so often. And have you ever run multiple monitors with different scaling factors? Works fine on macOS, and works terribly on windows.
This wasn't the case with my wife's Macbook. It kept going to sleep after closing despite being connected to AC power. There was no user-friendly setting toggle to fix this. Only:
Yeah very true, I have a single Mac alongside all my Linux machines and while there are a million other problems I have with Apple, display configurations have not been one of them. They do some things incredibly well.
I’ve kept around a Linux machine in some capacity or another for a long time now, and what I’ve found to hold true the entire time is that the less simple and common your setup is, the more likely you are to run into trouble. Stray off the beaten path even a little and there’s a significant chance you’ll find yourself out in the weeds.
It’s perfectly logical, since the most common setups are going to be the ones daily driven by both devs and users, but is also frustrating because power users (who are primarily going to be the ones seriously considering switching to Linux) are disproportionately likely to have a setup that’s at least slightly unusual and probably has a number of quirks that’ve barely been tested and are unlikely to have the time or energy to do the testing and fixing themselves.
The only way I see to fix this is for an end-user oriented distro to 1) accrue significant funding from its userbase and 2) use funding to set up and maintain a very large rolling test matrix of consumer PC configurations and systematically hunt down and fix these bugs and papercuts. Not exactly trivial.
I find this true for software in general. Unless you're willing to do or hire someone to do custom software development, you're better off modifying your use case to fit existing solutions than (extensively) modifying existing solutions to fit your use case.
I see so many people paint themselves into corners and waste a bunch of time trying to get a tool to do something that it's simply not designed to do.
That’s true, but I think it’s more pronounced for Linux since devs aren’t incentivized to cover anything but their own use cases, hardware, etc which isn’t usually the case for commercial software and even some FOSS projects that are well funded (like Blender).
I don't have the refresh rate hard limitation issue on nvidia on Cinnamon, however i do find the system feels a bit laggy or buggy if the rates do not match so yeah it's still an issue regardless and a "soft" limitation for me
I have had all sorts of display issues back when I used Windows (10/11) and have been in support jobs having to deal with display issues on them daily. I feel like both OS's have their own share of issues, they just impact things differently.
In Windows in particular I have had issues where, due to how DisplayPort works, it thinks a DP monitor is turned on when it is off, resulting in the same problem you describe on Linux (no idea if you use DP tho or if that's the problem). I think both OS's can encounter this. I have never had it on HDMI though (but I prefer DP)
Curious about KDE being blurry- I have used it on my living room PC, hooked to TV, on my laptop, and on other desktops and never encountered that before and i have used it at different fractional scaling settings, all crisp and sharp as long as it's set to the native resolution of the display in question. Using a resolution other than native can be blurry but that is simply due to display technology limitations not a linux problem. Maybe specifically an issue when the two displays have different resolutions? That's not been a situation I have been in so maybe that's relevant
That said I abandoned KDE for other picky reasons. Each DE definitely has its own set of quirks. Part of the situation is that Linux has WAY more options (distros, DEs, WMs, etc) so when you have that instead of one big monolithic Windows version, that customization means the complexity goes way up and makes peoples' experiences vary even that much more widely. Some of Linux's strengths are also its weaknesses and that's the tradeoff we make to get the rest of the benefits.
Display stuff definitely can be annoying though, in Linux for sure and in Windows too.
Overall, given how many different circumstances and system and hardware configurations exist out there, our experiences will widely vary of course, so not discounting your complaints. But I don't find Windows to be any better in my personal experience, and when I have had issues with Linux, I have had an easier time fixing them if they're fixable
(But again my use case is different, running two monitors at 144hz is not a dealbreaker for me whereas having to run your TV at half of it's capability I am sure is massively annoying)
Ultimately I permanently jumped to Linux myself on all of my machines including my daily driver gaming PC and I will never look back (I love it way more than Windows), but I understand not everyone's situation or experience is the same, so don't take this as me trying to evangelize you back to Linux (I know that part of the Linux community can get annoying), I get that for some people Windows just reduces friction in the right places for them.
I am not familiar with CachyOS, but I was under the impression that many of the issues you ran into were resolved in the last year with the latest releases of Wayland, KDE, GNOME and/or nVidia drivers. I could be mixing up some things I remember that may be Gamescope/SteamOS specific. Even if I am trying to say that these problems are "fixed" on Linux, it's certainly not a situation where these things happen by default or on the majority of distros, and it is frustrating. You will likely have to set it up in a very specific way to get a system to do these things properly. Sometimes you may have to issue terminal commands. That said, there are many things that Windows just doesn't support and there is no solution.
Bazzite might be a better fit for you if you ever want to give this another try. It is supposed to support VRR, monitors with different refresh rates, screens with different scaling factors. I might actually try it myself on my gaming PC this weekend just for fun.
CachyOS is bleeding edge for kernel/Wayland/KDE/nVidia/Proton etc. updates - it's a rolling Arch based distro and they release upstream updates usually within days of them becoming available, so should always be up to date on any upstream fixes.
Unfortunately Nvidia is a major pain in Linux. They don’t bother shipping quality drivers and you don’t have all the workarounds that exist on windows to make up for the broken drivers. I hate my nvidia GPU for this reason.
Regardless, I don’t think Linux will ever be as plug and play as windows or macOS. It’s part of the trade off. More freedom and customization but also a little more work to fix things here and there. That’s the deal.
I am a long-time, die-hard Linux user. Every stereotype you've heard about grumpy old greybeards who attempt to use Linux or BSD and FOSS for everything under the sun, I am probably a living embodiment of them all.
That said, if I had a dedicated gaming machine that I never wanted to use for anything other than gaming, I'd stick Windows on it (probably Nano11 to keep it clean and minimal). Gaming on Linux has come a long way, but you still make a lot of sacrifices and concessions and run into bugs and incompatibilities often enough to turn it into a headache at least occasionally, if not constantly. Windows is still superior for gaming, and even in 2025 anyone who tries to convince you that Linux is just as good is either lying to you or themselves.
When I have three monitors plugged in something before sddm refuses to load so I need to unplug one of them, restart, login, and then plug it back in... but after that I can logout and log back in fine. It only happens when the computer first turns on.
There are all sorts of these weird corner cases which would be smoothed out more if Linux had as much funding as Microsoft
It's not so much the technical hurdles as the feeling of being 10 years old waiting for my big cousin to help again.
I have this same feeling when I am trying to learn a new instrument or new sport:
I don't know what I dont know,
I do know there's a lot I don't know,
I want to try on my own but I'm scared of breaking something permanently (assurances that I can't mess up permanently fly in the face of experience)
I've been trying for a while and it's starting to feel frustrating
It feels uncomfortable to ask something and be met with "have you tried google" or "did you read the instructions properly"
But also the technical lol this morning I'm trying to transfer mp3s to my phone from Mint Box and I dont know how to do that.
Mint was the first linux distribution I tried. I got stuck on the install, asked a question and got blasted with superiority bombs. That was the last I experience I had on Mint. I picked my next (current) distribution based on careful observance of support forum interactions, and I'm really glad I did.
Are you using KDE on Mint? If so, KDE Connect works really well for transferring files, there is an app for it you put on your phone and a package on your computer (may be there already) you just connect the two and transferring is easy. (Just make sure they are on the same network and visible to each other.) Other than that, I'm not sure what people do.