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What are your current pain points with Linux?
Linux has certainly come a long way, but it's also got room to grow.
- What are the things that are current issues with Linux for you? Annoyances, incompatibilities, lack of polish, etc.
- Also, if you're willing, share your level of experience with Linux (e.g. newbie, seasoned veteran, etc.). (I imagine those new to the OS will have very different pain points than people who have been using it for 20+ years).
Importantly, I ask this NOT to have people dunk on Linux or to start arguments about different aspects of it, but I do so to start a conversation about what could be better/smoother/easier. I love Linux and love that it just keeps getting better, day after day and year after year. The idea of highlighting where it could continue to grow in the future is exciting to me.
LibreOffice.
I’m old enough to have grown up on OpenOffice, and I don’t think it’s improved noticeably in that time. I’m fortunate in that most of my personal life doesn’t involve spreadsheets and documents, or I’d have gone back to Windows by now.
Level of experience: old! I have compiled my own kernel, if that counts (recovering Gentoo ricer). Been a user for… actually no idea, but over 20 years.
I largely agree about LibreOffice. I’ve been a Linux user forever - compiled my first kernel on an SGI Indy back in ‘99. Using LibreOffice feels like opening OpenOffice 15 years ago.
I recently made the switch to OnlyOffice and this pain point is pretty much gone. It’s an excellent office suite, and has pretty fantastic compatibility with Microsoft Office. I work in a Microsoft heavy shop, and I’ve rarely run into compatibility issues across the entire office suite. I’ve heard there’s some concerns with Russian ownership of the code, so I’m looking forward to Euro-Office to release their official desktop editors soon.
Not only Russian ownership, but also plain dickheaded abuse of AGPL to try and claim "open-source" while prohibiting forks. Essentially, they added terms to their AGPL license mandating that any redistribution retains the OnlyOffice name and logo while also explicitly declining any redistributions the right to use OnlyOffice trademarks. "You must use our trademarks and you are not allowed to use our trademarks." They tried to exercise that stupid trap to block Euro-Office from forking it, but ultimately failed because AGPL says it cannot be restricted in that way.
Oh really! That’s great to know. I confess I’m /so/ jaded about it I gave up looking for alternatives years ago and just regard doing office work on my personal machine as taking my disgusting medicine (or it’s self-flagellation to make up for loving every other aspect of being a daily Linux driver). I’ll check it out, thank you!
Want to quickly echo that OnlyOffice is an excellent suite that has pretty much 100% compatibility with Microsoft Office.
The best thing that I can say about it is that I work in jobs where everyone uses Microsoft but I switched to OnlyOffice on my Linux machine not quite 5 years ago and literally no one has noticed the difference. Whatever files they give me, or files that I give them are going to look and act exactly the same (outside of the obvious VBA compatibility since Linux can't do that, but I don't need VBA for my work).
Do you do freelance work, or some other arrangement that allows you to use your personal computer for work?
I have used my personal Linux computer for work for about 5 years as mentioned, between now 2 full-time jobs at executive-level roles without telling anyone.
Both jobs since I switched gave me laptops and I was like "nah I'm good". I like it better and otherwise no one's asked about it. The work shows up the same.
It's kinda wild that I can get away with it.
I hear this frequently but for most people the biggest complaint is just not having perfect MS compatibility. I've never used office for anything serious but if there are specific issues with libreoffice functionality I'd like to know.
I can sum up my objections as - it’s an office suite built by developers. There hasn’t been a design or UX person within a hundred miles of that thing.
If I was willing to break my MS muscle memory that would be one thing, but their interface is close enough to MS to trigger that response, while being different enough that it’s completely unusable. The cognitive load of say, making a table nicely formatted in Writer is off the charts, kemosabe
One big thing for me is that Calc (the spreadsheet tool) doesn't support tables like Excel has. This isn't a point about file format compatibility--but rather a point about what the tools allow you to do.
Excel and OnlyOffice allow you to create a "table," which includes a named range, column headers, formatting, and logical column names that can be used in formulas. This makes actually working with data a breeze.
In LibreOffice Calc...you can kinda build your own I guess.
Ya that makes sense, the underlying functionality is there but super inconvenient to setup quickly.
Somehow, a few updates ago last year, two of the control points for cropping images up and vanished. Like, there's no node on the bottom-right to crop with anymore. At all.
Arch user for "only" 13 years here, currently on wayland/KDE (also x/xfce on my old machine), always on AMD graphics.
My only real gripe is that actually I want MS Office to work (word & excel is enough) natively (or on wine). I believe they are the best software MS makes and I miss out on compatibility/interop by using LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or the cursed ms-office-on-the-browser versions.
That being said, i have lots of respect for LO (for some tasks Calc does beat Excel).
Other than that, i feel the linux experience has been significantly better that any windows version, especially over longer time periods (even if win11 weren't a telemetry/cloud-infested mess)
This is the sort of thread where people really need to say what they're using Linux for. I have to imagine all the people who say they have zero pain points with Linux are programmers to some degree who do most of their work in either their IDE or web browser, on a custom-built PC or well-supported laptop. But maybe I'm wrong.
As for myself, I primarily do music work (composition, engraving, production), general work and productivity, along with some single-player gaming and media and such. I'm on Arch Linux with a custom-built PC using highly Linux-supported components (i.e. AMD CPU+GPU), and for most of my work I have zero issues: in fact it's generally far superior to Windows, which I dread having to boot into.
Unfortunately, Linux sucks for music production and composition. It's just not well-supported. For any "serious" work I'm forced to boot into Windows, either because Linux doesn't support the software I need, or supports it so poorly that it's barely worth using, especially when I have a deadline to meet and don't have the time to screw around with pipewire and ALSA and attempting to install and reinstall a half-dozen packages to fix some obscure bug that popped up randomly one day. Most of the software that natively supports Linux is built on an older codebase and has to run inside Xwayland, which brings its own host of problems, especially when trying to string multiple programs together.
Reaper works on Linux, but it works better on Windows. Musescore works on Linux, but it works better on Windows. Max MSP, Sibelius, Kontakt, iLok, and a million other major applications, don't work on Linux at all. I could try and run it in Wine or something but again, I can't rely on Wine not having a meltdown when I'm days or hours away from a deadline. For amateur work I can simply choose not to use unsupported software and opt for a libre alternative, but if a client wants an electroacoustic piece for Max MSP and I give them something in PureData, they'll simply reject it.
Lack of support isn't necessarily the fault of Linux, but the infamously shaky core of Linux's audio backend isn't doing it any favours getting major application support. Not to mention the myriad of issues with developing any Linux software: drivers, display protocols, support for a dozen different distributions, etc. I'm not a programmer so I'm not going to sit here and demand that the FOSS community make a whole new 10/10 standardised audio backend from scratch or something (which would obviously not work regardless), but I really do hate every time I have to switch into Windows to get some piece of work done, because I detest Windows these days and I would much prefer not having it on my computer at all.
I just want to echo that it simply isn’t an option for serious music production. I got sick of Windows, so decided to try a Mac and have actually been enjoying it more than expected over the past 6 months or so. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the keyboard shortcuts though.
Thirding this. I’m by no means a professional musician, but I dabble with recording on occasion. Whenever I’ve wanted to do a recording session under Linux, I always lost about a day trying to get the damn thing set up and working properly. Heinous experience. I tried with my Macbook a couple of months ago, and the difference was night and day; up and running within minutes. I would live to go back to all linux all the time, but it’s just an absolute mess to do audio work on.
My brother in law is not a pro musician, but definitely an up-there amateur.
He switched over to Linux/Reaper because the rage at Windows overcame his desire for perfection.
JACK with a realtime kernel is the backend audio solution that you are looking for, particularly if you're looking for live performance.
Caveat: Realtime kernels are not optimal for a typical desktop experience. They're optimized for low latency for a small handful of apps, which means interrupting literally anything that isn't top priority.
Edit: And a forum
Fully agree that Linux just isn't a great path for music stuff. Maybe if someone is starting out and has a limited selection of plugins they will be using it can be workable but frustrating
But even with things like yabridge and other attempts to bridge plugins from other platforms over it's just not great, can't really rely on it
Part of the problem is tons of plugin/VST companies have their own installers and their own licensing requirements and systems and like you said, some also use very common third-party ones like iLok and just trying to deal with getting things installed or working when you're messing with so many different companies and their software (and very many of which do not make any linux native plugins) is just an absolute rat's nest
The one single Windows(10) machine I allow in my house is for music stuff. It stays on 10, it's fine that it doesn't get anymore updates. Local account only. Customized to hell and back with replacement start menu system, debloated, etc. 10 is now at a state where it stays out of my way and i don't hate it. Because it's so single-purpose and I know what I am doing it doesn't have to be the most up to date or highly secure system so lack of updates isn't a problem
I also have plenty of hardware (interfaces, MIDI/USB contollers, etc) that i do not want to fiddle with to get working, so Windows it is
I do some basic recording but nowhere near professional on my setup (I run Arch btw) with vcvrack and audacity. I switched over to pipewire a few weeks ago and things have gotten better with latency, etc. Since learning about qpwgraph my audio management has improved but also become more complicated at times. Overall the system is still clunky UI/UX-wise but these are the quirks that I accept. I guess those quirks could be considered pain points but I'm so accustomed to that kind of thing.
I've used Linux in many forms since the late 90s and have been running it exclusively now for 6 or so years. Of course it's not perfect, but which system is? I feel like Linux in general has improved while Android and Windows have consistently been on an opposite trajectory.
I have no pain point as an Arch Linux veteran user.
Also a veteran user, but I have an hp ZBook with a Strix Halo and 128gb RAM. I experience regular crashes related to dynamic VRAM allocation as the Linux kernel still hasn’t totally caught up to the hardware, which is now about a year old. Sleep/resume can also be a nightmare on Linux laptops in general.
I've recently (okay, back in January) put Arch on my Lenovo Ideapad and it's had no sleep/wake issues. Granted, we're on two opposite ends of the spectrum...
Just other Linux users telling me to use Nix! If it ain’t the Debian way I ain’t doing it.
Debian is love. Debian is life. I'm reminded of an old bash.org quote:
Incredible comment
sent from my NixOS laptop
I'm a very recent linux desktop adopter (even if it's my second attempt) but a magnet for problems. Here are some of them (CachyOS):
I do basically a bit of everything on my computer. Seriously. Programming, gaming, spreadsheets, writing, 3D modeling, raster and vectorial image creation, networking, VR, audio editing, media center, real time chatting and cooperation, anything you can think of. (I have briefly experimented with crypto mining and LLMs years ago but since I'm not doing those things anymore, I haven't tried them on linux. Probably work great though.)
This may seem like a lot of issues for just a couple of weeks of Linux use, but honestly my outlook is optimistic. Most of this is actively being worked on; I'm also sure there were more issues I forgot to list but I've generally been pleasantly surprised about how there are people actively devoted to solving all the problems I'm running into.
Except for the VPN thing, the Wine thing and maybe some VR stuff. VR is an outsized source of frustration compared to the sum of everything else, but I've gotten even that to a pretty stable state, with some sacrifices.
And to be clear, the vast majority of things just work perfectly, no issues whatsoever.
@Sheep wrote:
That reminds me, this was also recommended to me when I had an issue with a USB device! Very black magic indeed. I refused to do it as a matter of principle ;)
I had a number of USB-related issues when I set up this computer but they all turned out to be related to MSI's BIOS (MSI strung me along for weeks and then blamed everything on AMD). Not Linux.
I also have no power management issues. It probably helps that this is not a laptop!
EDIT: I should probably mention that USB devices not responding can massively slow down Linux boots because it hard blocks the entire boot process until every device has responded or timed out (by calling
udevadm settle). This has come up. Windows boots faster in the same situation, and I've been told (take it with a grain of salt I guess) that this is because of how the way Linux filesystems are structured as a single tree make it desirable that every device is available or rejected before continuing.Good news coming in Plasma 6.8.
https://blogs.kde.org/2026/09/04/this-week-in-plasma-auto-scrolling-and-dwell-clicking/#plasma-68
edit: They've since reworded this, since it caused a little confusion (including for me). New text:
It's good news that they're still working toward improving the feature, but if I'm reading that correctly that's still no good; it relieves the need to hold the middle mouse button, but you must still keep pumping your arm/moving the mouse to scroll (that's how it works right now).
To work as it does in windows, autoscroll must drop an anchor and keep scrolling automatically taking the speed and direction from the vector between the anchor and the mouse pointer's current position. If the user is not moving the mouse pointer, scrolling should still be happening until autoscroll is cancelled.
I have very little experience with non-microsoft OSes but it was such an extreme between [oh no I hate this] and [this is amazing] that I feel there's an opportunity here.
Steam Deck. Perfection no notes.
Chrome OS. Kinda dislike it because of the Google lock down, not Linux fault.
The main one. Trying to uninstall windows and install Mint.
The guides make it painfully easy --- except when it doesn't work like the guide says. Then it's sheer panic and I feel so stupid and I don't have any of the background to even begin to problem solve.
I think there's a business opportunity for someone to remotely assist with setting up: choose a distro for me I honestly don't care, walk me through and if there are complications help me make it work. And set up backup for me. Once upon a time I would have liked to learn for myself but these days that's not something I have the energy for, and the "stakes" have gotten higher for how much time I can spend doing things I don't yet understand.
Microsoft had the advantage of shipping them from manufacturers and you just have to turn on. But they've devolved to a point where when something doesn't work (often) no one knows anything and there's no error codes nothing. And they keep pushing more changes. Linux systems still have the advantage of "this is your system, the information is here for you". We just need mediators to help train the next generation of users who own their systems.
Your point about not having the background to even begin to problem solve is a huge one that I think a lot of people who are technically knowledgeable underestimate. If someone doesn't know what, say, a "partition" is, they can come to dead lock on installing a distro when the installer asks them to make an important decision about partitioning their hard drive alongside BIG SCARY WARNING MESSAGES ABOUT DESTROYING DATA.
There's a lot of embedded knowledge that gets taken for granted. If you're someone without it, a lot of Linux can be opaque. @SamusAu captured the concept well here.
People here have mentioned that the Linux community can be a bit testy with newbies asking for help, and I've definitely seen that elsewhere. That said, I've asked for help a lot here on Tildes and have genuinely had nothing but positive experiences from kind, knowledgeable people. Nobody has ever made me feel bad for not knowing something. In fact, the main tone I've experienced has been eagerness from people genuinely wanting to help or explain things in a way that makes sense.
Here's a notable example. (Note: that laptop from 2019 is still alive and kicking and hasn't had any issues since its motherboard replacement)
So, if you made a "Help me install Linux Mint" topic or something and asked questions in it as they came up, I have no doubt that you'd get good feedback here. Not saying you have to do this or anything but simply that I forsee it going well.
I use openSUSE,, there are no pain points.
I basically agree, but there is a nuisance in the form of installing restricted multimedia codecs which can't|won't be shipped by the Opensuse project themselves due to potential patent trouble.
To get these codecs we have to use flatpaks (personally not a fan) or install them from a 3rd party repo (packman) which leads to the situation that from time to time the repositories are not in sync with each other and you get error messages when updating the system. These problems typically solve themselves by waiting a few days, but this whole situation is pretty annoying, and it is a hurdle for newbies.
This might get complicated in the future since recently the packman maintainers announced that they will close the repos on 2026.12.31 unless someone else takes over.
All that said, this is not a technical problem but a legal one. Unfortunate situation.
Interesting, I run Kalpa, which is an immutable (and somehow even more stable) remix of Tumbleweed that, as far as I can remember, enables this option OOB in setup. I could be mistaken though.
My pain point is people saying that Linux isn't ready for average users. When Windows 10 went EOL, rather than let my mom throw away a perfectly good computer, I put Linux Mint on her computer, put a Windows 10 theme on it and she hasn't had any questions for me other than once her Thunderbird email wasn't working, but it was just an issue with her ISP. If she can use Linux, anyone can. She's not a tech savvy person at all, and is retired just to paint a picture.
Hell, my 2 kids aged 10 and 13 have never used anything other than Linux. They game, surf the web, watch Youtube, etc. In fact my 10 year old knows how to install things from Flathub, he knows how to run wine from the commandline (I didn't help him with that...he just looked it up.) I know there are still pain points, but I have to use Windows 11 for work...and trust me, there are way more painpoints.
I think as long as you set aside hardware caveats (poorly supported hardware will torpedo anybody's experience), the group that desktop Linux is actually weakest for are people sitting in the middle in terms of technical capability.
It's great for basic use (email, YouTube, editing docs, etc) and it's great for people who live in terminals and can write code in their sleep, but it's likely to be frustrating for people who are just technical enough to get themselves into trouble or are capable enough but just don't have the patience to sort out the problems they encounter.
Cut and paste. Why, oh why, can’t there be a single interface across all applications. I’ve been using Linux for over 30 years and it has always been awful for this.
Which applications don't work with the system clipboard?
It seems like every application has its own clipboard setup, or even more than one. There’s stuff that happens when you right click and copy, there’s ctrl-c, there’s selecting and middle click, and that’s just inside the terminal. Who knows what will happen when you paste from a clipboard into another application.
I'm not trying to imply your issue isn't real or be an annoying linux guy, but could you give an example of two applications you can't paste between? I've genuinely never encountered anything like that. The only think I can think of is how in the terminal you have to press ctrl+shift+{c,v} since ctrl+{c,v} is a terminal code, and in emacs you have to do alt+w, ctrl+y since it's emacs, but even then, they both use the system clipboard.
The worst offender is any kind of Wayland vs X app, but different terminal apps all seem to behave uniquely as well. A particular annoyance is when an app ends up pasting control sequences into terminals instead of plain text.
Yep, likewise I have everything set up to copy to the system clipboard. Of course, neovim yanks to local registers, but I've mapped
<leader>yto copy to system clipboard through OSC52. I've set up copying and pasting from tmux via visual mode to do the same thing.I've not had an issue with GUI applications. I'm using Wayland and have wl-clipboard installed, which most applications will use if available, to my knowledge.
I forget how I did it but I disabled middle click paste. Then configure your terminal to copy and paste. Like in Kitty terminal:
Although... I understand some of the appeal that middle click paste has. I recreate some of that with this config:
Then for pasting for stdin (or inside of ssh) use
vipefrommoreutils:vipe | git apply -I was inspired by https://github.com/niedzielski/cb and made something similar bin/cb. Sometimes it's handy to put a file onto the clipboard (cb.file) (or maybe you just really need dragondrop) and to read the clipboard every time you press enter to append to a temp file to later parse out the links inside the HTML (cb.append.html) so having some programmatic way to work with the clipboard can be quite handy.
(and for images... bin/cbi though I rarely use this I think it's super interesting. You can see an example here: https://github.com/niedzielski/cb/issues/8)
Install CopyQ or some other clipboard manager too
Life without middle click paste is probably not worth living. I’d be reaching for MAID.
Middle click paste is one of the things that convinced me that Linux is the Way (ages ago)
Most of my pain points come from just not knowing Linux as well as Windows. I've been daily driving Linux at home for about 5 years, and dabbled another 5 before that. I've spent most of my professional life in the Windows world and know it inside out. Like 6ish months ago the wifi driver on my Ubuntu desktop just vanished. In the Windows world I wouldn't have even considered that a 'problem', I could fix it in my sleep. But I had no idea how to fix that in Linux. Turned out to not be hard, but it was an hour of googling and learning. So mostly its just knowledge gaps on my end.
If I had to nitpick, I think the community around Linux is uhh, challenging, as a newbie. And no native Notepad++. I know the reasons why, I know how to get around it, I know there are a zillion alternatives. I've just used it for sooooo long its like missing my right hand.
The 7.0.0-28 kernel update had some significant bugs, especially with the AMD video drivers, and this caused some head scratching on my part, until I started looking for answers at the Linux Mint forums. I also couldn't shut down my computer, except by pressing the on/off button for five seconds.
Trying to revert to 6.0.17 led to some interesting times with Grub. I dislike working with Grub more than any other part of the operating system, and this was a quick reminder of that antipathy.
The latest kernel seems to have solved the issues I faced.
I've been using Linux Mint for approximately nine years. I'm not technically skilled, however, and I do well to follow instructions.
CachyOS with the Limine bootloader. Much less painful than GRUB.
Is that what the problem was? It's cleared up on my end too (running Arch), but I've recently been having pretty high systemd-analyze blame times due to my drives and thought that may have been the reason. The boot times haven't improved but it's been a few weeks now that shutdown hung.
I switched to Mint from Windows last year and honestly the only issue I’ve had has been the occasional game not supporting it. What’s frustrating though is it’s not the old days of gaming where that sort of thing made sense. Because of the wonder of Proton it’s pretty much exclusively games using kernel anticheat (which imo should not exist). The main one I notice it for is Rocket League.
I pretty much keep my Windows partition around exclusively to play Rocket League occasionally at this point. I feel like every time I boot into it is a jump scare. How did I use that monstrosity of an OS for so long?
Rocket League doesn't have kernel anticheat, just regular anticheat. I haven't had any issues on Bazzite.
Interesting! It looks like they cut support just because of it being too much to maintain? Weird. Not sure I understand why I can play it but not play online.
You're likely playing the Linux version which is a very old build. You have to force steam to use proton and then it'll use the Windows version.
I've got a machine running Ubuntu with an Nvidia graphics card. I'd say I'm a bit of a noobie despite running Linux on my tower now for 3 years and gaming on it.
Pain points I've had:
Overall though, most issues I've had with Linux over the years have gotten better or just plain disappeared, which is great to see.
Regarding application packaging, are you using your distro's package manager? I know it's not always an option, but when it is, it's far superior to anything else and I've seen an odd number of newcomers who didn't know about it.
The default for Windows is downloading from a random website. Thus, having a pckage manager at all is not intuitive until you tell them it has an app store like your phone that will have most of the software you would want.
What would be cool is if your OS's package manager would open every common downloadable package file, search the repo for that package, and then ask if they would like to install the system-managed version instead.
Oh yeah I only use apt and the Ubuntu App Center nowadays but it was a bit confusing coming from Windows/Mac where I could just search the web and install. It still does annoy me sometimes with Flatpaks updating in the background and regular programs failing to update themselves. Right now my Chrome browser is out of date bc it had an issue auto-updating and it wants me to manually reinstall the whole thing to update.
Immutable systems are great for both these issues -- Bazzite for instance tests kernel + GPU drivers + DE version before shipping, the system is locked from modifying libraries beyond the base image. So you don't update a GPU driver on its own, you get it by updating the system image. Further, the system packages are also set, you can't easily create an interdependency hell like you described. If an image update breaks something, you can rollback to the previous. And then you can also do distrobox if you do need to run something reliant on system libraries not matching the ones in your image.
Swapping off Ubuntu was a pain, but well worth it. I forgot I had sleep issues until you mentioned it.
Yeah I tried Bazzite for a while, was definitely impressed with it. I think I eventually just switched back to Ubuntu just because of my familiarity with it.
I have a background of 10+ years in professional IT, but I've been tinkering with computers since I was a kid. I've been on PopOS for multiple years now, and I really can't complain. It's basically what I expect from an operating system. To me, the freedom it provides outweighs any cons.
Mostly my frustrations come from PopOS itself, but I haven't tried the new COSMIC DE yet.
Some Linux specific issues:
Even though I enjoy it, I don't think it's ready for my grandma to use. There's some very easy ways to fuck up your install if you're not careful. When I do have random issues or questions, ChatGPT is very helpful.
I've been considering switching to Arch, but getting my work environment set up took quite a while. I think it'd be nice to have a deeper understanding for all the different systems that interconnect. There's some inflexible parts of Gnome that I don't like.
Asking for help is always a fun one. People have learned from experience so many times that there's not a shared knowledge or reference on how one would do a thing if you're not already in the know of how to do it. In Windows or MacOS there's usually an end user intended way of completing a task, where in Linux you have limitless options, but it's a whole lot easier to get yourself stuck. Couple that with people getting defensive about their particular methods or "why you no read manual" and it can get hairy quickly for what was supposed to be a simple ask.
There’s also a surprising number of things that depending on your distro/DE/etc, there isn’t a UI (or good UI) for configuration and you’re pointed at arcane CLI incantations (which unlike in the BSD world, are wildly inconsistent and share no conventions) or editing a config file buried somewhere.
Unironically, I wish I could quit my job and just tinker on my own DE (or maybe even a whole distro) day in and day out because I find current options have lots of little blind spots like this that are obvious to longtime commercial platform users but don’t even register as a potential problem to *nix vets.
Right now? Power management and sleep.
I'm using an old Thinkpad running Fedora to play the music for my brother's wedding tomorrow (technically today now). I have pre-ceremony and processional music, but by the time the recessional comes up the laptop has put itself to sleep and locked. If I'm quick enough that won't be a problem, but I'd rather that it just obey my power settings and keep itself awake.
I've been using Linux for a bit over 15 years now, so you'd think I would have basics like this figured out.
If you're using KDE, right click battery icon and you can hard-disable locking and sleeping for that session.
The settings to change permanently (if you're looking to disable) are under both screen locking and power management.
It's XFCE, I've generally preferred it when I pick a DE (usually a tiling WM user, but I wanted this to be something anyone else could use) but I also use a desktop far more than a laptop. I think I can get away with just setting the timeout to an hour rather than trying to disable it altogether, that would be good enough.
The other alternative is to prefix the command with systemd-inhibit:
(if you are using mpv maybe you just need to set this in your config:
stop-screensaver=yes(oralwaysif you want it to prevent sleep even when playback is paused)... But I think that's the default anyway--ahh it only works when there's a window so playing audio only won't do it, you needforce-window=yes)This is basically where I am. My Linux problems are externally imposed, mostly by hardware, mostly sleep/suspend.
Pain points
Being forced to choose between heavy desktop environments with sensible defaults such as automatic screen blanking after some time if media is not being played back versus minimal desktop environment where you have to script those small bits of functionality yourself. My ideal would be something like i3/sway with just a few key bells and whistles from a larger DE.
The constant battle of wrangling theming across applications. You have to deal with QT and GTK, crack open Electron apps and modify their CSS after every update (sometimes rebuilding the AppImage if its distributed that way). Deal with flatpak apps needing their own copy of the theme etc.
Poor laptop support particularly in regards to power management.Nvidia optimus is such a pain.
Poor handling of network drives. Its very easy for a process to hang while in uninterruptible sleep if copying large files over sshfs
Poor security model generally and attempts to fix it like firejail are clumsy and require trial and error to figure out what permissions an application actually needs when error messages are cryptic.
Experience
Daily driver since 2018
You can absolutely do that. I ran KDE with i3 as the wm for years, and it was great. I had helpful utilities for connecting to wifi, suspending, dimming the screen and so on, while using the window manager I wanted.
The people that endlessly scream about bloat aren't worth listening to, they're not living in the same world as normal people.
CachyOS (and other arch-based distros): bleeding edge packages bite you when you least want them too or have suffered regressions as maintainers aim to support newer hardware than the 7+ year old tech I'm still daily driving. Being an early adopter means you're experiencing issues that haven't even been reported yet, leading to some really confusing time sinks.
Ubuntu (and other debian-like distros): Old packages suck, documentation from Canonical and ubuntu team is never enough, package availability sucks, PPAs and other user repos are in a sorry and weird state that causes more issues than anything else. Man, I hate snaps. Just let me install firefox onto the metal, Shuttleworth.
All distros: Coming back from sleep/hibernation is a coin toss that biases towards having to do a hard restart with the power button. This has been an issue on everything I've ever used on every bit of hardware for like 15+ years and still annoys me to this very day on all my active systems.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed was one of the least bad from that bleeding edge breakage perspective.
I've noticed sleep is much less bad (still not great) on full AMD systems and Thinkpads. I have no doubts Valve's Steam Deck work is why AMD stuff has been smoothing out.
Agree that's probably one of the biggest archilles heels.
Your #2 point is my biggest pain. I've been a Debian user for.. 15 years? Give or take. Old packages were the bane of some of my biggest problems. Thankfully, now a days, we've got better options. Repos from people who develop/maintain their own current binaries, backports, and even containerized images.
But whew, when I first started using zfs, there was quite a bit of pain from being several versions behind the (at the time) current.
Laptop support, I wish the battery life and suspend mode were as good as mac or windows.
The drivers for graphics cards always feel lacking compared to other OS, like you cannot squeeze as much power in Linux.
I'm a bit disappointed at the level of security in 2026.
the surface area for supply chain attacks is wide and surprisingly unused (that we know of)
every program can generally speaking read and write the files of every other program, unless you use Flatpaks et al, which remains a bit awkward
Nix has increased state-of-the-art when it comes to declarative configurations, but I feel like we're waiting for an "Arch Linux" moment, i.e. somebody making it much simpler without diminishing the power too much
new laptop prices, wow. If I upgraded my X1 Carbon to the latest model with the same ram/ssd specs, I'd pay 5000 euros
Just in everyday usage, things are pretty awesome. Audio and graphics seem solved: Wayland is amazing and so is pipewire. Windows has been made completely obsolete thanks to Valve, and Apple survives (in my mind) only thanks to their amazing hardware.
The thing about security is that it's directly opposed to convenience. Half the reason I use a desktop at all is so that I don't have to manage this stuff. Linux has enough weird gotchas adding mobile-OS level file protections just seems like a lot more pain than gain.
Ansible works fine for declaritive config and layers on pretty much any distro if that's what you're looking for. IMO it's far less painful.
All that said, I am looking forward to the evolution of a desktop that, as you mentioned, essentially containerizes all the things.
Mobile OSes had a huge advantage in that they were a greenfield implementation during a time that security started being taken seriously in OS design, and they've had the luxury of being controlled by a single entity that also controls the major distribution of software on it.
Microsoft wishes they had the level of control that apple and Google have over their OSes. It vastly simplifies things when you can say "hey, were making this change to our sandboxing/permissions structure/whatever, fix your apps in 3 months, or we'll yank it off the app store".
Linux, and even windows will never have that level of control, which makes doing "proper" security much, much more difficult.
Microsoft could probably pull it off, but it'd require something akin to Classic Mode in the early releases of OS X (a paravirtualized minimal old Windows build tweaked so programs play nice with host window/task management) for "old world" compatibility. The bones are even already there with WSL.
I suspect that the bigger challenge would not be technological but rather with PR. Microsoft has burned a lot of trust in the past decade and change, and so the first thing that will come to the minds of many if they attempt to properly secure the OS (breaking legacy compatibility in the process) is the possibility that they're aiming to lock down the ecosystem, regardless of their actual intent. Threading that needle would be an extremely delicate operation that I'm not convinced they'd be able to pull off if recent PR blunders are anything to go by.
Been a Linux user for almost 20 years now. Installed Ubuntu on my Sony Vaio back in 2007 because Windows Vista was just Windows Vista. In 2017 I switched to Linux Mint because I just couldn't get WiFi to work on my computer at the time, no matter what I tried. I've been using Linux Mint since then.
I am not a programmer so I just use it for casual browsing really and it works well. The only pain point I have is once every four months or so, it will just refuse to connect to my wireless printer (Brother). Restarting the computer doesn't have work. Restarting the printer doesn't work. Uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers doesn't work. Nothing works. Absolutely nothing. Meanwhile printing from my phone on the same printer works with no issues. And then I'll just give up. Then about six days later or whatever, I'll just be doing something when my printer goes off and then it will print 27 copies of what I was trying to print six days earlier. And then it will work perfectly for the next four to five months , and then our of nowhere when I try to print something, it will not print no matter what.
Printers have never been good, regardless of OS. They never will be good. The best printer in the world is still a finkicky physical thing that will break with moderate usage.
I've come around to only ever printing at work or the library. Sure, it's mildly more inconvenient to wait. But now I don't need to have a cursed printer in my house for the 2-3 prints a month.
Related: I miss the old dot matrix printers with the tear-off feed holes. So satisfying.
Hah, that's a heck of a core memory to dig up. Thank you for that :)
This won't help if you need to print from your phone on a regular basis, but in case your desktop is the only usecase which matters, ime connecting my Brother HL-L2460DW via USB to a Linux desktop has worked out fine for a year+ now. Any consumer electronics which connect over wi-fi seem to grow more fickle with time and eventually fail, so imo if reliability + using Linux is what you're after, it might make sense to plug it into a Raspberry Pi then host a printing server off of that.
I've thought about that and may have to do it eventually but my home office set-up isn't the greatest. The printer is on the opposite side of where my computer sits so I'd have to figure out a way to connect it and hide the cable somehow.
if you're ever interested (and bit tech savvy), i second the print server idea (rpi is a perfect fit for this or really any low power/efficient system that is compact and that you can install linux on), you're basically letting a pc be the brains of the operation and make the printer available to everything else, and it's a way to keep from having to run a long cable
i use an old dell micro pc with x86_64 variant of diet pi OS (any linux will do but this really lightweight setup worked nicely and has some preconfigurable stuff in the setup) installed on it, plugged via USB into printer, and sitting beside/behind printer. i installed some software (CUPS), loaded the printer driver into it, and now i can print remotely from anywhere in the house, from any system or phone on my network
Aah, makes sense! Hope you can figure something out :)
I have a similar Brother printer and it works with USB and wifi without issue. It actually gives far less problems than the Windows machines in the home.
20 years of experience. vector graphics are my pain point, the main option is inkscape and it has issues (mostly stability for me across 4 computers / 3 OSes), I'm enjoying https://graphite.art/ but it isn't there yet either. because of this I've been doing a lot of graphic design in blender and actually starting to enjoy it more, haha
Aside from random instabilities especially when it comes to audio drivers, my biggest issue is that there's still a lot of friction to doing basic things that's a total deal-breaker for non technical people. I use CachyOS and can deal with it, but it's still a pain. Some examples include:
I also have issues with the Linux community because even in 2026 people are terrible at recommending distros and software to newbies. I still see people recommending Arch to beginners and saying "it's not that hard" and recommending GIMP as a photoshop alternative.
All of this, yes. Plus when I talk about what a pain it can be to troubleshoot problems, a lot of Linux people say "well why didn't you do x" or "you should have done y". Well I did z because z was what I found online when I did searches because if there's documentation for this stuff hell if I know where to find it. It certainly isn't anywhere I know to find it on my system.
For me, who switched to full time about 5 years ago and dabbled with it since 2008, these days I only have two pain points:
First, suspension sucks. Every time the PC goes to sleep, regardless of hardware or distro, I have to hard-reset, it just won't wake up. So I turn of automatic sleep in settings and then my PC's awake 24/7 because I don't want to turn it off and on every 24 hours because my normal work setup is four virtual desktops with about 15 programs open which I don't want to spend time rearranging. Which is not the end of the world in and of itself, and specific to me, but I don't love the power consumption.
Second, email sucks. There is no truly great FOSS version for IMAP except maybe Aeiron which breaks half the time. Even with a default setup you lose a lot of formatting in something like Thunderbird and God help you if you're in dark mode. Even the paid versions like BlueMail suck. It's all garbage. I'm using Outlook as a PWA and it works great for work emails but doesn't have a unified inbox so my personal account is eating shit.
I still don't regret moving at all but they're nontrivial concerns.
I share your frustration with IMAP mail clients. Thunderbird may be the strongest contender but I've never really liked it much; it's somehow always felt clunky even relative to behemoths like MS Outlook (the old native Office app, not the newer electron monstrosity) which is really weird, because contemporary Firefox felt comparatively light and snappy.
My personal needs aren't crazy, I really just want OS X Mail.app (minus some more recent UI degradations) except on Linux, but no such thing exists. Geary was looking promising for a bit, but development stagnated before it could mature.
It entirely depends on your tech level and willingness to set it up. But have you looked into self hosted webmail offerings like roundcube or Tachyon? Disclaimer: RoundCube I know as being pretty solid but Tachyon came up when I was looking for another client that it is forked of.
Just figured I'd throw the idea out there.
I have a spare PC sitting in my closet that I've been debating setting up as a Nextcloud home server but otherwise don't have an active server at the moment.
I've done it in the past (setting up a server I mean) but it's been a long time so I would have to refresh myself on the technical details. And at least for the moment, I feel like that's a non-trivial lift to get running that I don't have time for right now. Especially because it's been a long time since I've set up hardening on a server so I don't quite remember all of the details. I can learn them, but that's probably going to be more than a weekend project for me since it's been so long. I will probably end up doing it though.
If you go down setting up a home server, I am personally a fan of unraid. It is not free, but takes away a lot of the technical aspects of managing a home server and NAS. You can run a variety of things on it through docker containers.
There are other options, but most of them do require significant more work to setup and maintain.
As far as hardening goes. I simply don't expose my home server to the internet from the outside. Instead I have a VPN connection setup, something my router supports with wireguard. But unraid comes with built in tailscale support as well (tailscale is also available on other platforms).
That basically takes away the worry that I am exposing too much by accident.
I'll look into unraid, thanks!
Probably window tiling.
I tried POP!_OS a few months ago, and loved the window tiling support, but didn't really like the rest of the half-baked feeling of the OS.
I started using Bazzite with KDE Plasma and have been really liking it, however there's nothing quite like Pop!_OS's window tiling feature. There's a couple window management plugins for window tiling, but they all kind of suck. The auto-tiling features just aren't adaptable enough or as flexible as POP!_OS's. Like one plugin I tried forced all the small password/warning/setting dialogues to open up in a tile, and another plugin wouldn't let me stack windows the way I want to, ie only letting me create vertical window slices, instead of putting one window on top and one on bottom.
Pop!_OS's window tiling really had a good balance of automatic tiling features that a lot of the plugins for KDE lack.
And I tried Gnome, and honestly hated it to the point that I don't care if it has better tiling, it's not worth it to have gnome.
I now have both Bazzite and a barebones Debian 13 install with LXQt, and man I really want Window Tiling back. haha
I hope KDE Plasma improves their tiling support. It's really annoying to me how there are no corner targets between side by side monitors. So i can't put a window in an inner corner without manual positioning and sizing (I could on Windows 10).
I hate to put myself out here for this, but I am a semi forced newbie in the Linux space.
Short story for context, I finished graduate school 2 years back and after I got a salaried position. I didn't need my laptop anymore and so I gave my nice laptop for my husband to play around a few months back. But with a preface I would like to have access to it when I need it.
My husband put some sort of Arch OS on the laptop. A few weeks ago, I tried to install Koreader because I bought myself a kobo reader. I couldn't make head or tail with it since he never showed how to use it other than how to get to a web browser. My problem with linux perhaps isn't the operating system, but more indictative of my relationship. Nowadays I simply don't have time since I have a toddler running around, and I really don't want to spend my few precious break time figuring out how to use this damn thing. I'm still waiting for my husband to install linux mint. So I can access my laptop normally and install a few software programs (koreader, krita, qgis). Or I will trade in that laptop in a few months for a MacBook and call it a night. So how easy is to install things onto Mint as a newbie who don't really care how linux work, but just want a working computer. I'm would say I'm tech savvy lite, but no way near of being a computer programmer. Just someone who got a C in C class and which told me I should try something else for a profession.
Mint has a Software Manager. You start it, type in Koreader and it shows you a download button. Click on that and it installs. Krita and qgis are also available through the Software Manager.
Ok I will try this after my husband eventually reinstall mint. More or less annoyed at why he didn't install mint in the first place.
Perhaps your husband can install Bazaar on Arch. It's an app store for linux for browsing and installing flatpaks from flathub (self-contained software packages that run sandboxed, so it's also more secure). It functions like an ad-free phone app store, has one click install for things and nearly everything I've searched for was there (including koreader).
Ubuntu at work, Mint at home.
The only real pain point is that my favourite mouse, the Logitech MX Master 3S/4 isn't really supported.
On Windows, there's an app called Logioptions or something where you can do all kinds of cool tweaking to the buttons and gestures, plus you can create cool workflows and stuff for the little on-screen menu widget.
Nothing like that on Linux. There are some half-assed tweaks you can make using some sort of sketchy third-party apps, but they only really scratch the surface.
I wish Logitech would just properly support Linux systems for their mouse, because frankly, the MX Master is a mouse for power-users, and in my experience, most power-users are using some flavour of Linux in their day-to-day.
Wont this work for you?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Logitech_MX_Master
I got an old MX Master 2 and it works just fine
Having lived in the world of peripherals-with-onboard-memory, my frustration in the same scenario you highlighted here would be less that Logitech software doesn’t work on Linux, and more that I can’t just program the functions I want directly into the mouse and then keep using it with the same functionality across devices.
My workplace uses Windows, but I have the same limitation that I can’t use the extra mouse buttons/functions because our environment is so locked down, and downloading Logitech software is a non-starter. I would be willing to take all the time to set up the buttons and functions from my home computer, but with no onboard memory, that wouldn’t carry across to my work computer.
I swapped to Linux around 2024 when I built a new system. The last Windows I used is Windows 7, which I refused to upgrade from. I use my PC for 3d modeling and printing, and theoretically gaming if I had more time. I installed debian based Mint on my personal system with KDE and have since installed kubuntu on my kid's pc and debian on a home server.
My pain points are many and sore. For one, I just had the fun experience of trying to share a folder on the server. Simple right? Nope. We bought a new hard drive for our server and wanted to use it as family storage backup and local device access. Just need the disk to show up in the local network, nothing fancy. I formatted it in exfat, because I thought that had the most cross-compatability with my partner's windows machine and my linux machines.
How it worked out:
Format the disk in partition manager
Allocate the space
Pick a mounting point and mount it
Right click disk, can't change permissions or even create folders
Open disk as root
I still can't create a new folder on the disk even as root?
Do a search and find people saying disks formatted in exfat have all permissions blocked by default for some reason (why??)
Do a search to remind myself how to take control of files with terminal
Change owner and group of the disk to my user
Still not granting permissions
Do a another search on how to fix it
Unmount, restart systemctrl daemon, mount it again
Still no permissions, restart system
Open Dolphin because Files doesn't have a share option in Properties
Go to Share tab, says there's a permissions error for Sambashare
Search error online to find out I've already followed the instructions on how to fix it months ago and forgot
The fix never worked, what did I do as a workaround?
Search system for samba.conf
Open as root
Do another search to see if I can add multiple paths to PublicFiles (no)
Change the path to the whole /mnt folder so everyone can just see all disks because at this point I just want it to work
Save and quit
How I thought it should work:
Format the disk in partition manager
Allocate the space
Right click the disk in Files
Select "properties" and go to "share"
Click "share" and choose options of with who
I run into issues that are unintuitive and opaque pretty consistently, like being unable to share my screen on another locally networked device (gnu displays never worked, general consensus is "shit's fucked, just use an hdmi cable"), not being able to find my installed programs where I want them (bottles, lutris, steam and linux natives all have their own defaults, and I want most of them on my HD not SSD), not being able to easily make program shortcuts, permission errors with certain program formats, random issues with waking system out of suspension, recently used folder tracking doesn't work consistently and is separate between Dolphin, Files, and whatever programs are using for file browsing... I worry that if I didnt have the internet, I would lose access to a large subsection of tools and controls because I don't know or can't remember terminal commands. There's often either no GUI for a lot of it, or the GUIs don't work because they were made by some volunteer 10 years ago who made it for themselves and shared it but it hasn't been maintained or lacks permissions or something. I just keep getting the impression that Linux isn't an OS so much as 200 programs in a trenchcoat.
Still never going back to Windows though.
I use NixOS on a Raspberry Pi and a few months ago I was updating to 26.05 and while rebuilding my configuration I noticed it was taking a much, much longer time than normal. Because it was trying to compile the entire kernel from scratch. Eventually I found this post mentioning that the kernel with some special Raspberry Pi sauce was missing from the public build cache, for whatever reason.
Oh well, I ended up switching to the regular non-Raspberry Pi kernel and then it updated within a few minutes. I don't know what I'm missing by not using the rpi kernel (I mostly use it as a monitoring server anyway, no fancy hardware things), but it was a bit frustrating to figure out why it's building the kernel from scratch when previously a build cache had always been available. The price of NixOS, I suppose.
Yeah, NixOS community frequently makes changes, I guess better than keeping legacy stuff... anyway, there was a decision to not maintaining many custom kernels anymore...
As for the raspberry pi.. its recommended to use https://github.com/nixos/nixos-hardware for certain devices, they have support for RPIs, it sets the correct kernel with extra modifications
When I originally set up this rpi I followed the NixOS wiki that at that point didn't use nixos-hardware yet (I think?). And I believe with 26.05 that original way wasn't possible anymore, at which point I switched to nixos-hardware. But then nixos-hardware changed something and no longer had its kernels in a build cache... See this issue on their GitHub.
hm yeah, it seems that there is no custom kernel for rpi cached in official cache.nixos.org ...
There is this project that has its own cachix: https://github.com/nvmd/nixos-raspberrypi
Edit: I have never used this repo, so I have no clue if it is ok.
I did find that one too when I was updating but by that point I wasn't in the mood to do any more fiddling and I just wanted the pi to be updated, so I switched off any special rpi kernel stuff and rebuilt with the standard kernel. Which seems to be working fine now, so all good.
The two qualms that surface in my mind most immediately are admittedly not necessarily issues with with linux itself so much as they are just frustrations that have arisen from my time using it.
The biggest source of gritted teeth has been the adobe software situation. I managed to just about get an older version of photoshop running in wine but the experience was poor, and my efforts to get after effects running the same way went nowhere. This become enough of an issue that I've had to resort to getting a second drive solely for dual booting into windows whenever I need to use something adobe.
Though in truth that's not really a linux problem as much as it is an adobe problem. They choose not to support the platform, and they apparently go about implementing their software in such a way that solutions which can reliably get even windows games running painlessly under linux, until recently, failed to even get their installer working properly. So yeah, that's been an annoyance but not really a fair criticism of linux itself.
A perhaps slightly more fair nitpick, though still not entirely fair, would be gnome's iffy relationship with multi monitor setups. I've used fedora gnome on my day to day desktop since back in Jan and quickly fell in love with how they did multiple desktop workspaces. The whole multiple workspace idea is one I'd seen in other desktop environments and even back on windows, but it was a way of working that had just never clicked in my head before.
That was until I came face to face with gnome's lack of a minimise button.. which it turns out has a way of pretty quickly getting you to adapt to a new but comfier way of working with multiple workspaces. Said comfy feel did however quickly go away when I swapped out my older single monitor with a pair of new monitors.
To quickly give context to those that don't use gnome, the way they do multiple workspaces is by letting you easily scroll between when in overview mode which is accessed by either flicking the mouse to the top left corner of the screen or just hitting the start button. Given you can't minimise windows the approach of simply putting windows (or sets of windows) in their own workspaces and scrolling over to them when needed quickly becomes muscle memory.
If you have multiple monitors, however, it can only work in one of two ways. Either scrolling between workspaces on one monitor also changes it on the other, or the workspaces feature is only enabled on one monitor, which is what I've ended up settling on. That is to say there's no option to flick the mouse to the corner of either monitor, opening the overview only on that one for quick workspace switching on just that screen. They either get switched in tandem or one monitor gets permanently relegated to second class status.
That said this is really a gnome criticism than a linux criticism. I could resolve the whole issue by just switching to KDE or one of the many desktop environments that treats multi-monitor setups as less of an afterthought. That linux offers the freedom to completely swap out to a different desktop environment is really a highlight of it and it's only through my own affinity for the rest of gnome's general UI/UX that I'm choosing to not take advantage of that freedom to switch away from it.
As for level of experience, having switched from full time windows to full time linux user back only in January, I'd say I'm a comfortable beginner at this point. New enough to be still picking things up for the first time but settled enough to feel completely at ease in my day to day use. I'd previously used linux intermittently but more so as an occasionally tasted novelty rather than as a daily driver, that much is a newer change which I'm very happy to have made.
As a guix user, there's a decent chance that anything I want to do will require me to package a program myself, and since guix requires things to be built reproducible completely from source, the difficulty can range from trivial to hell mode. Of course, I wouldn't use guix if i really minded this, and I can always grab the flatpak/nix version/run it distrobox.
My Bluetooth audio sometimes cuts out completely until I restart wireplumber
I've been a daily user for 4 to 5 years, going from Manjaro to EndeavourOS to now CachyOS. I overall love the OS but there are some gripes.
My audio is kind of fucky ever since I switched to a new AudioTechnica headset. I get crackling when I have multiple things running and my mic doesn't work half the time. Sometimes, plugging the headset off and on again works, but most of the time, I'm forced to restart to get it working. And then the mic just doesn't sound great! I do not understand how audio works on Linux at all, sadly, so trying to troubleshoot has been difficult. The most I've been doing is applying some filters with EasyEffects to make it more bearable for my friends.
There's also some minor issues I get with Wine and Proton. They're great; at this point, I expect most things I want to run to work. But it's still often that I come across things that don't, to the point where I'm a bit annoyed when people call it a totally equivalent gaming experience. Some games, Unreal ones particularly, don't properly respect my AZERTY keyboard layout and I don't always have recourse to change keybinds to work around it. Some games work fine vanilla but it falls apart when you try running mods or tools for modding (see Creation Engine games). Some games are just built on ancient tech with seventy dependencies from Windows XP (see BYOND). I feel like I often encounter edge cases.
Last thing I can think of is that keyboard layout management is kinda fucked up. But then again, it's also fucked up on Windows.
Unlke Mac and Windows, by default Linux just hands you raw sound input. Which is great if you're an audio engineer who wants control over these things, but much less good if you want to use an average mic.
Discord's Krisp also doesn't work right.
EasyEffects + a few tutorials about setting up a basic filtering chain will get your mic sounding amazing. Resources from musicians will be most useful for theory, but the quick and dirty is (use seperate filters if you can):
Low band pass
High band pass
Echo Cancellation
Denoise
Gate
Exciter
Derezz
EQ
I may have some of the order mixed up, and it's somewhat subjective anyhow.
Unless it's a grounding issue, try this next time instead of restarting the whole OS:
or if your OS is older perhaps:
Started using CachyOS earlier this year, going on about 6 months now (no dual booting, just Linux).
Main things that have caused friction are:
My elgato XLR interface works inconsistently. Very often the system just stops detecting mic input, I try to figure it out, and usually unplugging and plugging again fixes it but sometimes a restart is required. I know this is most likely Elgato's fault but I didn't want to throw away my expensive hardware for no reason. Could also be Vesktop being finicky but at this point I'm used to just "turning it off and on again."
WiFi did not work at all on my system (WiFi card wasn't detected) until I discovered a solution where I had to unplug my PC completely and hold the power button for a while to discharge residual electricity, which caused the motherboard to somehow detect it on boot again. This is the most "voodoo black magic" thing I've ever done with a computer problem and it baffles me that it was necessary (and also that it somehow worked). Thankfully it was a very quick and easy thing to do.
Can't play Hell Divers with friends. It is what it is.
I still like Word and Excel better than libreoffice but I can live with the latter for most applications. I still miss being able to boot up Photoshop for random stuff. There is simply no alternative for PS on Linux. Photopea is about as much as you can get and it doesn't come close still.
Installing a Japanese IME (the thing you need to convert your keyboard inputs into Japanese characters) or any IME for that matter (Chinese and Korean will run into the same issue) should not be as complicated as it is on Linux. On Windows as soon as I choose Japanese in the language settings it installs everything and I can immediately start typing. On Linux, choosing Japanese as a language or keyboard is not enough. I had to install 2 or 3 different pieces of software and the keyboard input configuration was a bit confusing (because your IME settings live separately from your keyboard settings, at least on KDE). It worked fine once I configured it but why oh why is there no set-it-and-forget-it option for users that don't use the Latin alphabet? This is the kind of basic essential thing that I feel should be shipped with the kernel and not be dependent on external software. Most users want to just type on their keyboards, not to tinker with settings...
USB wake from sleep was completely borked on my PC. I'd press the sleep button and it would just put itself in a weird half-asleep state with the fans/motherboard still running and there was no way out of it besides a hard shut down by holding the power button. Thankfully disabling the feature entirely solved the issue. Could be one of my devices and I did ponder disabling wake from sleep on just the one device, but I honestly didn't need the feature. Still, it was scary to see my computer never going to sleep until I figured out this was the cause.
I want to end by saying none of this makes me want to go back to Windows. Yes they are real pain points and annoyed me to deal with, but I could make just as long, if not a longer list of things that drove me mad on Windows. I could also easily make a list of things that I have loved since being on Linux, so it goes both ways.
Switching to Linux has also taught me a lot more about troubleshooting my own machine and made me confident about it. I've even started using terminal software which I thought would never happen before but Linux kinda forces you to open it at some point. And just the general relief in knowing that if something is wrong, there is at least usually a way to diagnose the issue, if not outright fix it, whereas on Windows you're basically praying things work all the time and are often out of luck when they don't.
CJK input. I have used Linux for over 20 years, and every time I setup a new machine, it is always a mystery whether or not I will be able to get non-Latin input methods working. Even when it works, it simply does not. CJK input has “bugs” in soooo many apps and has had them for at least the past 15 years that I have been fighting them. In some apps, CJK input is completely broken, and in others it behaves unpredictably (such as repeating the last character you typed when you finish typing). It is so annoying that you can’n just type in an app and expect the same behavior regardless of whether the app is QT, GTK, Electron, etc. There is also the problem that having to use a non-Latin input method at all feels like an afterthought, something just smooshed onto the vase after it has been fired. It can be so cumbersome, even just the way switching between input methods is handled, and if you don’t use QWERTY for Latin input in addition to requiring a CJK input method: RIP.
That there are too many package managers. I've been running ubuntu for a long time, and apt used to be the one that everyone supported because of debian. Nowadays it's not uncommon that a program I want to install has support for 5 or more different package managers, but not one that I can use on my system. I'm really not a fan of installing a snapshot, even if it's a "stable release". I want bug fixes and more importantly security fixes.
Alien may be of interest to you. Converts between different package manager formats.
Does it convert between package manager formats or package formats? The thing I'm missing most is the ability to upgrade automatically. Looks like it doesn't handle dependencies well either.
Package manager formats. And yea, it would have to be a piece of an automation puzzle that would be a hot mess.
I’ve had terrible joy with Alien, but I think that’s because it interfered so heavily with my existing Debian environment, and I was trying to install a whole new DE that isn’t packaged.
I've used Linux on and off for much longer than I want to think about (started experimenting about 30 years ago? 😬). It's come a long way in some things but still had a lot of room to grow. A few of my current struggles:
I could list other things, but many of my complaints have been mentioned above already.
(Although surprisingly, unlike many, my laptop sleeps really well and has an Nvidia GPU 🤷)
Could you please share your laptop model and distro?
Sure, it's a Lenovo Legion Y540 running CachyOS. I tried a great other distros and that's the one I've had the best success on. It doesn't have a built in fingerprint reader so I've been trying to find a reasonable USB one to purchase. I thought I had one (it was listed as compatible on a site, but it turns out that's not accurate).
I’ve been running Linux full time on my desktop for two and a half years. My wife has been running Linux for almost one year. The biggest pain point is that I switched to nixOS in 2025, which was great at first. After running it for a while I feel like I don’t fully understand my machine. I thought I could force myself to understand nix better by immersing myself in it, and I was wrong. I want to switch to something more minimal that I can wrap my head around but I don’t want to give up the insane number of packages available. My wife’s biggest pain points are not knowing the names of the apps she wants to install, and me nagging her to update her system once a month.
https://alternativeto.net is a great resource to help.
I'd throw a root systemd timer on your wife's laptop to do updates.
I switched to linux at the start of the year after hitting my breaking point dealing with Windows trying to control my PC. I went with Bazzite for something that was focused around out of the box support for NVIDIA cards and my intended uses. Overall its been a fairly painless transition/experience, and I have a seperate older drive in case I need Windows for whatever cursed reason. Its been months since I last loaded Windows though.
My computer is unrelated to my work, so productivity software is mostly a non issue. As far as gaming goes, my main pain points have been dual monitor support and cursor locking. Im a freak who still uses my monitors i got 12(!) years ago, 1600x900. I inherited a 1920x1080 monitor from a roommate, and was using that alongside the other 900p monitor. I've since given it to my partner after she got a PC for her work, but while I had two different sized monitors I had a plethora of issues related to cursor locking in games and applications. The issues were inconsistent and hard to diagnose, and eventually I resorted to just shutting off the other monitor when problems arose. After switching back to two monitors of the same size, issues mostly went away. Here and there I have cursor locking troubles but I can usually fix it quickly. Bazzite has decent documentation for most things I need from it and there are countless forums to search while I learn the OS better.
It's been a lot of fun to have a computer feel new again, and feel like a tool im controlling instead of something held hostage by a company I despise.
Old monitor club checking in. Still using some old 1080p IPS displays from circa 2010-2012. One Ultrawide LG with 75hz Freesync, and a basic but nice looking HP.
Sure, they predate HDR. Their response time is meh by modern standards. 75hz is pretty low for monitors today. But colors still look good, and if I do want a full eye candy experience I switch to the 4k TV.
At least I don't need to accept a terms of use to use them.
Exactly, my monitors are just a display, nothing more. Buying updated displays isnt exactly appealing with the state of todays tech landscape, in both price and levels of bloat. And if anything, the lower specs have helped my Nvidia 2080 go a lot farther than it otherwise might have.
I’ve been dabbling in Linux for a long time, starting in 2000-2005 with Yellow Dog Linux (Red Hat for PowerPC) and Ubuntu. In the early 10s I had a short stint where I daily drove a few distros including Mint, Crunchbang, and Sabayon. Currently I have a secondary laptop that runs Fedora, a home NAS/server running Mint, and a secondary Fedora partition on the gaming tower plus a Steam Deck running SteamOS.
It’s never stuck as my main OS because it’s always had a degree of awkwardness of some sort or another that shifts around depending on what distro and DE/WM/etc I’m using that is difficult to get past. Stuff like things that’d have a System Settings prefpane in macOS requiring packages that aren’t installed and upon attempting to install them, throwing errors or having clunky, error-prone setup UX.
That’s why as far as desktop use is concerned, I use Linux only in a secondary role. Basically as long as whatever I do works within the confines of a default install, the experience is great, but the more I stray from standard the hairier it becomes.
It also annoys me that there is no Mac paradigm desktop environment. The best that can be achieved is a half-functional facsimile by enabling the global menubar in a KDE install and tweaking a few settings, but tons of details are wrong and can’t be fixed without forking the project and something like half or two-thirds of apps won’t populate the global menubar.
I assume you’ve tried GNOME?
Yep, many times over the years. There are ways it’s more Mac-like than KDE, but for someone deeply familiar with macOS the resemblance is skin-deep. When you start digging in there are more differences than similarities.
It's been 90 days since my last reboot.
I know I should reboot, to get the latest security updates, but I don't want to.
I am a linux veteran, and have been using Void Linux for a while, doing everything from scratch myself.
I, however, cannot get my printer to work properly. I have CUPS set up and configured (IMO properly), yet half of my apps don't see it in their printer dialog. When they do, custom sizes will randomly print incorrectly etc. It's just an all around mess.
This is probably my fault, as it worked on previous, pre-made distros and I'm only having this issue on Void, where I did everything myself. Still, I have no idea how to fix it, and nobody I talked to about it did either.
At this point I have accepted that i need to print from my phone.
Are you hooking directly to the printer via USB or is it on your network? I've had vastly more success getting my network laser printer from Canon to work than my USB-connected Brother laser printer. It could be the difference between brands, though.
It's over network. Unfortunately, the printer is in a completely different room, but I am going to try the cable approach just to see what happens. Thanks for the idea!
With any luck, it’s just a matter of updating the drivers directly on the printer, and having that one Linux machine actually control the printer on the network and give everybody else the credentials and drivers support
I'm really happy with nixOS + KDE.
If I had to complaint about something it would be the fact that Dolphin isn't as fast at searching as fzf from the terminal and I don't really understand why.
And since I'm on the topic of Dolphin: it really should never freeze. If some drive is loading or performing any kind of action just queue up the action that I'm trying to take rather than making me wait.
Adobe, always Adobe. Plus windows ltsc iot on world region is actually extremely nice. For an idea of how bare bones it is, it doesn't even come with the snipping tool.
Been using Linux as an end-user on-and-off for 15 or so years, never really touched kernel code though outside of school. Currently I daily-drive macOS for most of my computing. I really only have two issues with Linux on my gaming PC:
This is more likely to be a page file or swap issue. Depending on your system and RAM configuration you could look into ZRAM configuration, or tuning your swappines.
I'll have to double-check, I compile with 16 threads on 32 gigs of memory and as far as my very casual btop monitoring goes I'm fairly sure it's CPU load that causes the freezes
Issue is btop freezes sometimes too…I've never had problems like this with schedutil
I would try compiling with
I would say it's more likely I/O related as CPU stalls recover pretty much instantaneously in comparison. Could be from reading lots of tiny files? Or maybe there's something quadratic going on in your build processes?
I think you were kind of dead on with the I/O thing. Looking at btop/iotop, the freezing corresponds with spikes in writes to the root SSD: https://postimg.cc/2Vqxx5Bb
Well. That's something I'll need to figure out I suppose. It's not a particularly slow SSD but it's not particularly fast either (It's a Crucial P2 something or other.)
Anything to do with iOS. Not having the ability to mount iCloud is a huge pain point since iOS really blows at interacting with other forms of file sharing or cloud drives. The solution would be either ios handles other cloud stuff more accurately (not likely) or linux becomes able to mount apples solution (more likely).
Today is your lucky day. Rclone is love, rclone is life.
Well looks like i have a project for next weekend
(I've been full time on Linux for a couple years, and worked on Linux servers professionally/as an amateur for decades)
The main pain point remaining for me has been the poor API design story around accessibility and Wayland. Others have put it better than I, but in a nutshell:
So now we're stuck with several competing implementations and a bunch of software that doesn't work. Often the people who complain most loudly against Wayland detractors are not accessibility software devs, and they appear to have driven many of them out of the room. Hopefully it gets better someday, but it kinda sucks atm. to wreck my hands in order to use a modern desktop environment.
I'm mixed on Wayland in general. When it was being introduced, I struggled to understand the benefit of it for me as an user beyond the vague notion of better security, and now that it's become the standard, it's caused me nothing but issues overall.
I've never had to code anything that involved interacting with it but the little I know about how it works compared to X doesn't sound good either? The one time I had to consider it was because I have an issue with some Unreal games that would have required me to rebind keys at the lowest level possible, and while X11 allows that with a simple config file somewhere, Wayland doesn't.
The fact that it just gave up on accessibility should frankly be damning. I don't understand why we support it.
Yeah, mostly the same ... I think that, in principle, it's supposed to reduce the friction for devs and address some otherwise intractable concerns in X11 (e.g. drawing latency in games). However, it feels like just dealing with the hacks would've been less pain at this point.
Still, there's something to be said about keeping foundational systems simple. Back when humans developed software, doing so was important for keeping people from going insane and burning out. Since FOSS projects live and die on volunteer labour, cycling through maintainers because X11 makes them blow a fuse every few years is problematic in the long term. I'm honestly not sure how the advent of modern tooling changes that equation. Although hopefully it accelerates the pace at which Wayland catches up with the remaining missing features from X.
Been on Fedora for one year (more or less).
Never had a problem and i'm quite shocked to think i have never ever reinstalled anything, let alone the whole OS.
I don't know what i was thinking but maybe i expected it to be less robust, i dunno... or that i could stumble upon something i couldn't manage... and instead everything works just fine. I have tuned a couple of things here and there, mostly aesthetic. The only complain i have is that as soon as the new version arrives it just bricks most of my gnome extensions and i have to wait a couple of weeks before having the desktop i am used to. For the rest it's simply... flawless.
Recently (uhm.. couple of months i guess) i have installed Bazzite on my gaming rig and i really liked it, all the games i have played were perfect BUT... the first time i have installed the OS (with kde) the colours were just horrible. The colour scheme was over saturated. I have tried to look for solutions online, i have prompted some AIs... nothing. The only solution i found was to install it again (this time with gnome) and now it is perfect.
So... I dunno. I suppose that when it works it works but i'm just too ignorant to undestand how to fix things i do not like. But that's more a "me" pain point than a linux pain point i suppose :)
I have some pain points, despite having Linux for 15 years, and would appreciate if anyone have any advice.
I would appreciate if someone could point to the soft that could help me. Maybe I miss something.
I use Linux since around 2009 as my only OS on my PCs. I have to use Windows on my work laptop. Thanks to his I have quite a.lit of experience using both and I can say that Windows, especially 11, is much more pain than Linux is these days.
I used Gentoo for a really long time and I still use it on my servers. This kinda makes me a bit of an advanced/experienced user. I know a lot of things about the OS itself thanks to this. Also running my servers helps with that.
Recently I jumped the ship to Arch on my desktops/laptops. It is much faster to set up and maintain, eben though some things were actually easier in Gentoo - ie. keeping older Nvidia graphics drivers due to HW being to old for new ones. Nevertheless, Arch it is and will be for now.
Linux made absolutely unbelievable way since when I first tried it (this was around 2004, actually) and since I started using it as my only OS. Back then I had to keep various repositories active for various programs, I had to resolve dependencies, many things were not available or easy to do. Actually one thing was easy - getting video from my firewire-able camera!
If I wanted tomplay games it was either SuperTux, SpringRTS Wprld of Padman, OpenTTD or using Wine. Wine was good, but pain in the ass to get games running through it.
Then Valve came with Linux version of Steam and quite a lot of Linux games and I started playing through Steam and buying games there. Even that wasn't hassle-free, sometimes the games didn't work due to mismatched libraries etc. I guess having lots of distros to pick from isn't always a great thing. But this got eventually better and nowadays it's mostly fine. And then Valve came with Proton, which is Wine on steroids. And since then I just buy and play games and do not worry about anything.
Linux itself got a lot better in the meantime. Dependency hell in Gentoo became kinda easy updating, just time and power consuming. Most things are available in standard repository andnjust work. Even support for various things got better - I have Brother multifunction laser printer and I.managed to set up even remote scanning to the server. Printers as a whole are.much less hassle on Linux (from my limited experience). Nowadays I can shoot video using OBS, then edit it using many available programs (I use Shotcut, as I don't need anything fancy, I just cut), GIMP does what I need with my photos, I run Immich, Jellyfin, TVheadend...
Testament to the ease of Linux use is my dad. One day he got upgraded PC from family and we went into issue of "We don't have Windows licence". Well, since that day he uses Linux and doesn't complain at all. He can watch movies, see photos, browse web and that's all he does. Another relative got Linux due to problems with Windows licence (unable to activate on new PC) and he plays a lot of games on it, including Anno 1800, both Kingdom Comes and some more. This one does complain a lot, but he is complainy normally about everything - his PC just works.
And the comparison with current state of Windows? I update Linux when I want. Windows updates itself at least fortunate times. Linux updates most of the time just go flawlessly. Windows updates fuck up my setup - ie. privacy settings or programs pinned to the bottom panel (they just disappear from there even though they are still installe). I know those are small things, but I come upon them more frequently than I would like. And I want my PC to do things that I want it to do and not do something for my by itself.
I wouldn:t turn back to using Windows on my PCs. Linux is the way to go and it's becoming the way to go for more and more people. And it should - it's free (as in price and as in freedom), it does the job, it can handle some things even better than Windows (printers, some games) and overall is more about youncontrolling the PC, not the other way around.
EDIT: Sorry, in my essay I completely forgot that this is about pain points. Well, I don't have any with my usage.
I have two really frustrating ones that I can't seem to resolve:
Fortunately, although both are annoying, I can live with them. I'd love to be able to use tablet mode on the laptop, but doing without it isn't so bad (and is better than babysitting the sensors). The other problem is worse but reliably stops happening a few minutes after boot, so it's kinda like having a pre-SSD machine that takes forever to boot up.
From someone not using Linux I'd say it's the impenetrable amount of different distros and use cases. PopOS? CachyOS? Bazzite? 5 or maybe 10 years ago nobody spoke about those. Well maybe Arch, but I know that because it was practically a meme in days past. Is Mint still a thing? What even is the right starting point? How do I choose and how do I keep up with the trend of changing distros down the line? I call it a trend, but often this happens because of security issues, development is dropped, or otherwise a discontinuation of a certain distro. Inevitably you need a new distro but finding out when, how, or even why requires much more than just getting your Linux toes wet.
It's an ever changing landscape that I don't know how to navigate. Or maybe even want to navigate. I'm getting more and more tired of having to continuously manage my home appliances.
Additionally, the times I have used Linux I ran into issues that required me to scrap the entire OS because fixing it cost more time than just nuking and paving the install happened a few times too many. Of course, that then dovetailed into having to reconfigure everything to my liking.
Then there's the institutional knowledge. Things taken for granted by long time Linux users that make it difficult to learn. Package managers that work on one distro but not another, so the guide I'm using is pointless, ever changing new package managers or driver mishaps and the endeavour becomes a test of patience more than I consider it a useful tool.
I'm still keen on making the jump at some point, but for now a severely stripped down Windows suffices and fits right into my already existing skill set and workflow. If something is broken I know where and how to fix it. Luckily scripts and other tools (or even Enterprise versions) to make Windows function as an OS rather than spyware are easy to get. I don't like the direction Windows is going, but my current install is usable and mostly without annoyances.
Tldr; lots of configuration in an ever changing landscape.
I've just made the jump after more than twenty years on the same Windows install (it's a ship of theseus kind of situation). The thing is, we have many years of accumulated Windows knowledge. Sure, we think "it just works" but we effectively learned all that institutional knowledge over the years on the Windows side of things, too. So I think a little bit of initial friction is unavoidable, but if you ever decide to make the jump, you can almost certainly do it! And over time things get easier and easier, certainly most of the big things you need to learn, you will learn very early on.
The distro families that exist haven't changed much and you are still able to use the same "parent" distros for each that you could have used ten or twenty years ago. The options you have mentioned are specialized downstream distributions that streamline things for certain kinds of usage patterns, so it's a matter of talking a bit with other people about what you do with your computer and how you want to manage it. I think there is a very small amount of particulars that you need to settle on in advance: The system package manager and package repositories you are using, for instance, since you don't want to have a bunch of services conflicting with each other if you can help it. These are typically already a function of the distro family you have chosen, so if you have an Ubuntu distro for example, you can always use Ubuntu packages, even if it's actually Linux Mint.
Other than that you can just cross-install things no matter what distro you're in. Distro choice should in theory not restrict what software you can run; you can pick and choose.
So far nothing has required me to scrap my entire OS. Things seem much, much more stable and bug-free than they used to be during my previous attempt, and any past OS-scrapping (which I have done many years ago) was caused by misguided attempts to install conflicting packages.
Oh I'm under no delusion that Windows "just works". But precisely that long time experience and knowledge makes my PC mine instead of something I need to wrangle.
Thank you for the clarification on software packages, it's one of those things that don't feel like I have a good grasp on things.
Do I use sudo apt-get, dnf, pacman? Flatpaks? I know now but it's a bit of a pain when you follow some installation process and it doesn't work because distro reasons.
I'm a relatively quick learner and it has been nice to glean some additional surface level knowledge from tinkering with my Steam Deck, so I'm sure I could figure it out if I intend to take the plunge. Right now though, Windows "just works" ... For what I intend to do with it.
As a noob (I switched to Mint in the spring of 2024), my only current concern is a lack of experience migrating to a new computer. My current one is "it was slightly above mid-range at Best Buy in 2019"-grade and really showing its age. I'd like to replace it, but I'm not sure what hardware would (a) even be an upgrade over what I have now at a cost I can afford, and (b) be easy to set up for someone who specifically looked for the best drop-in replacement for Windows when I initially switched.
I had issues when I first installed Mint and echo chocobean's point:
I don't want to buy a new PC, get halfway through installing Mint (since it will always come with Windows straight from the store), screw it up, not be able to fix it, not be able to return it to the store either at that point because I opened/modified it, and end up with a $1500 paper weight. I've avoided dealing with it for a while just due to the cost of a computer these days, but I installed Mint on a separate partition on a detachable spinning-rust HDD that isn't getting any younger, so it's going to come to a head at some point.
There are some decent vendors selling Linux preinstalled:
System76 (pricey)
Dell (developer focused)
Framework (new to me, big on repair-ability)
To add to this: here's a good rundown of all the available vendors supporting Linux.
I've been using a System76 Oryx Pro since 2019 and have nothing but good things to say about it and them (great customer service).
That said, I would recommend against using their Pop!_OS for the time being -- especially for anyone new to Linux. They just launched their COSMIC desktop environment which is really cool and has a lot of potential, but it simply isn't ready for primetime yet. It is being very actively developed and rapidly improving over time, but new users need a "Just Works" solution and COSMIC isn't there yet.
When buying through them you have the option of Ubuntu instead, which I'd recommend to new users over Pop!_OS. Alternately, you can always buy an S76 machine and simply put your own beginner-friendly distro of choice on it (Mint or Fedora KDE would be my recommendations).
ooh, great website!
I have Cosmic on a media/browser machine and it is fully usable but I'll agree that it probably has too many rough edges/annoyances for power users. KDE has a lot of features now and is pretty solid. Mint's MATE is simple but good too.
Since I use NixOS, basically everything, but I bear with it because the other features it has.
However over time you get adjusted... I think.
A more substantial answer however are DEs and lack of configuration software for peripherals.
For peripherals, there are some those use proprietary software(GMMK2 and Pulsar mice) or WebUSB(Fractal Scape and Topping DX1 II), Nix being Nix, I had the WebUSB part working... Like once, never again it seems, or maybe I only got it working on when I used Poop_OS!, Despite having udev rules in my config.
And for DEs?
"There's no good DE" is my motto.
I hate KDE's defaults, GNOME's alright but their file explorer SUCKS, and I hate the overview search thing, I'd rather have something like krunner, but any time I use a spotlight-like extension, it spontaneously combusts.
Cosmic a fucking mess, even after the full release, if i3wm wasn't such a pain to set up, and had some better QoL, I'd be using that instead.
I started with Ubuntu in 2018 as a daily driver, which caused a fair amount of avoidable stress looking back - but getting stuck on random issues is a good way to learn things I guess.
A few times I had trouble with Wi-Fi connections that had no obvious explanation. It seemed that the machine was connecting to a lot of different access points at once, with the result that the bandwidth was basically zero. I had to ask a more experienced friend to help fix it to a single access point (and have completely forgotten the relevant terminal wizardry).
Another time I changed my graphics drivers to Nvidia, then rebooted and... surprise! My Wi-Fi drivers are gone! No other machines around to troubleshoot from, and no way to install new packages, so the situation looked pretty dire... it was alright since booting with a different kernel gave the drivers back, but pretty hairy.
I switched to Mint last year since people said it was a lot more user friendly. After all this time, I'm definitely in the camp of "wants an OS that looks like Windows but without being Windows". So far, have had just one problem with freezing on sleep. It turned out to be to do with the Intel CPU's CSTATE. Other than that, it's literally been as if the laptop came with the OS out of the box. Compatibility for games and such has also never been better, so pretty happy.
I made the full switch from Windows to Linux on my desktop system about a year ago, and it has mostly been pretty good. I'm running Fedora 44 with KDE, upgraded pretty seamlessly from Fedora 43.
My main pain point is my X870e motherboard's Realtek 5Gb ethernet chipset. It works out of the box with modern kernels using the r8169 kernel module, but that is somewhat lacking compared to the r8126 driver that Realtek provides source for. My use case here is that my Fedora machine is used to host a Sunshine service for streaming Steam games on my LAN, and it occasionally suffers sudden drops in throughput using the built-in r8169 driver.
That r8126 driver can be easily compiled and installed, and the r8169 module blacklisted so that the system uses the correct driver... until Fedora pushes a new kernel and DKMS fails to build the driver... every... damn... time. I now know how to manually recompile and install the kernel module when this happens but damn it is a pain in the ass.
My other main pain point is Adobe Lightroom. I know there are FOSS alternatives like RawTherapee and Darktable, but this is a skill issue. I'm just broken by years of using Lightroom for my photography, and those habits are hard to break.
Cant comment so much on current pain points, aside from the obvious one that games with ring-0 anti cheat are incompatible.
Only Linux devices i have are a Chromebook (I mean it runs Linux apps) and a Steam Deck where I only found the Battle.net launcher a pain to install.
I also found that the occasional game verified for Steam Deck practically crashes to desktop (specifically Cthulhu Saves The World.)
I was practically forced to use Ubuntu eighteen years ago (TL;DR I got goaded into pirating Norton PartitionMagic by a "friend" from school because my computer was weirdly partitioned, nuked my Windows XP install, had no backup media and had to use Linux) and it was fucking awful. Only game I even managed to get running reliably was World of Warcraft.
The current state of Linux says a lot more about how the FOSS community (and more importantly, Valve) advanced the system's gaming support by a few decades.
Used Fedora for several years now. I dislike the added complication in adding non-free sources, but that’s minor. I strongly dislike that there exists no good replacement for Adobe acrobat. I dislike that I can’t play many online games.
I don’t get why micro editor control shift up selects everything rather than just the paragraph you’re on. That’s what nano does.
Putting Fedora to sleep often results in a black screen when you wake it, even worse on laptops.
I just submitted a paper and LibreOffice’s format showed up as a mess for the editors. That’s not acceptable.
LibreOffice impress is hot garbage. What takes an hour in office takes a day in impress.
Happy with Linux but a handful of dumb issue that shouldn’t work this way.
xournalpp is not a complete replacement but it's very handy!
There's also
pdftopsandps2pdfAnd recently I've really enjoyed using https://github.com/pdfarranger/pdfarranger for high level tasks like rotating pages (xournalpp doesn't know how to rotate)
A bunch of minor things:
Continued confusion over the installation and management of programs between Flatpacks, AppImages, Snap, RPM, etc. I rely on Gemini to tell me the best way to install a given program.
Discover has started getting stuck on "Fetching Updates" -- some sort of issue with Snap packages? -- so I have to do my updates through the terminal. Except a couple of programs (Google Earth and Slack) have a "digest error" that blocks the entire update process, so I have to run a custom command that skips them.
Programs randomly using the generic Wayland icon in the titlebar and taskbar, and related issues with syncing desktop icons, launcher entries, etc.
the desktop very occasionally freezes -- I can see but can't click on anything, and have to restart the shell via the terminal
Conversely, I've had very little trouble with the stuff I thought would be most vexing. My printer runs flawlessly, for example (though having a monochrome Brother laser printer helps), and I've had no problems with drivers, peripherals, etc. Despite the above quirks, I've been very happy with Fedora and KDE.
I'd say I've got comfortably "average" Linux experience, though I've not used it a lot in the last 5 years, so I'm a bit out of date.
I decided recently I was going to try using it as a daily driver and got a few distros to try out, then got as far as the live install before my QMK keyboard inputs completely fucked up.
My research at the time implied I probably had to switch the input mode on the board itself and at that point I just couldn't be arsed.
I plan to go back and try again at some point but it did grind my gears in the worst possible way before I even got as far as actually installing anything.
GNOME slows down with continuous use for no apparent reason and no other DM supports dynamic vertical workspaces even as a plug-in.
My setup is customized enough that the majority of my issues are of my own making. With that said, here are a handful of things that are currently a thorn in my side:
All of these fall into one of two categories: I could probably fix it but it hasn't crossed the worth-it time threshold, or it's some proprietary software that just doesn't support linux.
I've had some form of linux in my life for 15~20 years now, though only more recently leaving other OSes fully.
I don't have any interest in switching back; not because linux is perfect, but because the issues that arise are usually in my control. In contrast, the reason I needed the Chromebook Recovery Utility was because an automatic update a couple weeks back stuck my family member's chromebook in a bootloop. Just, turn on your computer one day and... nope! doesn't work.
My only pain point at the moment is that the built-in camera on my Dell XPS 16 doesn't work on my nixos setup. It's an annoyance. I did get it to work before by fiddling around a lot (building some drivers from source and such IIRC), but then I updated and it stopped working and I kind of face up on it. Connecting a USB based webcam when I need it just works out of the box. I won't be surprised if everything just starts working one day due to an update, but for now I can live with it.
Lack of (easy to install) drivers for Mac trackpad gestures. Seems like a waste to put it on an old laptop when you lose that functionality.
Curiously I don't have any major paint points that cannot be traced back to third party incompatibilties. This is possibly due to large amount of choice and personally I went through several distros until I found one I don't see any major problems with.
There are certainly things that I could prefer different but certainly less than what I deal with on Windows.
The worst problem is currently sleep/resume which can sometimes require hard restart.