What are your current pain points with Linux?

I have no pain point as an Arch Linux veteran user.

I use openSUSE,, there are no pain points.

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 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:

• There's software I use for work that I need to run inside of a Windows virtual machine
• Lately, gaming performance is worse compared to my friends on Windows
• Sometimes my GPU driver update fails and I have to manually uninstall/reinstall

However, just because I enjoy it, do I 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.

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.

Just other Linux users telling me to use Nix! If it ain’t the Debian way I ain’t doing it.

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).

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:

• Graphics break when my computer goes to sleep because Nvidia cannot write drivers still, so I just keep it on and out of sleep mode
• The CPU scheduler is pretty terrible, I've had multiple incidents where I'm compiling something and then the entire computer freezes for 5-10s. I tried switching to something called scx_bpfland a while back but it didn't help much.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My situation is probably unusual but with my current laptop I've had a surprising amount of friction with linux.

I have a Lenovo P15 Gen2 that's caused me all sorts of frustration, which is unusual since I was under the impression Thinkpads are usually really well supported, especially business models. I bought it refurbished from eBay 3 years ago, with 3 years left on its warranty.

At this point I'm leaning on the assumption some part of the chassis itself is cursed. I've RMA'd it twice now where it just up and dies and refuses to charge and they've replaced the motherboard both times. Looking up the serial number it looks like it's been warrantied several times before so this thing is basically the Thinkpad of Theseus.

Anyway, the reason I mention that is it was originally a $7000 laptop with a xeon processor, 64gb ram, an RTX 4000 GPU, etc etc, but on a fresh install of popos, fedora, ubuntu, xubuntu, barebones debian with xfce installed manually, etc, it's staggeringly slow. Like, apps take 5 seconds to launch, even opening the xfce menu or launching mousepad, which are equivalent to the start menu or notepad on Windows 98 or 2000. The only thing that worked for me is installing vanilla debian and then installing KDE on top. I have no idea what the issue is, but I suspect it has to do with nvidia quadro drivers plus wayland.

Basically at this point either my laptop is cursed or I have a serious skill issue, but either way I (as the brits would say) cannot be arsed to investigate issues this deep in my free time. It's actually kind of demoralizing, since I fix these sorts of issues for clients as a profession. I think this is sorta a meme, that the mechanic owns the shittiest car that always breaks down, or like a misogynistic joke about gynecologists.

Background: I'm a geek from the 80s who's used pretty much every version of windows since 2.0, first installed linux in 1997 or so, been daily driving it exclusively since the late aughts.

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.

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:

• Nvidia graphics driver weirdness. Only ever had one really bad update where I had to use a TTY to recover my machine. However, sometimes the driver may not initialize properly or a bad update will have the system fallback to a basic driver and I'm stuck at 800x600 for a bit as I diagnose and fix.
• Sleep. Never had a non-Mac computer that handled sleep correctly and Linux seems to be doing it worse than my last Windows PC. I haven't touched Windows since 2023 though so who knows if Windows got worse. On my tower, if I lock the machine manually with Super+L, the computer locks but the screen doesn't go to sleep. However, if I just let my machine idle, it'll sleep successfully after 30s of no activity.
• Application packaging. You may get a .deb directly or a tarball or 7zip or a Snap or Flatpak or whatever else exists. I'm spoiled by MacOS here since usually things either come in a .dmg installer (where you just drag an icon) or come as the app itself and you just move it into the Applications folder. If you want to uninstall, usually, you just delete it from the Applications folder and it's gone. Sometimes files will get left behind but it's not too hard to dig into the filesystem and clean them up. It's something I've gotten used to but it'd be nice if it were better.
• Debugging issues has always been more involved. I'll be honest, my one big use of LLMs has been debugging Linux issues and it's been a big help. One of Linux's biggest strengths and its biggest weakness is the sheer amount of choice, which can lead to random consequences. You'll be a few layers deep in debugging when you realized that A broke B which C relied on to get X to work but X doesn't work with Y but you need Y to use Z. This hasn't happened to me super often but its happened more on Linux than on other platforms. This debugging struggle is made worse by some people on Linux forums. While most Linux people I've directly interacted with are super kind and helpful, its common to see ones online who are not. Often times I've searched for an issue and found multiple forum posts matching my issue but the top comment will only say "RTFM" or "Shouldn't have used Ubuntu".

Overall though, most issues I've had with Linux over the years have gotten better or just plain disappeared, which is great to see.

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.