cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
Honestly, the only feature, and it’s not even part of baseline Windows (it’s from Windows Powertoys), that I’m missing is Workspaces, I had made that a main part of my workflow daily.
The feature creates Shortcut Buttons that when pressed does two steps, in sequence;
- opens specific numbers of specific windows
- automatically tiles them into a specific layout
Only had 2 of them;
- gaming
- opened Steam + Browser + Spotify + Discord
- Steam on the left screen, Browser and Discord on the right screen, Spotify minimised
- TTRPGs
- opened two browser windows and discord
- one browser window full screen on left, the other sharing half the screen with discord on the right
Seems like this is possible, but the method (and maybe ability) depends on your window manager.
If you’re using x11, you can interact with the window manager via the command line (so could set up the whole thing in a script). An example command line tool: xdotool (search for “interacting with x11 via command line” for more info).
If you’re on Wayland, one of the design principles was to avoid programmatically interacting with window size or position; the user will set up their composer to behave as they want, not how the programmer of that program wants, and especially not how programmers of other arbitrary programs want (it was a security issue at the extremes, or could be annoying for more common cases). But you, the user, do have control, though it depends on your DE and what Wayland compositor it is using. On fedora KDE, you can use KWin scripts (which supports several languages).
There’s also some other window managers that can offer better control, and perhaps it’s enough for the window manager to simply remember the position of windows when they are closed (which I think Wayland does or can be configured to do easier than writing a script, then you just need a launch script for the programs in your shortcuts).
kwin_wayland is currently using 2125Mb VRAM and 6268Mb GTT.
That seems unusually high, I’ve got a few graphical effects enabled and it’s just barely scratching 100MiB VRAM on my machine.
What’s GTT?
has your system been running for some while? i have observed this behaviour in niri (a separate wm) as well, and seemingly, it is not a issue. if i understand it correctly, for any app that had vrma allocated, and is closed it’s vram is not cleared correctly (on amd i gpu) and that usage just gets added to wm (the host program). if it is not using much gpu (check any app which shows usage), then it is just a reporting issue. like when i fresh boot, my wm uses 100MiB of vram, but with time, it becomes 2GiB and stays there, but i still can open stuff which requires vram. kinda like buffered ram, which is still allocated, but available to use.
Devs not working together to make Wayland universally supported ASAP or fix X11 ASAP. With Microslop Windoze being as horrible as it is we cannot permit ourselves to fight these silly internal battles; as long as someone is not bullying, raping, killing, or, you know, peddling crypto and cheering ICE, then give each other some slack.
As for daily usage I have no gripes. Linux works excellently. If I still gamed as much as I did back in the day then these shitty kernal anti-cheats would bother me—not a Linux problem but an anti-cheat engineer skill issue—now I simply don’t touch them.
That’s the thing with Linux: Devs work on whatever the fuck they want, because they don’t work for a single corporation with an over-arching goal.
And a lot of them have very strong opinions about what’s better, which motivates them to work on it in their free time in the first place.
But all the big corporate support and big donor money goes towards Wayland now.
X11 is basically frozen in the state it’s in for the few people who still rely on it, and losing dev wo*manpower quickly.or fixing X11 ASAP
There was this one guy doing major work on X11, but while he did some good work he also submitted breaking changes, was then barred from submitting patches and in turn created an angry fork (XLibre) breaking even more important things (e.g. the whole Nvidia driver).
That’s why we can’t have nice things. He probably turned a lot of people away who could’ve helped the project (and it also didn’t help that he was an anti-vaxer that even pissed Linus Torvalds off with his nonsense).
Since most of the X11 devs are Wayland devs now it’s understandable they don’t want to ever go back to it anymore. They know the limitations and the horrible, ancient feature-creep of it. This talk from 2013 explains their motivations for abandoning it pretty well.
Bluetooth.
Its always been an issue and it remains an issue.
TL;DR: I’d recommend getting a bluetooth dongle!
I’ve got an Asus bluetooth 4.0 dongle, and it works perfectly for bluetooth. PS5 controllers, Airpods Pros, they’ve all connected to it really nicely.
I used to have issues on Windows with bluetooth, but then I found out why. My Windows was using my motherboard BT instead of the dongle. I added a PS5 controller while that was in effect, and once I eventually got the bluetooth dongle (poor BT module in the motherboard sucked ass), I noticed I couldn’t remove the controller from the settings menu or through the old control panel way.
I had to turn on the BT module on my motherboard again, boot into Windows, remove the BT entries, then turn it back off. I’ve never had an issue in either Windows or Linux after that.
Ditto to this, I was having huge problems with the rpi4/5 modules, when I bought a dongle everything worked instantly.
yeah, I have one of those bluetooth earbud pairs that can pair individually, and they connect just fine but only via a low quality audio sink mode, so it sounds like shit. Works perfectly well with my android phone, so it’s definitely some linux bullshit.
I had issues with Bluetooth on Windows. Been having none since I switched to Debian + KDE.
I had a ton of issues on Arch/Artix, but Debian + KDE works as expected OOTB in terms of functionality and UI.
It depends HEAVILY on your chipset. I have a costco HP i bought as a backup that works seamlessly. Literally seamless at all times. Its a commodity piece of hardware. Millions of these things made.
My bleeding edge, new machine, cuts out, audio stutters, sleep issues; you name it: looking at you mediatek.
I find it very difficult to run windows programs that don’t have an automatic steam/lutris compatibility setup but require manual configuration. Havent had any luck getting stuff like game/map editors or obscure modding tools to run so far.
Aside from that i am pretty fine, excluding the keyring app. Wish there was an alternative because it never works for saving or providing login data any more.
Modding tools is also a pain point for me. If I need to use an external tool, it’s hours of frustration followed by throwing my hands up and swearing off mods.
That’s odd because I’ve had a ton of luck adding random crap to Lutris including obscure model railroad software
Could you elaborate on your process/give me a link to the guide you use(d)?
I would love to be able to mod certain games again.
I generally prefer to manually install and update my own mods so I’ve never tried running a mod manager in Lutris, but generally the thing you want to be mindful of is if you have everything running in the same wine prefix that needs to interact with each other. Each wine prefix is kinda isolated from another, so when you change which wine version (and therefore prefix) launches a given software, it loses all of its stored data from the appdata folder because that was left in the old prefix
I always use protontricks if I need to install something additional to a Steam game or Heroic Games manager, it can run arbitrary .exe files in a wine/proton prefix.
Everything is working in my daily use. But there are still little things that pop up less regularly, mostly around hardware.
I’ve got a USB SSD that I can’t use, because I need to “unlock” it in a windows device first. I can’t even re-partition it in linux.
I can’t update the firmware on my monitor because it can’t simply be done with a USB stick and on screen menus, but actually requires a windows only application.
And when I first started daily driving linux, my Nvidia GPU was a regular source of frustration, but it’s resolved now
Every one of these problems are because of manufacturers artificially locking hardware down, but they’re still problems. One can only hope that a growing linux using consumer base will shift their priorities
I’m so curious about this: can you tell us the make/model of the USB SSD please? That seems so hostile!
It’s a Samsung Portable SSD T5 1TB
I’ve got a USB SSD that I can’t use, because I need to “unlock” it in a windows device first. I can’t even re-partition it in linux.
Is this Bitlocker FDE? Have you tried using Dislocker?
If that doesn’t work, I recommend building a gparted live USB. Once you’re up and the SSD is visible, create a new partition table
Complete this step with no other changes. This shouldn’t care if the partitions on the disk or encrypted, it will reset the partition table which will make the disk appear blank, as if it was never formatted. You should then be able to create any new partitions you want in the available space.
! THIS IS DESTRUCTIVE !
But if you couldn’t access the encrypted partition then the data was effectively destroyed already.
There’s no data on it, and I don’t care about the disk particularly. If I really need it at some point, I’ve got a dual boot windows PC in the lounge room that serves as a media PC for the family that I can use to unlock it.
I bring it up mostly because it’s indicative of the hardware pain points. It’s also typical of them in that it’s annoying, relatively minor, and generally the fault of proprietary locking down, rather than a true compatibility issue.
Do you think the USB SSD issue could be because of the partition format? Example, Windows NTFS support can be enabled on Linux so you can then mount it. You can check partition type using a tool like
fdisk -l. Perhaps that might help.Nope. If it were that, I’d still be able to trash the partition.
The issue is apparently because it’s encrypted at the drive level and can’t even mount in windows without their proprietary software unlocking it first
I think it’s a Self Encrypting Drive. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Self-encrypting_drives There are basically two standards out there, the most common should be OPAL:
Install sedutil https://github.com/Drive-Trust-Alliance/sedutil/wiki/Command-Syntax Check #sedutil-cli scan This should list your drive with the locked state. You can unlock it using this tool if you remember the password - or reset it using the PSID (long number a sticker on NVMes, here possibly internal so you’ll have to open the case or read it from Samsung Drive Magician?) with the aptly named “yesIreallywanttoERASEALLmydatausingthePSID”.
Also in Samsung Drive Magician there should be an option for “Secure Erase” - which does the same thing and removes the password protection. But not for some drives, had the issue with a EVO Pro 990 - but the OEM variant, which Drive Magician macically no longer recognizes as a Samsung drive and refuses to cooperate.
I tried to install it on a friend’s 2012 macbook air, but the wifi didn’t work even after trying different distros and trying suggested answers like installing several additional wifi drivers.
I realize 2012 is a quite old machine, but the reality is that many (most?) people are going to be trying Linux for the first time on their very old computers. So having showstopper failures on old machines probably leads to a good amount of people thinking Linux doesn’t work well.
I had the same issue when installing on a similar MacBook. Plugging it in to Ethernet and running Driver Manager found me the driver I needed easily.
Absolutely, especially because Apple is formally discontinuing support for Intel. Seems there are rumors of a new partnership between them in the future, but it is what it is.
I switched to Bazzite from Spectre Ghost Win 10 about 6 months ago.
The first problem i had, which was entirely my own doing, was that no games would work from Steam. Turns out, you can’t run steam games from an NTFS hard drive, so reformatted and reinstalled.
Only two games that didn’t work:
Planetary Annihilation, has problems with Wayland, fixable.
Fallout 4, single digit frame rate and input lag. Switched over to New Vegas rather than try and fight FO4.
Edit: I tried another distro before Bazzite, couldn’t get Wi-Fi card to work, f-ing Intel…
I wanted a cheap way to try out using a tablet to read music from at my amateur orchestra. I couldn’t find a large-screened affordable android tablet, but I got hold of a cheap 2nd hand Surface Pro 5, a Surface Pen (for making annotations on the music), and a bluetooth foot pedal (for turning pages).
I figured I’d try sticking Fedora on it, but even with the surface specific kernel installed, it did not seem stable. Waking it with the power button randomly stopped working entirely, seemed quite sluggish, that kind of thing.
Even if I’d got it working, there are basically no ideal options on Linux for music reading software. Other platforms have MobileSheets, enScore, etc. If the core OS experience had felt more robust then I was looking forward to trying to create one myself in Qt, but just to get something working I had to give up and stuck a LTS edition of W10 on it instead, which (sadly) does work great and seems very stable in comparison. This makes sense - it’s a very Windows-specific bit of hardware; I was just hopeful that it’s basically just a x64/UEFI device with a bunch of tablety peripherals, so Linux should be an option even if it’s missing a few features. But I can’t risk it blacking out or failing to respond in the middle of a concert.
I use a TV as my monitor which only has HDMI inputs in combination with an AMD card. No HDMI 2.1 thanks to the HDMI Forum. Fuck the HDMI Forum.
Audio output over HDMI breaks when the PC goes to sleep. Need to shut the PC down to make it work again. Restarting it doesnt solve the issue.
Here and there some websites break slightly more often on Linux compared to Windows. Both with Firefox.
VR already was a troubleshooting sinkhole on Windows. On Linux its a bit worse. BUT it gets better every month and i’m amazed how well it already works tbh.
KDE doesnt let me resize the PIP window of Firefox on all of its sides. I heavily use this feature on a daily basis. I got used to it. But it was paaaaaiiiin the first few weeks.
Sometimes something breaks and CachyOS just doesnt want to shut down and i need to get the pillow to physically kill the PC.
I atleast had more hard system crashes than on Windows. Sometimes i feel like just the RAM fills up and in 70% of times only a reset helps. On the other hand killing rogue programs which dont want to hand me back the desktop like on windows arent an issue at all anymore.
Button mappings on my g27 racing wheel are out of order with seemingly no fix. Its a really minor issue. But still…
The documentation for certain things is still just utter ass. Sometimes i read through the most technically complex official docs ever for an hour without finding my answer. Then give up and ask in forum/chat/discord and its like: oh yeah just type “yorking” and if your done “exit”. Which wasnt mentioned once anywhere else.
Anything else was just getting used to a new OS and learning new things. Which can be painful but isnt a Linux issue.
Overall super happy. Its a pretty big post but i could write a book series with my Windows issues…
Regarding the racing wheel have you looked at Input Remapper? It’s not the same, but I use a Razer Tartarus game pad and Input Remapper has faultlessly remapped the keys to whatever I want.
For me, I think a really interesting take would be if Linux had a stronger office suite — meaning IT could more easily justify being a “Linux shop.” Active Directory + Microsoft Office 365 is the killer combination that leaves so many professionals saying “just use Microsoft.” Then it’s so much more natural to just issue everyone a Windows machine, and keep it that way because it’s already set up that way. If Linux could bolster itself to impress a similar level of confidence in IT professionals at the office, I think we’d see many more jobs willing to let their staff work on Linux (or even choose it exclusively for the business).
There would need to be corporations that can accept the same levels of liability Microsoft does, but for Linux. For many organizations, it comes down to who’s liable for what theoretical issues.
There would need to be corporations that can accept the same levels of liability Microsoft does, but for Linux.
There are. Red Hat, Canonical and SUSE. All of them offer workstation versions of the OS with paid support and all the enterprise stuff you need.
It’s really mostly the networking effect that keeps Linux out of that space. Huge macro-filled Excel sheets that run important tasks, customers sending in .docx files, specialized enterprise software that only runs on Windows because everyone uses that, and most importantly, none of the employees outside of IT having any Linux experience.
I’ve met small business owners who wanted to switch but couldn’t, because all the applicants for secretary/HR/accounting positions noped out when they were told they’d have to use LibreOffice.
Been daily-driving Linux for going on a decade, but recently got a “smart [bicycle] trainer” and a Zwift subscription.
Using this the Zwift program runs just fine. However, passing sensor data through Zwift Companion on my Android (GrapheneOS) phone, only some of the sensors connect and others don’t.
(Running Zwift itself on my phone connects to the sensors correctly, so that’s what I’ve been doing so far. I would like to get it set up more completely, though, with a decent-size screen for the main program and freeing up my phone for Zwift Companion, so I do need to troubleshoot it eventually.)
[Kubuntu 25.10]
Fingerprint support is weird. The hardware works after installing a driver from Dell but I could never get it to work on both login and lock screens at the same time - I get one working, the other breaks. Also, even when it works the behavior is not consistent between those screens, and also requires mouse movement or key presses before the sensor responds which is annoying.
Bluetooth support has some oddities, like the fact that some apps can properly swap my headset from “High Fidelity” and “Headset” codecs and others can’t. I’ve gotten used to doing it manually when necessary but it drove me crazy earlier on.
rclone is awesome but I really wish it had a way to set auto-mounting or auto-syncing as part of the setup. Took me quite a few attempts to get it working as I wanted.
I use Fedora on a laptop, NixOS on my PC and Debian for the servers. It is better than Windows in almost every way. Except:
When connecting a bluetooth headset to the Fedora laptop, lock it for a break and unlock it again, the headset won’t work. Only a few times bluetooth on and off helps, sometimes a whole restart. And connecting two devices the same time (like mouse + headset) can lead to both not working.
On NixOS/Hyprland Drag and Drop feels very wonky, for example re-arranging the toolbar in FreeCAD by drag and dropping the elements is more of a game of luck, if everything ends up in the place where it should be.
Getting the AMD-GPU to work with darktable always requires some time of tinkering, after setting up a new OS.
