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.
I’ve used a few different distros over the years: Debian, Ubuntu, Neon, openSUSE Leap
Never once has a major version upgrade ever gone 100% successfully. Even on a bog standard system with no 3rd party repos or niche hardware. I don’t know why it’s still so difficult
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.
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.
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.
Nvidia. I ordered a refurbished ThinkPad P1, and it showed up with a Nvidia card. There are problems waking up from sleep and sessions crashing that I don’t have with the iGPU devices which have FOSS drivers.
Electron apps. They eat RAM, but it’s the only way some apps are delivered.
MacOS can setup independent virtual desktops on each monitor, but Gnome has independent virtual desktops on only the main monitor with the others static. It can be set for all the monitors to change at the same time, but that’s not what I’m after.
LUKS is Linux only. There isn’t a cross platform way to do FDE on removable media.
Efi partitions use FAT FS. Why is this in the spec?
Only some manufacturers support LVFS. There isn’t a standardized mechanism for firmware updates, and many manufacturers don’t bother.
Gnome doesn’t have a profile export feature.
BTRFS is still a work in progress after all these years. Subvolume space quotas still aren’t recommended for use and encryption is “coming soon”. The tooling is a mess, no per subvolume mount options, no converting an existing folder to a subvolume. It mostly works, but ZFS is still nicer.
LibreOffice doesn’t have an “easy” mode similar to Google Docs and it doesn’t have a vim mode. Sometimes I just want to write, and not fiddle with every little detail.
LUKS is Linux only. There isn’t a cross platform way to do FDE on removable media.
You can try out Veracrypt for that. It is supported on Widnows, macOS and Linux and supports FDE on external drives. At least that’s what I am using at work.
I have, and it introduces a dependency, which can be a problem when software can’t be installed. I’d rather have support as part of the base OS.
This point I don’t get.
I guess you are afraid that at some point in time you are not able to download Veracrypt from a trusted Source. In this case you can keep a copy of the executable for all the platforms you need. If you are afraid that you might not be able to run it at some point in time (because dependencys are not met): this can be somehow mitigated by the Appimage version of Veracrypt bundling all its dependencies. If you think even this is not good enough: Keep a cheap reaspberry PI with Veracrypt installed arround. Just as a fallback solution to access your drives.
But if you want a cross platform solution, baked directly into Windows, MacOS and Linux … I don’t see this happening anytime soon.
The ridiculousness of hauling a RPi around everywhere I go so I can access files on a flash drive is exactly the point. LOL
Although, something like the NitroKey Storage is close to the same thing. It’s a small computer with flash storage. Packaging, I guess. LOL
Veracrypt would be one more thing to bootstrap when standing up a new computer, and I’d like to keep the amount of prep work I have to do to a new box before it’s usable to a minimum.
Endlessly tweaking systems to get it into a usable state is why I left Windows, and like to keep the complexity in my life to a minimum.
Honestly, it’s only annoying when moving between FOSS operating systems. MacOS not supporting luks, or whatever, is slightly annoying, but FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux not agreeing to make me shake my head.
Is this feedback for devs?
My 144hz monitor randomly runs at 60hz with no way of changing it apart from restarting several times.
I have a TV connected in addition to my monitor (for lazy gaming or watching series), but this causes various small but annoying problems. I can’t unlock my PC without moving the mouse over to my monitor, which invariably spawns on the TV, and I have to guess how to move it over (left/right alignment is also inconsistent). It also turns the mouse pointer massive on the monitor, presumably because the TV has a higher resolution. Despite marking the monitor as the main display, more than half of my applications launch on the TV. Except the ones I actually want there, of course. If my tv is off before booting is complete, and I turn it on later, my background disappears, and sound is routed to the terrible built-in monitor speakers instead of either the tv audio I use while it’s on, or the actually good headphones I use when it’s not.
At some point my kernel randomly broke because the driver of my WiFi adapter was somehow incompatible. It was a massive pain to figure out the problem and fix it.
As a causal user these are definitely points that came out worse than the competition functionality-wise, and since most of the general public will not opt for a lesser experience for the sake of idealism, this type of issue probably prevents other people who just want to use their PCs from switching.
Edit: it was also a massive pain to set up a Korean keyboard layout, in Windows you just select it and you’re done. In Ubuntu, you do the same and nothing changes. I don’t even remember what it was that actually fixed it, but I tried a lot of guides that didn’t work.
Power management could still be a lot better for Intel laptops (though admittedly over the past decade it’s come a VERY long way). On my Chromebook running Ubuntu the powersave governor noticably stutters as it decides whether to boost the clocks, but all the other governors significantly hurt battery life. Somehow Windows managed to solve this battery problem with all its bloat, and Chromeos also has while also ultimately running Linux under the hood. Laptops could really benefit from the same level of driver maturity as desktop platforms.
I’d also point out touchpad gesture support as a secondary point which is lacking. I love that pixel perfect scrolling and gestures are integrated into many desktop environments now, but they lack configuration for sensitivity and in some cases leave it to the applications themselves to control. Scrolling in Chrome is way too fast and Firefox way too slow for my trackpad, but unlike the cursor speed/acceleration, there is no setting to adjust the sensitivity of pixel perfect scrolling in supported applications.
Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I’m using at the moment) demanding the root password to install the updates it’s blinking at me about in the tray all the time. In this context, demanding a password at all is rather silly (Windows doesn’t require your password to install updates in a single user environment, and it doesn’t even pop up a UAC prompt) and this is going to be yet another one of those things that prior Windows users will moan about, declaring that “Linux is complicated and hard” and drive them back to the comfort of the devil they know when they feel like their own computer is actively trying to stymie them at seemingly every turn.
My user account is a sudoer so there is absolutely no technical reason my own password shouldn’t work. And, in fact, if I run updates via apt in a terminal it does. But allowing updates to install from the desktop environment, something ostensibly ought to be a routine userspace kind of operation, requires everyone using the system who might want to do this to know the system-wide root password. This is a monumentally stupid idea.
I am well aware there are myriad ways around this but they all involve hand-editing config files and come with stern warnings about “this may break your system so proceed ‘carefully,’” as if anyone who is not already an experienced Linux nerd will know just what the hell “proceeding carefully” is supposed to look like.
The inevitable XKCD comic succinctly sums this up:
The UNIX permissions and administration model may have made great sense on glass teletypes in the '70s and when nobody knew any better, but it’s certainly long outmoded now. It’s going to make a lot of people very angry to read this, but that’s actually one of the few things that Windows does much better, at least starting from NT onwards.
While I have switched from Windows to Mint with most of my PCs, permissions are the single most annoying thing I still deal with on Linux. And have been over the last decade of trying out distros over the years. I truly detest the way permissions work and were the main reason it took me so long to switch. The current political world and tech company garbage is what did it.
I’m not sure what app that is.
Software upgrades package on Fedora without requiring a password, so that future is a reality for some.
Reading up on PolKit and ACLs would probably be good.
Doesn’t Ubuntu disable the root user out of the box and expect these actions to be performed via sudo/polkit. There is clearly a precedent for not needing a root password and being able to use your own user’s password for these kinds of things. So it is a monumentally stupid idea to require the system-wide root password, but not one that is done by all of linux, and seems to be a decision made by your distro to not use the modern solution.
The fact is though, you’re right and the pain point is that distros are still doing things the silly way.
- Distros should be using sudo/polkit/anything other than root user password to do things like this
- Modifications to the sudoers file should be easier
- The distro setup process should just be able to have some prompts about smart default things (“Passwordless updates?”) even if they include strongly discouraging comments.
If I can
sudo apt installwithout requiring a password, I could generate a package that installs a custom sudoers config file that allows me to do anything, so “passwordless sudo, but just for apt” is potentially easily exploitable to gain full access. But that also still assumes A) you care and B) someone has access to your account anyway (at which point you may already have bigger problems)Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I’m using at the moment) demanding the root password
I run KDE Plasma on Debian. Discover (the GUI for package updates) has never demanded the root password.
I wonder why yours would do that. Maybe the difference is because my root account doesn’t have a password? If you’re already a sudoer, you might try that.
Hear me out: It still makes sense for servers, shared hosting, etc. So … where Linux has predominantly been the tool of choice.
It probably does. And in e.g. such a headless system, it makes sense as the default. Or more likely, whoever set that system up set it up in the way they want it to behave, hand-editing config files be damned because that certainly wouldn’t have been the only config file they had to edit.
From a home desktop computer perspective, however, it’s baffling. At minimum that should be one of the questions in the graphical installer: “Would you like Debian to make your routine installation of software updates annoying? Yes/no. You cannot change your choice on this later without doing a bunch of scary commandline shit.”
Oh I realize I didn’t mention this in my original comment at all. I agree with you 103%. I want to write a separate comment about this very thing, updating things in general on Linux. I have my dad daily driving Linux along with me, and he’s somewhere between a power user and a regular “need web, document editing and PDFs” type of guy, and there is such a wide spread of software from such a wide spread of “sanctioned” installation sources on Linux, that he never really knows how to update … Anything.
Here’s a random list of “ways to update a program” we have encountered in the last few weeks off the top of my head:
- Update via system package manager (with root password of course)
- Download a new .deb and install that
- Download a new .AppImage, replace links and startup scripts manually (bonus points if the new version is straight up broken, shout out to Nextcloud Desktop Client)
- Download archive of new files and replace all files in the “installation” directory manually
- Run a copied sequence of bash commands from the developers’ website
If anyone thinks of other ways to add to this list, feel free to post them, would give me a laugh for sure.
We are both definitely not going anywhere, but we have constant conversations about how it would be nearly impossible to daily drive Linux if you are not very technically inclined, and how these things make Linux very much “not ready for prime time”, because people are simply used to “X needs update! Do you want to update now? [Yes] [No] [Later]”, and the Update just … WORKING.
Couldn’t you just replace the old appimage but have the same file name?
not really a linux issue more of an application issue but I use Remmina for work and it crashes a couple times a day and that’s annoying. For a while Ubuntu didn’t have the GNOME changes that keeps the remote RDP session running when the client disconnects and I’d have to re-open all my remote applications a few times a day. I was expecting to have to wait till 26.04 to get that but a few weeks ago that update reached my work laptop and now I mostly have parity to how my old Windows work laptop worked.
That does sound annoying. I would hope there is a fix for such a regular crash. Fwiw, I’ve had a totally positive experience with Rustdesk for rdp through VPN.
tell me more of this rusty desk
Haha, I actually talked about it on my podcast at 28:17 of my podcast here. I use the rustdesk clients through a selfhosted server I access through VPN, which has been great while out of the office. I find it simple enough to use, so no real complaints.
It doesn’t make me coffee right before I wake up
You could definitely build something that turns on your coffee machine in the morning.
Running the kitchen appliances is BSD, not Linux
Just a few odd chinese windows programs to flash random devkits. They run in WINE but can’t pass USB through to actually flash them. Keep an offline windows 10 laptop around for such scenarios. I don’t want that shit on my system in any form.
I need office and affinity.
while not perfect, there is now an AppImage that comes with all the things you need to run Affinity via Wine.
https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer/releases
Also supports hardware acceleration. Had some artifacts for me, but I’m still pretty happy with it
All my games work like shit :(
And it’s kindof my fault because my hardware is outdated but while on Windows Hogwarts Legacy worked, in pain but worked, and Fallout 76 was fully stable and smooth.
On linux (Nobara), Hogwarts CTD’s on startup (shaders or something fails) and I had to lower setting in fallout to get it stable enough to play.
Bit I just began my adventure with linux as main OS so there’s still a lot to learn. One of stabilising things for Fallout was, for example, forcing dx12. Without it it froze my whole os sometimes. :(
Oh and KDEConnect reports it crashed for some reason if it cannot immediately connect to my phone. Which was funny until notification spam.
If you’re new to Linux you should go with either Bazzite or Cachy for gaming.
Nobara is more for people who like messing with their Linux build, since the dev mostly made it for themselves and their dad rather than for the general public.
Cachy is next in the list. Bazzite I believe doesn’t support my hardware (i5-4460 & gtx 750). If Cachy ain’t it, I’ll try Mint and after that if nothing lies well I am going for Win 10 LTSC IoT :(
You may want to try Pop!_OS at some point too. I’m not sure if it’ll support your card ootb, but it’s supposed to have better initial Nvidia support than other distros. Like Mint, it’s based on Ubuntu, but System76 has customized it a bit to be more gaming-focused.
gtx 750
That card only supports Vulkan 1.2 in hardware and Steam’s Proton does not run well on that (it needs Vulkan 1.4), so most games crash (or have graphical issues) because the DirectX calls cannot be translated properly.
I have a 780Ti card and I used Proton-Sarek from here, it makes it work with a lot of games: https://github.com/pythonlover02/Proton-Sarek
In general, I would recommend an AMD card for Linux. Nvidia is just painful, especially older cards that aren’t well supported on Nouveau.
Those old Nvidia GTX cards also don’t support adaptive clocking, so they run on low clockspeeds by default. You might need to set the clocks manually if you want (kinda) the same performance you get on Windows.
You can list the available power states with
cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pstateand then set one like this (if 0f is the one you want):echo 0f > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pstate(only if you use the nouveau driver, not the one from Nvidia)
Everywhere.
Skill issue
Theres only 2 times I have headaches due to being on linux.
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When I’m streaming, the streaming service I use (typically Amazon) refuses to stream at anything higher than like 320p, despite me enabling the DRM and all that stuff, cause they think if you’re on linux you’re the l33t h4x0rz out to steal their garbage files… Which isnt linuxes fault in the least.
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When I’m playin a game thats not easily moddable (like Cyberpunk) (Compared to easily moddable games, like Bethesda titles, or Stardew, Or Minecraft)that requires running tons of extra executables and stuff. its just a pain in the ass to get shit working, to the point I often give up half way through.
other than that, Linux really hasnt been a barrier to my daily life in any way. Granted, I kind of cultivated myself a proper linux enviroment before I even made the switch, by using AMD gear, and buying linux friendly web cams/printers/blue tooth dongles/etc etc.
Not sure if you’re exaggerating the low resolution, but I haven’t noticed quality issues on Amazon. I doubt the stream I’m getting is 4k, but it’s certainly better than 720p.
I’m using the flatpak firefox from the fedora install instructions that comes with more codecs, though. It plays a bunch of video that VLC won’t render with my current setup and I haven’t yet put the effort into getting full codecs outside of Firefox yet, but maybe your system has a similar codec situation and prime video defaults to some old or neglected format that caps out at the res you see.
Or it could be what you think and for some reason my system isn’t triggering it. Argh, this future is annoying.
Nope, Not exaggerating. I watched the last episode of Grand Tour at 320p when it released.
maybe they’ve changed something since then if you’re having a better experience now.
edit
Holy shit, the return to zimbabwe was sept 2024. where has the time gone…
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Less problems with Linux specifically, but they are minor issues that are annoying
Streaming to discord causes slight stuttering. It may have gotten better recently honestly, I haven’t been streaming anything performance heavy enough to notice. Could try one of the 3rd party clients, but then can’t have a universal mute/deafen bind so I’m not worrying for now.
I can’t boot sunshine because I went with 25.04 and they don’t have native builds for that, flatpak is not being nice with compatibility either. Technically I probably could make it work, but too much effort when steam is good enough for streaming metaphor refantazio to the tv for now.
For Discord I use a third party client that works exactly like Discord.
Just can’t remember the name since I recently got it, but it’s given no issues. I’ll update once I’m home.
If it’s one that has the ability for using universal function bindings then I’m all ears, my understanding is it’s a real trick to get that working in Wayland due to how it restricts non active windows from reading inputs.
I’m back! I use Vesktop
Yeah I did try that one, it’s great but the lack of binding mute and deafen is kind of a issue for my use. I was really impressed by the native Wayland support!
I remember binds working on it after a big update though 🤔 but I’ll double check. I haven’t used binding in awhile.
I can say the Blue Yeti X mic works well on Bazzite though, and it has easy toggle deafen options as well as a one press mute button, if that’s any help in the meantime.
No such luck unfortunately, just booted vesktop up and I’m still getting the message saying I need to download the client.
It’s all good, my setup is more or less running. If I really wanted I could put together some binds that mute discord and mic on the system level, there are workarounds.
