Personally I haven’t. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it’s whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.
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I’ve definitely had consistently less issues with dev stuff on linux, but Bluetooth is consistently lacking.
And I don’t know if I’d be able to get wifi drivers working on this laptop again if I had to reinstall
With Linux itself or with the broader realm of ‘Linux software’?
By itself, Linux is a fantastic family of operating systems. Has never failed me and probably never will. At least not until I care enough about differences in userland handling in Linux vs FreeBSD, for instance. And even then, I might just switch out of preference, and not because one or the other disappointed me.
As for broader Linux software, or GNU software, or just FOSS in general - by far the biggest potential issue is probably systemd, and it’s still meaningless for the vast majority of users. Other than that, my personal biggest issue was Hyprland breaking completely after updating. But it’s not a super major issue, because I can just use Plasma instead.
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Yes, in 1995, I was very disappointed that red hat 2.0 made me compile my own goddamn disk images before I had to write them to floppy. Which took several days on my 486SX 25 MHz processor, and that’s after almost a week I spent downloading all of the damn source code on a 28.8 baud modem. 7 disks, 13 if you wanted printer drivers. At least it had a somewhat helpful installer, not that it was capable of helping with much.
It wasn’t until red hat 2.5 that they started distributing pre-compiled disk images
Edit: tbf, nobody else did at the time, and at least red hat was one of the first start distributing it software in packages (rpm) like debian (deb), although both soon began offering software pre-compiled as they noticed people other than software developers were beginning to use Linux, and there was legitimate demand to put in the effort. By late 1995 in early 1996, pre-compiled install disks were available for both red hat, Debian, and SuSE for x86, RISC, and DEC/ALPHA, IIRC. It took a while for Slackware to come around.
To this day, I still grumble about the lack of universal middle-click autoscroll support in applications that aren’t browsers or Electron/Chromium-based.
“But middle-click pasting is better!”
Well I’m not a fan of it, and I’d like to be able to use my middle mouse button to autoscroll everywhere instead. After all, isn’t customization one of the main reasons to use Linux in the first place?
I’m disappointed by the number of packages that aren’t signed by developers.
Or that go with less secure package managers like flatpak instead of just working with Debian devs to add it to the official repos, because apt is actually secure.
Overall Linux has shifted over the past 10 years to be more of a dangerous place to download software. So more like Windows and Apple.
The number of things that want you to run a bash script to install is way too damn high.
I’ve also started to see more things recommend installation using homebrew on Linux.
Curl piped to sudo bash. My god.
Correct me if I’m wrong, since I’m no developer myself, but it sounds like a huge hassle to add your software to the official repos of the most popular distributions instead of providing an .AppImage and/or flatpak
Nah, you contact a maintainer. They do it for you. You just have to supply code and licensing info and stuff
Oh, okay. That sounds easy. Is this a one-time thing or do you have to do this for every update you push?
Depends on the update. If you add new lib depends, they’ll ask for the licensing of them (and if you include a closed source blob they might kick you out).
But most of the time you just do your own Dev and they’ll update without needing to communicate to them.
Thank you for the insight :)
No not really. Just people.
Lots of little extremely niche things people do on their computer on Windows are harder on Linux, I think the best example in general is video game modding. We can’t say it’s essential or barring anyone from making a switch and yet people like me wrankle. I’m disappointed no one ever put the honest time into cloning Mod Organizer and its amazing USVFS. Yes I know you can do it on Fuse, I know there are a couple other mod applications for Bethsoft games. The problem is ALL of these tools need a seamless way to talk between Proton instances, which would be a security risk I guess. And Mod Organizer was such a nice tool. The clone attempts I’ve seen have had shoddy UI, lacked core features you wouldn’t even bother calling it an MO clone without (Amethyst was not storing -downloads-, just running whatever FOMOD it found immediately and deleting the archive), or were done heavily with LLM AI which I don’t trust around proton instances.
It’s the absolute lowest priority right now and if you’re willing to accept a lot of potential suck you can eek by. I don’t use EMACs or I’d probably be the kind of person using that as mod manager, but hearing it described I’d liken my agony over lacking good mod tools to trying to use EMACs on a broken cellphone screen, or a keyboard missing half its letters. I miss the tools MO set the industry standard for.
That’s fair, some games are a pain to mod on Linux, or more cumbersome than it needs to be
The one recurring unsolveable problem I run into is not being able to kill a process that’s stuck in D state. If something has broken in the layers between that process and hardware (not uncommon when working with old cheap “box of scraps” hardware, as I like to do), it can get stuck forever and you have to kill the whole system, sometimes forcibly. Not the end of the world, but it sucks when it happens.
All the time. I run both windows and linux desktops side by side windows is leaps and bounds better as a desktop idk what people are talking about they must only browse the web if they think this shit competes with windows at all. Im disappointed in windows too but it’s not the same there isn’t people claiming it is the best thing ever so there is not as high expectations. And just to clarify I have been using linux since I was little it isn’t some foreign thing to me. Look at all these comments “great BUT” yea the buts are why it isn’t great.
Most of my disappointments with Linux come from the proprietary bits to be honest. Both the hardware drivers, and the games and other apps. And even the few times I’m let down by open-source apps, it’s because of abilities from their proprietary counterpart that they are yet to implement.
The amount of issues I’ve had with sound on Linux, I’m currently running Cachy and I’m still not getting it through my laptop speakers. Bluetooth on Arch is tempermental at the best of times too…
Windows isn’t much better, especially with Bluetooth involved. Audio never seems to get the attention it needs
I find Linux to be very bad at recovering from freezing. If something freezes on linux I almost always need to shut the entire PC down or go into TTY to kill the app. I expected it to be way more sturdy.
Is it your display driver that’s freezing? I’ve never had issues with one thing freezing the PC. The only time I’ve had it seem like that was the case was when it was the nVidia drivers that were having issues. But, that situation is much better than on Windows because I was able to SSH into the machine and everything seemed normal over an SSH connection. It meant I could shut things down gracefully and then eventually do a clean reboot. Meanwhile, the screen still looked as if the computer was locked up.
Not sure whats freezing. I think its KDE plasma that freezes then everything dies.
Hmm, yeah, if it is the desktop environment that’s having issues, that could be hard to recover from. I’ve never had that happen, or even heard of it happening. Maybe try out Gnome? Or try reinstalling? it doesn’t sound like a normal problem, and if it’s not a driver issue it could be just reinstalling will be enough to get things working.
Its not common enough for me to worry. Most versions are perfect sometimes i update and the new version is bad but after the next version its fixed and if next version is far away or its to bad i roll back.
Yeah. Ive managed to make it work now, but when I was starting off with installing Linux, my audio was broken and all sorts of other basic functions were broken. Headphones would work but laptop speakers wouldn’t. I had to restart all over several times after already installing everything I needed, just because some stupid niche (but important) thing was broken. Never had these issues when doing fresh installs of windows. I’m still very much on the “team” of Linux though, I just hope that it becomes a large enough part of the market that drivers for hardware are faster to come out.
