Linux

On my phone. I would love to be able to run a Linux system or at least a de-googled android. But some apps I need access to don't seem to be working without Google services and stuff like that si I'm stuck using a stock Google (Pixel) android.

Beside that, everything is and has been working smoothly on my computers since I switched from Apple to Linux Mint, 5 or 6 years ago. My only regret is to not have switched way earlier.

I do miss Spotlight. All the alternatives I have tested fall short one way or the other but giving up on Spotlight is not that bad of a deal considering all what Free Software, GNU and Linux have offered me in exchange. I would not want to switch back.

As much as if saddens me to write it: the enterprise bullshit.

I'm not allowed to use Linux at work because it's more complicated than the out of the box experience of MacOS and windows in terms of remote management, encryption enforcement, company certificates and all this useless bullshit.

Devs not working together to make Wayland universally supported and bug free ASAP or fixing 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 kernel anti-cheats would bother me,* now I simply don't touch them.

*Not a Linux problem but an anti-cheat engineering skill issue. Looking at you EA; RIP Battlefield 1.

I miss a task manager-like shortcut to come out to the desktop and easily kill processes freezing the PC.

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.

For me it's that 'can make it work' != 'want to spend hours researching to make it work'

If you have a well supported use case Linux is great, if you need to do some things that rely on proprietary drivers, old software, etc it's a pain

I like the ux in some common windows utilities a lot more than I like their Linux alternatives. I prefer nano zip over the default app that came with my distro.

Default video settings caused going to console to be use a comically oversized font for my large monitor. I remembered how to change fonts sort of, but couldn't for the life of me remember how to change the resolution. Internet searches had results of mixed quality. Pretty difficult to distinguish instructions for the old boot loader versus the current one. Set the res finally, but it didn't work. One of the commands I tried did seem to work, but then it caused the advanced graphics to disappear and video transcode suffered. Finally I found the answer I should have used all along: sudo dpkg reconfigure (some package I can't remember now)

And everything is like that. You want to do something, you better get educated. It's great for hobbyists, but I find as I get older I just want it to look right and do the thing, so I choose windows from the grub menu and forget I even have it for weeks.

It's great when everything is supported and works and you like the application and you'd spent sixteen hours theming your desktop and and and .. but ain't nobody got time fo dat

Bluetooth.

Its always been an issue and it remains an issue.

Printing.

Windows drivers are so fancy, with previews and a billion options, while Linux gets a randomly ordered list of raw options in a drop-down menu and that's it

Basically no support for CAD software. I started out on FreeCAD back in 2016 then switched to Fusion360 a few years later. I gave FreeCAD another go a little after it hit 1.0 but it still feels so clunky in comparison.

Even though I share most of my designs, I'm not interested in the free version of OnShape where there isn't a choice in the matter.

I'm no professional so I could probably make due with FreeCAD but I'll be keeping my dual boot since I have the option.

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

Unattended remote access under Wayland. I have multiple computers some headless and some with displays and I often like to remote into those from my other machines on my lan. With Xorg I used VNC. But with Wayland I have yet to find a reliable way to remote control a Wayland session without also sitting in front of the machine I’m trying to remote into.

Linux phones when? I personally don't have any issues but one thing that would be nice is how to make Linux dumber and idiot proof for the average consumer

There are a lot of things that bother me and could be improved:

Lacking Hardware support for Fingerprint readers: in my Lenovo Yoga 370 i could not (for gods sake) get the Fingerprint reader to work. But I gave up trying a couple years ago. So it might be working now but i don't know. I know its not the OS fault because it is just missing key Materials and driver support from the manufacturer. But in the end I don't care whose fault it is. It does not work, and that bothers me.

Not easy to use TPM for LUKS: why doesn't the installer of any distribution use the TPM module for storing the decryption key for LUKS. Or at least make it an option. They are made for that! TPM is not your enemy. Use them to help you! Better to use TPM (with exported strong recovery key) instead of having no encryption at all or a weak password.

Proper Backup and rollback Baker info the distro: why was only Opensuse able to have an integrated solution for backup and rollback of OS changes and updates? MacOS has this since years (maybe decades...)

No parental control features: Plesse give me things like settings usage time limits and APP access limitation for specific user accounts. I know I can somehow do this via Polkit. But this is not user friendly and too complicated for typical use cases. I am very happy that GNOME is currently working in a solution for this in GNOME 50 (Propably)

Bluetooth is very buggy, but it's not too much of a deal breaker.

It doesn't make me coffee right before I wake up

This has been driving me nuts and if anyone can shed any light on it I will be eternally grateful.

I am trying to install SketchUp Pro 2021. According to WineHQ it has a gold rating and two testers claim to have installed it without issue, but following their instructions doesn't help.

I am running the latest Mint with Wine 11.0. I've created a 64bit prefix running as Windows 8.1, installed .NET 4.8, had to manually install vcrun2017 because something has changed and the checksum fails in Winetricks. I try to install SketchUp and get Invalid Handle errors mainly to do with a KB2999286 check (Universal C Runtime update).

So I download the KB2999286 msu and tell Winetricks to run it, but it says there's no associated program. Maybe I need the Windows Update API? So I download that, which actually appears to be WinXP SP3 and fails to install. I'm just about ready to give up on this whole experiment. Is there something I'm clearly missing? Is the C Runtime Update hidden in a component I haven't installed?

Trouble alt+tabbing out of games in mint + cinnamon from fullscreen windowed and fullscreen. I can switch to other open windows easily, but what I can't do is click my sound manager shortcut in the taskbar to change audio devices, etc. So I have to open up the sound management application to make the changes. The desired behavior is to alt tab back to the desktop environment where the application being switched to is.

Trouble with specific windows only appliations that I can't get to work in wine/bottles. One I need to update my car's infotainment system and it's a huge pain in the ass. Trouble with weird .dll and font issues that are seemingly unresolvable, even once placing the relevant dlls and fonts in the right folders. Not linux's fault, just shitty software design. But still difficult.

When my PC goes into sleep or hibernate, my keyboard won't work after it wakes up. I have to unplug and reconnect my keyboard every... single... time...

Except for this issue, my PC works perfectly fine and better than Windows in nearly every way.

My personal top 3:

Video Editing - Kdenlive isn't bad in and by itself but it seems really slow to work with, and getting any kind of smooth preview seems impossible even with proxy clips ... the other day I bought a GoPro 3D camera, and I can cut, preview, rotate, reframe and encode with their Android app on my potato phone from 2021, and it feels snappy (I was surprised, really). Yet on my i7 laptop with Kdenlive, much simpler tasks feel much more sluggish on average ...

CAD - I use OpenSCAD for 3D modeling and I love it, but sometimes a GUI-Based CAD program would be nice. I'm sure FreeCAD is powerful but the UI/UX aspect makes it hard to unlock that power. I'm a bit conflicted about it because I really don't want to play down the efforts of the FreeCAD dev team, and it seems like everyone and their mothers talk badly about their UI/UX. But on the other hand I tried a couple times and got really frustrated, and I'm usually not one to shy away from steeper learning curves. Supposedly you can do CAD in Blender but I never really figured that out.

Laser cutting - While most slicers for 3D printers work on Linux, Lasercutting seems a different story. You can still use older versions of Lightburn but it's not FLOSS and it seems strange to pay for a license if the support for your OS has been discontinued 2 versions ago (or one, not sure right now). I want to give Rayforge (https://rayforge.org/) a try soon but until then it's LaserGRBL or the program that came with my laser cutter on a virtual machine.

Honorable mention: A linux phone would be nice.

My biggest problem with Linux is security. I want a relatively idiot proof setup like in Microsoft and Apple products. I do not to have to minutely setup the firewall or have to go into the terminal to run a virus scan.

Other than that I am not too demanding of my system I nearly never have a problem although recently the game A Hat in Time makes my pc kernal panic.

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.

Theres only 2 times I have headaches due to being on linux.

1. 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.

2. 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.

I need Nvidia graphic drivers for a card Nvidia just up and decided they didn't want to support. I ran updates and after rebooting just had no compositor until I moved to another driver set. Real shitty move, Nvidia. 1080 strix founders overclock. Now Vulcan is hit or miss.

Multi monitor still has some quirks from time to time. Don't take me wrong, it's already much better than just 2-3 years ago even, but...still has quirks. Specially with different DPI. Sometimes apps get very...wonky when moved from a monitor with a normal 100% scaling to one where it has 150% scaling or so. And on return, it's already messed up. Some start already in the wrong scaling with super tiny text. Or text double the size. Let's just say, sometimes scaling gets tricky.

There's also still a lot of games that don't like being moved to another monitor, and don't even give an option for it. Even when pushed to the non-main monitor by OS key combo (meta-shift-left, for example), they tend to rearrange themselves again back to the main monitor when changing from title screen to in-game screen, and things like that. So...still slightly wonky. Light years ahead of where we were just 3 years ago...but still wonky sometimes.