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.
On Bazzite.
Programs often take a concerningly-long time to load. Like 30 seconds+. But it’s intermittent. Haven’t been able to put together any patterns as to when this does or doesn’t happen.
About 1/3 of the time when I try to open a PDF file (which open in Firefox), they just… don’t. Plasma will just spin with the Firefox icon on the mouse cursor for like 10 seconds and then silently do nothing. No errors of any kind reported. No idea where I might look for logs or whatever to help diagnose the issue.
Dolphin is definitely lacking in the UX department for frequent actions I’m used to in Windows, like mounting SMV shares with non-default credentials (basically impossible in Dolphin, only doable in CLI), creating new folders (I’ve been spoiled by having a dedicated toolbar button), and working with elevated permissions (Windows will just seamlessly prompt you when additional permissions are needed, Dolphin will just error, sometimes with useless error messages, and make you go elevate your session separately).
Windows (the UI concept, not the OS) do not remember and restore to their prior locations, which Windows (the OS) always handled pretty seamlessly. I know I can supposedly make this happen via the “window rules” settings, but I haven’t been able to find ANY good resources on how that system actually works, and when I tried to just do it intuitively, I fucked up things like where the Application Menu and Open File dialogs appear. No, I don’t want to have to configure it specially for every app I might use, I want there to just be sensible defaults that I don’t have to fight against.
Those are the ones that’re coming to mind. All very nitpicky, but I’m largely a UI/UX designer at work, so I’m pretty sensitive to nitpicky things. No regrets, though.
New Bazsite user too.
The Firefox thing is not specific to opening a PDF. I get the same behavior you describe just when I open Firefox. It’s probably just first launch after a new boot for me but I’m not sure.
It’s definitely not just first open, for me. Every two weeks, I scan and organize receipts as PDFs for my own accounting, so I end up with many files open at once, all while my existing Firefox wibdows are already open.
Do you have to use firefox for your pdfs? There are much better alternatives.
Not particularly, it’s just the default. And it’s not really about the PDFs, it happens when I’m trying to visit links, from outside of Firefox as well. Opening PDFs is just something I do far more often.
I only really have two pain points, one of which isn’t the fault of linux, and the other that probably is.
First: Adobe shit. I depend on Adobe Lightroom. This is entirely on Adobe. I know about the alternatives, but apparently I suck and can’t get good at them. I keep a Mac laptop around just to use this application. I tried screwing around with Wine and VMs to get it working, but it’s pretty useless without GPU acceleration, and so far the only way to get that in a VM is to have a second dedicated GPU just for the VM. Plus, that still requires keeping a Windows installation around.
Second: Wake from sleep. Just doesn’t work properly on my desktop PC running Fedora 43 with KDE. AMD CPU and GPU, etc. The computer does wake up but the display never does, and nothing short of a hard power cycle seems to make it recover. Works just fine on my Thinkpad which is running the same environment, also all AMD but with just whatever AMD integrated graphics came with the CPU in that case.
Having chatted with some other people experiencing the same thing with similar hardware setups and F43 with KDE it apparently doesn’t manifest if using GNOME, just KDE. For now I just have the desktop set to turn off the display when idle but to not put the machine to sleep. I am a KDE enjoyer, GNOME does not float my boat.
Same here. Broken on KDE but not gnome.
Second: Wake from sleep. Just doesn’t work properly on my desktop PC running Fedora 43 with KDE. AMD CPU and GPU, etc. The computer does wake up but the display never does, and nothing short of a hard power cycle seems to make it recover. Works just fine on my Thinkpad which is running the same environment, also all AMD but with just whatever AMD integrated graphics came with the CPU in that case.
Having chatted with some other people experiencing the same thing with similar hardware setups and F43 with KDE it apparently doesn’t manifest if using GNOME, just KDE. For now I just have the desktop set to turn off the display when idle but to not put the machine to sleep. I am a KDE enjoyer, GNOME does not float my boat.
Lol I have a similar issue, with Debian on my AMD laptop. But for me it’s already on GNOME and it only manifests randomly -_-
First: Adobe shit. I depend on Adobe Lightroom. This is entirely on Adobe. I know about the alternatives, but apparently I suck and can’t get good at them. I keep a Mac laptop around just to use this application. I tried screwing around with Wine and VMs to get it working, but it’s pretty useless without GPU acceleration, and so far the only way to get that in a VM is to have a second dedicated GPU just for the VM. Plus, that still requires keeping a Windows installation around.
Have you seen the news about the Wine patch from a random GOATED dev that fixes the CC installer? Iirc they tested Photoshop so far and reports it’s “buttery smooth” so other Adobe softwares might not be too far behind!
I don’t like that I get zero feedback when typing in my boot-time decryption password. Like, I can’t even tell if my keyboard is even working. Did I press Enter or am I wasting my time staring at the prompt: “enter password for drive whatever (random guid)”.
I’ve literally sat there with my keyboard not even plugged in, not realizing it wasn’t dong anything because there’s no feedback. Like, you cant even show some asterisks? Or maybe “attempting decryption” after I press Enter, or anything? The only feedback is: it will either boot or say “invalid password” eventually.
It’s a minor frustration, but it’s every day that it bugs me.
(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. LUKS2 or whatever, using the built-in encryption when I first installed it on my laptop.)
for me the blinking cursor resets when i enter my luks key 😅 so when i see the cursor immediately disappear i know my keyboard is workin, but absolutely agree on that
Interesting, I don’t have this issue using rhel8. It always shows asterisks for keystrokes.
crypttab provides “password-echo” option, something related on archwiki here
that should fix it
I’m using Fedora KDE, and for the first time in my life, an upgrade (42 to 43) completely borked the system, in a way that I couldn’t boot to anything else other than a kernel panic.
I had to boot up a live USB, mount and chroot into the old system, and manually fix each duplicated / corrupted package. And it still caused every now and then some weird issue with dnf, so in the end I just reinstalled the entire OS.
I feel like updates “offered” via a nice and convenient gui shouldn’t really do this out of nowhere - and I wasn’t the only one to report this in the past half year.
I found on the 42->43 upgrade, Wine 32-bit was removed, and the upgrader errors out instead of fixing it. Wht I did to fix was immediately, manually (via dnf) uninstall wine*, then immediately run the upgrade again, and it fixed itself, finishing the upgrade with 64-bit Wine installed.
Sorry you had to go through with that.
Point-release distros like to tout stability, but they face all the same problems as rolling-release distros when upgrading between versions.
The 4 year upgrade cycle is too short on one hand. On the other, critical software like Firefox is too old even then so I have to use a flatpack for that which does not integrate well. I am using Debian 12. The other option is that Mozilla does have a debian repo but that is harder to setup.
I run firefox nightly from my home directory. It upgrades just about daily. I generally don’t suggest running stuff outside the package manager, but this use has never caused me issues. For years.
If you aren’t running a server, I recommend changing to testing/unstable. Unstable doesn’t mean unstable->it will crash a lot, it means the packages will be updated. More like a rolling release, aside from the window of time right before stable gets updated.
No fingerprint login. Its frustrating that in all cases I can use my fingerprint instead of a password except when booting up my laptop.
Also, QOL and stability features would be nice. Buttons that dont work shouldn’t be visible, for example, and getting a useful error message from many apps can be a headache.
Recently, I had a problem where amy app using electron suddenly stopped working at all. When ran with the terminal, it showed 2 errors, neither of which told you how to fix the issue. Eventually I figured out that using flatseal to force all apps to use wayland fixed the issue and made things smoother as well.
Fedora: requires some rework of Nvidia drivers to wake the screen back up from sleep. Updating GPU drivers does nothing to improve game rendering so frame rates for games of yesteryear on a RTX3080 were single digit. Required some changes to h264 drivers just so I could see videos on YouTube or Dailymotion while simultaneously messing with my VLC install. My VPN blocks off my subnet whenever it’s on so I can’t access my NAS.
CachyOS (Arch fork): drivers for my printer aren’t available without compiling them myself which did not go well. My preferred 3d printer slicer is difficult to install but that’s because I’m a total noob when it comes to installing anything from GitHub. My VPN blocks off my subnet whenever it’s on I can’t access my NAS.
So far ChachyOS has given me the best experience out of a few other distros like Mint or Bazzite.
I cant get my epson ecotank et2710 to work under arch/endevaouros.
On Fedora KDE.
Office, specifically Excel. I use it professionally for work and the lack of feature parity in Linux alternatives (Libre Office and Only Office, specifically) are a perpetual thorn in my side.
I do my best to use Linux alternatives in my personal life, and, if necessary, use the MS web version of Excel but every so often I run into something that can only be done in the full desktop version and I have to boot back into Windows.
I’ve heard of WinBoat and https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps, but at least when I tried them they were too resource heavy to realistically run on a laptop
What features do you find missing from open office? The way I use it open office calc is better than Microsoft excel
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Laptop OEMs seem to go with fingerprint readers that have no Linux support.
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A number of distros out of the box have some IMO dumb things you need to change.
E.g. Fedora insisting on having their own Flatpak repository that isn’t as well-stocked or updated as Flathub, and missing audio/video codecs (I realise this is due to licensing concerns, but other distros get around it).
- I’d like Linux to feel more like an ecosystem. If I could sync my DE’s settings, installed apps, etc as trivially as I can sync my Firefox bookmarks/settings/extensions then I’d be happy. Frankly I’m amazed that Gnome and KDE haven’t attempted this.
Yes, I know I can manually and painstakingly do a lot of this with Syncthing. It’s not the same. It’s a lot more time/effort and you need the knowledge to set it up.
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I guess the biggest thing I’m missing right now is VR gaming.
But since my VR googles need WMR to work, I wouldn’t be any better off with Windows 11 either.
I was surprised to find my Valve Index work flawlessly after switching to Linux (Pop!_OS). Even had a better framerate in some games.
Same. Quest 2. Fedora 43. 5700X3D / 9070 XT. Steam Link can’t find AMD video decoder on the pc to run. ALVR has death wobble-like reprojection jitter. WiVrn works when Envision feels like it, which is never as it constantly errors out compiling due to some dependency I can’t find for the life of me.
I know compiling from source is preferred as “the linux way”, but I would like to spend more time actually using my pc than fixing it. There’s no reason the VR software needs to be recompiled just to change a setting. Maybe bake in the ability to change settings instead of hardcoding everything.
Wine would be super helpful if they can find way to make older (2019 and older) Quickbooks run reliably. Lots of small businesses locked into old platforms because the accountants or the people who do accounting themselves can’t learn how to use anything else, and the linux alternatives require a phd in linuxology to learn and don’t offer the easy business-in-a-box functionality.
Waydroid is neat, but poorly integrated in the desktop. It runs as a full screen app, and doesn’t task switch easily.
Please, Valve, make Steam a 64-bit native client! So few people use 32-bit systems that the few that do probably aren’t running Steam to save on memory.
Pipewire audio devices and webcam support needs to be smoother. I’ve never seen so much console shim hacks just to get a virtual webcam working.
I haven’t even begun to try my NXT Gladiator flight stick in linux… that might be a whole nother can of trouble to open.
I had the same issue as you with steam link and my 7800xt. Putting this in my launch args for SteamVR fixed it
RADV_PERFTEST=video_decode,video_encode DRI_PRIME=1 ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrmonitor.sh %command%and if you try that and get a different error code from before, ( I think it was like 1033) swap your mesa drivers to the freeworld variety. That should besudo dnf swap mesa-vulkan-drivers mesa-vulkan-drivers-freeworld.The only thing is, steamvr can’t display your desktop properly if you’re using wayland, it simply doesn’t support it. BUT here’s a cool project that can help you work around it, for some reason there’s currently a bug with their pipewire implementation (or something like that) such that you have to manually connect the display streams in the coppwr pipewire gui (helvum and carla don’t work), otherwise it’ll only show one frame of the display stream.
y’know what, I’m actually gonna make a post about this, since it took me many hours of searching forums to find this solution.
I’m looking forward to the Steam Frame, hopefully it’ll support SteamOS out of the box
I would be a lot more excited if I wasn’t worried it was going to cost +$1,099. I hope that I am wrong.
They said they are shooting for less than the price of the index so that’s $999 or less, not sure if they will reneg on that due to ram prices.
It’s also unclear if they’re comparing it to the cost of the index with or without the Lighthouses.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
that is just for the memory
Not that it’s Linux fault, but access to and compatibility with popular creative tools like Ableton or Adobe products.
Sure, it’s feasible to use Wine to run these products, but not in any professionally usable manner.
Yes, I am aware there are Linux-friendly alternatives, but they lack the plugins, compatibility, features, and quality of their industry~standard counterparts.
I second this. I use Gimp, but it’s UI and UX is just the worst I’ve ever seen. (It has some great tiny features here and there, though.)
I hope this situation would improve over time, and I’d try to contribute as much as I can. So, fingers crossed. Otherwise, I’m quite happy with Linux being my primary OS for many years.
This plugin might help you https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
Thanks, I use it, but I could mention it, so it’s great you did! To me, Gimp became usable, I cannot stand its interface without it!
I agree, GIMPs UI is pretty nasty. Same as LibreOffice Writer, but I still use them.
Umm… not much to be honest. It’s overall pretty great. I switched my main rig fully to Linux about 2 years ago.
First year was Manjaro w/xfce which got a little janky around the edges, probably due to how they avoid using the AUR directly. Can’t remember specific problems that couldn’t be attributed to old RAM or my own tomfoolery.
Past year has been on EndeavorOS w/KDE Plasma. Took a little time on the Arch wiki to get my Mesa install fully operational, but wasn’t bad. And I think at one point yay tried to compile electron32 from scratch which was kind of insane (probably wasted 80 GB of download for that one night) but eventually I found forum posts saying it was fine to just remove. Besides that, it’s been fantastic. It’s rare now that I even find a game that doesn’t work well, and half the time I forget to even check protondb like I used to.
Oh here. I guess combining PDFs could be a better experience. Had to use pdfunite in the command line which worked well but felt a lot more awkward than just using Acrobat to drop in pages and rearrange them. But there’s probably a GUI utility I just didn’t find.
Ah, and printer support. Wifi printing worked once for no apparent reason then never again. But printers are terrible in Windows too so I blame the OEMs.
Ah, printer support.
I have better experience with Linux than with Windows for printers.
But it never really is 100% reliable for some models
I’m pretty picky about my keyboard layout (a specific variant of bépo) and I’ve found it surprisingly awkward to use a layout that isn’t provided. I know that Bépo is typically included in Linux distros, but not the variant I prefer.
If I had to name a thing … My only issue is the lack of support from organizations. Drivers, though It’s getting better for printers/scanners etc. but like HW identifiers from banks etc are still windows (and mac). And no, i’m not gonna install windows or anything wine-like for it. (so far I’ve been able to take the alternative route/work around it)
Probably the banks don’t even check HW identifiees, they see that you are using Linux and just decide to block you, at least, many reported that with many banks but it’s not a universal rule ofc
