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)

Resolution settings is one thing I can think of right now.

In Windows, I can right-click the desktop, click Display Settings, and easily choose what resolution I want the monitor at.

Why? Because I stupidly bought an ultrawide monitor back in 2017, and when trying to remote in to do something from a different room in the house, the screen is too tiny for my weak eyes to read.

On Windows, I can remote in with RDP (KRDP for KDE users), do the above clicking, and then be greeted with a properly scaled environment to work with on a smaller device. Think 15in trying to use 2560x1080. It doesn’t work for what I need.

I read that it might be because my monitor doesn’t come with those presets (i.e. 1920x1080), but Windows doesn’t care. I can do it there, painlessly. Linux wants me to (as far as I know) mess with a config file somewhere, and I just am not going to do that any more. I’ve ruined a lot of distros trying to fuck around with those damn config files! >:(

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.

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.

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.

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.

I can’t get the Windows based firmware updaters for my motorcycle helmet Bluetooth headset and joystick fully running under Wine/Lutris/Whatever. They both use USB and just will not connect.

Also, once a quarter I have to use an archaic Excel sheet that is heavily dependent on some VB Script. This file absolutely will not open correctly in anything other than a locally installed version of Excel because the script needs a real local printer and Open/Libre/Whatever cannot handle the insanity of the VB Script. I have a Windows VM just for this one thing.

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.

When the update process feel so perilous that I pray every time that my system reboots to the desktop safely, because the pain of troubleshooting the issue for 4 or more hours still haunts me (Nobara linux).

And I’m not new to linux, but because it works as expected 95% of the time, that 5% where it doesn’t work stands out so much more.

I recently experienced a failed update on my laptop running arch, where the laptop lost power for some unknown reason, and bricked my system. I was so tired of this shit that I just downloaded cachy OS and wiped the disk, installed the OS and called it a day.

I know not everything is the fault of linux, but man . . . . There’s too many small problems to count . . . The fragmentation of application UI frameworks, GNOME this, QT that, GTK there, wlroots here, wxWidgets over there . . . . KWin randomly crashing, scripts that should just be a part of the WM instead of breaking with every update, lack of standardization of UI menu structures, wayland being great but still not good enough for production environments, THE UTTER LACK OF VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS FOR AUDIO PRODUCTION ON LINUX, WHYYYYYYYYYYYY

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.

Can’t get an auto shutdown at a specific time working on Bazzite.

I have a few 5th and 6th Gen Intel laptops and mini PCs for my kids with games. Working well enough for the most part and PAM account login time limits what times if the day they can sign in but I want it to auto logout or even better force shut down at the end of the day instead of them staying up all night.

Most guides recommend using cron which is fine in general but it isn’t available in Bazzite. Even when I tried installing it since it isn’t included by default. Tried two different guides and an AI recommendation to do it via Systemd but that isn’t working as mentioned at the top.

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

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.

Not daily, but sim racing. Game and peripheral support is all over the place. Wheels/wheelbases generally need Windows to update firmware or adjust features.

Some games will detect wheel, pedals, handbrake, etc. no prob in Windows but not at all in Linux. Certain games need reg fixes in Windows that are more complicated to apply in Linux.

It’s a pain, and the best supported wheel is also one of the cheapest/poorest quality ones on the market (Logitech G29). If you have higher end DD gear or mix and match stuff, it can get complicated or unviable.

Backing up my BTRFS file system. I’m on day two of reading the docs, and I still feel like I have tenuous grasp of the ins and outs. To be clear I’ve used ext4 and timeshift for years with absolutely no problem at all. I’m just looking to make generic backups of my system once a month(most the time I do it manually), and I feel BTRFS is overkill for what I need. I also feel like I’m not far away from it “clicking”. Guess we’ll see, I still don’t ever see myself leaving Linux, but I may switch back to ext4.