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.
As someone with an Nvidia GPU on Wayland, unfortunately quite a few places.
Resuming from sleep requires power cycling the monitors.
Glitchy transparent artifacting down to the desktop if windows are overlapping next the task bar.
Widgets in the system tray (KDE Plasma - I have temperature readouts) disappear and reappear randomly, and sometimes switch which taskbar they live on.
VRR support is pretty bad, causing black screens when using full screen applications.
2D-heavy games are flooded with thousands of vulkan draw calls, leading to abysmal performance and massive current spikes (and therefore coil whine). This is mitigated per-game with dxvk settings - often removing the whine without improving performance.
HDR is … technically available.
Overall I’m happy, but I cannot recommend this experience to anyone I know because it would drive them insane.
Fingerprint reader does not work as it does on other OS. You can log in, but the key ring stays locked causing programs in user space to break, so I always need to log in with my password before it works. The fingerprint prompt blocks input access so you can’t type in the password and you have to wait for it to time out, also the prompt does not always appear. And the developers actively refuse to fix the not unlocking the keyring because it’s “not secure”.
Fingerprint scanners for both Windows and macOS, you can log in and it just works.
Second thing is the still broken bluetooth drivers on Debian based distro’s where it randomly just fails. No such issues on Fedora (KDE) as of yet, but I use both.
The biggest problem for me right now is FreeCADs control scheme is atrocious. Trying to use it to do even basic shit takes forever because it’s not intuitive at all. Even when I pick the option that’s supposed to be closest to Fusion360 (which is what I’m used to). I shouldn’t have to google how to select things because left clicking does nothing. The other stuff I’ve tried so far has been relatively painless but that app pisses me off so bad every time I touch it.
VR. Using CachyOS, a new 9060xt 16gb, and a Quest2. When I can get steam VR to launch and connect at all its extremely choppy and stuttery to the point its unusable. Worked fine on the same hardware and network before switching from windows.
Using Mint for some years now, there are two main pain points for me. Both do not stop me from using Mint as my daily operating system, but they reduce convenience.
Default package repositories contain software versions that are long outdated (e.g. tmux, claws mail, neovim, libreoffice). Although this can usually be fixed by custom ppa or manual installation it decreases the benefits of a default package repository and causes additional maintenance efforts.
Laptop hardware / driver issues:
- When using nvidia graphics driver, FN+Fx keys do not change display brightness (although brightness hud is shown). When using xorg driver instead, these work, but the input for unlocking my luks volume at boot freezes and I cannot enter the password.
- FN+Fx does not enable/disable touchpad. I was able to fix this with a custom script and keybinding.
- Keyboard lighting cannot be controlled by OpenRGB and some other tools I tried, because the specific keyboard is not supported (yet?).
Just wanted to say this is a nice thread, thanks OP for starting it and everyone for participating :)
Gives me nostalgia for the “tech support” category in forums. We should really really bring them back, they’re not well suited to “aggregator” platforms like Lemmy/Reddit or messaging applications like Discord
Most popular games still don’t work.
And stuff randomly breaks. Most recently turning on a Bluetooth mic crashes gnome.
Apparently there’s a fix coming but insane that stuff like this can be broken for a whole month.
Most popular games still don’t work.
I’ve been running Bazzite on my main PC since October (I have a bad habit of tinkering with my Linux installs to death so I opted for immutable so I’m less likely to break it) and of all of the weird and obscure windows software I’ve installed, all has worked flawlessly including funky model railroad track planning software and some somewhat obscure simulator games. I also have some games from the 90s that haven’t worked on modern Windows in years run flawlessly. Heck even Sims via EA’s launcher runs flawlessly (if not better because I can minimize it from fullscreen, something it can’t do on Windows since the DX11 update)
Literally the only thing I’ve found that I can’t run is anything requiring Ubisoft’s launcher. The furthest I got is to about 30% through downloading Anno 1800 before it crashed and refused to run the launcher again. I can’t help but suspect they intentionally broke compatibility because that would be very on-brand for them, but you never know. Kinda sad because I wanted to play an Anno game that’s new enough to not have gotten a disc release but whatever I have plenty of other games I can play
Most popular games still don’t work.
Not according to the steam deck verified list…
What distro is that?
Are all of those games having kernel anti cheat? If not which games you are having issues with?
Not op but last time I tried (recently around 2 weeks ago), the performance in Le Mans Ultimate was terrible. And I couldn’t get Crew Chief to work with it.
I got my sum racing stuff working(not the rev lights on the wheel though), got the game running, but performance was 30-90 FPS and jumping all over the place. In comparison to windows with the similar settings, that runs 100-160fps even though it’s with a larger number of visible cars(62 instead of the 30 I had on Linux).
I had Nobara installed, 5700x3D with a Nvidia 4080, I really wish I could switch but currently I would give up too much, Le Mans Ultimate and EAs WRC are currently large portions of my hobbies, and WRC has anti cheat that doesn’t work.
When i start PC (mele go2) and forget to power on the screen, if i start it after boot PC, the sxreen stay black…
Most things that are barriers for me are knowledge and time gaps, I am below novice.
I would like to get links, files etc to my pc remotely. Like sending a torrent file and have it start , or a file to print.
The best way would be to use Qbittorrents web interface. You can drag and drop files and have them start downloading imediately. If you need to do it over the terminal, qbit has an option to watch certain folders for new torrent files. You could then use Samba to transfer files over your local network.
Edit: I skipped over files for printing. Can’t help with that, but my guess would be Samba as well.
Choose your route: spend your time to learn the terminal, then you’ll be able to do pretty much anything via SSH, or learn docker and networking basics and you’ll be able to do pretty much everything via web interfaces. I’d recommend the latter if you are not strictly interested in learning the OS but just want to build stuff on top of it
I looked at docker because it seems to be able to do anything I think I might want it for, but was told to reverse course and learn the system first before going deep into such complicated systems.
HDMI 2.1.
Always preferred DisplayPort, but sadly my current screen doesn’t have one.
The problem is entirely caused by the HDMI forum not opening the spec. No fixes until they do I’m afraid.
I think security wise linux can do better, I’d like to see more isolation of processes. I find accessibility is lacking as well, particularly translation and ocr software. I think this is actually something local visual ai models would be very good at but are not leveraged for in open source.
You can improve the security model by using SELinux, but not without hating yourself tbh
I think secureblue is probably the least painful way to make it a little tighter
Unfortunately I still have to keep a windows around for word. Colleagues are still writing papers in word with zotero citations in those and except if they setup the citation as “bookmarks” (which is not fail proof) opening and saving in libreoffice would break the citations… Office is provided by my workplace and cannot run in wine. So I have it on a laptop that I use to run specific software to interface with diverse sensors (another reason to keep windows) and RDP in it from my linux workstation.
Otherwise I’ve been using linux since 2005 non stop, now on Fedora silverblue since 5 years I think and I’m enjoying my days. Just today I needed to install a piece of software that required java 17, did it in a toolbox with fear of breaking other software or the system. Pretty reassuring. No dist-upgrade fear, automatic updates on, most apps as flatpak or in a toolbox, and just working. I’ve stopped distro hoping, customizing my DE and just use Gnome vanilla, and focus on using the pc as a tool.
At home I have a 10 years old laptop with Fedora silverblue, that I turn on when need to do some private stuff, admin mostly in the browser (Firefox of course) and even if it has been a while I can just update to the last version , thanks to atomic updates. Never had a problem.
My needs are basic so I have had always a good experience on linux distros.
For word. If you PC can handle it take a look at winboat. It will use a VM underneath but integrates seamlessly with the Linux DE.
Can’t you use Office 365? You can run Word from your browser. Last time I checked it worked fine even in Firefox.
OnlyOffice deals very well with MS format files. I use it on Mac because neither Apple nor Libre handle MS files well.
I second OnlyOffice. I am not a power user of Word, but neither a novice. Things haven’t broken yet and I’ve been editing .docx files for over a year now.
Colleagues are still writing papers in word
You should ask them to use a format that isn’t inherently broken and repeatedly needs reverse engineering despite being "standard"ised.
I haven’t tried it yet, but WinApps should run MS office pretty well. https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
Mainly kernel level anticheat, though that is obviously not really linux fault.
My other personal gripe is probably stumbling across a GTK based app that works for what I want it to do but clashes extremely badly with my Plasma DE.
For example, I wanted to set up automatic file backups to an SFTP server using borg. The two common UI interfaces I found are vorta and pika-backup. Vorta only supports SSH and local backup repositories while pika allows SFTP through some kind of compatibility layer with gvfs.
Seems like pika is the right choice for me but the UI felt incredibly dumbed down and really did not match with anything else on my PC. Since both programs were kind of out, I found another backup tool in Kopia.
The reason I was looking for a backup tool at all? I was previously using synology active backup for business, which is available on all linux distros except arch.
Leaving Standby. Can’t count the times I’ve opened my laptop to just see a black screen. Hard reset was the only option
I’m going to be honest, as a long time Linux user I also think this is one of those issues that is more common than it should be. It’s incredibly annoying and really pushes you away from using it as your daily driver.
Btw, check your last boot’s log with
sudo journalctl -e -b -1to see what its dying words were. If you’re lucky it’s dying when coming back up and spitting the related errors in red, but sometimes it will just be “Reached target sleep” in which case it’s a bit of a bitch to troubleshoot. You can look through the logs to see if any error might be related, but if you’re not well versed in Linux it might as well be an alien language. Common suspects: Nvidia, Bluetooth, encrypted swap or RAM, ACPI bugs, BIOS needs an update.I had the same issue on my Thinkpad p14s 5th gen. UEFI upgrade fixed it for me.
In my Linux mint I downgraded to playing only 1080p because 4k is very laggy and filled with artifacts.
I have a mini optiplex 7070 with 32GB of ram, Intel processor (not a powerful one).but in windows 11 I could play 4k content with no issue.
You could try one of the “gaming” focused distros like Cachy or Bazzite. They do their own tweaks to squeeze more performance out of you hardware. Sadly, many game won’t reach the performance level of Windows, but you can get pretty close, like 85-90% close (depends highly on the game in question, no guarantees).
Mint ships an old kernel by default. But there’s a GUI that lets you install a newer one.
This would most likely fix your issue.
Or do you have an nVidia graphics card and didn’t install the proprietary driver?
