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.
So far the switch has been fantastic. Its just taking time to write new scripts and such as I port my old windows workflows over to Linux.
The one thing I haven’t gotten working is SteamVR. I’ve only been able to launch into the steam vr home and it puts me underneath the floor. I can teleport move around but can’t interact with things and it leaves me under the floor.
Things have gotten A LOT better since I started using it, but here’s a list of things I hate after using Arch with KDE as my main OS for almost 7 years:
- Not having an archive manager as good as 7-zip was on Windows. Ark is a good replacement but it supports less formats, has less options when compressing, and most importantly if you close the archive while extracting it silently fails (reported in 2019, still not fixed)
- You can’t make an account without a password (yes, I know I can configure the sudoers file and polkit to skip password prompts, but that’s not user friendly). For the average user, having to type the password after login is incredibly annoying, I would like to have something like the UAC prompt in Windows
- Wayland: it was made mainstream waaaay too early, causing a lot of issues with both Qt and GTK applications, some of which persist to this day, especially with fractional scaling and HDR
- Developers seem to think that I enjoy using the terminal: I don’t, I hate it. Why isn’t there a GUI for pacman supports the AUR and doesn’t suck?
- Random broken commits being pushed to stable. I’m talking about “how the f did you not notice this?” kind of bugs, like how I had to rename files twice in Dolphin before it would actually rename them. It was fixed quickly but how did this get into stable in the first place?
- Flatpak having its old ass version of mesa in the runtime, causing all sorts of issues if you have a newly released GPU. I stopped using it because of this
Bluetooth headsets. Still can’t have sound and microphone at the same time, which isn’t great.
My primary use case is for audio production. I love that my DAW is native (Bitwig Studio), it runs like a charm. I ran into a lot of issues implementing it with Wine and yabridge with the flatpak install to still use my windows only plugins (I have a large collection of really cool tools)
After building Bitwig in a distrobox with Wine and yabridge I was successful, almost all of my windows plugins work - some as smoothly as Windows, some with some wrinkles. A few of my favorites just dont work at all unfortunately, and after looking into this, its an issue with JUCE8 and wine - specifically,
full support for Direct2D feature level 1.3 in Wine.
I’m novice level with Linux and pretty advanced in Audio production, I’m hoping we can get some folks from the audio world together to contribute to wine to try to make this happen… I want me Aberrant DSP and Eventide plugins working properly!
Thankfully, many whose GUIs are broken can still be somewhat utilized due to Bitwig exposing plugin parameters in their own wrapper - I can tweak from there, but it’s not ideal.
I’ll continue to pressure developers to offer Linux native support as well, but so far its mostly crickets with a few noticing an uptick in requests and considering adding it…
My biggest challenge is really around Podman on Bazzite. It is just different enough from Docker to be annoying. I had the system lock up, and the Podman containers / pods (whatever you want to call them) would not launch. In fact, the system claimed they didn’t even exist. I was looking for the files and logs all over to try to figure it out. I ended up doing a clean shutdown and restart and then the container started without issue.
The second issue I have is also related to my Jellyfin container/pod. I have gone through all the recommended settings and troubleshooting, adding permissions exceptions, all the podman settings, and I still cannot get it to take advantage of the Nvidia acceleration unless I put SELinux in permissive mode, which the Internet says is a bad thing.
Other than, honestly Bazzite has been great as my daily driver for about 4 months now.
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.
Linux hobbiest for a couple decades, began daily driving a couple months ago. My workflows for graphic design have been extremely stunted without being able to use Illustrator.
I’ve been looking for a reasonable replacement since 2012. Reasonable meaning it can do everything I need it to do and without slowing down productivity. So, this pain point didn’t come as a surprise, it just is.
It’s a tradeoff I made willingly and with full knowledge of the ramifications. I have zero regrets, even if I’m handicapped on certain tasks.
Now that I’m daily driving, I’ve been able to learn much more than when I just had Linux on my gaming box. For instance, I friggin love how expandable Dolphin is. Batch resize and convert images with a couple clicks from a file browser? Hell yeah!
The terminal has also become a closer friend, but I still hate VIM. :p
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.
Im pretty sure the Index works great with Linux right?
Meta headsets are largely shit. I have a quest 2 and I got sick of how invasive and maliciously coded it was so it just sits now. I dont need zucc seeing inside my house.
Yeah I only have that quest 2 because it was free. I would like to only stream PCVR titles to it to minimize meta usage. At least until the steam frame comes out.
Gotcha
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.
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.
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.
The more knowledge you have the easier troubleshooting will be, but you can get pretty far once you learn the absolute minimum required to get to
docker runand connecting to your container.
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.
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
I’m on Kinoite for a host of reasons but one reason I chose an atomic distros was isolation / containerizatoon. I’ll take a look at what secure blue adds and see if I can manually implement any of that in Kinoite
