We love to praise linux constantly and tell everyone to change to it (they should) but what are your biggest annoyances ?
Mine would be, installing software (made even more complex by flatpaks being added, among the 5 other ways there already were to install software) and probably wifi power management issues.
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The community’s general overestimation of the average person’s tech capabilities.
Not necessarily fair to pin this on Linux per se, but there’s hardware that doesn’t work well or at all still and alternative solutions still aren’t there. So this would be mostly on companies making software for Windows but not for Linux, but it’s still part of the Linux experience that I do not enjoy.
I have to troubleshoot things on Linux more than I did on Windows.
I disagree honestly
I think the biggest strength of Linux is that it gives people power over their own computing. That has and probably will be its best selling point.
I personally wish that there was something Linux based and Foss that is closer to Chrome OS/Android. I want to have a desktop experience that is hassle free and dead simple. Dahlia OS was promising for a while but it has now seemingly been abandoned.
You disagree with… the things I personally find annoying about Linux?
I don’t like LibreOffice as the only open source Office software that seems to compete with Microsoft. It feels bloated and outdated and for years and years I have display problems with it. The community answers to problems are often written by arrogant pricks.
However, at the pace Microsoft Office is deteriorating with all that copilot crap LibreOffice begins to look better every day. They don’t even have to do anything for it.
I am close to adopting LibreOffice but their excel equivalent lacks some table functions that I use almost any time I use Excel.
Have you tried Proton? It works like a charm for videogames.
I was able to get Office working without issue through Proton, but I couldn’t get my reference manager to work with Office within Proton. Ultimately I ended up acquiescing to LibreOffice, and I’ve ended up liking it more than the bloated monstrosity that is M$ Office in the latest iterations.
I’ve also found SoftMaker Office to be great (faster than OnlyOffice and even better docx compatibility) but it doesn’t respect Linux’s cursor blinkrate when you build from source (it’s supposed to respect the default, per the devs), and instead uses a really fast rate. I’m weird, but that issue is damning for me, and idk how/where to fix it. So, I stick with LibreOffice.
When I was running a Linux distro regularly (1995-2015), audio output would break every couple of upgrades.
It was frustrating, because I was pretty happy with the rest of the OS.
After switching my gaming PC from Win 11 to Linux Mint earlier this year, audio is the only thing I consistently have issues with. I have the PC connected to my living room TV via HDMI via an Onkyo AVR. I have pipewire installed (correctly, I think).
Whenever audio starts, there’s a couple second delay before I can hear it. Haven’t been able to solve that so I just live with it.
The more annoying thing is after an update earlier this week, the audio output is now defaulting to “Dummy Output” instead of HDMI. I have to manually switch it via pipewire. It randomly switches back and I haven’t figured it out either.
Whenever audio starts, there’s a couple second delay before I can hear it. Haven’t been able to solve that so I just live with it.
That can be because of a power saving feature - basically PulseAudio puts your sound card to sleep when nothing is playing, and then there’s a bit of lag before it wakes up. In my case it was really annoying because I use the optical output, so when PulseAudio put the sound card to sleep, my receiver would also go to sleep after a bit, and resulted in quite a bit of a delay when it was time to get it come back up.
This fixed it for me (see part 4.8): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting
I tried this and it worked for about a day haha.
I’ve gone through a couple pulseaudio configuration tutorials, but nothing is working consistently. Seems to work fine after initial reboot, but almost every time after waking from sleep I have to reconfigure the audio outputs. I swear this all worked fine until I updated something last week.
Ironically, it’s only gotten better since 2015ish. For the most part I’ve used pulseaudio like most others, but I’ve also used jackd when I need to do audio stuff. After pipewire became usable it’s more or less flawless for me.
Audio output doesn’t “break,” but it’s easy for it to get redirected to the wrong device (e.g. by plugging something in, like headphones or an HDMI monitor, and the system trying to be “helpful” by automatically reconfiguring). With so many layers (OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, JACK, PipeWire) it’s hard to figure out how to fix it.
When I was running a Linux distro regularly (1995-2015), audio output would break every couple of upgrades.
It seems to go hand-in-hand with bluetooth breaking.
Bluetooth is still… not great.
I didn’t even try Bluetooth. That would have been too frustrating.
I’ve amazingly not had a single audio problem, and i mess with inputs and outputs on the front and back panel often, as well as use usb audio devices. Mint and pulseaudio
I just find it annoying that I have to manually change audio output device every time I connect or disconnect HDMI to our TV. Annoying, but at least not difficult.
That’s awesome! I’m not sure if/when I’ll go back to Linux as a daily driver, but I that I have your experience.
This does need some attention from the Pipewire profiles perspective. It’s mostly a hardware combo thing though. Even if you’re using an audio code that has kernel support, the speaker configuration from manufacturers changes CONSTANTLY, really causing problems. They need to break this out into its audio profile IMO.
I hope image-based distro can solve this issue. In general I feel a lot of these breakages are caused by repeatedly migrating configuration files, yet fresh install usually fixes these issues.
I think one of the advantage of image based distros is that they are much more principled in migrating config files.
Snap. The very existence of it.
The fact that there is NO agreed single package standard across distros.
This is probably the biggest barrier to mainstream linux adoption - devs have to choose between supporting 5+ package formats or just say “screw it” and make a windows/mac app instead.
This has its pros. If all agree to use, say, deb, then some of the users will complain, “I downloaded package XYZ from Arch and it doesn’t work on Fedora!”
No, not really true, IMO.
If all distros come together and agree on a single package format (e.g. deb), then if arch makes a package available in .deb, it can be downloaded and installed on Ubuntu or Fedora, as it becomes an universal package format like flatpak.
Currently we have to compile the source code in such situations.
If flatpak is universal doesn’t it solve the issue ? Is it the sandboxing people dont like?
My system is a mix of .Deb, manual compiled, and flatpaks. As im sure many are. Im not an organized person.
Yep, it’s sandboxing that I don’t like. They feel “tacked on” and don’t integrate properly.
Same for my system which is also a mix of deb, flatpak and Snap.
The main complain of flatpak being size and performance in comparison to ‘native’ installations.
This is my own opinion, but I think Flatpak and Flathub need to be universally adopted as a standard. It’s already growing that way organically, even if major distro projects haven’t recognized it yet.
With usage of Flatpak growing over time, I think we are heading towards that way.
Suspend/sleep. I bought a specific laptop so it works, but these manufacturers need to let our developers know what the fuck is going on in the hardware
The sleep/hibernate is specifically designed to work only with windows, especially on modern hardware. It’s a known problem and it’s not easy to reliably get around it.
That stuff doesn’t even work right on Windows anymore.
It’s kind of sad, 10-15 years ago I’d say everyone (both Linux and Windows) more or less had the whole sleep/hibernate thing figured out. But it’s all gone to shit in the past few years.
Presumably, it’ll work in a few years. Which is when Microsoft will change it to something else.
You want to do some cool thing and you find instructions online.
But that shit only works when t every single aspect of the s is the exact same version.
Which will never be the case, so now you’re at co desperately trying to improvise the steps that, if you inherently knew how to do, you wouldn’t have needed instructions for in the first place.
Flatpaks apps & their runtimes is taking 20 gb, was 80 gb before I realize it and start cleaning up. That’s annoying. But I also like Flatpak. I may just prioritize DNF first (I’m on Fedora) to minimize Flatpak bloats.
60 gb is very significant for me being in 256 gb ssd.
Sometimes I dislike how most distros are against proprietary and closed source code. But then I remember all of the money those companies are making off of war, genocide, and slavery and I feel better about it.
Sleep seems to work nine times out of ten.
In that 1 time it hangs when resuming, so the computer is on but in a zombie state where it doesn’t do anything (won’t even power on USB devices).
Maybe my motherboard just sucks tho.Also someone pretty please with a cherry on top make a VNC or RDP server that works on Plasma Wayland, I’m so sick of using Sunshine+Moonlight, it just isn’t built for non-gaming usecases at all
Same problem here but it hangs when entering sleep! There were other people with this issue and apparently the manufacturer released a firmware update that might fix it… in the form of an exe file
Wait, does TigerVNC not work with Wayland?
Given this open issue on their repo, no, unless I’m missing some sort of experimental flag or build
It is not Linux itself but:
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I dislike when something goes wrong with a program and the documentation is not clear on how to fix it. But I do not complain because it is understandable when developers write documentation they have to choose who’s hand to hold, if they choose to help everyone then the documentation can get long and perhaps redundant.
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When one is a beginner and installs a distribution for the first time one can get scared by the splash screen showing errors which are 99% of the time safe to ignore (e.g showing that a device was not found). I know its important for developers and advanced users to know all this info but it can make beginners feel so damn scared (like me).
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Naming, like in the general sense, it seems like many software have some ridiculous names (dolphin, ncmpcpp, gimp, foot, gnome). Very subjective, I know, but in the end I love and hate these names.
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Bluetooth… yeah.
Naming, like in the general sense, it seems like many software have some ridiculous names (dolphin, ncmpcpp, gimp, foot, gnome)
For dolphin, if your talking about the emulator it is avalible for windows too and its called that since thats what the gamecube was called internally.
For gimp, yeah i hate the name too, its the “gnu imange manipulation program” and is also avalible for windows.
Those programs that look like random assortments of characters are generally libraries that other programs use to standarize functionality across programs. Don’t want there to be 15 different ways for your computer to understand “write this file to this location” for example. You’ll generally never need to know what they are or what they do.
Exactly. Anyway, I was referring to KDE’s file manager(Dolphin).
Ah, I don’t use KDE, that is a dumb name for a file manager.
I’m a perpetual child so I like Gimp. Lol
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vendor support
We have awesome distributed systems like Kubernetes (rke2, or k3s as easy distro examples) BUT no desktop usage.
I want a distributed desktop dang it. My phone, my smart tv (media PC), my gaming computer, my SOs gaming computer, my router, my home lab, etc, etc should theoretically all be one computer with multiple users, and multiple interfaces.
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The lack of a universal application installation method which 98% of developers use. Windows has .exe and it makes it so much easier for developers to release one application which is dead simple for users to install. No instruction manual with different methods per distro. Just double click. This results in less support for Linux in general. Fewer games and applications an drivers with fewer features.
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Poor backwards compatibility. Yes it results in bloat, but it also makes it much cheaper to develop for and maintain applications, and this results in more developers for Windows. More hardware and driver support. More applications. More games.
It is no mystery to me why developers don’t focus more on Linux support. It’s more expensive. They tell us this. What is so frustrating is that Linux fans are so quick to blame developers instead of focusing inwards and making Linux a more supportive platform for said developers.
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The elitism
