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.
Been using it for a couple years, my main ones currently are:
- VR. SteamVR is a broken mess, Monado is pretty much functional, but I haven’t switched yet. Mesa or the kernel sometimes forget about VR and break it in an update.
- QT5 to QT6 transition for my favorite Matrix client, Nheko. Scrolling is a pain, and the clipboard randomly stops working.
- Wayland freedom and featureset is nowhere close to X11. I can’t choose a window manager without locking myself in to a specific featureset on my display server. Stuff like global hotkeys isn’t supported in most applications. I’m still on the godawful GNOME desktop portals, which is most annoying for file picking. I have no HDR support because my window manager isn’t from KDE or GNOME.
- GTK4 apps looking like shit (there are patches luckily), I try to avoid them just because of
libadwaitaand GNOME’s awful design.
On the note of Wayland, I have switched, and for good reason. Besides unimplemented features, things “just work” a lot better than X11. Still wish I could have effectively bspwm window management with kwin featureset though. (Plugins for tiling are not the same experience)
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.
Linux is better for audio production than it’s ever been. That said, the plug-in support is still severely lacking. Even the VST bridges are hit or miss because a lot of plugins install via .exe installers which may or may not run well via wine. Getting a raw .vst file is actually pretty rare. And that’s for free plugins that don’t require DRM. Most professional quality plugins are more complex.
Have you tried LSP? I’m super impressed by it and it can be a drop in replacement for many pro-grade technical plugins. That and reapak have pretty much replaced everything for me.
LSP seems neat from what I’ve used. I think Reaper’s stock plugins are higher quality compared to the stock plugins in most other daws as well. I’m specifically in the market for modern metal drum sampler and amp sim plugins. The open source stuff is great compared to what it used to be. Just nowhere near what I can get pretty easily on Mac or Windows. It’s the finally itch I need scratched to really whole heartedly use Linux full time
Just last night I was playing around with the Tukan plugin collection and they are mental. Lots of very good sounding clones and models. I haven’t checked the drum stuff, but I did play around with the bass and guitar stations and managed to dial in some serious high-gain wall of sound type tones very easily.
Another way of getting good tones is simply obtaining high quality IR-s and just loading them in a suitable plugin. If you have a reamp box and access to some nice amps you can even create your own.
You could also do something similar for the drums. Just get some nice samples, load them into any old sequencer and you got yourself a drummer who’s never late or drunk. Then again, you lose the out of the box experience, but you only have to do it once.
I regret not switching my audio workflow to linux much earlier. A few years ago I got rid of everything Microsoft and started working with Reaper stock plugins exclusively. Not as pretty, but basically anything can be done with some fiddling. Only now I’m exploring the JSFX and LSP options and I’m hard pressed to find anything that I miss from the days of expensive plugins. Made me a better engineer as well. Less distractions, more listening and measuring.
I have been using pirated versions of plugins I own (iLok is a blight), but I understand how that wouldn’t be feasible in a lot of cases.
It is probably because I am a moron and just took a long time to figure it out, but its always harder to set up network shares with my linux desktop than any other machine in my house. At this point I know how to do it pretty well, but its a LOT more involved because none of the GUI tools seem to really work right.
Like I will share a folder from my server (also running linux BTW) and its instantly viewable on my windows laptop and even my streaming devices, but to discover it on my other linux machine is always a chore that involves editing a few config files and just kinda randomly poking around until it works.
but to discover it on my other linux machine is always a chore that involves editing a few config files and just kinda randomly poking around until it works.
What’s your desktop environment? On KDE you can just enter
smb://serverhost/pathin the Dolphin navigation bar and it will open it.Haha, you can! But other programs which don’t have built in network share support can’t use those. Also a bit annoyed by this, but it’s an easy fix.
Yes, that’s still a bit annoying unfortunately.
Editing the fstab to properly mount a network share also currently has no UI available in KDE and has to be done manually.
The Dolphin file browser picked mine up pretty quick. In the left folder tab I think I just had to click on the Network folder and then my shares were there, and I could right click and pin them to the sidebar
Touchpad: No matter what I did, the touchpad is always so bad on Linux (tried on different devices, different hardware, different distros). Two finger scrolling is not consistent, movement doesn’t feel right, gestures are not precise enough. Tried to get the “two finger swipe back” on the browser on my old Intel Macbook Air and it was just horrible. Could only get three finger swipe to work and recognition of that was just not very consistent. At the moment I have a old notebook sitting here to set up for one of my family members and could only get somewhat smooth scrolling to work on Mint by using some arcane workaround… but only in Firefox, scrolling anywhere else still sucks. Apparently touchpads on Linux are still my nemesis.
I would love to use Linux on my notebook too, but I also don’t want to fight with my main input all the time. :( Will try Asahi linux on the M1 Macbook as soon the battery issue improves, but I have a feeling that the touchpad problems will drive me back to Mac OS again (which sucks, because they keep locking Mac OS down more every year…).
Flatpack and password managers. They’ll oil and water.
What do you mean by that? I use the Keepass flatpak and even got autofill to work by adding some kind of launch option of I remember correctly.
I use LibreWolf and that was flat pack. It seemed I needed the PAA(?) Version of it so that keep ass could interact with it.
I have 1password and it’s just a pain setting it up with browsers.
Then the CLI integration is janky and doesn’t work unless the desktop is on.
I hear you. Kinda by design though. Its supposed to be difficult for containered applications to interact.
I think i installed keepassxc native. Then some config magic I’ve forgotten.
Yeah, it’s not the worst thing in the world, just makes things awkward.
I do really like the idea of flatpack, I’m 110% in on containers, probably too much. There are just compromises that ned to be made today.
Keepassxc works great for me
Linux kernel or distros?
Assuming distros, my pain point is that it is not popular. For Linux to actually take over, UI/UX for everything without a single touch of CLI (akin to Windows and Mac OS) needs to be normalised. And everything just needs to work (see LTT), be snappy/instant (looking at you file browsers, Firefox, etc.), and use established behavioural norms within Windows and Mac (looking at you middle click paste, and it not being a universal scroll) as basics. Just give any distro to any Asian population. They won’t even be able to figure out how to type their own language as if they are exiting Vim.
For Linux to actually take over, UI/UX for everything without a single touch of CLI needs to be normalised. And everything just needs to work, be snappy/instant, and use established behavioural norms as basics.
I wish an OS like this existed.
Mac OS is pretty close. But not everything is a Mac 🙃
and use established behavioural norms within Windows and Mac
Even when they fucking suck some times?
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
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
Running Arch when you hate the terminal and want stability is quite the mood.
What can I say, I’m a sucker for punishment 😂
I like having the latest (or at least recent) hardware so having the latest kernel and mesa is a must.
Developers don’t think you enjoy using the terminal. It’s just the option that works with the most systems with the least explanation. They can just give you a command to copy/paste instead of a tutorial on what buttons to click, assuming you even have that.
There are GUIs for package managers. I haven’t used one, because I feel like there’s no need, but they do exist. I don’t know if they support the AUR and pacman though. That probably exists, but you’ll have to look it up.
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
A handful of sites that decide because I’m on Linux, I must be a bot and I’m blocked from opening sites.
That’s usually a good sign, it means tracking protection is working :)
Spoofing your User Agent as Chrome on windows is easy via browser extension, and almost never causes actual compatibility issues
Plasma apps don’t navigate to network shares. So backup sync is not possible for non IT people. Even though Dolphin can easily access those shares. No backup is quite a showstopper. There is no easy way to permanently mount shares either.
Does adding them to fstab not work?
I’m looking for a solution that non IT users can easily do.They will not discover that, or know exactly what to type in. This is something that should be very easy for people. It really needs a setting or command in a Dolphin menu.
In my experience a lot of non it people have used computers with text interfaces and don’t have any problem with things like fstab but I understand what you’re saying.
It’s in our interest to have good usability to encourage Linux use for a broader range of people. Mounting needs to be discoverable, and done in a few clicks. Command line, and typing magic words into fstab is a definite no-no for people who never work that way for everything else they do.
The strange thing is, why did KDE miss this critical step for backups?
I’m swiftly moving into the sparsely populated camp which holds that it’s not actually in our interests. Maybe the bell labs people were the good path and were walking parcs bad path now. We’re gonna find out for sure!
Idk how kde missed it, they’re probably taking fixes, why not whip something up?
I wouldn’t wish Windows 11 on anyone. More people on linux means better driver support and more main applications. And better open standards support.
I’ve reported it several times. KDE just keep closing it as a duplicate of a totally different bug.
More users of a system has never meant more driver support. The two don’t correlate on windows, mac or linux. Hell, the kernels been shedding drivers during the last few years! I also don’t think more users means more main applications, no matter what you mean by that, but it’s neither here nor there because neither one of us can pull things in the direction we want.
What are the kde people saying it’s a dupe of? Is there a number?
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.
Vorta only supports SSH and local backup repositories while pika allows SFTP through some kind of compatibility layer with gvfs.
That’s kinda wild given SFTP is just SSH.
If you’re flinging files across the network, rsync is usually a really good option. It’ll typically be run over SSH/SFTP and is capable of resuming if interrupted, verifying the copied files match the original, etc. and rsync can be super fast compared straight SFTP in some cases. In a pinch you can always cobble together a pretty robust backup script purely based off rsync
Kopia is a solid choice!
My latest project is a NixOS based NAS, with the goal being to make something super reproducible I can help friends setup for themselves to build out a decentralized backup/media/adblock/fileshare/communication tool for me and my loved ones.
I understand the concept and use case of flakes and home manager but every time I have attempted to install these, down to just fully copying provided configs, something doesn’t work, and then uninstalling them is a bit of a nightmare. I’ve yet to find a truly accessible NixOS tutorial as someone coming from an Arch from scratch install and tinkering with some 6 other Linux based operating systems.
I’d love for either a fully flake free setup, that is just simple “default style” config files, OR an actually useful tutorial that discusses the generic process of installing these in a way that I can actually understand, because I clearly lack some important piece of knowledge to make it work as intended. So many pieces of software I’m interested in simply say “install the XYZ flake and you’re good to go”. People make Nix seem so simple (and when it works it feels that way) but there’s some disconnect between the author of every tutorial I’ve followed and me as a relatively new to Nix end user.
I love the idea of nix, but nix packages are often broken on debian in my experience.
I have a few windows programs that don’t play nice with wine. Otherwise I do everything on Linux when I can
