I guess the biggest thing I’m missing right now is VR gaming.

But since my VR googles need WMR to work, I wouldn’t be any better off with Windows 11 either.

I’m using Fedora KDE, and for the first time in my life, an upgrade (42 to 43) completely borked the system, in a way that I couldn’t boot to anything else other than a kernel panic.

I had to boot up a live USB, mount and chroot into the old system, and manually fix each duplicated / corrupted package. And it still caused every now and then some weird issue with dnf, so in the end I just reinstalled the entire OS.

I feel like updates “offered” via a nice and convenient gui shouldn’t really do this out of nowhere - and I wasn’t the only one to report this in the past half year.

The biggest difficulty is music production plugins. Some have a Linux version, some work via yabridge and wine (with some GUI bugs), and some don’t work at all.

On top of that, my initial attempt was using Mint with all of the audio optimisations (including kernel) but it was stuttery and slow. Unfortunately, oving to another distro is not painless when you have to move all the plugins too but CachyOS has been much better so far.

I don’t like that I get zero feedback when typing in my boot-time decryption password. Like, I can’t even tell if my keyboard is working. Did I press Enter or am I wasting my time staring at the prompt: “enter password for drive whatever (random guid)”.

I’ve literally sat there with my keyboard not even plugged in, not realizing it wasn’t dong anything because there’s no feedback. Like, can’t it show some asterisks? Or maybe “attempting decryption” after I press Enter, or anything? The only feedback is: it will either boot or say “invalid password” eventually.

It’s a minor frustration, but it’s every day that it bugs me.

(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. LUKS2 or whatever, using the built-in encryption when I first installed it on my laptop.)

Fingerprint reader: that thing looks at me every day, obscenely suggesting I boot up Windows instead of Linux so I can stroke it gently and login conveniently.

Oh, also battery life. Windows always has managed to extract more uptime from a single charge in my laptop.

I’m pretty picky about my keyboard layout (a specific variant of bépo) and I’ve found it surprisingly awkward to use a layout that isn’t provided. I know that Bépo is typically included in Linux distros, but not the variant I prefer.

Mobile

On Fedora KDE.

Office, specifically Excel. I use it professionally for work and the lack of feature parity in Linux alternatives (Libre Office and Only Office, specifically) are a perpetual thorn in my side.

I do my best to use Linux alternatives in my personal life, and, if necessary, use the MS web version of Excel but every so often I run into something that can only be done in the full desktop version and I have to boot back into Windows.

I’ve heard of WinBoat and https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps, but at least when I tried them they were too resource heavy to realistically run on a laptop

Some permissions got messed up in my KDE install the other day after an update, I’m really not sure how. I tried to fix it by recursively changing ownership of /usr/ to root. Don’t do this. This kills the OS. It was technically repairable but like, I don’t wanna go through that rigamarole, I just nuked it and restored from a backup.

Sometimes I’m reminded that I often know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be safe.

On Bazzite.

Programs often take a concerningly-long time to load. Like 30 seconds+. But it’s intermittent. Haven’t been able to put together any patterns as to when this does or doesn’t happen.

About 1/3 of the time when I try to open a PDF file (which open in Firefox), they just… don’t. Plasma will just spin with the Firefox icon on the mouse cursor for like 10 seconds and then silently do nothing. No errors of any kind reported. No idea where I might look for logs or whatever to help diagnose the issue.

Dolphin is definitely lacking in the UX department for frequent actions I’m used to in Windows, like mounting SMV shares with non-default credentials (basically impossible in Dolphin, only doable in CLI), creating new folders (I’ve been spoiled by having a dedicated toolbar button), and working with elevated permissions (Windows will just seamlessly prompt you when additional permissions are needed, Dolphin will just error, sometimes with useless error messages, and make you go elevate your session separately).

Windows (the UI concept, not the OS) do not remember and restore to their prior locations, which Windows (the OS) always handled pretty seamlessly. I know I can supposedly make this happen via the “window rules” settings, but I haven’t been able to find ANY good resources on how that system actually works, and when I tried to just do it intuitively, I fucked up things like where the Application Menu and Open File dialogs appear. No, I don’t want to have to configure it specially for every app I might use, I want there to just be sensible defaults that I don’t have to fight against.

Those are the ones that’re coming to mind. All very nitpicky, but I’m largely a UI/UX designer at work, so I’m pretty sensitive to nitpicky things. No regrets, though.

App stores are always terrible no matter which distro you use.

• Images don’t load
• Stuck waiting 30 seconds for a page in the app store to load (if it loads at all)
• last rating is 7 years old
• random utilities written 12 years ago are at the top of the page
• “featured” apps haven’t even been tested on that distro

RE engine games like monster hunter and dragons dogma are a mess. I blame Capcom and NVIDIA, but because not everyone is having the same issues I do it’s safe to assume there is some Linux solution out there that isn’t documented. So I guess my pain point is lack of good documentation, a tale as old as time tbf.

I have a pair of Bluetooth earbuds that I sometimes use with my laptop. The actual BT connection goes smoothly in the KDE ui, but they don’t show up as an audio device until I restart the audio service in the terminal.

I can’t cross play on Ghost of Tsushima.

I can’t get my MT7927 wifi chip to work

I still have issues with Snap… But I switched to an Arch distro to fix that problem

I only really have two pain points, one of which isn’t the fault of linux, and the other that probably is.

First: Adobe shit. I depend on Adobe Lightroom. This is entirely on Adobe. I know about the alternatives, but apparently I suck and can’t get good at them. I keep a Mac laptop around just to use this application. I tried screwing around with Wine and VMs to get it working, but it’s pretty useless without GPU acceleration, and so far the only way to get that in a VM is to have a second dedicated GPU just for the VM. Plus, that still requires keeping a Windows installation around.

Second: Wake from sleep. Just doesn’t work properly on my desktop PC running Fedora 43 with KDE. AMD CPU and GPU, etc. The computer does wake up but the display never does, and nothing short of a hard power cycle seems to make it recover. Works just fine on my Thinkpad which is running the same environment, also all AMD but with just whatever AMD integrated graphics came with the CPU in that case.

Having chatted with some other people experiencing the same thing with similar hardware setups and F43 with KDE it apparently doesn’t manifest if using GNOME, just KDE. For now I just have the desktop set to turn off the display when idle but to not put the machine to sleep. I am a KDE enjoyer, GNOME does not float my boat.