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.
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.
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.
OnlyOffice deals very well with MS format files. I use it on Mac because neither Apple nor Libre handle MS files well.
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.
Easy Anti cheat
I miss notepad++ so much. I miss musicbee so much.
Oh and I miss TagScanner so much too.
Notepadqq or Kate are supposed to be pretty good replacements!
There is also NotepadNext, which has active development compared to Notepadqq.
The one thing I can’t get set up on Kate is leaving temporary text files open between sessions.
Probably a bad habit of mine but I sometimes end up pasting some info into a notepad++ file without saving it and then come back much later to check it out again
I miss musicbee so much dude, tauon is great but it still isnt the same
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 had the same issue on my Thinkpad p14s 5th gen. UEFI upgrade fixed it for me.
Been on it permanently for years now. Only complaint is that I found XFS to be better than BTRFS, though most people probably wouldn’t notice.
Only other “complaint” is Fedora doesn’t have a lot of support for embedded arm devices, so you’re on your own if you want an RPM style distro on something like an Orange Pi.
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.
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.
Mouse sharing, but I also failed it to set it up on my Mac.
Have you tried KDE connect? It should work also on other DEs, I believe. I use it on my phone to do remote input, but it should also do PC <-> PC
I’m not sure why but SDL wants to change to sdlcompat and this is a breaking change for another application I’m running and I don’t know why this package change is needed when I just keep hitting no each time and everything works as expected
This is why I think we shouldn’t recommend any (mutable) ArchLinux distro to gamers who come fresh from Windows. Including CachyOS.
Not implying you are one, IDK your experience level, but these kinds of prompts being shown to the user about packaging are a core feature of ArchLinux. This can happen anytime you update an Arch-based system.
Mine is pretty ridiculous, but if solved the presentation would improve tenfold:
The booting process, specifically the different screens.
Screen 1: select boot Screen 2: some text Screen 3: brief logo Screen 4: black Screen 5: login Screen 6: black/splash Screen 7: desktop
Some of these could be consolidated.
I’m aware that this depends on the distro, but it still looks ugly
I always set the timeout to 0 in /etc/default/grub, that gets rid of the first screen.
And with plymouth installed, add “quiet splash” to the kernel parameters in the same file, that improves the rest (although it’s still not perfect).
Some distros have this set up out of the box. Ubuntu even compiled their own grub version to make booting look better (and Mint uses it too).Use
quiet splashgrub options or change bootloader?
Scrivener. Everything else has a substitute or workaround that is easily implemented by a non programmer. I own both the Apple and Windows forms of the program.
The only real thing that’s consistently annoying for me is UI scaling on high-DPI displays. Between the DE, GTK, and QT all needing different settings that all act differently.
But I guess generally once you get it set it’s mostly fine.
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
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 🙃
