Linux

Chatted about this thread on my little podcast show. Cheers.

I still have win on my laptop, but I barely use it. I decided to install CachyOS on my new desktop, and it works better than I expected) Still have some problems, though, and they mostly come down to my reluctance to do research. Here are the main ones: My azeron is not supported. There is antimicrox program recomended to map inputs, and it worked first time I configured it. But then I decided to change it a little, and changes will not apply, keeping my first configuration. After I leave computer unattended for several minutes, it won't properly wake up. Strangely, it wakes up normally if I send it to sleep manually. Some programs (mainly Steam). Take unexpectedly long to startup after boot. What is worse, window system completely freezes while it starts up, the experience I last had with Windows))

Anyway, I'm happy and not going back

I’ve used a few different distros over the years: Debian, Ubuntu, Neon, openSUSE Leap

Never once has a major version upgrade ever gone 100% successfully. Even on a bog standard system with no 3rd party repos or niche hardware. I don’t know why it’s still so difficult

On my phone. I would love to be able to run a Linux system or at least a de-googled android. But some apps I need access to don't seem to be working without Google services and stuff like that si I'm stuck using a stock Google (Pixel) android.

Beside that, everything is and has been working smoothly on my computers since I switched from Apple to Linux Mint, 5 or 6 years ago. My only regret is to not have switched way earlier.

I do miss Spotlight. All the alternatives I have tested fall short one way or the other but giving up on Spotlight is not that bad of a deal considering all what Free Software, GNU and Linux have offered me in exchange. I would not want to switch back.

As much as if saddens me to write it: the enterprise bullshit.

I'm not allowed to use Linux at work because it's more complicated than the out of the box experience of MacOS and windows in terms of remote management, encryption enforcement, company certificates and all this useless bullshit.

When my PC goes into sleep or hibernate, my keyboard won't work after it wakes up. I have to unplug and reconnect my keyboard every... single... time...

Except for this issue, my PC works perfectly fine and better than Windows in nearly every way.

Energy management is the part that still complicates things most for me. Rfkill not being managed correctly. Machines that suspend but don't hibernate, or that hibernate but don't suspend. Laptops that de-suspend during transport. Batteries that overdrain during suspend. Bluetooth. And most annoying of all, NVidia (insert Torvalds iconic scene).

Games with anti-cheat don’t work.

Secureboot doesn’t like GRUB.

Solidworks doesn’t run natively on linux, neither does my Sketchup Pro program.

SteamVR doesn’t run well on linux

What does work that I use regularly? My older DVD drives work fine, ripping my music and dvd/blu-rays works well and seamlessly with multiple instances of the programs running simultaneously. The typical FOSS stuff I use is a no-brainer, from Gimp to Blender to Libreoffice.

But for the stuff I work with most and the games I play most often? It just doesn’t work well or at all.

For me it's that 'can make it work' != 'want to spend hours researching to make it work'

If you have a well supported use case Linux is great, if you need to do some things that rely on proprietary drivers, old software, etc it's a pain

I like the ux in some common windows utilities a lot more than I like their Linux alternatives. I prefer nano zip over the default app that came with my distro.

Default video settings caused going to console to be use a comically oversized font for my large monitor. I remembered how to change fonts sort of, but couldn't for the life of me remember how to change the resolution. Internet searches had results of mixed quality. Pretty difficult to distinguish instructions for the old boot loader versus the current one. Set the res finally, but it didn't work. One of the commands I tried did seem to work, but then it caused the advanced graphics to disappear and video transcode suffered. Finally I found the answer I should have used all along: sudo dpkg reconfigure (some package I can't remember now)

And everything is like that. You want to do something, you better get educated. It's great for hobbyists, but I find as I get older I just want it to look right and do the thing, so I choose windows from the grub menu and forget I even have it for weeks.

It's great when everything is supported and works and you like the application and you'd spent sixteen hours theming your desktop and and and .. but ain't nobody got time fo dat

Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I'm using at the moment) demanding the root password to install the updates it's blinking at me about in the tray all the time. In this context, demanding a password at all is rather silly (Windows doesn't require your password to install updates in a single user environment, and it doesn't even pop up a UAC prompt) and this is going to be yet another one of those things that prior Windows users will moan about, declaring that "Linux is complicated and hard" and drive them back to the comfort of the devil they know when they feel like their own computer is actively trying to stymie them at seemingly every turn.

My user account is a sudoer so there is absolutely no technical reason my own password shouldn't work. And, in fact, if I run updates via apt in a terminal it does. But allowing updates to install from the desktop environment, something ostensibly ought to be a routine userspace kind of operation, requires everyone using the system who might want to do this to know the system-wide root password. This is a monumentally stupid idea.

I am well aware there are myriad ways around this but they all involve hand-editing config files and come with stern warnings about "this may break your system so proceed 'carefully,'" as if anyone who is not already an experienced Linux nerd will know just what the hell "proceeding carefully" is supposed to look like.

The inevitable XKCD comic succinctly sums this up:

The UNIX permissions and administration model may have made great sense on glass teletypes in the '70s and when nobody knew any better, but it's certainly long outmoded now. It's going to make a lot of people very angry to read this, but that's actually one of the few things that Windows does much better, at least starting from NT onwards.

Devs not working together to make Wayland universally supported and bug free ASAP or fixing X11 ASAP. With Microslop Windoze being as horrible as it is we cannot permit ourselves to fight these silly internal battles; as long as someone is not bullying, raping, killing, or, you know, peddling crypto and cheering ICE, then give each other some slack.

As for daily usage I have no gripes. Linux works excellently. If I still gamed as much as I did back in the day then these shitty kernel anti-cheats would bother me,* now I simply don't touch them.

*Not a Linux problem but an anti-cheat engineering skill issue. Looking at you EA; RIP Battlefield 1.

Bluetooth is very buggy, but it's not too much of a deal breaker.

All my games work like shit :(

And it's kindof my fault because my hardware is outdated but while on Windows Hogwarts Legacy worked, in pain but worked, and Fallout 76 was fully stable and smooth.

On linux (Nobara), Hogwarts CTD's on startup (shaders or something fails) and I had to lower setting in fallout to get it stable enough to play.

Bit I just began my adventure with linux as main OS so there's still a lot to learn. One of stabilising things for Fallout was, for example, forcing dx12. Without it it froze my whole os sometimes. :(

Oh and KDEConnect reports it crashed for some reason if it cannot immediately connect to my phone. Which was funny until notification spam.

I can't figure out how to run game mods that are arbitrary .exe programs that are meant to hook into a running game. Specifically, otis_inf camera tools with, for example, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I've tried protontricks but its so damn complicated and poorly documented I don't really know how.

Multi monitor still has some quirks from time to time. Don't take me wrong, it's already much better than just 2-3 years ago even, but...still has quirks. Specially with different DPI. Sometimes apps get very...wonky when moved from a monitor with a normal 100% scaling to one where it has 150% scaling or so. And on return, it's already messed up. Some start already in the wrong scaling with super tiny text. Or text double the size. Let's just say, sometimes scaling gets tricky.

There's also still a lot of games that don't like being moved to another monitor, and don't even give an option for it. Even when pushed to the non-main monitor by OS key combo (meta-shift-left, for example), they tend to rearrange themselves again back to the main monitor when changing from title screen to in-game screen, and things like that. So...still slightly wonky. Light years ahead of where we were just 3 years ago...but still wonky sometimes.

Printing.

Windows drivers are so fancy, with previews and a billion options, while Linux gets a randomly ordered list of raw options in a drop-down menu and that's it

My biggest problem with Linux is security. I want a relatively idiot proof setup like in Microsoft and Apple products. I do not to have to minutely setup the firewall or have to go into the terminal to run a virus scan.

Other than that I am not too demanding of my system I nearly never have a problem although recently the game A Hat in Time makes my pc kernal panic.

I miss a task manager-like shortcut to come out to the desktop and easily kill processes freezing the PC.

For me it's the fact that there's no "perfect setup" for anything. This likely only applies to my specific machine (kids, don't buy an asus rog strix, trust me) but I can never get the "ok this setup is perfect, everything works exactly how I like it, I can't complain"

What I mean by this is for example KDE Plasma 6. All my apps and everything work on it. games work flawlessly, all my dev tools, great. so I should be happy right? no. workspaces suck on multi-monitor setups, no native auto tiling and the third party script that does it is kinda wonky. Ok fair enough lets use something else like say Niri or Sway or Hyprland whatever. cool I got my tiling, I have my vim nav, awesome right? no certain games don't work with these WMs as they all have issues with mouse constraints on certain xwayland stuff that KDE has managed to solve.

OK fair enough lets try an x11 WM. nope can't do it on my laptop as I have both an integrated AMD gpu and and discrete Nivida gpu therefore x11 can't handle it as far as gaming goes.

There's a few other things like that. Like I want to use something that isn't packaged for whatever distro so you go with the app image of it but it's pretty much useless since it won't integrate with your system. i.e. the appimage of Tabby. Or waiting on a package to get approved but the maintainer drops out at the last minute so either you have to pick it up or wait on someone else to which essentially resets the process (yay nix pkgs).

Essentially with linux in most cases the focus always seems to be on fixing the complicated things while ignoring the easy user experience things. Like workspaces shouldn't suck as much as they do on Plasma and the "fix" coming next month isn't going to improve things that much. oh boy I can pin a single app on my second monitor...that doesn't fix the dreadful workspace experience on Plasma. ALL they have to do is allow independant sets of workspaces per monitor. that's it. that's all I want. but the devs at KDE, just like their opinions on tiling, will say "well we don't use workspaces like that so you won't either".

Is this feedback for devs?

My 144hz monitor randomly runs at 60hz with no way of changing it apart from restarting several times.

I have a TV connected in addition to my monitor (for lazy gaming or watching series), but this causes various small but annoying problems. I can't unlock my PC without moving the mouse over to my monitor, which invariably spawns on the TV, and I have to guess how to move it over (left/right alignment is also inconsistent). It also turns the mouse pointer massive on the monitor, presumably because the TV has a higher resolution. Despite marking the monitor as the main display, more than half of my applications launch on the TV. Except the ones I actually want there, of course. If my tv is off before booting is complete, and I turn it on later, my background disappears, and sound is routed to the terrible built-in monitor speakers instead of either the tv audio I use while it's on, or the actually good headphones I use when it's not.

At some point my kernel randomly broke because the driver of my WiFi adapter was somehow incompatible. It was a massive pain to figure out the problem and fix it.

As a causal user these are definitely points that came out worse than the competition functionality-wise, and since most of the general public will not opt for a lesser experience for the sake of idealism, this type of issue probably prevents other people who just want to use their PCs from switching.

Edit: it was also a massive pain to set up a Korean keyboard layout, in Windows you just select it and you're done. In Ubuntu, you do the same and nothing changes. I don't even remember what it was that actually fixed it, but I tried a lot of guides that didn't work.

In my case is Kernel Anticheats that work exclusively on Windows. It's a pain to switch to Windows just to play those games. Obviously the fastes way to fix this is to directly not play those games anymore.

Bluetooth.

Its always been an issue and it remains an issue.

I have to turn on my screen before turning on the PC otherwise Linux doesn't appear on the screen.

Also if the screen goes into standby In often have to restart my computer.

I have Nvidia so not sure if thats the reason

Basically no support for CAD software. I started out on FreeCAD back in 2016 then switched to Fusion360 a few years later. I gave FreeCAD another go a little after it hit 1.0 but it still feels so clunky in comparison.

Even though I share most of my designs, I'm not interested in the free version of OnShape where there isn't a choice in the matter.

I'm no professional so I could probably make due with FreeCAD but I'll be keeping my dual boot since I have the option.

Linux phones when? I personally don't have any issues but one thing that would be nice is how to make Linux dumber and idiot proof for the average consumer

Theres only 2 times I have headaches due to being on linux.

1. When I'm streaming, the streaming service I use (typically Amazon) refuses to stream at anything higher than like 320p, despite me enabling the DRM and all that stuff, cause they think if you're on linux you're the l33t h4x0rz out to steal their garbage files... Which isnt linuxes fault in the least.

2. When I'm playin a game thats not easily moddable (like Cyberpunk) (Compared to easily moddable games, like Bethesda titles, or Stardew, Or Minecraft)that requires running tons of extra executables and stuff. its just a pain in the ass to get shit working, to the point I often give up half way through.

other than that, Linux really hasnt been a barrier to my daily life in any way. Granted, I kind of cultivated myself a proper linux enviroment before I even made the switch, by using AMD gear, and buying linux friendly web cams/printers/blue tooth dongles/etc etc.

Backing up my BTRFS file system. I'm on day two of reading the docs, and I still feel like I have tenuous grasp of the ins and outs. To be clear I've used ext4 and timeshift for years with absolutely no problem at all. I'm just looking to make generic backups of my system once a month(most the time I do it manually), and I feel BTRFS is overkill for what I need. I also feel like I'm not far away from it "clicking". Guess we'll see, I still don't ever see myself leaving Linux, but I may switch back to ext4.

My personal top 3:

Video Editing - Kdenlive isn't bad in and by itself but it seems really slow to work with, and getting any kind of smooth preview seems impossible even with proxy clips ... the other day I bought a GoPro 3D camera, and I can cut, preview, rotate, reframe and encode with their Android app on my potato phone from 2021, and it feels snappy (I was surprised, really). Yet on my i7 laptop with Kdenlive, much simpler tasks feel much more sluggish on average ...

CAD - I use OpenSCAD for 3D modeling and I love it, but sometimes a GUI-Based CAD program would be nice. I'm sure FreeCAD is powerful but the UI/UX aspect makes it hard to unlock that power. I'm a bit conflicted about it because I really don't want to play down the efforts of the FreeCAD dev team, and it seems like everyone and their mothers talk badly about their UI/UX. But on the other hand I tried a couple times and got really frustrated, and I'm usually not one to shy away from steeper learning curves. Supposedly you can do CAD in Blender but I never really figured that out.

Laser cutting - While most slicers for 3D printers work on Linux, Lasercutting seems a different story. You can still use older versions of Lightburn but it's not FLOSS and it seems strange to pay for a license if the support for your OS has been discontinued 2 versions ago (or one, not sure right now). I want to give Rayforge (https://rayforge.org/) a try soon but until then it's LaserGRBL or the program that came with my laser cutter on a virtual machine.

Honorable mention: A linux phone would be nice.

There are a lot of things that bother me and could be improved:

Lacking Hardware support for Fingerprint readers: in my Lenovo Yoga 370 i could not (for gods sake) get the Fingerprint reader to work. But I gave up trying a couple years ago. So it might be working now but i don't know. I know its not the OS fault because it is just missing key Materials and driver support from the manufacturer. But in the end I don't care whose fault it is. It does not work, and that bothers me.

Not easy to use TPM for LUKS: why doesn't the installer of any distribution use the TPM module for storing the decryption key for LUKS. Or at least make it an option. They are made for that! TPM is not your enemy. Use them to help you! Better to use TPM (with exported strong recovery key) instead of having no encryption at all or a weak password.

Proper Backup and rollback Baker info the distro: why was only Opensuse able to have an integrated solution for backup and rollback of OS changes and updates? MacOS has this since years (maybe decades...)

No parental control features: Plesse give me things like settings usage time limits and APP access limitation for specific user accounts. I know I can somehow do this via Polkit. But this is not user friendly and too complicated for typical use cases. I am very happy that GNOME is currently working in a solution for this in GNOME 50 (Propably)