Linux

I can’t get the Windows based firmware updaters for my motorcycle helmet Bluetooth headset and joystick fully running under Wine/Lutris/Whatever. They both use USB and just will not connect.

Also, once a quarter I have to use an archaic Excel sheet that is heavily dependent on some VB Script. This file absolutely will not open correctly in anything other than a locally installed version of Excel because the script needs a real local printer and Open/Libre/Whatever cannot handle the insanity of the VB Script. I have a Windows VM just for this one thing.

I need office and affinity.

Struggling to get my dev environment setup on nixos. A bit of a tutorial gap for LEAN4 and sagemath in particular.

No autohotkey style automation, in particular I miss hotkeys that would move the mouse. Kmonad has done a ok job of rebinding keys, though it doesn't convert a held key into multiple inputs afaik.

Some VR games on steam are also a bit rough, possibly a graphics driver problem? (Though I would be just as happy for a Linux optimized resonite competitor.)

Just submitted a bug report to KDE for Discover where apt update failed behind the scenes due to Synaptics changing some value in their repo. It just needed a confirmation [y/n] to continue, figured someone would want to do it.

I find it very difficult to run windows programs that don't have an automatic steam/lutris compatibility setup but require manual configuration. Havent had any luck getting stuff like game/map editors or obscure modding tools to run so far.

Aside from that i am pretty fine, excluding the keyring app. Wish there was an alternative because it never works for saving or providing login data any more.

Spent 4 hours on Sunday debugging "SW microcode error" iwlwifi crashes... eventually found some random shit on the Arch forums where you turn a bunch of shit off and it fixes it

Upgrading distros after a couple years of stagnation is a huge pain point. Why can't i skip versions in the middle?

Also for some strange reason, my both my PC and laptop with ubuntu freezed multiple times during update. Even while copy a large number of files, it happened. The workaround was to use tty thingy and skip UI completely.

Also, lack of proper errors could be another thing, while updating my distro, I kept getting strange errors that linux-firmware could not be updated. It took multiple bricks (including breaking filesystem and booting with usb to fix it) for me to realize the issue was, i was using a custom kernel mod for wifi devices that I installed 6 years ago cuz of a bug in kernel (which was fixed in versio 6.1+ i believe) and the error it was giving was reaaaally not helpful

I have an issue with my laptop on my school's network, which is likely an issue with the way the network is configured, because I've never had the issue on other computers or networks elsewhere, but sometimes my laptop(Linux Mint ThinkPad T490) will stay connected to the network, but say 'authentication required' and have no internet access until I reconnect. It also sometimes pops up a password box and asks me to reauthenticate to the network which I do, still using the same saved password. This gets annoying while writing tests that use browser window monitoring software. Like I said, it's probably an issue with the network but none of the windows or Mac users seem to have this issue so maybe someone has come across something similar or knows how to fix it.

Briefly:

My ThinkPad and it's snapdragon 5G modem. *ubuntu is the only distro where it works, and it only works because I am using the fcc unlock scripts that are no longer functioning automatically/by default. The docs for this are abysmal and atrocious.

On my desktop, my creative sound blaster cards (two of them, AE-5 and Z) when set to surround/5.1 - FL and FR are correct, no other channel is. After days of research and tinkering, I achieved no progress and it has been a known issue for like 8+ years, according to forum posts. Stereo/2.0 is fine.

My desktop is thus stuck on W10 (there are additional hurdles but that is a blocker), while the TP is for niche use cases. I do more server stuff than desktop/workstation.

Shortcuts (symlinks). Cannot work out why the fuck they are not appearing on a shared drive. The folders are, but the symlinks inside? Nada. Source is accessible and mounted

When the update process feel so perilous that I pray every time that my system reboots to the desktop safely, because the pain of troubleshooting the issue for 4 or more hours still haunts me (Nobara linux).

And I'm not new to linux, but because it works as expected 95% of the time, that 5% where it doesn't work stands out so much more.

I recently experienced a failed update on my laptop running arch, where the laptop lost power for some unknown reason, and bricked my system. I was so tired of this shit that I just downloaded cachy OS and wiped the disk, installed the OS and called it a day.

I know not everything is the fault of linux, but man . . . . There's too many small problems to count . . . The fragmentation of application UI frameworks, GNOME this, QT that, GTK there, wlroots here, wxWidgets over there . . . . KWin randomly crashing, scripts that should just be a part of the WM instead of breaking with every update, lack of standardization of UI menu structures, wayland being great but still not good enough for production environments, THE UTTER LACK OF VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS FOR AUDIO PRODUCTION ON LINUX, WHYYYYYYYYYYYY

I wish my Mint wouldn’t freeze so hard it blocks out all input.

For me, I think a really interesting take would be if Linux had a stronger office suite — meaning IT could more easily justify being a “Linux shop.” Active Directory + Microsoft Office 365 is the killer combination that leaves so many professionals saying “just use Microsoft.” Then it’s so much more natural to just issue everyone a Windows machine, and keep it that way because it’s already set up that way. If Linux could bolster itself to impress a similar level of confidence in IT professionals at the office, I think we’d see many more jobs willing to let their staff work on Linux (or even choose it exclusively for the business).

There would need to be corporations that can accept the same levels of liability Microsoft does, but for Linux. For many organizations, it comes down to who’s liable for what theoretical issues.

I'm confused about Flatpaks :c The flatpak version of PhpStorm was the easiest way to install it, but because it's isolated from the rest of my system it couldn't really talk to the php version that's globally installed on my machine. I couldn't really figure out how to get the php version into the flatpak, so I installed it in some different way. Not a huge hassle, and I bet I'll understand it some day, but I did feel pretty dumb haha

Thermaltake Riing fan controller needs special python software. It worked fine from RPM in Fedora 42, but it hasn't been updated for Fedora 43 yet. Tried installing with pip, and creating a systemd service, but it didn't work immediately, and haven't had time to fuss with it again. Probably just going to get new fans I can control through mobo.

Was using default Fedora gnome, but it started getting into hibernation loops. Swapped to KDE, but I'm not sure I cleaned up the gnome install perfectly.

not really a linux issue more of an application issue but I use Remmina for work and it crashes a couple times a day and that's annoying. For a while Ubuntu didn't have the GNOME changes that keeps the remote RDP session running when the client disconnects and I'd have to re-open all my remote applications a few times a day. I was expecting to have to wait till 26.04 to get that but a few weeks ago that update reached my work laptop and now I mostly have parity to how my old Windows work laptop worked.

full handwriting input.....

already whined about it here with a handwriting example to show what my regular input on windows is. i basically used a wacom drawing tablet as my primary input and barely touched the keyboard at all.

Hardware RGB configuration is a pain. I tried some opensource tools but none of them are good.

To configure my Corsair RGB lights I only had luck by installing Corsairs iCUE software in a VM and configuring it that way. It's literally a 1 GiB software just to change some variables in the RGB controller that saves and handles the lights without even needing to have the VM turned on.

After building my new machine. I swapped from Windows to Bazzite, then now CachyOS. It's been pretty smooth.

My current things are:

• Ring timeouts on my 9070xt. I feel like I've tried everything. Seems like this is an issue with directX 12, swapping to 11 works for the most part.

• Wayland shenanigans. I want to use PTT in discord. If I use the x11 environmental, it works, but that then means I can't PTT when using my browser. Using the git that everyone recommends works globally, but seems to be adding Ctrl or alt to my press after starting a game, which breaks my in game keybinds. For now it's the env fix and swapping to voice activation if talking while browsing.

• Hyprland stuff including keybinds to open on my other monitor when my first monitor has a full screen app. I can launch the apps and set full screen properties via window rules, but need to toggle full screen in order for it to work the way I expect. Oh and then there is also the problem with the wallpaper swapping forcing my workspace back to 1, even if I am on another workspace using an app.

Most other stuff has been nice. I don't miss Windows in the slightest. These are just the last few bits to bother me and are by no means show stoppers.

Honestly, the only feature, and it's not even part of baseline Windows (it's from Windows Powertoys), that I'm missing is Workspaces, I had made that a main part of my workflow daily.

The feature creates Shortcut Buttons that when pressed does two steps, in sequence;

1. opens specific numbers of specific windows
2. automatically tiles them into a specific layout

Only had 2 of them;

• gaming
  • opened Steam + Browser + Spotify + Discord
  • Steam on the left screen, Browser and Discord on the right screen, Spotify minimised
• TTRPGs
  • opened two browser windows and discord
  • one browser window full screen on left, the other sharing half the screen with discord on the right