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 miss start menu ads, intrusive bing searches, copilot upselling, MSN news, and uninstallable things I’ll never use on my PC like Xbox.
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.
Black screen or a frozen, jumbled screen.
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.
Bazzite. Internal Bluetooth sucks so I have an external USB Bluetooth. Certain devices refuse to respect that I don’t want to use internal Bluetooth and bazzite frequently turns it back on. I shouldn’t have to go into config files to fix this. I get it, it’s Linux, sometimes you need to but for mass adoption things like this should be a toggle in gui. Hell, maybe it’s in the gui somewhere. I fiddled with it long enough to give up for now
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.
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 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’ve been fine with proton pass but maybe you’re referring to specific autofill use cases?
Keepassxc works great for me
Minor issue is the vulken shaders that load before I play a game. Most of the time it’s quick and only done after an update but some games do take a long time.
Also having issues where Wine freezes up when running applications. Sometimes for close to two minutes before responding. I haven’t looked into this one yet as it just happened recently.
Bazzite with Nvidia GPU of this matters.
Non pain point not having the system install updates during my “focus” time and bringing the system to a crawl until I let it finish.
With the advancements in wine and proton, I’ve found a lot of games do well with adding -dx11 or -dx12 in the launch options.
Maybe a ticket could be made about considering changing the default for one of those programs
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?
Had to think about it… The answer is nowhere. I built my digital life around Linux for 23 years.
Not my pain point, but my friend’s.
He recently installed linux mint to try, mainly because of the dubious quality of windows 11. After using it normally for many hours (maybe for 2 ~ 3 days), his system just froze, the audio entered a loop, and he was only able to shut the computer down pulling it from the plug.
I have no idea why this happens, this used to happen to me as well on arch, but then it just stopped (maybe some package update fixed it?).
I’ve seem people pointing to proprietary nvidia drivers causing it, but I never understood how the driver could freeze everything in the computer.
Most things that are barriers for me are knowledge and time gaps, I am below novice.
I would like to get links, files etc to my pc remotely. Like sending a torrent file and have it start , or a file to print.
The best way would be to use Qbittorrents web interface. You can drag and drop files and have them start downloading imediately. If you need to do it over the terminal, qbit has an option to watch certain folders for new torrent files. You could then use Samba to transfer files over your local network.
Edit: I skipped over files for printing. Can’t help with that, but my guess would be Samba as well.
For sending a file to print, share your plugged up printer over the network.
For sending a torrent file most of the time people use their torrent clients web interface. A person suggested using qbittorrent and that’s a perfectly fine one, but if you’re a fellow or lady of girth swishing brandy around in a snifter, might I recommend rtorrent+rutorrent?
My bazzite PC in my living room stopped recognizing the Bluetooth built into my motherboard which is annoying but easily worked around with a USB Bluetooth dongle.
Turn off the power supply, wait a minute, turn back on
Its not a Linux Problem, happens with MBS in general
Finally got around to trying this and it worked. Thank you! I was just shutting it down before not turning it off at the power supply.
My desktop PC running Fedora 43 goes to sleep in a weird way. When I was running Windows and the computer went to sleep the power button would blink and I could wake the PC with my keyboard or mouse. On Fedora the power button doesn’t blink (no big deal) and I can’t wake the PC with my keyboard or mouse, only the power button works.
Another issue is if I have the option to turn the monitor off after a certain amount of time I cannot get it to wake from sleep. If I turn the monitor off and on there’s no signal. If the monitor goes to sleep because the PC goes to sleep it’s fine.
Something randomly causes Firefox to hoover up all my computer’s RAM. I can tell my system is going to lock up because the fan on the CPU cooler ramps up. When Firefox finally sucks up all the RAM the entire desktop is unresponsive. I had to enable the system rescue keys and I sometimes have to manually trigger the OOM killer.
Raw photo editing on Linux sucks. I’ve tried DarkTable, RawTherapee and some other program and didn’t like any of them. The UI is incredibly complex or blurry.
Using Mint for some years now, there are two main pain points for me. Both do not stop me from using Mint as my daily operating system, but they reduce convenience.
Default package repositories contain software versions that are long outdated (e.g. tmux, claws mail, neovim, libreoffice). Although this can usually be fixed by custom ppa or manual installation it decreases the benefits of a default package repository and causes additional maintenance efforts.
Laptop hardware / driver issues:
- When using nvidia graphics driver, FN+Fx keys do not change display brightness (although brightness hud is shown). When using xorg driver instead, these work, but the input for unlocking my luks volume at boot freezes and I cannot enter the password.
- FN+Fx does not enable/disable touchpad. I was able to fix this with a custom script and keybinding.
- Keyboard lighting cannot be controlled by OpenRGB and some other tools I tried, because the specific keyboard is not supported (yet?).
I have been using various Debian-flavored Linux variets for several years in both desktop and server.
Recently I got a System76 laptop for work because they are food quality, repairable, and mostly “just work”. The main issue I have run into is Cisco Secure Client (formerly AnyConnect) simply breaks in Ubuntu/PoP. If I do get it to install by ignoring Cisco’s shitty instructions, it either won’t route traffic once connected or corrupt itself attempting to auto-update.
It is purely a Cisco issue because they don’t put much effort into their Linux VPN software. Other VPNs not only work easily, but can also integrate into PoP Cosmic. Cisco and their restrictive nature just make the process impossible.
Heck, you can’t even download their VPN software without a Cisco contract. So if my company doesn’t provide the correct version or distro package, there is no way for me to get it. Since most people on the helpdesk don’t know anything about Linux, they simply provide the generic Linux.tar.gz file instead of the DEB or RPM files.
I gave up and installed Windows on a second NVMe.
I dont know your specific network topology, but I’ve always been able to use
openconnectrather than Cisco’s clientnetwork-manager-openconnectfor NM support