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.
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.
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.
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.
Davinci resolve has acceleration support on Linux, but it’s not for the faint of heart.
Doubly so with vapoursynth.
Honesty, Windows sucks too. As sad as it is, I color grade some video on my iPhone because it just works with HDR, in basically any format.
Regarding laser cutting: Some fablabs have been using Inkscape and just print the vector graphics to the laser cutter. Have you tried this?
Hmm not sure whether my cutter directly accepts SVG, I have to check … in fact I’m using Inkscape to assemble everything and then just use the application to generate gcode … not sure whether I can skip that step because the SVG doesn’t contain any info regarding cutting speed, laser power etc …
From what I’ve understood, there is a translation table of line thickness to power/speed, that can be configured in the driver.
My current no. 1 pain point is Remote Desktop on KDE Plasma Wayland.
The only functional one is Sunshine and Moonlight, and while they’re great, they’re gaming focused. Trying to do productivity work from my phone is just not feasible, not to say the bandwidth usage if I’m on mobile data.Their RDP server is supposedly working already but I never managed to get anything more than a black screen on the clients.
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.
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.
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.
Have you tried GrapheneOS (since you have a Pixel)? I put it on mine, and it works great. It treats Google services as just another app, so you can control what it has access to while also putting it into a sandbox. Plus, with the user profiles, I have further segregated Google away from my data. I have a profile solely dedicated to apps that require Google services, and so far, I’ve had only minor issues (which may just be how I’m setting my security, so it could just be a me issue).
Literally the only issues I have with Graphene are that my banking app won’t work and I can’t add my debit card to the wallet app. But my bank has a website, and I can still carry my card in my real wallet so I’m not really fussed.
I have not personally encountered a Google-based app I could not run within Sandboxing google play services on a GrapheneOS running Pixel phone. So, fwiw, it is working in my experience these last three-ish years.
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.
If you’re new to Linux you should go with either Bazzite or Cachy for gaming.
Nobara is more for people who like messing with their Linux build, since the dev mostly made it for themselves and their dad rather than for the general public.
Cachy is next in the list. Bazzite I believe doesn’t support my hardware (i5-4460 & gtx 750). If Cachy ain’t it, I’ll try Mint and after that if nothing lies well I am going for Win 10 LTSC IoT :(
gtx 750
That card only supports Vulkan 1.2 in hardware and Steam’s Proton does not run well on that (it needs Vulkan 1.4), so most games crash (or have graphical issues) because the DirectX calls cannot be translated properly.
I have a 780Ti card and I used Proton-Sarek from here, it makes it work with a lot of games: https://github.com/pythonlover02/Proton-Sarek
In general, I would recommend an AMD card for Linux. Nvidia is just painful, especially older cards that aren’t well supported on Nouveau.
Those old Nvidia GTX cards also don’t support adaptive clocking, so they run on low clockspeeds by default. You might need to set the clocks manually if you want (kinda) the same performance you get on Windows.
You can list the available power states with
cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pstateand then set one like this (if 0f is the one you want):echo 0f > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pstate(only if you use the nouveau driver, not the one from Nvidia)First of all, thanks for all the tips. I tried Sarek back on Nobara, didn’t seem to do much. Then I spent a bunch of hours installing Cachy instead, now on it, works faster than Nobara, nice. And Sarek is built into their proton version, so doubly nice.
Sadly, Hogwart is still no go for me. Probably will still reinstall Windows to finish Hogwarts legacy ( I really got into it :| ) and then we’ll see. But sure as hell I feel more prepared for my jump to linux now.
I also tried checking the power state with commands you gave me and they failed. With ls’sing drm I found out card was instead
card1(…why?), but I lackpstate. Hadpower_state, that show only one record with cat which wasD0. Whatever it may be. :| Maybe some CachyOS thing? Not sure. Found also/sys/class/drm/card1/device/powerdirectory with “control” file, but cat’ing that shown only one lineauto. So I am out of ideas and too scared to try something weird with it xDUpdoot: Found out in nvidia app that I should have two performance settings, with one vastly higher. I can OC my card in this menu, but cannot change performance mode so kinda afraid. Found out about and installed gamemode, then hooked it up in Heroic Launcher. Hogwarts still isn’t talking, but seems to work better before crashing? So other games at least should work smoother.
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.
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.
This might be of interest for you on the antivirus part:
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.
While I have switched from Windows to Mint with most of my PCs, permissions are the single most annoying thing I still deal with on Linux. And have been over the last decade of trying out distros over the years. I truly detest the way permissions work and were the main reason it took me so long to switch. The current political world and tech company garbage is what did it.
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
This is heavily dependent on the printer driver used.
My bother does this until I install the CUPS PPD from brother.
Newer process are moving to a driverless IPP model, which should help with this.
Exhibit A:
The same, but in Windows:
My HP Deskjet 1110:
The only other option the driver provides is Color or Grayscale. It’s pretty clean.
I always liked the Linux ones over Windows. No random bullshit depending on who made the drivers, just a solid set of options.
Could do with being prettier through.
