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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only issue I have faced, and still no solution that I can find is that I can’t sleep my desktop. I’m running Arch (i7-12700KF, NVIDIA RTX 3090, Asus motherboard)
I’ve looked at the Arch wiki, and nothing I have found has helped.
You could try the “Newbie Corner” on the Arch forum (and drop the link back here). There are a lot of friendlies there. Found this thread, in case it helps in terms of lid no suspending: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=294549
Running Windows in VMWare Workstation: I do development work that really has to be done in Windows, so that’s where I spend my day. Even on my Windows machine, I keep the dev environment in a Virtual machine so that I can go anywhere with it, or use if from any machine with VMWare loaded.
I find myself having to stay booted into my Windows Drive to run VMWare without a bunch of lag / weird issues. So at that point I just kept working from that drive and don’t really boot back to the Linux drive.
I also seem to have a heck of a time seeing files on my NTFS drives from Linux.
Some of this is probably the older Nvidia card that I have, and the fact that I run 3 monitors, and running VMWare on 3 monitors acts weird in Linux.
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.
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
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.
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.
Power management could still be a lot better for Intel laptops (though admittedly over the past decade it’s come a VERY long way). On my Chromebook running Ubuntu the powersave governor noticably stutters as it decides whether to boost the clocks, but all the other governors significantly hurt battery life. Somehow Windows managed to solve this battery problem with all its bloat, and Chromeos also has while also ultimately running Linux under the hood. Laptops could really benefit from the same level of driver maturity as desktop platforms.
I’d also point out touchpad gesture support as a secondary point which is lacking. I love that pixel perfect scrolling and gestures are integrated into many desktop environments now, but they lack configuration for sensitivity and in some cases leave it to the applications themselves to control. Scrolling in Chrome is way too fast and Firefox way too slow for my trackpad, but unlike the cursor speed/acceleration, there is no setting to adjust the sensitivity of pixel perfect scrolling in supported applications.
Theres only 2 times I have headaches due to being on linux.
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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.
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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.
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Been daily-driving Linux for going on a decade, but recently got a “smart [bicycle] trainer” and a Zwift subscription.
Using this the Zwift program runs just fine. However, passing sensor data through Zwift Companion on my Android (GrapheneOS) phone, only some of the sensors connect and others don’t.
(Running Zwift itself on my phone connects to the sensors correctly, so that’s what I’ve been doing so far. I would like to get it set up more completely, though, with a decent-size screen for the main program and freeing up my phone for Zwift Companion, so I do need to troubleshoot it eventually.)
Just submitted a bug report to KDE for Discover where
apt updatefailed 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.
