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 guess the biggest thing I’m missing right now is VR gaming.
But since my VR googles need WMR to work, I wouldn’t be any better off with Windows 11 either.
I was surprised to find my Valve Index work flawlessly after switching to Linux (Pop!_OS). Even had a better framerate in some games.
I’m looking forward to the Steam Frame, hopefully it’ll support SteamOS out of the box
I mean it should. It’ll have a steam os installed on the device itself. It’d be a pretty silly oversight to not work with a computer running Linux.
I would be a lot more excited if I wasn’t worried it was going to cost +$1,099. I hope that I am wrong.
that is just for the memory
They said they are shooting for less than the price of the index so that’s $999 or less, not sure if they will reneg on that due to ram prices.
It’s also unclear if they’re comparing it to the cost of the index with or without the Lighthouses.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Same. Quest 2. Fedora 43. 5700X3D / 9070 XT. Steam Link can’t find AMD video decoder on the pc to run. ALVR has death wobble-like reprojection jitter. WiVrn works when Envision feels like it, which is never as it constantly errors out compiling due to some dependency I can’t find for the life of me.
I know compiling from source is preferred as “the linux way”, but I would like to spend more time actually using my pc than fixing it. There’s no reason the VR software needs to be recompiled just to change a setting. Maybe bake in the ability to change settings instead of hardcoding everything.
Wine would be super helpful if they can find way to make older (2019 and older) Quickbooks run reliably. Lots of small businesses locked into old platforms because the accountants or the people who do accounting themselves can’t learn how to use anything else, and the linux alternatives require a phd in linuxology to learn and don’t offer the easy business-in-a-box functionality.
Waydroid is neat, but poorly integrated in the desktop. It runs as a full screen app, and doesn’t task switch easily.
Please, Valve, make Steam a 64-bit native client! So few people use 32-bit systems that the few that do probably aren’t running Steam to save on memory.
Pipewire audio devices and webcam support needs to be smoother. I’ve never seen so much console shim hacks just to get a virtual webcam working.
I haven’t even begun to try my NXT Gladiator flight stick in linux… that might be a whole nother can of trouble to open.
I had the same issue as you with steam link and my 7800xt. Putting this in my launch args for SteamVR fixed it
RADV_PERFTEST=video_decode,video_encode DRI_PRIME=1 ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrmonitor.sh %command%and if you try that and get a different error code from before, ( I think it was like 1033) swap your mesa drivers to the freeworld variety. That should besudo dnf swap mesa-vulkan-drivers mesa-vulkan-drivers-freeworld.The only thing is, steamvr can’t display your desktop properly if you’re using wayland, it simply doesn’t support it. BUT here’s a cool project that can help you work around it, for some reason there’s currently a bug with their pipewire implementation (or something like that) such that you have to manually connect the display streams in the coppwr pipewire gui (helvum and carla don’t work), otherwise it’ll only show one frame of the display stream.
y’know what, I’m actually gonna make a post about this, since it took me many hours of searching forums to find this solution.
Mobile… I want a Linux phone 😭
Just dusted off one of my old Android apps and I completely agree with you.
Android has to be one of the least-competent, hacked-together, yet overengineered pieces of shit on the planet.
It saddens me that people were paid 6 figures to make it. They did not deserve that money and did a horrible job.
@Sprocketfree @cm0002 the problem is not that they don’t exist it’s that they barely have apps.
I know… And I’m sad
linux and the DEs dont make it easy to write apps for, this is a compositor/window manager/de issue to solve.
Want to write an for gnome? Javascript or c++. Enjoy libadwaita. Want to write for kde? C++ only. Dont want to write js and you only know kotlin/swift/java/objc? Tough fucking shit, get fucked. Want to write rust? Not supported by kde or gnome ootb, the learning resources are bare etc. Oh and for kde you have to learn QT as well have fun:)
Itd be cool if rust was the baseline standard for writing apps and was fully supported by the major DEs. I honestly cannot be bothered to learn C++ just to make a tiny app for my desktop, I will never use it again in my life because it is dying.
@dreadbeef C bindings can be used on Rust so Gnome should be easier. I find QTs lack of AT-SPI to be a non starter. Also nothing says you need to use gnome or it if you’re making your own mobile first compositor.
right, but popular (and valid imo) complaint about mobile on linux is the lack of apps. GUI applications either have to bring their own GUI toolkit (slint/qt/etc) or use the one provided by the host (the DE on linux). Like all of linux, its very fragmented at the moment, and theres no clear leader
@dreadbeef super valid point. I do believe having a Wayland compositor that just reformatted the app via ST-API would be a massive first step. It would force accessibility and dynamic sizing. Given only Gnome has ST-API built in. Qt is just a mess for accessibility
I’m using Fedora KDE, and for the first time in my life, an upgrade (42 to 43) completely borked the system, in a way that I couldn’t boot to anything else other than a kernel panic.
I had to boot up a live USB, mount and chroot into the old system, and manually fix each duplicated / corrupted package. And it still caused every now and then some weird issue with dnf, so in the end I just reinstalled the entire OS.
I feel like updates “offered” via a nice and convenient gui shouldn’t really do this out of nowhere - and I wasn’t the only one to report this in the past half year.
Sorry you had to go through with that.
Point-release distros like to tout stability, but they face all the same problems as rolling-release distros when upgrading between versions.
I found on the 42->43 upgrade, Wine 32-bit was removed, and the upgrader errors out instead of fixing it. Wht I did to fix was immediately, manually (via dnf) uninstall wine*, then immediately run the upgrade again, and it fixed itself, finishing the upgrade with 64-bit Wine installed.
Sure would be nice if they caught and fixed that before pushing the update and requiring users to do it themselves.
I only really have two pain points, one of which isn’t the fault of linux, and the other that probably is.
First: Adobe shit. I depend on Adobe Lightroom. This is entirely on Adobe. I know about the alternatives, but apparently I suck and can’t get good at them. I keep a Mac laptop around just to use this application. I tried screwing around with Wine and VMs to get it working, but it’s pretty useless without GPU acceleration, and so far the only way to get that in a VM is to have a second dedicated GPU just for the VM. Plus, that still requires keeping a Windows installation around.
Second: Wake from sleep. Just doesn’t work properly on my desktop PC running Fedora 43 with KDE. AMD CPU and GPU, etc. The computer does wake up but the display never does, and nothing short of a hard power cycle seems to make it recover. Works just fine on my Thinkpad which is running the same environment, also all AMD but with just whatever AMD integrated graphics came with the CPU in that case.
Having chatted with some other people experiencing the same thing with similar hardware setups and F43 with KDE it apparently doesn’t manifest if using GNOME, just KDE. For now I just have the desktop set to turn off the display when idle but to not put the machine to sleep. I am a KDE enjoyer, GNOME does not float my boat.
Same here. Broken on KDE but not gnome.
Second: Wake from sleep. Just doesn’t work properly on my desktop PC running Fedora 43 with KDE. AMD CPU and GPU, etc. The computer does wake up but the display never does, and nothing short of a hard power cycle seems to make it recover. Works just fine on my Thinkpad which is running the same environment, also all AMD but with just whatever AMD integrated graphics came with the CPU in that case.
Having chatted with some other people experiencing the same thing with similar hardware setups and F43 with KDE it apparently doesn’t manifest if using GNOME, just KDE. For now I just have the desktop set to turn off the display when idle but to not put the machine to sleep. I am a KDE enjoyer, GNOME does not float my boat.
Lol I have a similar issue, with Debian on my AMD laptop. But for me it’s already on GNOME and it only manifests randomly -_-
First: Adobe shit. I depend on Adobe Lightroom. This is entirely on Adobe. I know about the alternatives, but apparently I suck and can’t get good at them. I keep a Mac laptop around just to use this application. I tried screwing around with Wine and VMs to get it working, but it’s pretty useless without GPU acceleration, and so far the only way to get that in a VM is to have a second dedicated GPU just for the VM. Plus, that still requires keeping a Windows installation around.
Have you seen the news about the Wine patch from a random GOATED dev that fixes the CC installer? Iirc they tested Photoshop so far and reports it’s “buttery smooth” so other Adobe softwares might not be too far behind!
The biggest difficulty is music production plugins. Some have a Linux version, some work via yabridge and wine (with some GUI bugs), and some don’t work at all.
On top of that, my initial attempt was using Mint with all of the audio optimisations (including kernel) but it was stuttery and slow. Unfortunately, oving to another distro is not painless when you have to move all the plugins too but CachyOS has been much better so far.
Native Linux audio plugins are frustratingly uncommon. I’m gradually trying to replace my Windows plugins with Linux native ones but it’s hard to do sometimes. My thing lately has been building my own replacements with plugdata.
Plugdata seems like a deep rabbit hole, so I’m a little afraid of it but maybe that’s the next step.
For now, I’ll share my latest Linux plugin find: https://store.harrisonaudio.com/all-products/harrison-32classic-channel-strip says it doesn’t support Linux but if you buy it and download the “old” version from here https://support.harrisonaudio.com/hc/en-gb/articles/19516617411613-Harrison-AVA-downloads-OLD-VERSIONS (it has the same version number as the most recent Windows copy), then you can activate it and it works well. I think I had to say no to linking iLok when purchasing. It’s crap that they’ve recently stopped supporting Linux (because they’ve moved to using iLok) but I’ve been happy with the plugin.
Plugdata is a rabbit hole, but thankfully you only need to learn a few dozen of the most common objects to start making things. It took me a week of low effort learning before I could make patches without needing tutorials or outside help. The built-in documentation is all you need after that.
Does that plugin have a distinct sound you like? To be honest I’ve never moved beyond my DAW’s stock eq and compressor. And god, iLok is a scourge.
You might enjoy this video/series: https://youtu.be/yawlonjLp4c
I’ve been trying to get my audio working the way I want (instead of everything just going to the default sink), and it’s been helpful.
Thanks, I’ll take a look!
I have the same problem with nixos. It’s partially solved but some plugin derivations are behind the times or something (or maybe I’m the problem and I can blame documentation :P)
I don’t like that I get zero feedback when typing in my boot-time decryption password. Like, I can’t even tell if my keyboard is working. Did I press Enter or am I wasting my time staring at the prompt: “enter password for drive whatever (random guid)”.
I’ve literally sat there with my keyboard not even plugged in, not realizing it wasn’t dong anything because there’s no feedback. Like, can’t it show some asterisks? Or maybe “attempting decryption” after I press Enter, or anything? The only feedback is: it will either boot or say “invalid password” eventually.
It’s a minor frustration, but it’s every day that it bugs me.
(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. LUKS2 or whatever, using the built-in encryption when I first installed it on my laptop.)
crypttab provides “password-echo” option, something related on archwiki here
that should fix it
for me the blinking cursor resets when i enter my luks key 😅 so when i see the cursor immediately disappear i know my keyboard is workin, but absolutely agree on that
Interesting, I don’t have this issue using rhel8. It always shows asterisks for keystrokes.
If I had to name a thing … My only issue is the lack of support from organizations. Drivers, though It’s getting better for printers/scanners etc. but like HW identifiers from banks etc are still windows (and mac). And no, i’m not gonna install windows or anything wine-like for it. (so far I’ve been able to take the alternative route/work around it)
Probably the banks don’t even check HW identifiees, they see that you are using Linux and just decide to block you, at least, many reported that with many banks but it’s not a universal rule ofc
I use Linux daily for work and personal tasks, but I sometimes have to resort to either a Windows VM or Windows running natively for the following:
Hardware
- Gaming with the Oculus Rift S
- My third-party Xbox One wireless controller adapter for the non-bluetooth models
- Brook controller adapters
Software
- Microsoft Office. I absolutely need the documents, spreadsheets, and presentations I work on to be interoperable with Windows users who exclusively use Microsoft Office. I am no position to ask them to change what software they use. OnlyOffice is the closest to achieving interoperability and its UI is very similar, but it still falls short. Multiple animations on 1 slide don’t carry over, none of the macros my coworkers have made seem to work, slide formatting may look different, and transformed cells don’t seem to automatically update.
- Some games, such as Fortnite and CastleMinerZ either have bug-breaking issues or the publisher/anti-cheat sucks and blocks Linux. I don’t particularly care for these games, but I’m also not willing to give up game nights with lifelong friends over these. I’ll play them, suck at them, and have a good time. Then there are games such as Halo: MCC that mostly work, but then co-op campaign de-syncs.
- Original Xbox and Xbox 360 development and modification tools/programs don’t work. I can’t even FTP a file over from Fedora without it being unrecognized. I obviously don’t expect any of this to change.
And I desperately miss the native Stream Deck software. StreamController’s page-changing is very slow, in general is finicky, buggy, and less intuitive.
Unfortunately, the anti-cheat is a conscious decision by the developers to forego any sort of Linux compatibility. Anything that allows it to be run in Linux will likely result in the anti-cheat software being updated to block that workaround.
Not that it’s Linux fault, but access to and compatibility with popular creative tools like Ableton or Adobe products.
Sure, it’s feasible to use Wine to run these products, but not in any professionally usable manner.
Yes, I am aware there are Linux-friendly alternatives, but they lack the plugins, compatibility, features, and quality of their industry~standard counterparts.
I second this. I use Gimp, but it’s UI and UX is just the worst I’ve ever seen. (It has some great tiny features here and there, though.)
I hope this situation would improve over time, and I’d try to contribute as much as I can. So, fingers crossed. Otherwise, I’m quite happy with Linux being my primary OS for many years.
This plugin might help you https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
Thanks, I use it, but I could mention it, so it’s great you did! To me, Gimp became usable, I cannot stand its interface without it!
I agree, GIMPs UI is pretty nasty. Same as LibreOffice Writer, but I still use them.
The current Virtual Keyboard solution on KDE (
maliit) isn’t working quite as much as i’d like. It only works on GTK apps, and only sometimes shows. When it does, it won’t relaunch after dismissal untill you kill it. Add to that it’s not as feature-dense as its windows alternatives.I hear that they are working on their own
plasma-keyboard, and I hope that will fix most of these issues, but I haven’t had the tim to update my system.Why duplicate this thread? There’s now at least 3 copies…
This is certainly one of the strength/weaknesses of Lemmy. I wish there were a way to, I don’t know how to phrase it, federate the different community posts into one. So like in this case, replying to any of the three would be seen on any of the three threads. As an option at least.
Sure, but there’s also no reason to make the post 3+ times in the first place
I agree.
Fingerprint reader: that thing looks at me every day, obscenely suggesting I boot up Windows instead of Linux so I can stroke it gently and login conveniently.
Oh, also battery life. Windows always has managed to extract more uptime from a single charge in my laptop.
I installed
power-profiles-daemonon my laptop (and configured it in the settings) a while back and noticed a bit better battery life. Maybe it could also be the kernel? I updated mine a while back and there was also an improvement.I haven’t done recent comparisons, maybe it has gotten better these days. I use Ubuntu LTS, so I’ll have a good opportunity for before/after benchmarking this April.
What are you using for power management on Linux? I forgot what I switched to but switching from the default (I think it was CPU power deamon) to something more granular literally doubled my uptime.
Whatever Ubuntu 22.04 LTS shipped. I know we have many tools to micromanage energy in Linux, and I’ve used them, but I think it’s fairer to compare Windows vs Ubuntu out-of-the-box, without tweaks.
The only two issues I have at the moment are that Nemo is not a reliable file browser. It crashes almost daily. Some of its behavior is also frustrating when I go up a directory and it reshuffles my view and loses where I was. I deal with copious files and directories so this can be painful sometimes. Maybe need to play with Dolphin more or find another manager. Open to suggestions. I miss the expected behavior of the file manager in windows, but I don’t miss windows at all.
That second issue is not having an easy method to manage my iPhone with Linux. Pulling images is awkward and always requires fiddling. No iTunes of course for backup and updates. I don’t like OTA updates. So I keep a W10 VM (with no route out) for that stuff.
Otherwise, Linux works for everything else perfectly fine.
I think you should try out different file managers like GNOME files or Dolphin from KDE. One might solve your issue with iPhone
I can get to the phone data with Nemo. It’s just flakey. I’ve used Dolphin, but when comparing then the look of Nemo seemed to win. In practice, having nemo bomb out every other day is frustrating. I’ll take a peek at Hnome files. Thanks for the suggestion!
And I do enjoy the command line plugin(?) for Nemo. It is handy for sure (it provides a command prompt that follows along wherever you cd to. Maybe enabling some of the plugins is causing the instability with Nemo….
Perhaps for the phone you could try something like KDE Connect. You have to be on the same wifi, but once connected, you can do things like remote input, sharing the clipboard, sending sms, sending files, and you can browse files from the PC.
Some things I have listed here may differ as I am on an Android
I am currently using dolphin, and I would highly recommend. I tried xfe before. It’s highly customizable, but opening files was king of annoying (you had to manually input the path of the application)
E: more information
Thanks! I did see a couple of tools like KDEC, but my main system is wired only. I suppose I could pop in a WiFi card and give that a whirl. If I can do some of those things that’d be nice. To move a file from Signal off my phone I had to use VLC. It worked, but yeesh.
Appreciate the input!
no problem!
P.S. You don’t need a WiFi card to use KDE Connect. I have it set up on my desktop (Ethernet only), and it works perfectly. I think you do have to make sure that it connects through the same router that the wired connection uses.
On Bazzite.
Programs often take a concerningly-long time to load. Like 30 seconds+. But it’s intermittent. Haven’t been able to put together any patterns as to when this does or doesn’t happen.
About 1/3 of the time when I try to open a PDF file (which open in Firefox), they just… don’t. Plasma will just spin with the Firefox icon on the mouse cursor for like 10 seconds and then silently do nothing. No errors of any kind reported. No idea where I might look for logs or whatever to help diagnose the issue.
Dolphin is definitely lacking in the UX department for frequent actions I’m used to in Windows, like mounting SMV shares with non-default credentials (basically impossible in Dolphin, only doable in CLI), creating new folders (I’ve been spoiled by having a dedicated toolbar button), and working with elevated permissions (Windows will just seamlessly prompt you when additional permissions are needed, Dolphin will just error, sometimes with useless error messages, and make you go elevate your session separately).
Windows (the UI concept, not the OS) do not remember and restore to their prior locations, which Windows (the OS) always handled pretty seamlessly. I know I can supposedly make this happen via the “window rules” settings, but I haven’t been able to find ANY good resources on how that system actually works, and when I tried to just do it intuitively, I fucked up things like where the Application Menu and Open File dialogs appear. No, I don’t want to have to configure it specially for every app I might use, I want there to just be sensible defaults that I don’t have to fight against.
Those are the ones that’re coming to mind. All very nitpicky, but I’m largely a UI/UX designer at work, so I’m pretty sensitive to nitpicky things. No regrets, though.
New Bazsite user too.
The Firefox thing is not specific to opening a PDF. I get the same behavior you describe just when I open Firefox. It’s probably just first launch after a new boot for me but I’m not sure.
It’s definitely not just first open, for me. Every two weeks, I scan and organize receipts as PDFs for my own accounting, so I end up with many files open at once, all while my existing Firefox wibdows are already open.
Do you have to use firefox for your pdfs? There are much better alternatives.
Not particularly, it’s just the default. And it’s not really about the PDFs, it happens when I’m trying to visit links, from outside of Firefox as well. Opening PDFs is just something I do far more often.
I really wish there was a good remote desktop method that supported attaching to my “local” session but keeping the displays locked. Similar to how windows RDP works.
If I have to remote into my work machine from home, I have XRDP setup to make a separate session that I can have run simultaneously to my local session. It’s fine, but if I could use the existing local session that would be superb (without unlocking my local displays while I’m not there is the big point)
GNOME has RDP/VNC abilities, but in my experience a) the screen has to be awake, or else it becomes none responsive, b) it only worked with one monitor IIRC, and c) it unlocks the local display.
x11vnchas issue C.I think KDE is working on improved Wayland RDP? Haven’t seen if it satisfies this. Sadly though, my work IT doesn’t support Wayland
