Personally I haven’t. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it’s whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.
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I’m now completely free from Windows in my personal life. After running Linux on my notebook for years and occasionally dual-booting on my Main PC, I purged the Windows partitions back in March and switched over to Bazzite. Everything works like a charm - with Firefox being the only exception. I can’t get the new profile manager to work in the flatpak version or native via rpm-ostree. I have a workaround using distroshelf, which is not perfect (e.g. not being recognised as a browser by the “Webapps” application) I never had any problem with this feature on my Notebook (EndeavourOS). Anyone with similar experiences?
With Linux itself or with the broader realm of ‘Linux software’?
By itself, Linux is a fantastic family of operating systems. Has never failed me and probably never will. At least not until I care enough about differences in userland handling in Linux vs FreeBSD, for instance. And even then, I might just switch out of preference, and not because one or the other disappointed me.
As for broader Linux software, or GNU software, or just FOSS in general - by far the biggest potential issue is probably systemd, and it’s still meaningless for the vast majority of users. Other than that, my personal biggest issue was Hyprland breaking completely after updating. But it’s not a super major issue, because I can just use Plasma instead.
Not being able to use middle click as a scroll tool. For an OS that’s supposed to be about user choice, this option is stupidly baked into the depths of the kernel.
It’s because X-Window, the original Unix (and thus Linux) desktop system, supported 3 button mice WAY before Windoze did. It used it for the clipboard paste operation; you highlight some text in one window, and it’s immediately put on the clipboard; then when you middle-click, it’s pasted into whichever window is under the mouse pointer. Most old hand Linux and Unix users like this behaviour.
It’s been optional, and configurable for a long time. It’s mainly controlled by the receiving window’s configuration, but you can set it globally to do just about anything supported by your version of X-Window, including to scrolling. It’s been like this since about the late 1990’s, but it’s just not the default behaviour, probably because for much of that time, most Linux users preferred the X-Window behaviour.
‘Kernel’ is probably the wrong term to use. ‘Not easily user accessible setting’ might be more accurate.
but you can set it globally to do just about anything supported by your version of X-Window, including to scrolling
I’m not aware of any way to get Windows-style autoscroll on any distro without a lot of hacking. That was my takeaway from when I spent several hours researching this a year ago.
It’s not a kernel thing, more like a libinput thing. Libinput has an option to make it autoscroll, and if you’re on KDE, you can find the setting under mouse settings.
Libinput allows you to activate omnidirectional scrolling by holding the middle mouse down, which is not the same behaviour as windows / (mac?) . It’s confusing since both features have the same name.
Trying to find the path of a mounted USB stick is painful as well. Is it at /mnt, /media or /run? Who the fuck knows.
At least with windows you just have drive letters
If we’re comparing Linux to Windows, then it should be noted there’s Plasma and Gnome that will auto-detect any USB stick in existence and show you its path in the GUI.
Oh god this one, I never understood why mounting drives in Linux needs to be so convoluted. It’s the whole reason my NAS is running on LTSC. Adding drives to my NAS under windows is literally plug and play where as with linux theres always some bullshit.
I have neither the time nor the inclination these days to troubleshoot that bullshit.
No.
I’ve only even been disappointed at myself.
And Nvidia.
I’ve definitely had consistently less issues with dev stuff on linux, but Bluetooth is consistently lacking.
And I don’t know if I’d be able to get wifi drivers working on this laptop again if I had to reinstall
I am deeply disappointed in the Android flavor of Linux. 17 years of development, and your phone still does not have a terminal app built into the OS.
It does have one built in, you just have to enable it in developer settings
Available only on select Pixel phones, and the virtualization API that makes it possible is available only to preinstalled system apps.
So no, you cannot install Ubuntu image onto your Samsung phone, you specifically need to buy the newest Pixel.
When Pulseaudio and Wayland were still kind of rough I migrated to Macs for like 5 years.
The failure to properly protect against file access between programs is kind of disappointing. Flatpak has made great progress here, but it isn’t quite universal.
The worst annoyances of Linux are nothing compared to basic use of Windows or MacOS.
Yeah, it’s usually quality of life misses. An example: if I mount a network drive (mine auto-mounts upon login) and then that NAS goes down for whatever reason, if I open Dolphin it’ll hang trying to connect to the offline network drive and never timeout. I can restart my NAS and then as soon as it’s online again, my file manager will open 😅.
I’d have to manually unmount in terminal if that NAS became non-functional. Windows just times out and marks it as offline so File Explorer still works.
I’ve been using AutoFS and that’s no longer an issue for me. How did you mount the NAS?
SMB mount via fstab, hadn’t heard of AutoFS. That’s usually how it goes, I learn about something better after going through the pain of doing it an inferior way.
kde got over a mil to fix network drive issues and I have no doubt they’ll be best in class next year
My installation of arch broke, kept breaking, and the AUR has been unusable for weeks, I switched back to fedora (after using Arch for about a year)
Just gaming on Linux Mint. Most big modern games work, but support for older and smaller games just isn’t there. I tried to play Doom 3. It wouldn’t start. Shadowrun Hong Kong was so slow it was unplayable.
I’ve had no issues with Doom 3 on Bazzite if you want to give that a try.
The sims 4 works flawlessly, but the sims 3 won’t even boot
I find Linux to be very bad at recovering from freezing. If something freezes on linux I almost always need to shut the entire PC down or go into TTY to kill the app. I expected it to be way more sturdy.
Specifically with the Cinnamon Panel (taskbar) on Linux Mint during fullscreen gaming. I like to tab out during long matchmaking and under Windows the taskbar would be visible and usable when another window gets focused over the fullscreen game. With Cinnamon, the space for the panel is there, but not the panel itself. When you press Super, the menu pops up and shows the panel with it, but the panel isn’t usable…
There is an active issue on the cinnamon github from 2012. No one even knows if this should be a bug or a feature request, so it’s just all undefined behavior right now.
Edit: it’s even worse, a newer issue was closed last year after a discussion that can only be described as very linux.
My disappointments are few, and are outweighed by the fact that if I update the computer doesn’t suddenly grow new advertisements or try to force new subscriptions onto me, or even break that many things? The skill floor is slightly higher sure, but the skill ceiling is so much higher, it doesn’t feel like a thinly veiled Eldritch monster.
