We love to praise linux constantly and tell everyone to change to it (they should) but what are your biggest annoyances ?
Mine would be, installing software (made even more complex by flatpaks being added, among the 5 other ways there already were to install software) and probably wifi power management issues.
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Managing multiple harddrives- I’m used to running multiple harddrives to manage disk space, but everything in Linux installs into /home without giving me an option to install somewhere else. I can apparently set a hard drive to be an extension of a Linux folder, but then how do I know what physical drive a file is on?
Making shortcuts- was very easy to make a shortcut in Windows. My Linux distro (Mint) has a specific keyboard command for it, but nothing in the GUI/menus.
oh i was annoyed with this too! WHY can’t i change where software installs??? I use a smaller boot drive and have extra large hard drives. it’s also very confusing how you mount a drive inside your media folder so then it looks like the data is actually under your home folder on your boot drive…but it’s not.
I have spent way too much time fiddling with audio, both in PulseAudio and Pirewire. Granted, this sucks even more on Windows.
Weird how my absolute favorite thing about Linux is how easy and simple installing software is, at least on Arch. Never touched a flatpack or snap or whatever else they’re called for my 13+ years if use.
Electron apps (more like erection apps), I rather burn my computer quit civilization and live on a deserted island than using any apps that has electron as a dependency.
We have awesome distributed systems like Kubernetes (rke2, or k3s as easy distro examples) BUT no desktop usage.
I want a distributed desktop dang it. My phone, my smart tv (media PC), my gaming computer, my SOs gaming computer, my router, my home lab, etc, etc should theoretically all be one computer with multiple users, and multiple interfaces.
Excessive jargon, tends to push away people who didn’t take classes in computer engineering or grow up using unix. Mounting of drives, incomprehensible error or status messages or even “sudo”.
Bluetooth support that only sometimes works with my soundcore q30’s.
Security should be the default, but instead a lot of security features are optional things we have dig through docs to set.
TPM support is getting more common, using it should be too. Detected during install? Set it up as part of LUKs during install, and enable a password, and provide option for TANG (both usage or deployment).
fscrypt should be enabled by default and keys set by logical differences of file types. (Yes on top of LUKS). Honestly setup following selinux profiles and per user is a reasonable default. Hardware wrapped keys should be default.
Encrypted memory an option for this CPU? Enable it. Features for multiple key memory encryption? Enable it. Encrypt on a per VM and per container level by default.
Each service should be containerized, connections made explicit (ideally with l7 rules, l4 at least). If a user want to tinker with have a dev mode that opens that service up, with expectation that it’s temporary (track and warn user when active). Each service should run as it’s own non root user.
Each application should containerized. Wayland should be default to minimize shared data. Access by apps should be explicit and user approved and user configurable. Application should never run as root and escalations should be temporary and explicitly approved by the user. Application to the network should be explicit per connection and l7 aware.
MACSec WPA3 pki should be available during install. Wireless WPA3 PKI option should be default on wireless setup. IPSec/Wire guard VPN/Tor should be available option by default on setup. Vlan tagging should be available options on setup.
FIPS or equivalents should be enforced by default. Old encryption methods/cipher/etc should require explicit approval by the user.
Selinux should enabled by default and selinux tagging should be exposed in user applications, so users can choose the security levels, privacy tags (medical or tax docs or etc), or pseudonym access they want.
Sudo should be setup by default for least privileged roles and not god mode access. The combination of those into a single user could look indistinguishable but it should be set and ready for adding users that are limited in scope.
Encrypted backups following the 321 rule (at least 3 backups, 2 different types of media, 1 off site) should be the default and configurable on install. Schedule and triggered backups should be frequently (ideally constantly backup, with snapshot ting being periodic).
Multiple factor logins should be the default. Support for smart card, key fob, OTP, biometric, plus password built-in and encouraged on install.
Number of known CVEs for hardware, packages, and configurations should be tracked and obviously available for privileged users. Hardware missing for full best practices (like TPM 2.0, memory encryption support, etc). Software source should be kept easily accessable to users for remove and modifications. Software should adhere to SLSA build practices, exception explicitly choosen the user.
Systems should be immutable with expectations being explicit to the user and triggering snapshot ting.
DNSSEC and DNSoTLS/DNSoHTTPS should be default and configurable on install.
NTS should be default for NTP configuration. Hardware time sources should be configurable on install.
Applications should be privacy preserving by default (not defaulting to Google for example).
These are just off the top of my head stuff, stuff I had to annoyingly learn and set up myself to harden systems instead of it just being part of sane defauls. CIS bench mark has more controls that should be set.
Multithreaded performance is awful. The system becomes completely unresponsive if a single process uses a lot of CPU despite another core being available. Copying a file in the background slows everything down to a crawl.
That and laptops. Will hibernation work this time? Will it wake up or do I need to forcefully restart it? Will my second monitor work after hot-plugging it? Will the battery last 2 or 6 hours this time?
My one major complaint is audio in general. I’ve had so many audio issues. If you need an eq or noise canceling it’s a pain to get it working. There’s always a bug somewhere, always a random distortion.
Voicemeeter is the only thing I miss about Windows. I really do.
I have an audio issue where it starts chopping if (I think, but could be CPU as well) the GPU struggles (think shader compilation). I’ve tried a couple of things to fix it, but haven’t been successful yet. So far it’s been my only major complaint.
Bluetooth support can be a mix bag one point my keyboard constantly disconnects for every few minutes likely due to the hardware aggressively try to save power.
Suspending can be 50/50 especially on old hardware. Either you get it back up and running or you will have to forcibly shut it down since it refuses to accept any commands.
Linux needs a shared API framework for all desktop apps for them to succeed. It’s ridiculous that gnome apps and other apps look different and have different theming conventions. I’d love to get into theming and application building, but I’m so afraid that I’ll waste my time on something that won’t apply to everything. macOS solved application cohesion perfectly.
There’s now game developers dropping native support for proton, because proton has a more uniform, stable and predictable API.
So while Linux in many ways becomes the better way to play Windows games, it’s also better to play Windows games on Linux than Linux games on Linux.
I can see a future where more and more of Linux just becomes a wrapper around Proton.
Proton for everything would be pretty heavy though. I’m referring to user facing APIs that could be made consistent.
Proton is not that heavy. In many cases it’s less heavy than Windows.
And sadly I cannot see a future where all of Linux rallies under the same APIs without giving in to the urge to forge.
Having to install apps manually and figure out dependencies myself because a popular piece of software only officially supports Ubuntu and Debian. No normal human would ever do this. They would go back to Windows. Hell, I still haven’t even gotten one piece of software to work on my new OpenSUSE system yet: Beyond Compare 4. There’s no flatpack for it. The RPM test says all dependencies are satisfied, but when I run the program, nothing happens. I did some web searching, but I haven’t dug too deep yet.
Why are there so many package managers with such different syntaxes? And why does one repo maintainer decide to call it “package” and another calls it “package4”? Or some entirely different name! It’s maddening. I’ve had to create empty proxy packages that translate package names just to install some RPM file. Again, the average person is not going to do this.
In KDE plasma, the first thing most people do is set up Wi-Fi on their computer, but you need to set up KWallet first or else the password gets stored in some other dimension. I accidentally typed my Wi-Fi password wrong, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to clear it out and make it ask me for the proper password when I try to connect. I even went into network manager and switched the network to say, “ask me every time”. It wouldn’t! It would just sit there and hang on “authenticating”. I never did figure it out. I ended up forgetting to encrypt my system partition, so I simply reinstalled the OS.
And it’s not only obscure software on obscure distros.
The Arduino IDE doesn’t run on Fedora 42. It just doesn’t work.
I personally don’t need it, I use ESP-IDF on Platformio, but Arduino is an incredibly common piece of software and one I would have expected to work flawlessly on Linux.
A lot of Linux software has really stupid names, and has since before Torvalds even started. GNU is a garbagepuke name for an operating system, and they’ve just kept doing that. Recursive actronyms like NANO and LAME, Gpackages and Krograms, and then so many bash built-ins and common shell programs have names like lsphw.
I once had this conversation:
“This distro comes with a kernel that’s so new it breaks compatibility with [some piece of hardware]”
“use mainline”
“Yeah, okay, I have no idea how to do that in this distro.”
Turns out “Mainline” is a kernel management tool. I thought the guy was telling me to use a mainline Linux kernel instead of a customized one, because A. the name of the app is poorly chosen, and B. he had the communication skills of a homeschooled zoomer.
The elitism
Having to use the terminal even once
I mean I agree, but I love how fast and to the point the terminal can be. But yeah it scares people so I get it. Imo they should learn to not be scared of it but we all say that…like trying to get a young American kid to drive a manual
