• audio - Most of the time it works, but there have been plenty of times that after an install, I have to go in and make a handfull of changes to get it working.

• "you are using it wrong" developers - Lookin at you, Gnome, Mozilla and Pottering. Yes, you are donating your time, and I appreciate that, but don't be dismissive of people if they bring up valid issues. If you just don't want to fix problems, that's fine, but just be honest about that, instead of blaming the user.

• sleep/hibernate - I've never depended on sleep or hibernate to work properly. I gave up on that years ago, and whenever I come back and try it again, I remember why I gave it up.

• documentation - As a seasoned linux person, I love man-pages, but they are soooooo obtuse and hard to parse for newbies. I also hate it when the website has mountains of documentation, but they couldn't be bothered to put that into the man-pages.

• video/wifi drivers - Yes, I know that this is mostly a problem because of the manufacturers. That doesn't mean it isn't a problem.

• unsympathetic users - Just because it works for you, doesn't mean it works for other people. I can't wait for year-of-the-linux-desktop, but it just isn't there yet. As soon as you have to tell a non-tech to open a terminal, the vast majority of them are out. You and I know that 'editing /etc/somedir/somefile and running /usr/sbin/somecommand' is easy, but sooooo many of them don't know what that means, nor will they care. I hear that windows is pretty bad nowadays, but people will often stick with the devil they know.

The community's general overestimation of the average person's tech capabilities.

Not necessarily fair to pin this on Linux per se, but there's hardware that doesn't work well or at all still and alternative solutions still aren't there. So this would be mostly on companies making software for Windows but not for Linux, but it's still part of the Linux experience that I do not enjoy.

I have to troubleshoot things on Linux more than I did on Windows.

I don't like LibreOffice as the only open source Office software that seems to compete with Microsoft. It feels bloated and outdated and for years and years I have display problems with it. The community answers to problems are often written by arrogant pricks.

However, at the pace Microsoft Office is deteriorating with all that copilot crap LibreOffice begins to look better every day. They don't even have to do anything for it.

Suspend/sleep. I bought a specific laptop so it works, but these manufacturers need to let our developers know what the fuck is going on in the hardware

Terrible documentation that is written assuming far too much prior knowledge.

I'm pretty technologically literate but just don't have a lot of experience with Linux, in the last year of trying properly to switch over the most frustrating part is trying to fix problems or follow peoples "guides" to various things. There is plenty of information out there for sure but when I have to keep looking up a string of things to try and get to my desired end result then the original documentation I'm trying to follow is not adequate.

I can only imagine what it might be like for users who are less inclined to learn about this stuff and just want to use it / solve a problem.

I think that a lot can be said for well written documentation that describes necessary processes to get a desired result in a way that everyone can follow regardless of their prior experience or knowledge.

Snap. The very existence of it.

The fact that there is NO agreed single package standard across distros.

Flatpaks apps & their runtimes is taking 20 gb, was 80 gb before I realize it and start cleaning up. That's annoying. But I also like Flatpak. I may just prioritize DNF first (I'm on Fedora) to minimize Flatpak bloats.

60 gb is very significant for me being in 256 gb ssd.

Sleep seems to work nine times out of ten.
In that 1 time it hangs when resuming, so the computer is on but in a zombie state where it doesn't do anything (won't even power on USB devices).
Maybe my motherboard just sucks tho.

Also someone pretty please with a cherry on top make a VNC or RDP server that works on Plasma Wayland, I'm so sick of using Sunshine+Moonlight, it just isn't built for non-gaming usecases at all

You want to do some cool thing and you find instructions online.

But that shit only works when t every single aspect of the s is the exact same version.

Which will never be the case, so now you’re at co desperately trying to improvise the steps that, if you inherently knew how to do, you wouldn’t have needed instructions for in the first place.

Not a Linux thing directly but something that bothers me a lot: The complete lack of support from professional applications.
Wanna use this tool that cost hundreds of bucks on Linux? Lmao fuck you.
You’d think companies that actually make money could afford to support Linux and hobbyists doing FOSS stuff for funsies can only focus on the OS they use themselves but somehow we live in a world where the opposite is true.

This is what makes switching to Linux for me personally and probably a lot of other people completely unviable because it means having to give up on thousands of dollars of stuff for “freedom”.

And the onus is 100% on the companies developing software. They have to offer Linux versions first, so people can switch to Linux, giving them more Linux users. Doesn’t work the other way around.

Oh also psst don’t ever mention spending money on proprietary software around Linux people, they will have a heart attack.

It is not Linux itself but:

• I dislike when something goes wrong with a program and the documentation is not clear on how to fix it. But I do not complain because it is understandable when developers write documentation they have to choose who's hand to hold, if they choose to help everyone then the documentation can get long and perhaps redundant.

• When one is a beginner and installs a distribution for the first time one can get scared by the splash screen showing errors which are 99% of the time safe to ignore (e.g showing that a device was not found). I know its important for developers and advanced users to know all this info but it can make beginners feel so damn scared (like me).

• Naming, like in the general sense, it seems like many software have some ridiculous names (dolphin, ncmpcpp, gimp, foot, gnome). Very subjective, I know, but in the end I love and hate these names.

• Bluetooth... yeah.

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. [UPDATE: I got it from work. Either I was blind or they just added OpenSUSE instructions. ]

Why are there so many package managers with such different syntaxes? And why does one repo maintainer decide to call a package "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.

All the different window top bars/UI elements not lining up.. especially for stuff that has nothing up there.. extra annoying when disabling window decorations don't disable them

Total lack of stability, not in "crashing programs" but in the entire idea of "throw it all out and start over" that seems to 100% infest every single Linux developer every few years.

Not to mention the total loss of every single bit of UNIX philosophy over the years.

"Everything's a file." ? Not according to Linux, not any more.

All the various *ctls necessary to run and inspect your system have completely gotten out of control.

vendor support

The elitism

When I was running a Linux distro regularly (1995-2015), audio output would break every couple of upgrades.

It was frustrating, because I was pretty happy with the rest of the OS.