Been using it for a couple years, my main ones currently are:

• VR. SteamVR is a broken mess, Monado is pretty much functional, but I haven't switched yet. Mesa or the kernel sometimes forget about VR and break it in an update.
• QT5 to QT6 transition for my favorite Matrix client, Nheko. Scrolling is a pain, and the clipboard randomly stops working.
• Wayland freedom and featureset is nowhere close to X11. I can't choose a window manager without locking myself in to a specific featureset on my display server. Stuff like global hotkeys isn't supported in most applications. I'm still on the godawful GNOME desktop portals, which is most annoying for file picking. I have no HDR support because my window manager isn't from KDE or GNOME.
• GTK4 apps looking like shit (there are patches luckily), I try to avoid them just because of libadwaita and GNOME's awful design.

On the note of Wayland, I have switched, and for good reason. Besides unimplemented features, things "just work" a lot better than X11. Still wish I could have effectively bspwm window management with kwin featureset though. (Plugins for tiling are not the same experience)

Linux is better for audio production than it’s ever been. That said, the plug-in support is still severely lacking. Even the VST bridges are hit or miss because a lot of plugins install via .exe installers which may or may not run well via wine. Getting a raw .vst file is actually pretty rare. And that’s for free plugins that don’t require DRM. Most professional quality plugins are more complex.

It is probably because I am a moron and just took a long time to figure it out, but its always harder to set up network shares with my linux desktop than any other machine in my house. At this point I know how to do it pretty well, but its a LOT more involved because none of the GUI tools seem to really work right.

Like I will share a folder from my server (also running linux BTW) and its instantly viewable on my windows laptop and even my streaming devices, but to discover it on my other linux machine is always a chore that involves editing a few config files and just kinda randomly poking around until it works.

Bazzite. Internal Bluetooth sucks so I have an external USB Bluetooth. Certain devices refuse to respect that I don't want to use internal Bluetooth and bazzite frequently turns it back on. I shouldn't have to go into config files to fix this. I get it, it's Linux, sometimes you need to but for mass adoption things like this should be a toggle in gui. Hell, maybe it's in the gui somewhere. I fiddled with it long enough to give up for now

Touchpad: No matter what I did, the touchpad is always so bad on Linux (tried on different devices, different hardware, different distros). Two finger scrolling is not consistent, movement doesn't feel right, gestures are not precise enough. Tried to get the "two finger swipe back" on the browser on my old Intel Macbook Air and it was just horrible. Could only get three finger swipe to work and recognition of that was just not very consistent. At the moment I have a old notebook sitting here to set up for one of my family members and could only get somewhat smooth scrolling to work on Mint by using some arcane workaround... but only in Firefox, scrolling anywhere else still sucks. Apparently touchpads on Linux are still my nemesis.

I would love to use Linux on my notebook too, but I also don't want to fight with my main input all the time. :( Will try Asahi linux on the M1 Macbook as soon the battery issue improves, but I have a feeling that the touchpad problems will drive me back to Mac OS again (which sucks, because they keep locking Mac OS down more every year...).

I think security wise linux can do better, I'd like to see more isolation of processes. I find accessibility is lacking as well, particularly translation and ocr software. I think this is actually something local visual ai models would be very good at but are not leveraged for in open source.

Flatpack and password managers. They’ll oil and water. 

Not my pain point, but my friend's.

He recently installed linux mint to try, mainly because of the dubious quality of windows 11. After using it normally for many hours (maybe for 2 ~ 3 days), his system just froze, the audio entered a loop, and he was only able to shut the computer down pulling it from the plug.

I have no idea why this happens, this used to happen to me as well on arch, but then it just stopped (maybe some package update fixed it?).

I've seem people pointing to proprietary nvidia drivers causing it, but I never understood how the driver could freeze everything in the computer.

Had to think about it... The answer is nowhere. I built my digital life around Linux for 23 years.

Just wanted to say this is a nice thread, thanks OP for starting it and everyone for participating :)

Gives me nostalgia for the "tech support" category in forums. We should really really bring them back, they're not well suited to "aggregator" platforms like Lemmy/Reddit or messaging applications like Discord

Minor issue is the vulken shaders that load before I play a game. Most of the time it's quick and only done after an update but some games do take a long time.

Also having issues where Wine freezes up when running applications. Sometimes for close to two minutes before responding. I haven't looked into this one yet as it just happened recently.

Bazzite with Nvidia GPU of this matters.

Non pain point not having the system install updates during my "focus" time and bringing the system to a crawl until I let it finish.

A handful of sites that decide because I'm on Linux, I must be a bot and I'm blocked from opening sites.

I miss start menu ads, intrusive bing searches, copilot upselling, MSN news, and uninstallable things I'll never use on my PC like Xbox.

I miss notepad++ so much. I miss musicbee so much.

Oh and I miss TagScanner so much too.

My latest project is a NixOS based NAS, with the goal being to make something super reproducible I can help friends setup for themselves to build out a decentralized backup/media/adblock/fileshare/communication tool for me and my loved ones.

I understand the concept and use case of flakes and home manager but every time I have attempted to install these, down to just fully copying provided configs, something doesn’t work, and then uninstalling them is a bit of a nightmare. I’ve yet to find a truly accessible NixOS tutorial as someone coming from an Arch from scratch install and tinkering with some 6 other Linux based operating systems.

I’d love for either a fully flake free setup, that is just simple “default style” config files, OR an actually useful tutorial that discusses the generic process of installing these in a way that I can actually understand, because I clearly lack some important piece of knowledge to make it work as intended. So many pieces of software I’m interested in simply say “install the XYZ flake and you’re good to go”. People make Nix seem so simple (and when it works it feels that way) but there’s some disconnect between the author of every tutorial I’ve followed and me as a relatively new to Nix end user.

Can't stream peacock to watch my motorsports. Resolved by unsubbing but I still wanna watch sometimes.

Using Mint for some years now, there are two main pain points for me. Both do not stop me from using Mint as my daily operating system, but they reduce convenience.

Default package repositories contain software versions that are long outdated (e.g. tmux, claws mail, neovim, libreoffice). Although this can usually be fixed by custom ppa or manual installation it decreases the benefits of a default package repository and causes additional maintenance efforts.

Laptop hardware / driver issues:

• When using nvidia graphics driver, FN+Fx keys do not change display brightness (although brightness hud is shown). When using xorg driver instead, these work, but the input for unlocking my luks volume at boot freezes and I cannot enter the password.
• FN+Fx does not enable/disable touchpad. I was able to fix this with a custom script and keybinding.
• Keyboard lighting cannot be controlled by OpenRGB and some other tools I tried, because the specific keyboard is not supported (yet?).

Mainly kernel level anticheat, though that is obviously not really linux fault.

My other personal gripe is probably stumbling across a GTK based app that works for what I want it to do but clashes extremely badly with my Plasma DE.

For example, I wanted to set up automatic file backups to an SFTP server using borg. The two common UI interfaces I found are vorta and pika-backup. Vorta only supports SSH and local backup repositories while pika allows SFTP through some kind of compatibility layer with gvfs.

Seems like pika is the right choice for me but the UI felt incredibly dumbed down and really did not match with anything else on my PC. Since both programs were kind of out, I found another backup tool in Kopia.

The reason I was looking for a backup tool at all? I was previously using synology active backup for business, which is available on all linux distros except arch.

Most things that are barriers for me are knowledge and time gaps, I am below novice.

I would like to get links, files etc to my pc remotely. Like sending a torrent file and have it start , or a file to print.

Linux kernel or distros?

Assuming distros, my pain point is that it is not popular. For Linux to actually take over, UI/UX for everything without a single touch of CLI (akin to Windows and Mac OS) needs to be normalised. And everything just needs to work (see LTT), be snappy/instant (looking at you file browsers, Firefox, etc.), and use established behavioural norms within Windows and Mac (looking at you middle click paste, and it not being a universal scroll) as basics. Just give any distro to any Asian population. They won't even be able to figure out how to type their own language as if they are exiting Vim.

Plasma apps don't navigate to network shares. So backup sync is not possible for non IT people. Even though Dolphin can easily access those shares. No backup is quite a showstopper. There is no easy way to permanently mount shares either.

I have been using various Debian-flavored Linux variets for several years in both desktop and server.

Recently I got a System76 laptop for work because they are food quality, repairable, and mostly "just work". The main issue I have run into is Cisco Secure Client (formerly AnyConnect) simply breaks in Ubuntu/PoP. If I do get it to install by ignoring Cisco's shitty instructions, it either won't route traffic once connected or corrupt itself attempting to auto-update.

It is purely a Cisco issue because they don't put much effort into their Linux VPN software. Other VPNs not only work easily, but can also integrate into PoP Cosmic. Cisco and their restrictive nature just make the process impossible.

Heck, you can't even download their VPN software without a Cisco contract. So if my company doesn't provide the correct version or distro package, there is no way for me to get it. Since most people on the helpdesk don't know anything about Linux, they simply provide the generic Linux.tar.gz file instead of the DEB or RPM files.

I gave up and installed Windows on a second NVMe.

I fully switched to Linux in 2024, my last desktop Linux experience before that being at least five years prior.

• Windows behaves a bit more gracefully then Linux when the VRAM is being exhausted. On Linux I can get graphics artifacts and sometimes Steam crashing. That mainly becomes relevant when doing GPGPU stuff, though; gaming works fine.
• Some apps use GTK4. Since GTK3, GNOME has been moving away from a "regular" desktop experience and towards this weird pseudo-mobile thing that goes against all established conventions. That might be nice if you really like their style and use nothing but GNOME, but it's really annoying if you don't. I long for the good old days where action buttons weren't crammed into title bars.
• Occasionally having to manually fix package updates. Only an issue because my distro is Arch-based and that kind of stuff is to be expected there.
• I haven't managed to get three-finger swipe mapped to PgUp/PgDn so far but I use the trackpad rarely enough that I haven't bothered investing time into it yet.
• Occasionally the system just shits itself when rapidly switching between different users' desktop sessions. Again, that happens so rarely that I haven't bothered trying to deal with it yet.

On the other hand, I'm happier than expected with Wayland and PipeWire. They just work with little fuss. Sure, I'm a KDE user and Wayland is reportedly less fun outside the big DEs, but for me it just works.