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'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.

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.

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.)

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)

Mobile... I want a Linux phone 😭

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.

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.

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..

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.

Edit: Mint btw. I do love how Linux makes the OS a tool for me rather than a tool for them.

I'm pretty picky about my keyboard layout (a specific variant of bépo) and I've found it surprisingly awkward to use a layout that isn't provided. I know that Bépo is typically included in Linux distros, but not the variant I prefer.

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.

Mobile

1. It's annoying to set up hibernate on Kubuntu and I can't seem to figure out how to add it to the UI.
2. i really miss the login UI of W11, just select pin, fingerprint, fido key or password. On kubuntu I have to unplug the fido key so it fails if I want to use my password. The UI also has no indication of wether I am entering the pin for the fido key or my linux password.

I can't cross play on Ghost of Tsushima.

I can't get my MT7927 wifi chip to work

I still have issues with Snap... But I switched to an Arch distro to fix that problem

Some permissions got messed up in my KDE install the other day after an update, I'm really not sure how. I tried to fix it by recursively changing ownership of /usr/ to root. Don't do this. This kills the OS. It was technically repairable but like, I don't wanna go through that rigamarole, I just nuked it and restored from a backup.

Sometimes I'm reminded that I often know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be safe.

• Laptop OEMs seem to go with fingerprint readers that have no Linux support.

• A number of distros out of the box have some IMO dumb things you need to change.

E.g. Fedora insisting on having their own Flatpak repository that isn't as well-stocked or updated as Flathub, and missing audio/video codecs (I realise this is due to licensing concerns, but other distros get around it).

• I'd like Linux to feel more like an ecosystem. If I could sync my DE's settings, installed apps, etc as trivially as I can sync my Firefox bookmarks/settings/extensions then I'd be happy. Frankly I'm amazed that Gnome and KDE haven't attempted this.

Yes, I know I can manually and painstakingly do a lot of this with Syncthing. It's not the same. It's a lot more time/effort and you need the knowledge to set it up.

On Fedora KDE.

Office, specifically Excel. I use it professionally for work and the lack of feature parity in Linux alternatives (Libre Office and Only Office, specifically) are a perpetual thorn in my side.

I do my best to use Linux alternatives in my personal life, and, if necessary, use the MS web version of Excel but every so often I run into something that can only be done in the full desktop version and I have to boot back into Windows.

I've heard of WinBoat and https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps, but at least when I tried them they were too resource heavy to realistically run on a laptop

App stores are always terrible no matter which distro you use.

• Images don't load
• Stuck waiting 30 seconds for a page in the app store to load (if it loads at all)
• last rating is 7 years old
• random utilities written 12 years ago are at the top of the page
• "featured" apps haven't even been tested on that distro

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. x11vnc has 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

*PTT key on my mouse. For some reason it keeps changing that mouse button to some weird collection of button presses. *KDE on multi monitors my mouse gets snagged on the screen edge if its moving slow. I tried turn off the settings I found in System Settings but it only reduced the issue didnt fix it.

Why am I seeing like 5 different posts like these, all of the sudden? They're all the same, literally same title, just posted by different users.

Umm... not much to be honest. It's overall pretty great. I switched my main rig fully to Linux about 2 years ago.

First year was Manjaro w/xfce which got a little janky around the edges, probably due to how they avoid using the AUR directly. Can't remember specific problems that couldn't be attributed to old RAM or my own tomfoolery.

Past year has been on EndeavorOS w/KDE Plasma. Took a little time on the Arch wiki to get my Mesa install fully operational, but wasn't bad. And I think at one point yay tried to compile electron32 from scratch which was kind of insane (probably wasted 80 GB of download for that one night) but eventually I found forum posts saying it was fine to just remove. Besides that, it's been fantastic. It's rare now that I even find a game that doesn't work well, and half the time I forget to even check protondb like I used to.

Oh here. I guess combining PDFs could be a better experience. Had to use pdfunite in the command line which worked well but felt a lot more awkward than just using Acrobat to drop in pages and rearrange them. But there's probably a GUI utility I just didn't find.

Ah, and printer support. Wifi printing worked once for no apparent reason then never again. But printers are terrible in Windows too so I blame the OEMs.

I have a pair of Bluetooth earbuds that I sometimes use with my laptop. The actual BT connection goes smoothly in the KDE ui, but they don't show up as an audio device until I restart the audio service in the terminal.

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.

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.

Gaming is the only thing stopping me from completely getting rid of windows forever, its slowly getting there. I feel powerful with my hands on a terminal, only the sky is the limit on what I can do, where as powershell makes me want to start chain smoking.

Daily usage? I have some audio issues. It "feels" like the whatever resets/reinitializes. Really quickly though, playback isn't being interrupted. Sometimes it switches to a dead output channel though and I have to reset it to the actually connected output. Too lazy to diagnose it.

As a longer standing point of annoyance, I find it very difficult to quickly go UI -> package name -> bug tracker -> bug report. For understandable reasons devs don't exactly advertise their bug trackers, they're always a bit obfuscated and have some barriers.

Color management continues to not work correctly, although that may be due to some x11 wayland conflict. I have a dark color theme preference and certain applications that aren't directly available as package, but e.g. via flatpack don't integrate well. Gnome calendar is something I can name, without wanting to blame the devs of that piece of software in particular. They're doing their best, it's not a priority, maybe not even an issue on their preferred config.

I also have some freeze crashes, although that's more recent, might be a harddrive/hardware issue that throws off something very low level. But the reboot is so quick I barely mind that.