cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
I still have win on my laptop, but I barely use it. I decided to install CachyOS on my new desktop, and it works better than I expected) Still have some problems, though, and they mostly come down to my reluctance to do research. Here are the main ones: My azeron is not supported. There is antimicrox program recomended to map inputs, and it worked first time I configured it. But then I decided to change it a little, and changes will not apply, keeping my first configuration. After I leave computer unattended for several minutes, it won’t properly wake up. Strangely, it wakes up normally if I send it to sleep manually. Some programs (mainly Steam). Take unexpectedly long to startup after boot. What is worse, window system completely freezes while it starts up, the experience I last had with Windows))
Anyway, I’m happy and not going back
I’ve used a few different distros over the years: Debian, Ubuntu, Neon, openSUSE Leap
Never once has a major version upgrade ever gone 100% successfully. Even on a bog standard system with no 3rd party repos or niche hardware. I don’t know why it’s still so difficult
On my phone. I would love to be able to run a Linux system or at least a de-googled android. But some apps I need access to don’t seem to be working without Google services and stuff like that si I’m stuck using a stock Google (Pixel) android.
Beside that, everything is and has been working smoothly on my computers since I switched from Apple to Linux Mint, 5 or 6 years ago. My only regret is to not have switched way earlier.
I do miss Spotlight. All the alternatives I have tested fall short one way or the other but giving up on Spotlight is not that bad of a deal considering all what Free Software, GNU and Linux have offered me in exchange. I would not want to switch back.
I have not personally encountered a Google-based app I could not run within Sandboxing google play services on a GrapheneOS running Pixel phone. So, fwiw, it is working in my experience these last three-ish years.
It is interesting to me that at this point, because of Waydroid, the primary things keeping me from using a Linux phone are the same things keeping me from de-googling more of my current phone. When running LineageOS in the past, I couldn’t reliably use RCS. Plenty of apps have issues with google’s Play Integrity shenanigans.
Once I hit a point where Im ok with running a degoogled android, I’m basically ready for just going straight to Linux on phone.
Waydroid
I wouldn’t recommend using Waydroid, it basically runs Google Play services and other stuff as root on your machine.
Instead, it would be nice if we had seamless integration of virtual VMs including Android like Qubes OS does this.
Have you tried GrapheneOS (since you have a Pixel)? I put it on mine, and it works great. It treats Google services as just another app, so you can control what it has access to while also putting it into a sandbox. Plus, with the user profiles, I have further segregated Google away from my data. I have a profile solely dedicated to apps that require Google services, and so far, I’ve had only minor issues (which may just be how I’m setting my security, so it could just be a me issue).
Literally the only issues I have with Graphene are that my banking app won’t work and I can’t add my debit card to the wallet app. But my bank has a website, and I can still carry my card in my real wallet so I’m not really fussed.
KDE Plasma has a search feature similar to that of Spotlight. You could try it with Fedora KDE’s live ISO.
I will give it a look, thx for the tip :)
GNOME shell’s overview search does almost the same.
As much as if saddens me to write it: the enterprise bullshit.
I’m not allowed to use Linux at work because it’s more complicated than the out of the box experience of MacOS and windows in terms of remote management, encryption enforcement, company certificates and all this useless bullshit.
yeah corporate environments continue to be a pain point. IT wants centralised management a la intune/GPE, i want to be able to use proper terminal tools for automation.
last time it came to a head i moved into a vm and refused to come out for two years.
And I’m not sure why Linux doesn’t excel in a centrally managed environment, since it descends from an OS that was designed from the ground up to be used by many users in an enterprise environment.
Because Microsoft office
Office, teams, SSO, SharePoint… You get a very interesting package of features from Microsoft of you are a company. And most integrations with services exist for MS SSO, so its sadly easy.
Desktop management wasn’t, and isn’t, a priority. Managing fleets of servers has been the focus, and the Linux vendors make most of their money selling server distros.
It can be done, but it has to be built using the raw tools available. This is a strength and a weakness. Strength because it’s super flexible, and a weakness because random IT person has to know what they’re doing.
There are some projects like FreeIPA, Gnome FleetCommander, SaltStack, and Foreman which have parts. There’s nothing turn key like Intune or Jamf though. Plus this is all based on on-prem stuff. We’re not even touching on Entra replacements.
There are a few closer to turnkey solutions available now, scalefusion & 42gears to name a couple of providers.
Often times it’s more about visibility rather than absolute control - tools like osquery support Linux as well.
Interesting. I’ll check those out. 🙂
I’ve looked at osquery. It was all the rage for a minute in the monitoring industry when Facebook released it, and then it didn’t really go anywhere.
Really just needs one vendor to provide a unified way of configuring and managing a fleet of laptops/desktops. All of the bits exist, just needs someone to bring it all together
Some companies allow specific Linux distributions (like RHEL) only. Maybe that’s something for your case too? At least there is “Enterprise” in “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” ;-)
About 15 years ago I used to run my work desktop Windows in a VMware instance on Linux. We had Redhat and VMware licenses too use. I swear it ran faster than on bare metal for some reason. I used VMware’s virtual apps for Outlook and IE.
These days i just run what they hand me. No point getting on the bad side of the admins.
When my PC goes into sleep or hibernate, my keyboard won’t work after it wakes up. I have to unplug and reconnect my keyboard every… single… time…
Except for this issue, my PC works perfectly fine and better than Windows in nearly every way.
Energy management is the part that still complicates things most for me. Rfkill not being managed correctly. Machines that suspend but don’t hibernate, or that hibernate but don’t suspend. Laptops that de-suspend during transport. Batteries that overdrain during suspend. Bluetooth. And most annoying of all, NVidia (insert Torvalds iconic scene).
Games with anti-cheat don’t work.
Secureboot doesn’t like GRUB.
Solidworks doesn’t run natively on linux, neither does my Sketchup Pro program.
SteamVR doesn’t run well on linux
What does work that I use regularly? My older DVD drives work fine, ripping my music and dvd/blu-rays works well and seamlessly with multiple instances of the programs running simultaneously. The typical FOSS stuff I use is a no-brainer, from Gimp to Blender to Libreoffice.
But for the stuff I work with most and the games I play most often? It just doesn’t work well or at all.
Devs not working together to make Wayland universally supported and bug free ASAP or fixing X11 ASAP. With Microslop Windoze being as horrible as it is we cannot permit ourselves to fight these silly internal battles; as long as someone is not bullying, raping, killing, or, you know, peddling crypto and cheering ICE, then give each other some slack.
As for daily usage I have no gripes. Linux works excellently. If I still gamed as much as I did back in the day then these shitty kernel anti-cheats would bother me,* now I simply don’t touch them.
*Not a Linux problem but an anti-cheat engineering skill issue. Looking at you EA; RIP Battlefield 1.
That’s the thing with Linux: Devs work on whatever the fuck they want, because they don’t work for a single corporation with an over-arching goal.
And a lot of them have very strong opinions about what’s better, which motivates them to work on it in their free time in the first place.
But all the big corporate support and big donor money goes towards Wayland now.
X11 is basically frozen in the state it’s in for the few people who still rely on it, and losing dev wo*manpower quickly.or fixing X11 ASAP
There was this one guy doing major work on X11, but while he did some good work he also submitted breaking changes, was then barred from submitting patches and in turn created an angry fork (XLibre) breaking even more important things (e.g. the whole Nvidia driver).
That’s why we can’t have nice things. He probably turned a lot of people away who could’ve helped the project (and it also didn’t help that he was an anti-vaxer that even pissed Linus Torvalds off with his nonsense).
Since most of the X11 devs are Wayland devs now it’s understandable they don’t want to ever go back to it anymore. They know the limitations and the horrible, ancient feature-creep of it. This talk from 2013 explains their motivations for abandoning it pretty well.
Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I’m using at the moment) demanding the root password to install the updates it’s blinking at me about in the tray all the time. In this context, demanding a password at all is rather silly (Windows doesn’t require your password to install updates in a single user environment, and it doesn’t even pop up a UAC prompt) and this is going to be yet another one of those things that prior Windows users will moan about, declaring that “Linux is complicated and hard” and drive them back to the comfort of the devil they know when they feel like their own computer is actively trying to stymie them at seemingly every turn.
My user account is a sudoer so there is absolutely no technical reason my own password shouldn’t work. And, in fact, if I run updates via apt in a terminal it does. But allowing updates to install from the desktop environment, something ostensibly ought to be a routine userspace kind of operation, requires everyone using the system who might want to do this to know the system-wide root password. This is a monumentally stupid idea.
I am well aware there are myriad ways around this but they all involve hand-editing config files and come with stern warnings about “this may break your system so proceed ‘carefully,’” as if anyone who is not already an experienced Linux nerd will know just what the hell “proceeding carefully” is supposed to look like.
The inevitable XKCD comic succinctly sums this up:
The UNIX permissions and administration model may have made great sense on glass teletypes in the '70s and when nobody knew any better, but it’s certainly long outmoded now. It’s going to make a lot of people very angry to read this, but that’s actually one of the few things that Windows does much better, at least starting from NT onwards.
While I have switched from Windows to Mint with most of my PCs, permissions are the single most annoying thing I still deal with on Linux. And have been over the last decade of trying out distros over the years. I truly detest the way permissions work and were the main reason it took me so long to switch. The current political world and tech company garbage is what did it.
Doesn’t Ubuntu disable the root user out of the box and expect these actions to be performed via sudo/polkit. There is clearly a precedent for not needing a root password and being able to use your own user’s password for these kinds of things. So it is a monumentally stupid idea to require the system-wide root password, but not one that is done by all of linux, and seems to be a decision made by your distro to not use the modern solution.
The fact is though, you’re right and the pain point is that distros are still doing things the silly way.
- Distros should be using sudo/polkit/anything other than root user password to do things like this
- Modifications to the sudoers file should be easier
- The distro setup process should just be able to have some prompts about smart default things (“Passwordless updates?”) even if they include strongly discouraging comments.
If I can
sudo apt installwithout requiring a password, I could generate a package that installs a custom sudoers config file that allows me to do anything, so “passwordless sudo, but just for apt” is potentially easily exploitable to gain full access. But that also still assumes A) you care and B) someone has access to your account anyway (at which point you may already have bigger problems)Hear me out: It still makes sense for servers, shared hosting, etc. So … where Linux has predominantly been the tool of choice.
It probably does. And in e.g. such a headless system, it makes sense as the default. Or more likely, whoever set that system up set it up in the way they want it to behave, hand-editing config files be damned because that certainly wouldn’t have been the only config file they had to edit.
From a home desktop computer perspective, however, it’s baffling. At minimum that should be one of the questions in the graphical installer: “Would you like Debian to make your routine installation of software updates annoying? Yes/no. You cannot change your choice on this later without doing a bunch of scary commandline shit.”
Oh I realize I didn’t mention this in my original comment at all. I agree with you 103%. I want to write a separate comment about this very thing, updating things in general on Linux. I have my dad daily driving Linux along with me, and he’s somewhere between a power user and a regular “need web, document editing and PDFs” type of guy, and there is such a wide spread of software from such a wide spread of “sanctioned” installation sources on Linux, that he never really knows how to update … Anything.
Here’s a random list of “ways to update a program” we have encountered in the last few weeks off the top of my head:
- Update via system package manager (with root password of course)
- Download a new .deb and install that
- Download a new .AppImage, replace links and startup scripts manually (bonus points if the new version is straight up broken, shout out to Nextcloud Desktop Client)
- Download archive of new files and replace all files in the “installation” directory manually
- Run a copied sequence of bash commands from the developers’ website
If anyone thinks of other ways to add to this list, feel free to post them, would give me a laugh for sure.
We are both definitely not going anywhere, but we have constant conversations about how it would be nearly impossible to daily drive Linux if you are not very technically inclined, and how these things make Linux very much “not ready for prime time”, because people are simply used to “X needs update! Do you want to update now? [Yes] [No] [Later]”, and the Update just … WORKING.
Couldn’t you just replace the old appimage but have the same file name?
Also: If I (or my aforementioned dad) install an AppImage, that is named “Nextcloud-DesktopClient-4.0.4.AppImage” that sets up its own startup shortcut and so on, and then I download an update (because the program literally asked me to download the new AppImage), and the new file is named “Nextcloud-DesktopClient-4.0.5.AppImage”, am I supposed to rename it to 4.0.4 manually? Rubs me the wrong way somehow. Or am I supposed to know to rename it to a version-agnostic filename before first opening it, so I don’t break things when it updates weeks down the line? My dad wouldn’t think of either of these options by the way.
You totally could, but like in my example in the parentheses, if stuff breaks, you have just killed your working version of a program, so I don’t have the balls to do that.
I’m not sure what app that is.
Software upgrades package on Fedora without requiring a password, so that future is a reality for some.
Reading up on PolKit and ACLs would probably be good.
Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I’m using at the moment) demanding the root password
I run KDE Plasma on Debian. Discover (KDE’s GUI for package updates) has never demanded the root password.
I wonder why yours would do that. Maybe the difference is because my root account has password access disabled? If you’re already a sudoer, you might try that.
For me it’s that ‘can make it work’ != ‘want to spend hours researching to make it work’
If you have a well supported use case Linux is great, if you need to do some things that rely on proprietary drivers, old software, etc it’s a pain
I like the ux in some common windows utilities a lot more than I like their Linux alternatives. I prefer nano zip over the default app that came with my distro.
Default video settings caused going to console to be use a comically oversized font for my large monitor. I remembered how to change fonts sort of, but couldn’t for the life of me remember how to change the resolution. Internet searches had results of mixed quality. Pretty difficult to distinguish instructions for the old boot loader versus the current one. Set the res finally, but it didn’t work. One of the commands I tried did seem to work, but then it caused the advanced graphics to disappear and video transcode suffered. Finally I found the answer I should have used all along: sudo dpkg reconfigure (some package I can’t remember now)
And everything is like that. You want to do something, you better get educated. It’s great for hobbyists, but I find as I get older I just want it to look right and do the thing, so I choose windows from the grub menu and forget I even have it for weeks.
It’s great when everything is supported and works and you like the application and you’d spent sixteen hours theming your desktop and and and … but ain’t nobody got time fo dat
Bluetooth is very buggy, but it’s not too much of a deal breaker.
All my games work like shit :(
And it’s kindof my fault because my hardware is outdated but while on Windows Hogwarts Legacy worked, in pain but worked, and Fallout 76 was fully stable and smooth.
On linux (Nobara), Hogwarts CTD’s on startup (shaders or something fails) and I had to lower setting in fallout to get it stable enough to play.
Bit I just began my adventure with linux as main OS so there’s still a lot to learn. One of stabilising things for Fallout was, for example, forcing dx12. Without it it froze my whole os sometimes. :(
Oh and KDEConnect reports it crashed for some reason if it cannot immediately connect to my phone. Which was funny until notification spam.
I can’t figure out how to run game mods that are arbitrary .exe programs that are meant to hook into a running game. Specifically, otis_inf camera tools with, for example, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I’ve tried protontricks but its so damn complicated and poorly documented I don’t really know how.
I miss a task manager-like shortcut to come out to the desktop and easily kill processes freezing the PC.
At least KDE has a shortcut in the Window Management settings that kills any window you want with a single click. You just press the key combination (Meta+Ctrl+Esc by default) and your cursor turns into a skull. Then just left click the frozen window and it closes instantly. Never had it fail, you can even kill your Desktop if you miss lol
TIL Thanks!!!
You’re welcome, it’s a pretty handy feature.
FYI, on other DE’s you can just bind
xkillto whatever shorcut you want. I tried it recently and it works just fine on Wayland.
Totally. I’ve keybound
xkillor similar to recreate that experience.Correct me if I am wrong, if I switch away from a fullscreen application, I won’t have it available to be terminated using xkill, right?
In that case you would switch back… my thought is to add xkill or similar to a keybinding so it can be called without switching away from the thing.
And knowing what’s actually eating cpu cycles. Sometimes 4 threads are at 25% but usage should be like 4-5% per thread.
Ctrl+alt+t -> xkill -> click window you want to terminate
But yes I agree that seeing a better GUI of open programs and attached processes would be good to have.
I’m sorry what? Ctrl+Alt+t is bound to opening a terminal emulator (whichever I fancy ATM) on any system I use. I know it’s a Ubuntu binding but I got so used to it if I’m ever on a system that doesn’t have it I just hammer it 15 times till I gather that it’s not set up there so this would never work for me 😅
Yeah, i just mean open terminal then type xkill and click. I thought ctrl+alt+t was the default in ubuntu/mint
I had a problem with Unity games on Steam freezing the PC due to fractional scaling. In that case not even the terminal would show up. Also, if I switch away from a fullscreen application, I won’t have it available to be terminated using xkill, right?
In case you haven’t tried it, you can run Steam games in native Wayland mode, and get a more stable experience. Especially with fractional scaling. There are two steps:
- Install a GE-Proton runner, and configure the game to use it.
- Set game launch options to,
env DISPLAY="" PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 %command%
I am on Mint. For now. Anyway I am quiet quitting Steam for GOG and Heroic had no problem running Unity games with fractional scaling.
If you can’t see the terminal, then that’s pretty bad so idk -> if everything goes unresponsive I just slap my monitor in impotent fury and reboot
If you can see the terminal but not the window, idk if xkill would work. Then you’d need to find the process id and kill it with pkill.
Like say you’re playing age of empires 2: pgrep aoe (should return all running processes called aoe with their pids > process: aoe2 pid: 69420 …or something like that) then: pkill 69420 > ded
Yeaaa…nope.
We definitely need a better UI with highest prio for this.
A few select games, Notably Watch Dogs 2 and Fallout: New Vegas, probably because of Proton bugs, occasionally freeze my (Debian+i3wm) desktop. My computer is not frozen, but my desktop session is. I can take my smartphone and SSH into my desktop to kill the game’s process (or Steam, which will take the game with it when it dies).
I’ve come to enjoy this process because I feel like some kinda movie hacker.
How much ram you hauling? I’ve had similar issues when voices of the void sprung a memory leak in an earlier build, completely froze my desktop until I nuked it.
48G but that’s not it. I have plenty left over whenever it happens, and running out of memory has never frozen my desktop.
Shit that’s crazy. I guess the syslog might help but I know it won’t give you wine/proton logs, and I’ve not worked out how to get at those myself yet.
You should be able to switch tty to access the system directly from the pc. If you’re unaware… ctrl alt f3 will switch to another terminal where you can login and access things. Generally your default sessions is in f2 (ymmv) so ctrl alt f2 should return you to your desktop where you left off once you nuke the offending pid.
Yes, I am aware, but my keyboard can’t do that shortcut
PSA Don’t buy a 60% keyboard for use with Linux…
You can always come out of everything to a separate terminal, not sure how many users actually know that.
It’s not always helpful or even very friendly, but it can save butts.
Ctrl + Alt + F1 or …F6, sometimes even up to F8. Usually desktop is at F2. Sometimes it’s not. But you can check them any time.
There was one time years ago I was working on some unholy mess of mods for Transport Fever and the game kept crashing and bringing the whole X session down with it, and instead of just rebooting like a sane person I instead started a new X session on a new terminal session. I think I got up to 4 or 5 dead x sessions before I finally finished sorting out my mods and rebooted to clean it all up
IDK what desktop environment you’re using… or your specific scenario… but most DE should have something like that. KDE and Gnome have a version of “system monitor” which will work very much like task manager on windows.
https://apps.kde.org/plasma-systemmonitor/
https://apps.gnome.org/SystemMonitor/
Generally there are preinstalled and already assigned a hotkey.
Cinnamon
I believe cinnamon uses gnome system monitor by default so there should be a way to set a custom hotkey for it in settings.
I use Mission Center because I’m someone who prefers a GUI. Maybe that will help some here. :)
