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.
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Default package repositories contain software versions that are long outdated (e.g. tmux, claws mail, neovim, libreoffice).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?).
HDMI 2.1.
Always preferred DisplayPort, but sadly my current screen doesn’t have one.
The problem is entirely caused by the HDMI forum not opening the spec. No fixes until they do I’m afraid.
Most popular games still don’t work.
And stuff randomly breaks. Most recently turning on a Bluetooth mic crashes gnome.
Apparently there’s a fix coming but insane that stuff like this can be broken for a whole month.
Are all of those games having kernel anti cheat? If not which games you are having issues with?
Not op but last time I tried (recently around 2 weeks ago), the performance in Le Mans Ultimate was terrible. And I couldn’t get Crew Chief to work with it.
I got my sum racing stuff working(not the rev lights on the wheel though), got the game running, but performance was 30-90 FPS and jumping all over the place. In comparison to windows with the similar settings, that runs 100-160fps even though it’s with a larger number of visible cars(62 instead of the 30 I had on Linux).
I had Nobara installed, 5700x3D with a Nvidia 4080, I really wish I could switch but currently I would give up too much, Le Mans Ultimate and EAs WRC are currently large portions of my hobbies, and WRC has anti cheat that doesn’t work.
Most popular games still don’t work.
Not according to the steam deck verified list…
What distro is that?
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.
Choose your route: spend your time to learn the terminal, then you’ll be able to do pretty much anything via SSH, or learn docker and networking basics and you’ll be able to do pretty much everything via web interfaces. I’d recommend the latter if you are not strictly interested in learning the OS but just want to build stuff on top of it
The best way would be to use Qbittorrents web interface. You can drag and drop files and have them start downloading imediately. If you need to do it over the terminal, qbit has an option to watch certain folders for new torrent files. You could then use Samba to transfer files over your local network.
Edit: I skipped over files for printing. Can’t help with that, but my guess would be Samba as well.
waking from sleep
like 75% of the time it just… didn’t
tbh since turning sleep off i haven’t really missed it at all, but weird that i had that issue consistently on multiple distros on different hardwareI 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.
You can improve the security model by using SELinux, but not without hating yourself tbh
Unfortunately I still have to keep a windows around for word. Colleagues are still writing papers in word with zotero citations in those and except if they setup the citation as “bookmarks” (which is not fail proof) opening and saving in libreoffice would break the citations… Office is provided by my workplace and cannot run in wine. So I have it on a laptop that I use to run specific software to interface with diverse sensors (another reason to keep windows) and RDP in it from my linux workstation.
Otherwise I’ve been using linux since 2005 non stop, now on Fedora silverblue since 5 years I think and I’m enjoying my days. Just today I needed to install a piece of software that required java 17, did it in a toolbox with fear of breaking other software or the system. Pretty reassuring. No dist-upgrade fear, automatic updates on, most apps as flatpak or in a toolbox, and just working. I’ve stopped distro hoping, customizing my DE and just use Gnome vanilla, and focus on using the pc as a tool.
At home I have a 10 years old laptop with Fedora silverblue, that I turn on when need to do some private stuff, admin mostly in the browser (Firefox of course) and even if it has been a while I can just update to the last version , thanks to atomic updates. Never had a problem.
My needs are basic so I have had always a good experience on linux distros.
For word. If you PC can handle it take a look at winboat. It will use a VM underneath but integrates seamlessly with the Linux DE.
Can’t you use Office 365? You can run Word from your browser. Last time I checked it worked fine even in Firefox.
Colleagues are still writing papers in word
You should ask them to use a format that isn’t inherently broken and repeatedly needs reverse engineering despite being "standard"ised.
OnlyOffice deals very well with MS format files. I use it on Mac because neither Apple nor Libre handle MS files well.
I second OnlyOffice. I am not a power user of Word, but neither a novice. Things haven’t broken yet and I’ve been editing .docx files for over a year now.
I haven’t tried it yet, but WinApps should run MS office pretty well. https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
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.
Easy Anti cheat
Are there specific games that don’t work with EAC? I’m playing DBD and elden ring, and steam handles installing EAC in the initial setup.
In my Linux mint I downgraded to playing only 1080p because 4k is very laggy and filled with artifacts.
I have a mini optiplex 7070 with 32GB of ram, Intel processor (not a powerful one).but in windows 11 I could play 4k content with no issue.
You could try one of the “gaming” focused distros like Cachy or Bazzite. They do their own tweaks to squeeze more performance out of you hardware. Sadly, many game won’t reach the performance level of Windows, but you can get pretty close, like 85-90% close (depends highly on the game in question, no guarantees).
Mint ships an old kernel by default. But there’s a GUI that lets you install a newer one.
This would most likely fix your issue.
Or do you have an nVidia graphics card and didn’t install the proprietary driver?
Leaving Standby. Can’t count the times I’ve opened my laptop to just see a black screen. Hard reset was the only option
I’m going to be honest, as a long time Linux user I also think this is one of those issues that is more common than it should be. It’s incredibly annoying and really pushes you away from using it as your daily driver
I had the same issue on my Thinkpad p14s 5th gen. UEFI upgrade fixed it for me.
I miss notepad++ so much. I miss musicbee so much.
Oh and I miss TagScanner so much too.
I’m using Notepad++ on CachyOS.
Notepadqq or Kate are supposed to be pretty good replacements!
There is also NotepadNext, which has active development compared to Notepadqq.
The one thing I can’t get set up on Kate is leaving temporary text files open between sessions.
Probably a bad habit of mine but I sometimes end up pasting some info into a notepad++ file without saving it and then come back much later to check it out again
I miss musicbee so much dude, tauon is great but it still isnt the same
Mouse sharing, but I also failed to set it up on my Mac.
Have you tried KDE connect? It should work also on other DEs, I believe. I use it on my phone to do remote input, but it should also do PC <-> PC
Mine is pretty ridiculous, but if solved the presentation would improve tenfold:
The booting process, specifically the different screens.
Screen 1: select boot Screen 2: some text Screen 3: brief logo Screen 4: black Screen 5: login Screen 6: black/splash Screen 7: desktop
Some of these could be consolidated.
I’m aware that this depends on the distro, but it still looks ugly
I always set the timeout to 0 in /etc/default/grub, that gets rid of the first screen.
And with plymouth installed, add “quiet splash” to the kernel parameters in the same file, that improves the rest (although it’s still not perfect).
Some distros have this set up out of the box. Ubuntu even compiled their own grub version to make booting look better (and Mint uses it too).Use
quiet splashgrub options or change bootloader?
I’m not sure why but SDL wants to change to sdlcompat and this is a breaking change for another application I’m running and I don’t know why this package change is needed when I just keep hitting no each time and everything works as expected
This is why I think we shouldn’t recommend any (mutable) ArchLinux distro to gamers who come fresh from Windows. Including CachyOS.
Not implying you are one, IDK your experience level, but these kinds of prompts being shown to the user about packaging are a core feature of ArchLinux. This can happen anytime you update an Arch-based system.
