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Where is Linux not working well in your daily usage? Share your pain points as of 2026, so we can respectfully discuss

4mon 27d ago by discuss.online/u/kiol in linux@lemmy.ml

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

Jarvis, I'm low on karma. Make a quirky comment about windows 11.

it works!!!

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.

Btw, check your last boot's log with sudo journalctl -e -b -1 to see what its dying words were. If you're lucky it's dying when coming back up and spitting the related errors in red, but sometimes it will just be "Reached target sleep" in which case it's a bit of a bitch to troubleshoot. You can look through the logs to see if any error might be related, but if you're not well versed in Linux it might as well be an alien language. Common suspects: Nvidia, Bluetooth, encrypted swap or RAM, ACPI bugs, BIOS needs an update.

I had the same issue on my Thinkpad p14s 5th gen. UEFI upgrade fixed it for me.

Black screen or a frozen, jumbled screen.

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)

I actually haven't had much problems with VR. Gussings thing will improve with the steam box

It depends heavily on headset. From what I hear, standalones with WiVRN or Steam Link work fine ootb, not much different than desktop gaming with Proton. I have a Valve Index, a PCVR headset. Getting it to run (properly) is a pain. Monado is making it easier, but it's not 1 to 1 the same experience as on Windows.

I can't get past the train in alyx after getting the gun, I crash on the loading screen. I tried both bazzite and cachOS with the same result. Getting it to even run is always a hassle too and feels like it comes down to luck if it runs or not. Multiple components seem to fail at random either it doesn't launch or the headset stays black, or I can't get the game to run and stay in the cloudy sky or the room scale messes up and I'm half stuck in the floor. The whole experience is awful even though I really want to enjoy VR. I got myself a really beefy pc with a 9800x3d and a 7900xtx so I hoped not having to struggle with nvidia drivers would make things easier but I'm at a loss what to even try anymore or if its worth it.

This website has some good resources for Linux VR and links some support channels: https://lvra.gitlab.io/

I use a valve index too, only problem I've had that I can link to Linux is loud static sometimes that plays over game audio. Relaunching steamvr a few times seems to fix it. I think adding a dummy audio output also helped, but I made that a hot minute ago.

My experience has been very slightly better (Quest 3 + Wifi 7 AP) on CachyOS compared to Win11. I was using Virtual desktop streamer (paid $25 for it) and now on Cachy using ALVR (free).

Framerates are more stable, very slightly lower averages in a few games, but the 0.1% lows that make me nauseous are now gone on Linux!

Regarding HDR yeah, I wish it had more widespread support and not get stuck on 1 window manager. But on KDE at least the SDR->HDR color mapping looks better than the Win11 auto HDR.

Needs more work for sure, some X.org applications really look terrible out of the box lol, but overall it feels good to be on an OS that gets improvements with time instead of downgrades.

GTK4 apps and libadwaita apps are different though. You can theme both as well.

Regarding Wayland, I wonder why features still vary so wildly, even with projects like wlroots. Do WMs just not care enough?

Scrolling in Qt apps in general isn't great. Still no inertial scrolling for example.

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.

Have you tried LSP? I’m super impressed by it and it can be a drop in replacement for many pro-grade technical plugins. That and reapak have pretty much replaced everything for me.

LSP seems neat from what I’ve used. I think Reaper’s stock plugins are higher quality compared to the stock plugins in most other daws as well. I’m specifically in the market for modern metal drum sampler and amp sim plugins. The open source stuff is great compared to what it used to be. Just nowhere near what I can get pretty easily on Mac or Windows. It’s the finally itch I need scratched to really whole heartedly use Linux full time

Just last night I was playing around with the Tukan plugin collection and they are mental. Lots of very good sounding clones and models. I haven’t checked the drum stuff, but I did play around with the bass and guitar stations and managed to dial in some serious high-gain wall of sound type tones very easily.

Another way of getting good tones is simply obtaining high quality IR-s and just loading them in a suitable plugin. If you have a reamp box and access to some nice amps you can even create your own.

You could also do something similar for the drums. Just get some nice samples, load them into any old sequencer and you got yourself a drummer who’s never late or drunk. Then again, you lose the out of the box experience, but you only have to do it once.

I regret not switching my audio workflow to linux much earlier. A few years ago I got rid of everything Microsoft and started working with Reaper stock plugins exclusively. Not as pretty, but basically anything can be done with some fiddling. Only now I’m exploring the JSFX and LSP options and I’m hard pressed to find anything that I miss from the days of expensive plugins. Made me a better engineer as well. Less distractions, more listening and measuring.

I have been using pirated versions of plugins I own (iLok is a blight), but I understand how that wouldn't be feasible in a lot of cases.

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.

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.

What's your desktop environment? On KDE you can just enter smb://serverhost/path in the Dolphin navigation bar and it will open it.

Haha, you can! But other programs which don't have built in network share support can't use those. Also a bit annoyed by this, but it's an easy fix.

Yes, that's still a bit annoying unfortunately.

Editing the fstab to properly mount a network share also currently has no UI available in KDE and has to be done manually.

The Dolphin file browser picked mine up pretty quick. In the left folder tab I think I just had to click on the Network folder and then my shares were there, and I could right click and pin them to the sidebar

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

I have similar issues with even edited bluetooth config files occasionally being overwritten with a system update. Suddenly the way I had it set on purpose by editing the config file has been reverted back to the way I don't want it.

You may be able to disable the internal Bluetooth entirely via BIOS.

Yeah my bios is dumb and that isn't an option unfortunately

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...).

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

What do you mean by that? I use the Keepass flatpak and even got autofill to work by adding some kind of launch option of I remember correctly.

I use LibreWolf and that was flat pack. It seemed I needed the PAA(?) Version of it so that keep ass could interact with it.

I have 1password and it’s just a pain setting it up with browsers. 

Then the CLI integration is janky and doesn’t work unless the desktop is on. 

I hear you. Kinda by design though. Its supposed to be difficult for containered applications to interact.

I think i installed keepassxc native. Then some config magic I've forgotten.

Yeah, it's not the worst thing in the world, just makes things awkward.

I do really like the idea of flatpack, I'm 110% in on containers, probably too much. There are just compromises that ned to be made today.

Keepassxc works great for me

I've been fine with proton pass but maybe you're referring to specific autofill use cases?

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.

For Linux to actually take over, UI/UX for everything without a single touch of CLI needs to be normalised. And everything just needs to work, be snappy/instant, and use established behavioural norms as basics.

I wish an OS like this existed.

Mac OS is pretty close. But not everything is a Mac 🙃

and use established behavioural norms within Windows and Mac

Even when they fucking suck some times?

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.

You can improve the security model by using SELinux, but not without hating yourself tbh

I think secureblue is probably the least painful way to make it a little tighter

I'm on Kinoite for a host of reasons but one reason I chose an atomic distros was isolation / containerizatoon. I'll take a look at what secure blue adds and see if I can manually implement any of that in Kinoite

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.

A device driver needs access to the system to control a device. There's a couple ways of going about it, but GPUs are effectively required to use a kernel driver. A kernel driver runs as part of your system, and crashes have different effects from normal programs. If a normal program crashes, the system handles that, the program closes, too bad. If the kernel crashes, nothing can catch that, and your whole computer crashes.

That being said, with this little info on the crash there's nothing anyone can do except speculate on the cause. It could be hardware, it could be the kernel. Whatever it is, you'd need more information (journalctl -b -1 after a crash and reboot) to diagnose this issue.

Though important to note; if holding the power button for an extended period of time (30s) doesn't shut down the computer, it is most likely a hardware fault.

4 seconds should be enough.

A driver can absolutely freeze the entire computer.

That said it’s not really likely to be Nvidia since so many people are using that one without issues.

Linux people just like to hate on Nvidia and blame them for every possible issue because they’re not open source.

The only actual Nvidia problem iv seen in 5 years is that monster hunter wild is broken on their newer drivers only on 5000 series cards because of nvidia's own choices.

Which is also broken on windows. So it's just a Nvidia problem.

I've gotten such symptoms before when running out of RAM - I'm on Arch and never bothered setting anything up for that instance and I'm not sure what's going on, but I think the system is struggling to recover memory or something before it resorts to killing processes, and would sometimes freeze for a minute like that.

That said, yeah... Kernel modules (which device drivers often are) are allowed to run at a higher level of privilege, with less oversight, more access to hardware and better performance, so if they misuse that privilege they can break things badly. And with proprietary drivers, you have no idea or control of what it's actually doing, so you can only try to downgrade or wait and hope the company fixes it.

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

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.

With the advancements in wine and proton, I’ve found a lot of games do well with adding -dx11 or -dx12 in the launch options.

Maybe a ticket could be made about considering changing the default for one of those programs

My friends play the finals and arc raiders and i tried both games on linux and they worked fine. Suddenly after an update both of the games (same developer) just don't load anymore. They work if i dorce dx11 on them, but run like shit.

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

That's usually a good sign, it means tracking protection is working :)

Spoofing your User Agent as Chrome on windows is easy via browser extension, and almost never causes actual compatibility issues

..if this works for my use-case I'm going to kiss your feet.

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.

I love the idea of nix, but nix packages are often broken on debian in my experience.

Things have gotten A LOT better since I started using it, but here's a list of things I hate after using Arch with KDE as my main OS for almost 7 years:

  • Not having an archive manager as good as 7-zip was on Windows. Ark is a good replacement but it supports less formats, has less options when compressing, and most importantly if you close the archive while extracting it silently fails (reported in 2019, still not fixed)
  • You can't make an account without a password (yes, I know I can configure the sudoers file and polkit to skip password prompts, but that's not user friendly). For the average user, having to type the password after login is incredibly annoying, I would like to have something like the UAC prompt in Windows
  • Wayland: it was made mainstream waaaay too early, causing a lot of issues with both Qt and GTK applications, some of which persist to this day, especially with fractional scaling and HDR
  • Developers seem to think that I enjoy using the terminal: I don't, I hate it. Why isn't there a GUI for pacman supports the AUR and doesn't suck?
  • Random broken commits being pushed to stable. I'm talking about "how the f did you not notice this?" kind of bugs, like how I had to rename files twice in Dolphin before it would actually rename them. It was fixed quickly but how did this get into stable in the first place?
  • Flatpak having its old ass version of mesa in the runtime, causing all sorts of issues if you have a newly released GPU. I stopped using it because of this

Running Arch when you hate the terminal and want stability is quite the mood.

What can I say, I'm a sucker for punishment 😂

I like having the latest (or at least recent) hardware so having the latest kernel and mesa is a must.

Developers don't think you enjoy using the terminal. It's just the option that works with the most systems with the least explanation. They can just give you a command to copy/paste instead of a tutorial on what buttons to click, assuming you even have that.

There are GUIs for package managers. I haven't used one, because I feel like there's no need, but they do exist. I don't know if they support the AUR and pacman though. That probably exists, but you'll have to look it up.

7-zip does have a linux CLI, which works well.

The most basic command you need to use is 7zz x archive-name to extract an archive. Building a GUI around it doesn't seem like it would be too much trouble honestly, wonder if anyone has done that.

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.

Does adding them to fstab not work?

I'm looking for a solution that non IT users can easily do.They will not discover that, or know exactly what to type in. This is something that should be very easy for people. It really needs a setting or command in a Dolphin menu.

In my experience a lot of non it people have used computers with text interfaces and don’t have any problem with things like fstab but I understand what you’re saying.

It's in our interest to have good usability to encourage Linux use for a broader range of people. Mounting needs to be discoverable, and done in a few clicks. Command line, and typing magic words into fstab is a definite no-no for people who never work that way for everything else they do.

The strange thing is, why did KDE miss this critical step for backups?

I’m swiftly moving into the sparsely populated camp which holds that it’s not actually in our interests. Maybe the bell labs people were the good path and were walking parcs bad path now. We’re gonna find out for sure!

Idk how kde missed it, they’re probably taking fixes, why not whip something up?

I wouldn't wish Windows 11 on anyone. More people on linux means better driver support and more main applications. And better open standards support.

I've reported it several times. KDE just keep closing it as a duplicate of a totally different bug.

More users of a system has never meant more driver support. The two don’t correlate on windows, mac or linux. Hell, the kernels been shedding drivers during the last few years! I also don’t think more users means more main applications, no matter what you mean by that, but it’s neither here nor there because neither one of us can pull things in the direction we want.

What are the kde people saying it’s a dupe of? Is there a number?

Software and hardware companies look at the market share to decide if its worth making a Linux version. If linux has a chunk of the market it becomes viable.

This is one issue on the topic. It was changed by nate to the kup application, then marked incorrectly as a duplicate. Backing up should be possible with most applications. Today none can do it. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513001

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

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.

Vorta only supports SSH and local backup repositories while pika allows SFTP through some kind of compatibility layer with gvfs.

That's kinda wild given SFTP is just SSH.

If you're flinging files across the network, rsync is usually a really good option. It'll typically be run over SSH/SFTP and is capable of resuming if interrupted, verifying the copied files match the original, etc. and rsync can be super fast compared straight SFTP in some cases. In a pinch you can always cobble together a pretty robust backup script purely based off rsync

Kopia is a solid choice!

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.

Can't you use Office 365? You can run Word from your browser. Last time I checked it worked fine even in Firefox.

Not compatible with zotero citations.

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.

Office is provided in managed windows pc, we are free to use Linux but then we are on our own. I will not buy an office version with my own money. So winboats, winapps and VM are not possible. I've used winapps in the past and it was pretty nice though.

That's a odd way to do things. Iam used to being able to login with my college account in the office apps and it activates office.

Anyway office is free 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️ Take a look at massgrave.

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.

While I totally agree, that is a great way to instantly antagonize or alienate a lot of people because you make them feel dumb.

"Could you please export your document as .odt? That .docx has issues with everything but MS-Word."

I've done it with students but I have many collaborators and it is impossible to ask all and for some it would be unthinkable to not use word... Younger one are now moving to Google docs (where you can use zotero or other reference manager). While not perfect, that's much better.

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 use onlyoffice for pptx files as I had better results than with libreoffice. But I don't think there is a zotero plugin for it. Will check again as it has been a while.

It does exist! https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/workspace/administration/connect-zotero.aspx

Will try it on some files next week.

I haven't tried it yet, but WinApps should run MS office pretty well. https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps

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.

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.

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

I looked at docker because it seems to be able to do anything I think I might want it for, but was told to reverse course and learn the system first before going deep into such complicated systems.

The more knowledge you have the easier troubleshooting will be, but you can get pretty far once you learn the absolute minimum required to get to docker run and connecting to your container.

For sending a file to print, share your plugged up printer over the network.

For sending a torrent file most of the time people use their torrent clients web interface. A person suggested using qbittorrent and that’s a perfectly fine one, but if you’re a fellow or lady of girth swishing brandy around in a snifter, might I recommend rtorrent+rutorrent?

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

Oh and I miss TagScanner so much too.

Notepadqq or Kate are supposed to be pretty good replacements!

There is also NotepadNext, which has active development compared to Notepadqq.

Kate is okish. But all my reflexes and habits are on Notepad++ :(

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'm using Notepad++ on CachyOS.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/notepad++

I miss musicbee so much dude, tauon is great but it still isnt the same

Oh. I'll check tauon, I didn't know it. But yeah, when I first installed linux like 5 years ago, I looked for a Musicbee alternative for months. Still miss it.

Its pretty good if you are mainly looking for that simple itunes grid and left list style. It doesnt show the artwork of the current track and I wish it let you customize more than it does but its p damn good. Hope that dev is doing well lol.

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

My desktop PC running Fedora 43 goes to sleep in a weird way. When I was running Windows and the computer went to sleep the power button would blink and I could wake the PC with my keyboard or mouse. On Fedora the power button doesn't blink (no big deal) and I can't wake the PC with my keyboard or mouse, only the power button works.

Another issue is if I have the option to turn the monitor off after a certain amount of time I cannot get it to wake from sleep. If I turn the monitor off and on there's no signal. If the monitor goes to sleep because the PC goes to sleep it's fine.

Something randomly causes Firefox to hoover up all my computer's RAM. I can tell my system is going to lock up because the fan on the CPU cooler ramps up. When Firefox finally sucks up all the RAM the entire desktop is unresponsive. I had to enable the system rescue keys and I sometimes have to manually trigger the OOM killer.

Raw photo editing on Linux sucks. I've tried DarkTable, RawTherapee and some other program and didn't like any of them. The UI is incredibly complex or blurry.

I run F43 KDE on my desktop. I have an amd gpu and ryzen cpu. And I also experience weirdness with display connections.

I used a KVM to switch between my work laptop and personal desktop but since I use Fedora, I can't. I cannot switch back to my desktop. The screen remains blank no matter what I do. I could not figure out if the underlying system is responsive or not.

When booting, it feels like there is a race condition between the gpu drivers maybe and something else. Sometimes I get no image after GRUB. The PW promt for LUKS would be the next step, but the monitor receives no signal and goes to sleep. Reboot fixes it, but sometimes 3 tries are needed.

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.

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?).

As someone with an Nvidia GPU on Wayland, unfortunately quite a few places.

Resuming from sleep requires power cycling the monitors.

Glitchy transparent artifacting down to the desktop if windows are overlapping next the task bar.

Widgets in the system tray (KDE Plasma - I have temperature readouts) disappear and reappear randomly, and sometimes switch which taskbar they live on.

VRR support is pretty bad, causing black screens when using full screen applications.

2D-heavy games are flooded with thousands of vulkan draw calls, leading to abysmal performance and massive current spikes (and therefore coil whine). This is mitigated per-game with dxvk settings - often removing the whine without improving performance.

HDR is .. technically available.

Overall I'm happy, but I cannot recommend this experience to anyone I know because it would drive them insane.

And oh god the scaling - forget the fact that running livecd or first start gives you resolution settings. Oh no. You must scale, and apply every login manually. And sometimes when you have an external display attached, the main panel will look like an old tube TV that needs a good smack. Until you assume it's on the login screen, enter your password, and it's fine.

I have an AMD card and resuming from sleep is still a mixed bag. Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes the monitors stay off even tho i manually power cycle them and lately, it just works.

Likewise. This is my only reoccurring issue I have had since switching, and it isn't consistent enough to really be a problem.

I do notice that after sleep mode when things work fine I'll get a notification my displays are detected. So I assume display detection is switched off during sleep mode, and maybe not always turning back on.

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 dont know your specific network topology, but I've always been able to use openconnect rather than Cisco's client

network-manager-openconnect for NM support

I have a few windows programs that don't play nice with wine. Otherwise I do everything on Linux when I can

My bazzite PC in my living room stopped recognizing the Bluetooth built into my motherboard which is annoying but easily worked around with a USB Bluetooth dongle.

Turn off the power supply, wait a minute, turn back on

Its not a Linux Problem, happens with MBS in general

Finally got around to trying this and it worked. Thank you! I was just shutting it down before not turning it off at the power supply.

Honestly right now there's no way to use 90% of the industry standard audio plugins and most popular DAWs on Linux. FL Studio and Ableton do work on Linux but very unstable and as long as they're not stable you can kinda skip the latency talk, because stability is quintessential. You are bound to native plugins and as long as alternatives are way harder to use and take longer to learn configure, there's a massive overhead, not even talking about the ones that genuinely do not work even with wine and or winetricks, bottle, etc..

The same goes for video and photo editing as well as post effects. Although I have to admit you genuinely have more options and some setups even though not much more stable to technically work already.

Games are also annoying but I just don't play valorant or battlefield 6 or any other games that are kind of incompatible by design, so if that was the only thing I could manage.

And lastly (but everyone knows), office compatibility is still an issue because sometimes I need to do something in Microsoft office to ensure it still works when I send it over.

Honestly the real deal breaker for me is the first paragraph. I currently mix & master a band and produce music by myself, with friends and do small audio jobs for other people. Gimme an environment I don't have to pour another decade into and I'll switch. In it's current state I will not place a bet that if I give it my all things will still work when I need them to and that's the bare minimum.

It's a shame because honestly I found setting up a modern Linux distro for audio work is actually easier and more flexible than windows now, by a long shot. Pipewire is awesome, routing signals is so easy and latency is great with no third party drivers.

Unfortunately I don't think there's a good solution for plugins, as long as developers don't provide a Linux build we're mostly stuck with alternatives. LSP is pretty neat, but I understand that not being able to use the suites you're accustomed to sucks.

I find Reaper is great. And Bitwig works well as a replacement for Ableton.

I tried but there's so many things that I need to be able to turn from bad to good in just a few clicks, and that's basically irreplaceable for me rn.

I tried reaper and even if I learned it more thoroughly it would still result in 3x the time on every single process in song production, mix & master and that's unacceptable for me.

Heard a lot about bitwig and that would probably be my preferred alternative but that unfortunately still leaves the issue of third party Plugins.

I've been trying to find a way to do this properly for quite a while now but I have yet to find a way to do this that's sustainable long term.

Not trying to talk down your suggestions because I genuinely think they could work for others, just adding more information to why that's unfortunately not enough for me to switch completely.

Btw for my servers and backup notebooks I already use lots of Linux. Anything not main driver kinda works perfectly with Linux and most of all it keeps on working when I need it. In fact I suspect my hardware will give in before the os and or software will pose any issues.

Have you tried using yabridge? https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge#configuration

It's not perfect, some plugins still have issues. But most of the time it works really well. I use this with reaper and find music production is totally doable in Linux

In my distrobox bitwig set up with Wine 9.21 I am using the following with no issues

  • Melda (various including MSoundFactory)
  • Native instruments (including Reaktor and Massive X)
  • unfiltered audio / plugin alliance including battalion
  • psychic Modulation
  • all arturia
  • all Valhalla dsp
  • Adam Szabo viper and jp6k
  • lese smear And a bunch of others with no problems.

Usable with some issues

  • Newfangled audio - plugins work and sound great but GUI hangs or is extremely laggy

Not working at all

  • some eventide plugins
  • all aberrant DSP
  • all UVI

This is all under a unified wine prefix - o might try playing with different prefixes for different plugins and see if I can't fix some of the above or some of the QoL issues

I thought I had but I might try this again because if everything does work I'll move in a heartbeat.

  • A udev rule that won't work in my new distro (cachyos) for no apparent reason when it worked fine everywhere else

  • Obs using way too much cpu for no reason even in a clean setup at idle

  • Having to select what window will be captured to the obs canvas every time

  • Having to swap active audio outputs until volume stops being too low at every restart.

That's about all of it, I think.

dist-upgrade must die.

I spent like three hours I didn't have the other day trying to bring a Debian Unstable system up to date, it decided to stop every few packages to tell me it failed because the t64 libraries conflict with the regular ones and nobody taught apt how to figure that shit out for me and install the right ones.

Even Ubuntu is like "oh hey there's a new release, you're available for three hours straight to, every two to fifty minutes, explain to a TUI dialog that you don't have an opinion, right? Oh also can you resolve this merge conflict on this config file we think you edited, but you didn't, by being shown the diff once and then opening nano?"

This is not an acceptable way for this to go.

Life protip, if you arnt using Debian, as in normal Debian. Just use fedora or arch.

If you need anything remotely up to date, just avoid anything and everything that uses apt. You will have Infinitly less headaches.

There's a good fucking reason valve uses arch.

Debian unstable is not a distro....

You cant complain about software breakage in a software that is still under development

Consider it as an early access game on steam.

What it is is my attempt to avoid the nonsense biannual massive Ubuntu upgrades.

Really I've got "Siduction", an ostensible distro "based on" Debian Unstable. This is accomplished by just having the Debian Unstable package sources in there, plus a couple others that give you pretty themes.

I expect Debian Unstable to occasionally ship me broken packages, but I'm surprised to have it just generally not have functional migration solutions when the setup goes through major changes. Not because there's a bug in something, as far as I can tell, but because nobody engineered anything.

I thought of another gripe. Mint works great but the logo is horrible. Sorry to whatever graphic designer I just insulted. I literally jumped distros because I was sick of seeing it.

That default background is a horrible first impression too.

The only real thing that's consistently annoying for me is UI scaling on high-DPI displays. Between the DE, GTK, and QT all needing different settings that all act differently.

But I guess generally once you get it set it's mostly fine.

I started playing Warframe again recently, after a many years break (something like five years). There's an app that shows you the value of random rewards that open, so you know what to choose (WFInfo) I have not been able to get it to work. There's also Linux alternatives, one of which I've been messing with trying to get it to run, and the other is much more limited.

Other than this, I have no recent issues. I've been full-time Linux for like three years now, so I've got everything sorted, and I usually can get anything running that I need, even when people say it doesn't work.

Edit: for anyone who wants to help, I'm on Garuda (an Arch based distro). That probably won't matter, but who knows.

The last time I tried WFInfo, it wasn't working for me on Windows either, so maybe not a Linux issue. But if you get any of the Linux alternatives running, I'd be interested too.

Wfinfo-ng seems to work alright, but it's only a terminal application and it only does fissure rewards. It sometimes fails to read, but so far it's like 90% success, only using it today. The biggest feature I wanted was to check the value of stuff in my inventory to sell, because a lot is vaulted and pretty valuable, which this doesn't do.

As far as my novice knowledge understands, this isn't a fixable "issue". But I'd love to use Debian as my main OS for everything, but I know there's gonna be issues with Steam/GOG games and GPU drivers. My patience and tolerance with "daily drivers" is much lower than my servers, so as far as I know that pretty much limits me to Mint (which isn't as cool)

There's also Ubuntu (which is even less cool than Mint, i guess, but nevertheless exists).

What about trying a non-Debian distro that "just works?" The only main difference is package managers, and some files being in a different place (excluding home directory).

I'd consider it, got recommendations?

Something Arch or Fedora based depending on what you want to do. EndeavorOS, Garuda on the Arch side. Fedora is good too as-is, just make sure you add RPM Fusion, another package repo, because some stuff like NVIDIA drivers aren't available. RPM also has a graphical setup option on their website.

Basically I would take a glance at the docs for Arch and Fedora and choose based off which one I like reading better.

Thanks for the info! I've heard very little about Fedora so I assumed it had a large learning curve. My only experience with Arch-based distros is whatever they put on Steamdecks, and my friend with one has had problems every time he's over

I ran Debian as my main OS for years around 2005-2010 or so. If you run the testing branch it gets you pretty new stuff. Just don't run the testing branch for a few months after they do a stable release as that's when all the big breaking changes take place. Also, Trixie is still relatively new and has a new enough kernel to make most GPU stuff work well. If you need a newer kernel it's not too difficult to build a new one and use that so you can get fresher amdgpu modules, for example.

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.

it's not the prompt that's the issue, and yes I've seen it all the time

it's not the prompt that's the issue

No it's not, it's the underlying philosophy/expectation that you want to be aware of and in control of every single package/library that's installed on your system.

And that is not true for the vast majority of people who are getting CachyOS as a recommendation when they search for a "Linux for gaming".

I think CachyOS is great, and I use it myself, in spite of the ArchLinux base, but I know the pain it brings and have consciously accepted that, and I have fallback plans: I make sure it is easy to re-install my system without losing my home dir or game files. I could even pull in all the important stuff in my home dir from my dotfiles repo.

But this is something you have to want.

On the other hand, I did have to compile xpadneo from source on my wife's Mint pc in order for her to be able to use an Xbox controller, because there is no deb or PPA of it. So far for Ubuntu-based distros being "GUI only". On Arch, you could install it from AUR through a GUI.

I use arch because in my experience noodling with debian/Ubuntu to get something to work is far more infuriating.

I have a very minimalist approach to how I install packages and typically don't have any issues.

When I was googling around for why the electron application was no longer working I couldn't drill it down to sdl compat because nothing hinted at sdl, it only mentioned OpenGL.

In fact I find it strange that an electron app would break over an sdl package, when others such as discord don't.

Apps, always with apps, most app in ubuntu store are not the latest version, nor reviewed or crypto signed for safety. Then you still have to deal with RPM or Deb or flatpack ...

There is no good frontend for the clamav antivirus that is maintained! yes we may not need an antivirus but if you want one, you have to go command line. As an old ace developer, this is not an issue for me, but yeah at home I don't want to use that knowledge nor can recommend linux to newbies.

Maybe a easy to use frontend for docker app is missing (nono I use portainer) but something more easier like the defunct CasaOS for beginner to install decentralized apps is also something that could promote Linux a lot. Ubuntu could also hide docker app in its store, just telling users that they should not let their notebook or computer go to sleep if they install server app like immich or jellyfin

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 splash grub options or change bootloader?

Take a look at systemd boot then plymouth for a nice splash. I find it to be much better than grub for just simply booting 1 distro quickly. Try systemd-analyze blame to see whats slowing down the boot. Sometimes there are drives that take awhile to mount and speed can be improved by adding them into fstab by UUID.

Screen blanking, or rather screen blanking not functioning properly.

I have literally spent 9 months researching every possible angle and even going as far as buying some of those Edid Emulator passthroughs for each monitor to see if those helped. Tried disabling the Kscreen manager in KDE. Tried manually controlling it via CLI and DPMS. Tried different mice and keyboards to see if it was my inputs waking it up. Tried making sure all the monitors had their auto-select input option disabled. Nope, my monitors blank for a second or two and then unblank immediately. The issue is present in both X11 and Wayland.

I have had to jump through hoops to enable a screen saver in wayland. I have to turn my monitors off manually every night. It's really frustrating. It seems like a really simple thing, but it's like, literally all I want is consistent screen blanking and I have spent the better part of 9 months on and off trying to find a fucking solution to no avail. I still have no explanation for why they wake instantly, they don't seem to be triggered by anything on the system, based on the logs.

I even made a post asking for help regarding it here on Lemmy about six months ago. No luck.

It drives me up the wall because I'm actually really good at researching and finding solutions for problems I've run into online. This one mystifies and eludes me and while seeming minor I feel like is a genuine pain in my ass.

Related: Have an old laptop running a server OS with no GUI and have no ability to disable the monitor since technically there isn't any monitor rendering set up, so all commands to screen blank the monitor fail because there's technically no monitor to turn off according to the system.

Had a problem like this a year ago, figured out it was because I was using display port. Some weird quirk of its protocol basically fubars it.

Switching to hdmi cables fixes the problem.

But HDMI cables have bigger issues so I just learned to deal with the problem.

I don't really have an option. I have four monitors and four video outputs, and only one output is HDMI. In fact, three of the cables are DP to HDMI because I don't have any DP capable monitors. So yeah.

Some weird quirk of its protocol basically fubars it.

Seems like this would be something to be producing logs on for community developers in hopes of finding a solution though. Could you maybe point me to the info you found on this? I'd be interested to see if there's any timeline that anyone is working toward in fixing it.

Funny thing is that the same issue was resolved for me by switching the other way around - from HDMI to DisplayPort. So there's something weirder going on than a bug in DP implementation

I'm sorry if you've already checked this, but I had a similar problem with a Windows laptop recently that just would NOT stay in standby. It wasn't a question of if, but how long.

Eventually I found that some "Wake on IP' settings were set to "Wake on any/all IP traffic". I switched those off and now the thing stays in standby/screen blanked.

Good suggestion, but I just checked and my Wake-on-LAN settings are already disabled.

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.

Most popular games still don’t work.

Not according to the steam deck verified list...

What distro is that?

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.

You might wan to checkout the proton version from glorious egg roll on github. It has a load of improvements.

I already used that(specifically this version), it is the only way to get the game to actually load.

Most popular games still don’t work.

I've been running Bazzite on my main PC since October (I have a bad habit of tinkering with my Linux installs to death so I opted for immutable so I'm less likely to break it) and of all of the weird and obscure windows software I've installed, all has worked flawlessly including funky model railroad track planning software and some somewhat obscure simulator games. I also have some games from the 90s that haven't worked on modern Windows in years run flawlessly. Heck even Sims via EA's launcher runs flawlessly (if not better because I can minimize it from fullscreen, something it can't do on Windows since the DX11 update)

Literally the only thing I've found that I can't run is anything requiring Ubisoft's launcher. The furthest I got is to about 30% through downloading Anno 1800 before it crashed and refused to run the launcher again. I can't help but suspect they intentionally broke compatibility because that would be very on-brand for them, but you never know. Kinda sad because I wanted to play an Anno game that's new enough to not have gotten a disc release but whatever I have plenty of other games I can play

My primary use case is for audio production. I love that my DAW is native (Bitwig Studio), it runs like a charm. I ran into a lot of issues implementing it with Wine and yabridge with the flatpak install to still use my windows only plugins (I have a large collection of really cool tools)

After building Bitwig in a distrobox with Wine and yabridge I was successful, almost all of my windows plugins work - some as smoothly as Windows, some with some wrinkles. A few of my favorites just dont work at all unfortunately, and after looking into this, its an issue with JUCE8 and wine - specifically,

full support for Direct2D feature level 1.3 in Wine.

I'm novice level with Linux and pretty advanced in Audio production, I'm hoping we can get some folks from the audio world together to contribute to wine to try to make this happen... I want me Aberrant DSP and Eventide plugins working properly!

Thankfully, many whose GUIs are broken can still be somewhat utilized due to Bitwig exposing plugin parameters in their own wrapper - I can tweak from there, but it's not ideal.

I'll continue to pressure developers to offer Linux native support as well, but so far its mostly crickets with a few noticing an uptick in requests and considering adding it...

hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world and I are interested in getting Windows builds of plugins to work "reliably" on Linux, could you expand a bit on your setup or share some resources you followed? :)

Fingerprint reader does not work as it does on other OS. You can log in, but the key ring stays locked causing programs in user space to break, so I always need to log in with my password before it works. The fingerprint prompt blocks input access so you can't type in the password and you have to wait for it to time out, also the prompt does not always appear. And the developers actively refuse to fix the not unlocking the keyring because it's "not secure".

Fingerprint scanners for both Windows and macOS, you can log in and it just works.

Second thing is the still broken bluetooth drivers on Debian based distro's where it randomly just fails. No such issues on Fedora (KDE) as of yet, but I use both.

A recent update added 104ms to my boot time and I am SEETHING and will get to the bottom of this and make those responsible pay dearly.

I have a Thinkpad with integrated graphics I basically use as a launcher for Firefox and Steam.
Attached to a docking station with an external monitor connected via HDMI. Nothing fancy.
In several different distros, I can't play my Steam games on Gnome with Wayland, because the game window won't open properly.
It's either bigger than the screen so I only see part of it, or smaller and windowed. A lot of the time it will just show a black screen inside the window.
Tried all available Proton versions, laptop lid open or closed, laptop monitor active or deactivated. Makes no difference.
It works fine on Xfce (X11), KDE 5 (X11) and Plasma (Wayland), so I'm not too bothered.
I'd prefer Gnome, though.

Other issues that don't bother me much: I had to disable the fingerprint reader in BIOS to get rid of error message spam during boot, and the monitor configuration isn't applied on the login screen so I have to type my password in blindly.

What bothers me more is that the laptop doesn't receive an IP address from my DHCP server over WiFi, while my wife's Windows PC and my phone do. But that's more likely due to a misconfigured DHCP server than the OS.

What bothers me more is that the laptop doesn’t receive an IP address from my DHCP server over WiFi, while my wife’s Windows PC and my phone do. But that’s more likely due to a misconfigured DHCP server than the OS.

Do you have static DHCP IPs being handed out or do you mean it's just not getting an IP from the DHCP pool? Because for static IPs with machines that sometimes connect via hardwire and sometimes connect via WiFi I always make sure to provision two separate IPs with the MAC addresses for ethernet and WiFi each assigned to the different IPs.

It's supposed to get an IP from the pool.
But I have a wonky setup with a WiFi repeater that combines 2 SSIDs from the router (for 2G and 5G) into one.
If I connect directly to the router's WiFi I have no issues.

That sounds less like misconfigured DHCP and more like the wonky setup is preventing DHCP handshakes happening consistently, but could be several different issues, really.

My D drive doesn't auto mount on boot. Fixing isn't worth the effort if clicking two buttons.

For anyone else, fstab is probably your friend.

And if editing fstab yourself is too daunting, there is also gnome-disk-utility which has a nice GUI for setting auto-mounts that edits fstab for you.

Game support.

Also arm support, I really wanted to use asahi but a lot of my apps just dont support it. I was going to look into recompiling some of the open source apps I use like my authenticator but havnt gotten around to it yet.

Game support.

What game? I used to need to occasionally boot into Windows to play games, but it has been over a year since the last time I had to do this.

I play beamng on windows. My steering wheels force feedback doesnt work ootb and neither does the multiplayet mod. There are work arounds but they are complicated and I havnt got around to properly trying them.

I do agree most games work but my main game is beamng so like...

Fair enough.

I've had frustation with the lack of support for some HP laptops. I have a HP Dragonfly 13.5-inch G4 Notebook and I haven't been able to get my sound to work despite finding others who have gotten it to work. None of the people who got it to work were using simple installation or sources to get the sound to work.

My only pain, since last year, is the horrible amount of tweaking needed to have flameshot work in Gnome. I have not found a single screen shot app that even comes close in terms of features and UI.

On my specific setup (5700x3d, 5700xt) with the Vive gen 1 I can't get it to run VR nicely. There is huge performance hitches compared to Windows. Only VR is like this most my non VR games see performance gains across the board.

Also, steamvr takes prohibitively long to load and frequently crashes. Half-Life, Alyx can't get past a certain point in the game on Linux but runs past just fine on Windows. This feels like just a Linux driver issue. I've tried several distributions with the same problems.

Peripherals...

• A document scanner with pretty great Windows software that has features that are not nearly as easy to do with FOSS Linux software (splitting documents, auto cropping and alignment, OCR, etc)

• A 3D printer that doesn't have Linux software, so I can't easily send prints to it from Linux

• A webcam that supports device-level configuration (zoom, cropping, etc) but doesn't have Linux software to control it

Out of interest, which printer? Anycubic Kobra by any chance?

Regarding the camera: you could probably script this with ffmpeg and let it output the cropped stream as a virtual camera but I am nog going to pretend this sounds very appealing to most people.

Regarding scanning. Maybe you can scan to PDF and then use this: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf. does seem to do OCR also but havent tried it myself.

Printer: FlashForge AD5X (more in this comment)

Camera and scanning: Yes, I could put together some sort of solution, but "you can get it working by spending time putting a solution together that entails more manual steps (or scripting or whatever) and/or requires the CPU/GPU to do more of the work" is something I'd prefer to not have to do. And this makes it less compelling to advocate to others if they also have any such peripherals or workflows.

The 3D printer doesn't support a plain serial interface via USB? I believe most can accept g-code over it and most slicers can serve it? Been a while since I was using non-Klipper printers though

FlashForge AD5X using FF's Orca Slicer, which has better support for their IFS, and for which there isn't a Linux build. The printer is in a different room, so running a dedicated cable isn't a viable option (and would regardless still fall into the "inconvenience or compromise of using Linux")

Definitely not a fix but have you tried this? https://winboat.app/

I have a KVM/qemu VM (which doesn't work for some things because of the lack of an easy way to do bridged networking over wifi) and I've tried WINE (which appears to not support a DLL that FlashForge's Orca Slicer needs to work). WinBoat is on my list to try, but my guess is that it also won't support bridged networking over wifi, and I've already spent too many days on this problem.

Just confirmed that Winboat (like Docker, KVM/qemu, and other container/VM solutions) can't do bridged networking over wifi. At least one Windows app that I'd like to be able to use (FlashForge's Orca Slicer) needs to be on the same LAN as the printer in order to work (in LAN mode so it can be used from more than one computer).

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.

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?

No graphic (its integrated with the CPU). Ill have a look

Edit: realized that i didnt specify videos. I want to play 4k videos, not gaming

In that case, you're missing codecs.
For video players, they'd be called gstreamer-plugin, and for Firefox they may be missing in the distro repo's version if it focusses on open source software.
The version from Flathub has them.

My other thought is screen tearing and similar. I think Mint still ships with X rather than Wayland and screen tearing is a pretty infamous limitation with Xserver

See if you have qsv decoding support enabled. The Intel CPUs in those little mini pcs usually have a video card that will do the heavy lifting using a system called quick sync video but if you’re isn’t set up to decode in hardware then it’s gonna have to do all the work in software and that’s slow.

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).

Big upsy moment. Playing videos. I just want to watch legal movies

That is even stranger. My RX6600 has zero issues with 4k 10bit content. Do you watch via browser or ripped dvds?

Using vlc to play super legal movies

Oh, ok. That makes some sence. I had a similar issue with Fedora 41 as they didn't update to a newer version of FFMPEG that fixed some conflicts/issues. I had to download a different video player that shipped with it's own ffmpeg packaged. Can't remember the name, but try seeing what's in the software store. You might be affected by a similar problem.

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

I've been using synergy for years, no complaints

The biggest problem for me right now is FreeCADs control scheme is atrocious. Trying to use it to do even basic shit takes forever because it's not intuitive at all. Even when I pick the option that's supposed to be closest to Fusion360 (which is what I'm used to). I shouldn't have to google how to select things because left clicking does nothing. The other stuff I've tried so far has been relatively painless but that app pisses me off so bad every time I touch it.

I can second this.

Like, holy shit guys, why can't we call it "Extrude" like literally every other CAD program does? Don't be different solely for the sake of being different. It just makes it harder for people to switch.

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.

Intel Arc card. Though, to be fair, it's only in a small few cases.

There are some games I sometimes play that don't work. Fortnite, Infinity Nikki, maybe Overwatch.

I also like using One Drive for syncing around and accessing files and it works well with my NAS. I have not really got it working at all in Linux.

On my laptop, when not connected to my home network, the file browser (I tried several) hangs terribly terribly bad when opening it because it can't find the network drives in my fstab file. It was bad enough I just took them out and manually browse to the folders if I need to by IP.

I really like Affinity Photo and have a paid copy from before it went free. I can't get it working in Limux on my laptop. I absolutely HATE GIMP, do not sughest GIMP. The UI has been dog shit for forever (I have tried using it off and on for ages now, like, decades, if its been around that long). Its garbage.

Overwatch works great on Steam!

OneDrive works too, or at least used work back in the day on Ubuntu 16.

Surface camera doesn't work.

I think that's it.

Since Gnome 49 and the switch to wayland, all of the dynamic workspace things have not been working. Primarily, can't move a window to a new workspace in between or before an existing one and connecting/disconnecting monitors completely shuffle around windows/workspaces. And various other oddities like moving a window to workspace 3 makes it show up on workspace 4 in the shell overview.

I've been using Linux almost exclusively at home since the late 1990s.

I have very few issues with it. I think Debian's tendency to break my Nvidia drivers on my gaming machine is probably the worst, but that's just a matter of running the installer again. It's not really Debian's fault, it's just updating the kernel.

I wish WINE would let me use Bluetooth or even ANT+ connections to my smart bicycle trainer, but connecting via the phone works quite well most of the time (unless my wife starts the car and it grabs my Bluetooth phone connection). So that is my biggest wish. Well actually I wish Zwift ran natively on Linux. That'd be even better.

My friends on windows and discord keep asking me to stream because they know with my Nvidia card that my game and stream will become choppy.

reading all them pain points, I had to type this up. free advice, worth what you paid for it.

you know how in life you're supposed to pick your side, your team, and stick to it? like, no tifosi is changing their allegiance because the rival got a fancier kit or a new power forward or whatever; in fact, you'll root harder for your underdog darlings. you don't become a nazi overnight because they're flooding the aether or their spokes is a dead ringer for scarjo. etc.

here, you gotta do the opposite. you gotta anticipate where the major development effort goes to and go there now. you can't cling to X11 and xfce4 and sysv init and whatever and then removed that you can't nicely alt-tab out of games or have functioning HiDPI or you audio stack from 2006 is crapping out and such.

the largest linux hardware manufacturer at present is valve. they went with plasma, they went with wayland, they put in a lot of work to make it better, and with new steam hardware that's likely to continue. in addition, there's a smorgasbord of activity in that sector and that's your best - and I contend, only - bet.

so that's what you'll run, and like it. I've ran close to everything prior to plasma and have occasional nostalgic flashbacks and miss a feature or two over here. but this is the thing with the most hands on and your best bet that someone already solved your issue or is aware of it and working on it.

Are you really complaining that community effort and team work are a bad thing...? I'm confused here, it sounds like you are. But that can't be right.

I have not really had anything. I do have a thing where my mouse goes wonky but I think its the my touchpad and not linux.

VS, that's it. Other than that, office once a few months when my school requests an assignment in .docx / .pptx /.xlsx format. Edit: forgot about windows install USB-s (I know ventoy exists).

Nothing but there were some gpu issues with sleep signals on the newest Debian release. As it's an always on server I turned those flags off and it's running normally.

I wish I had Paintdotnet but my daily usage sees Krita work.

I cannot for the life of me, get hibernate to work with nvidia

I believe most people have kinda given up on hibernation :p

so its not just a skill issue?

Afaik: no

I can’t wake up from hibernation… the monitors don’t get signal again, so I have to restart.

Need proper replacements for:

  • AirPlay/Sonos (SendSpin has made a huge splash in recent months)
  • Easy wireless display sharing to TVs à la AirPlay mirroring and Windows Cast

PipeWire supports AirPlay...?

At least with PipeWire 1.4.9, I regularly cast audio to my wife's Apple Homepod

True but I want a fully open source stack to replace it. Sendspin is looking really good so far

Ah. Open source would be better, but I don't think AirPlay support is stopping anyone from using Linux.

I'm not sure about Sonos

Can't mount flashdrives since the last Ubuntu update...

Any clues in the dmesg output?

It just says there's an error and I need to check my drive. Worked OK before the update, still works with Windows...

So far, Linux has been great for me for most common apps, however there are a few niche apps that don't run natively on Linux and are borked under wine.

paint.net is the main issue currently as the devs have stated they won't make any other ports, and the latest versions have a "Garbage" rating on WineHQ. There is Pinta, which is based off an older version, but it's not good enough for my use cases.

So, for the time being, I'm stuck with using a Win10 VM with a shared folder to use paint.net.

(And before anyone asks: No, GIMP will not work for me. It lacks the tools and plugins I use frequently with paint.net)

Have you tried running paint.net in Bottles? It would be less overhead.

80% of tools and tasks take about 20% more effort to get set up how I'd like them, which is fine - and even usually better because I can customize it more. However 20% of tools and tasks take 8,000% more effort to even work correctly, and I give up on half of them.

Scrivener. Everything else has a substitute or workaround that is easily implemented by a non programmer. I own both the Apple and Windows forms of the program.

Have you tried Fade In? fadeinpro.com

One thing that is really annoying is that for working with plugging in and out SD cards in my internal SD card reader I always have to go to standby for it to properly remove and then again to properly detect a new one being inserted. This does not seem to be a problem with external readers.

Also I mostly keep my laptop in standby but have to restart every two weeks since some small things like fingerprint sign in seem to just randomly stop working after a few days of usage.

Otherwise it's smooth sailing but I think that's mostly because I have an older Thinkpad and they are just really well supported and I'm not trying to do very special things and mostly stick do default workflows in my distro.

Bluetooth headsets. Still can't have sound and microphone at the same time, which isn't great.

That's a limitation of Bluetooth itself afaik, when bidirectional audio is active and the headset goes into "hands-free mode" you get a shit bitrate. Windows behaves the same, not sure about AirPods on Mac

That is true, but I think there are some newer protocols that support higher fidelity.

Also Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (for example) was shipped with pipewire instead of pulse audio which just made the handsfree profile (aka low fidelity bidirectional audio) work out of the box. Have been using it without significant problems since that release.

Yeah, a TRRS jack :D

I'm not aware of any big improvements, even BT6.0 is the same afaik. All the fancy audio codecs don't matter in the handsfree mode

My pain points with Fedora: signed sdboot and anaconda. Anaconda in particular looks like an unmaintainable mess that needs to be replaced.

So far the switch has been fantastic. Its just taking time to write new scripts and such as I port my old windows workflows over to Linux.

The one thing I haven't gotten working is SteamVR. I've only been able to launch into the steam vr home and it puts me underneath the floor. I can teleport move around but can't interact with things and it leaves me under the floor.

Been on it permanently for years now. Only complaint is that I found XFS to be better than BTRFS, though most people probably wouldn't notice.

Only other "complaint" is Fedora doesn't have a lot of support for embedded arm devices, so you're on your own if you want an RPM style distro on something like an Orange Pi.

Been on it permanently for years now

Haha we can tell by the fact your complaint is about filesystem differences. Thats such a linux user complaint.

At work, they keep using windows for some reason. Tried telling them “apt get anything other than this” but it didn’t take 🤷‍♂️

Cant stream Paramount+

Can host jellyfin tho ;)

It doesn't work even on chrome? Maybe you need some extra package like widevine-drm?

I use Firefox, not interested in switching browsers, but from what I've read it doesn't matter which browser I use. It's on my to do list to try out jellyfin.

In a browser?

Yeah, I use Firefox, but I've also searched it and it seems that it just doesn't work in Linux.

For some reason my webcam is squished to a 16:9 format on Teams through Vivaldi for work. Other than that, both work and private use and gaming has been fairly flawless. Oh, except for Star Citizen that was a hassle to set up, but once the community guides were found, it was easily figured out.

I had issues yesterday getting an aur package of scratchjr as a desktop electron app from 2021 running on my daughter's laptop. Worked fine when I tested it on mine, so not sure what the issue is there. Means she can only use it on the website with an internet connection for now, which is not the ideal flow from my perspective.

Other than that, pretty great, no notes.

Edit: I was missing the libxss dependency. A fact that was immediately obvious from journalctl. Working now.

For me the thing that actually matters is Respondus not working on Linux. There's no solution other than have a dedicated Windows laptop if I want to take tests for my college. Everything else has a workaround.

I've been struggling to get Linux installed again. I had to reinstall Windows to even use the thing. I'm at a loss and really don't know what I'm doing wrong. I'm deep in that Dunning-Kruger valley where I know enough to really mess things up and not how to fix them.

I have an Asus ROG gaming laptop from 2023. I had Ubuntu installed no problem, but when. I wiped my Windows drive, it wouldn't boot anymore. Pretty sure I wiped the bootloader too, I'm not sure. I can install Bazzite or Ubuntu on my Asus ROG Ally no problem, but had an issue later on and reverted that back to Windows too.

I also run local servers for Phantasy Star Online and Minecraft, and the best way to run those has been through Windows. I never use that computer except for running the two servers, so I don't really care what operating system is on it, but if I could install my servers, that would be ideal.

Well, this is more of an I should probably learn how to thing, but even with all the customizations I've made to Cinnamon, I'd love to be able to do more customizations.

I cannot switch off Cinnamon on my desktop since I'm technically running tech support for my dad, also running Mint w/Cinnamon. Would if I could.

That's kinda the limitation with Cinnamon, it's not as customizable as it could be.

I've been a linux user since 2010s more or less. For some reason on my new tuxedo laptop with mint installed + qtile it sometimes freezes or logs me out. Super frustrating, and don't know how to debug it. But mostly I'm happy with my setup.

Support for higher levels of ARM SystemReady seem like they're poorly supported in the Linux ecosystem right now.

ARM boards nearly always require a devicetree entry for that specific board.

This may not be entirely a Linux problem, but my understanding is that some of the x1 elite laptops we've seen DeviceTree entries added in the Linux kernel are using SystemReady ES or SystemReady SR on Windows

Audio. As much as windows has issues, it is not hard to get good latency. The same process is it less accessible to most users. A reliable gui is needed.

VST's and their associated DRM is a blocker but not the fault of Linux. The same is true for hardware that can only be properly configured with a windows or Mac only tool. These problems need a critical mass of users, and a legal requirement to support Linux for mainstream products. (EU, I'm talking to you)

VR. Using CachyOS, a new 9060xt 16gb, and a Quest2. When I can get steam VR to launch and connect at all its extremely choppy and stuttery to the point its unusable. Worked fine on the same hardware and network before switching from windows.

Im pretty sure the Index works great with Linux right?

Meta headsets are largely shit. I have a quest 2 and I got sick of how invasive and maliciously coded it was so it just sits now. I dont need zucc seeing inside my house.

Yeah I only have that quest 2 because it was free. I would like to only stream PCVR titles to it to minimize meta usage. At least until the steam frame comes out.

Gotcha

On a surface level, it works fine for me, i installed pop os a few months ago and i'm happy. There is a lot i haven't really figured out yet, and i don't know if i ever will or have to. There is an UEFI update that has been pending ever since i installed it. It says i may have to hit the power button multiple times to install it, no idea what that even means, and i don't really want to read 2 pages of documentation to make it work. Most peripherals i have are straight up not supported on linux. They work, but i have to use windows to configure them. I tried to install a razer software for linux, but the hurdles i had to go through and the amount of: now go to this website to install this flatpak is kinda nuts, just for it not to work at the end. I still don't really know what a flatpak is, so that doesn't help. On one of my mice, the muddle mouse button just straight up doesn't work on linux. Every other works, it works on windows, this just doesn't.

The weirdest thing that sometimes happens is that i play a game and i think when i plug in my headset or mouse, something freaks out and i can still use M1 to shoot for example, but i can't use M1 in the game menu. Or any menu at all. I can use M2 to put the PC to sleep and then it works again.

I tried to use Wine to try some windows programs to see if they work, but i don't even know where to start, i installed them, and everything looks like it should just work (or not) but it just does nothing.

I'm running endevourOS with KDM and there are some major issues with bluetooth...I can't get some devices to connect (e.g my keychrone Keyboard, and Cricut plotter)

I still have to disable my wireless mouse, when I hibernate, because I couldn't be bothered to adapt the udev rules to disallow the mouse to trigger the pc to start

And finaly, I just got back into X4 Foundation and my HOTAS setup depends on which device is recognized first...either its correct, or the controls are swapped (stuff that should be on the joystick is on the thrustmaster and vice versa)...un- and replugging in the correct order fixes this, but one wod think that it would lock the controls to a fixed device identifier

  • Obs uses more cpu in cachyos than linux mint, no idea why or what I can do about it, experienced the same difference between manjaro and mint (might be something to do with kde)
  • audio breaks, when I boot I have to switch to output devices to fix it. No idea why
  • sometimes it logs out of the desktop and when logging in it freezes

Having said all that I'm having the time of my life with cachyos, everything works great and better than it ever has in my experience running an nvidia GPU. I did do some tweaks of my own, wizh I didn't have to but it's not bad at all

Linux hobbiest for a couple decades, began daily driving a couple months ago. My workflows for graphic design have been extremely stunted without being able to use Illustrator.

I've been looking for a reasonable replacement since 2012. Reasonable meaning it can do everything I need it to do and without slowing down productivity. So, this pain point didn't come as a surprise, it just is.

It's a tradeoff I made willingly and with full knowledge of the ramifications. I have zero regrets, even if I'm handicapped on certain tasks.

Now that I'm daily driving, I've been able to learn much more than when I just had Linux on my gaming box. For instance, I friggin love how expandable Dolphin is. Batch resize and convert images with a couple clicks from a file browser? Hell yeah!

The terminal has also become a closer friend, but I still hate VIM. :p

I'm in a similar boat, as a 2D animator. Which admittedly is pretty niche but if Linux had something like Moho Pro or Toon Boom then I could delete my Windows partition forever. You can do 2D animation in Blender, but IMO it's not quite up there compared to a dedicated 2D software like Toon Boom Harmony.

That is a vendor problem, not a Linux problem. Take it up with Adobe.

Downvote or not, what I said is true. Linux cannot force adobe to publish software for Linux. The problem is adobe. Now go downvote them somewhere while your voting finger is so click happy and maybe stop shooting the messenger.

When i start PC (mele go2) and forget to power on the screen, if i start it after boot PC, the sxreen stay black....

Handful of Windows desktop apps that don't work well on Wine - WeChat desktop, LINE app desktop. I do tons of copy pasting of mocked up screenshots and stuff. It just doest work as well as in windows.

My linux mint installation is frequently timing out on some part of the start up process. I'm half guessing it's because the windows partition is fucking with things, because every time it happens and I switch to windows and back again, the problem resolves itself.

But I also don't care to diagnose the issue any further, because I'm going to be doing a fresh install of everything soon.

This issue did not affect my previous laptop. However, under heavy load, my current laptop sometimes freezes and even REISUB sometimes failed to work. The only way is to force power off via button.

This persisted across all distros from Debian based to Fedora to current Void.

Other times, laptop will stutter to a near halt post some complex process and even after said process(like a Handbrake task) is closed, continues to act as if the resources were never freed.

I only used Windows 11 for a single month b/w 2016- current (other wise, distro hopping was default) and it was stable. I can't pin point the actual root cause (driver issues, kernel level problem) but still persist with Linux (Windows has its own stuff of problems that we all are aware).

I wonder if maybe it's a governor problem. Laptops are often super power limited, sometimes even more so thermally limited, so they rely on increasingly bonkers power profiles to try to balance it, but pegging the laptop at 100% utilization such as while transcoding can still cause it to fall over. Have you played with adjusting the power profile at all?

It is not a power profile problem since I have looked into that. Even under normal circumstances, simple stuff like having tons of tabs open cause it to creak. Yes the hardware is not cutting edge but my previous laptop was worse (4 GB Ram) and whilst Linux showed it's limits then, it never came close to crashing ever. I don't think my Debian install in the past ever freezed on older laptop.

But it is bonkers on this model.

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.

To have EAC work on Linux you need to set a toggle during build, some developers just refuse to do that so EAC won't work. There are also companies that are just plain hostile to Linux, because that's where the hackers live or some bullshit.

That's a problem with the game producer not making it for Linux, not Linux's problem. Take it up with the game producer and maybe with Steam's Proton support.

I couldnt even get it to work on chrome ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For several years I daily drove PopOS and it was good. I liked their window management. It was unstable, especially with waking from sleep, which led to filesystem corruption sometimes, but timeshift always bailed me out.

Then I tried the Comic beta and loved the paradigm but it was even less stable.

Then I found Bread on Penguins on YouTube and got interested in how Steam was putting all this work into gaming on Linux, and how Wayland was supposed to be so much better for gaming.

So I tried Arch, but it was A LOT. The games did not run well. I feared I was missing a lot of crucial components.

I found the Asus RoG Linux site and switched to Cosmic+CachyOS. The games ran better if on the laptop screen only but Cosmic was still unstable.

I tried Niri but that created a ton of flickering when two monitors were plugged on, which is my typical setup.

I played around with nvidia drivers more as I had been doing the entire time but this time fucked my system up and my new setup of time shift didn't save me.

So I clean installed CachyOS on Gnome. The games still run well enough on the laptop only. Two monitors works and is stable but the framerate is low in general and my mouse is choppy. I had to spend hours rewriting scripts because Gnome isn't wlroots based and so doesn't support fuzzel/rofi/et al. When waking from sleep it will fall back asleep like 4 times before staying up, so I've turned sleep off.

I feel pretty exhausted and defeated in all honesty.

My biggest challenge is really around Podman on Bazzite. It is just different enough from Docker to be annoying. I had the system lock up, and the Podman containers / pods (whatever you want to call them) would not launch. In fact, the system claimed they didn't even exist. I was looking for the files and logs all over to try to figure it out. I ended up doing a clean shutdown and restart and then the container started without issue.

The second issue I have is also related to my Jellyfin container/pod. I have gone through all the recommended settings and troubleshooting, adding permissions exceptions, all the podman settings, and I still cannot get it to take advantage of the Nvidia acceleration unless I put SELinux in permissive mode, which the Internet says is a bad thing.

Other than, honestly Bazzite has been great as my daily driver for about 4 months now.

unless I put SELinux in permissive mode, which the Internet says is a bad thing.

I am also The Internet, and I say unless it is an internet-exposed service, just do it. More security is never bad of course, but process isolation and privilege escalation prevention is pretty low on the list of security measures you should focus on. First thing, unless it's meant to be a "public" service (one that someone without pre-authorization may access), it shouldn't be exposed to the internet at all, and that alone brings the threat model from "definitely will be scanned and automatically attacked, decent chance it gets pwnd if you don't have good passwords and update often" to "someone needs to be both skilled and targeting you". Spend an afternoon or two setting up a VPN so you can access your services from wherever, and share them with select people.

SELinux is the cause of many headaches, and its main proposition is against untrusted code or in a shared system. If it's your box, in your network, and you're not aiming for a Red Hat certification, it's ok to disable it.

Docker is available for Linux.

There’s nothing wrong with it. Quit trying to kick up fud.