Personally I haven’t. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it’s whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.
Disappointed at linux directly? No.
Disappointed at linux indirectly? Absolutely.
- Nvidia’s linux support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
- Ubuntu
Unity(at least it’s gone from main installs now)- Snaps
KDEVersion 4(at least it’s good now)
FedoraForcing their own broken version of OBS that didn’t work(they finally removed it)
- Wayland
Not supporting screenshare(fixed with portals)- Not supporting global shortcuts (currently being investigated)
- Accessibility (currently being investigated)
- Gnome
- Not supporting system trays
- Most people don’t want their background apps (discord, teams, docker/podman, OBS, etc…) to be filling up the foreground.
- Not supporting server side decorations
- Literally the stupidest decision ever made
- Not supporting it forces all other developers to spend their time integrating their own client side decorations just so users can move/close a window in someone else’s desktop environment. (example: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-408#%3A~%3Atext=Client-side+window+decorations)
- Not supporting it means every developer has to deal with issues being reported to them that aren’t their fault.
- Not supporting it means every developer now has less time to work on their own applications.
- Not supporting it means that humanity has wasted a stupid amount of time reimplementing the same thing over and over again instead of just once.
- Gnome saying that: “it’s not part of the standard”
- Buddy, you’re the only one holding it back from being standardised.
- Cosmic: Supported
- Hyprland: Supported
- KDE (Kwin): Supported
- Unity (Mir): Supported
- Niri: Supported
- Sway: Supported
- etc…: Supported
- Gnome (Mutter, and those downstream like Muffin): Not Supported
- It has… by all metrics… become… THE defacto standard.
- “It’s not in the official wayland standard”
- Buddy, wayland needs to support more than just the desktop metaphor. It also needs to support things like phones, handhelds, kiosk machines, car infotainment systems, etc… where having a window on a screen doesn’t make sense. You are a desktop environment using the desktop metaphor, you need to support the basic functionality of moving windows that pop up on the screen, and you are the only one failing, and not only failing but failing so hard you’re negatively affecting all those around you, and not only that but you’re also not being accountable to how your actions are negatively affecting others.
- Buddy, you’re the only one holding it back from being standardised.
- Not supporting system trays
Snaps, and things like it, are really the only one I can blame on “Linux” (or at least Linux distributions).
I’ve had annoying headaches with drivers for 20+ years, but I expect that because Linux just doesn’t have enough users for most companies to bother making sure they have working drivers for Linux. I’ve been annoyed when some software or some tool or process isn’t as polished as the Windows version. But, mostly that’s something I got for free thanks to someone donating their time and effort, so I don’t want to complain about that.
But, I hate it when a major Linux distribution decides they’re going to ignore the standard way of doing things and only do things in their unique way. It often seems like one vendor / distributor is trying to build a walled garden and lock people in. It’s similarly annoying when vendors try to funnel people towards their “enterprise” version by making it harder to install certain apps that are “enterprisey”.
I get that it’s hard to make money selling Linux distributions. But, that’s what you signed up for. You don’t get to start behaving like Microsoft because it turns out to be hard to sell open source / free software.
Not supporting it forces all other developers to spend their time integrating their own client side decorations just so users can move/close a window in someone else’s desktop environment. (example: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-408#%3A~%3Atext=Client-side+window+decorations)
This kind of things is handled directly at an engine or toolkit level - so no your average developer won’t give a fuck. And for those that are reinventing the wheel there’s libdecor (official gnome support btw) which your factorio developer is using.
Trying to find the path of a mounted USB stick is painful as well. Is it at /mnt, /media or /run? Who the fuck knows.
At least with windows you just have drive letters
Oh god this one, I never understood why mounting drives in Linux needs to be so convoluted. It’s the whole reason my NAS is running on LTSC. Adding drives to my NAS under windows is literally plug and play where as with linux theres always some bullshit.
I have neither the time nor the inclination these days to troubleshoot that bullshit.
If we’re comparing Linux to Windows, then it should be noted there’s Plasma and Gnome that will auto-detect any USB stick in existence and show you its path in the GUI.
Oh yeah, totally, but when using the terminal it’s a pain
Does
lsblknot work? I checked on my machine and it shows the correct path, assuming you know your stick issdbor whatever. Something likelsblk -o MODEL,MOUNTPOINTis (generally) a bit more clear but admittedly getting into the ‘pain’ territory.
One thing I’ve been annoyed by for over a decade now is having to unmount USB drives before removing them or they’ll brick. That shit worked fine on windows unless you were writing/reading iirc.
Not really. Windows and assume Linux cache writes and might actually write after you thought it’s written, that’s why you have to always unmount USB drives before you pull them out.
Later versions of windows recognise that the device is removable and don’t cache writes. From the users point of view the copy dialog box only closes when writes are complete.
Yeah, that’s really annoying with Linux filemanagers
Just tell me when you’re done and not when the file is completely written into cache, that doesn’t help me in any way
I love my Linux, but it’s really annoying to open a terminal to run sync, just to be sure
I guess that depends on the settings. I’d still click sa
vfe remove, though.https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/storage/do-you-really-need-to-eject-a-usb-drive/
Windows does not cache writes for removable media
Constantly, I’m pretty sure that part of the experience.
However, anytime I have to use windows or mac I very quickly get over whatever my issue with linux is.
Yeah, it’s usually quality of life misses. An example: if I mount a network drive (mine auto-mounts upon login) and then that NAS goes down for whatever reason, if I open Dolphin it’ll hang trying to connect to the offline network drive and never timeout. I can restart my NAS and then as soon as it’s online again, my file manager will open 😅.
I’d have to manually unmount in terminal if that NAS became non-functional. Windows just times out and marks it as offline so File Explorer still works.
I’ve been using AutoFS and that’s no longer an issue for me. How did you mount the NAS?
SMB mount via fstab, hadn’t heard of AutoFS. That’s usually how it goes, I learn about something better after going through the pain of doing it an inferior way.
Ah yes I did it like that before. At home it’s not a problem since my NAS is always connected but taking my laptop outside would be problematic unless I had the VPN enabled.
i think if you have it in fstab that forces kio to wait. instead of adding to fstab i just right click and add smb to places in dolphin for a direct link. dolphin doesn’t hang on load anymore, auto mounts and even sends wol, might comment it out from fstab or set noauto to see if it speeds up dolphin
kde got over a mil to fix network drive issues and I have no doubt they’ll be best in class next year
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Been using linux for more than 10 years as a less technical user, and yeah pretty regularly.
Its still my OS of choice, but theres a fair bit of jank around the corners you interact with less and places where the GUI methods for things just kinda fall short.
But I like having an OS that shows me tech treating me with dignity and respect is possible. So many problems in this world are hard to know how we might solve, but technology that treats me justly is a thing I can have today, and given its actually able to meet my needs, thats pretty cool ☺️❤️
There’s an insane amount of jank people are just used to with windows that blends into the background since that’s just the way it is. I notice it more and more at work. Simple things like quality of life features just don’t exist in windows, and the usual reasons are:
A) backwards compatibility jank
B) we’re a monopoly, get fucked
C) fuck you! that’s why.
And there’s simply no way to circumvent it. At least on Linux I have multiple solutions typically since I am person # 9431007 to have this exact problem, and someone deeper into the autism spectrum than me made a FOSS solution to it.
Inconsistent behavior with the Elan touchpad on the ThinkPad E16 Gen 1 (AMD). Works in a live image but not when I install. Adding kernel parameters and loading specific modules gets it working, but it stops again after a few minutes. Sometimes unloading/reloading the module gets it working again, sometimes it doesn’t. 4 different distros, 4 different kernel versions, still have to use Trackpoint.
Other than that, I daily-drive Debian on my home and office workstations. Those ones just work.
I had a an issue with Elan touchpad were one connects the laptop to the power and the touchpad input starts lagging. This happens in all distros too. It is not too terrible since most of my workflow is on the keyboard.
Similar situation on my workstations: mostly keyboard or keyboard-like devices (DaVinci Resolve Speed Editor, Micro Color Panel). The E16 is for when I’m being lazy on the sofa, so the lack of touchpad is just grating.
Once I was looking forward to the challenge of connecting a linux PC to a Windows domain, only to find out the current version of the distro had that functionality by default. 😐
So that was cool, I guess…
my disappointment in Linux has lessened over the last few years as issues are being resolved.
Currently my only real disappointment is driver support, but that’s less of a flaw on anything linux, and more of a flaw on the providers.
That being said, I also am disappointed with sound management. Trying to do anything in that hellscape on most distros leaves you with a pounding headache. It’s a monkey-patch of multiple handlers that gets confusing really fast.
Lots of little extremely niche things people do on their computer on Windows are harder on Linux, I think the best example in general is video game modding. We can’t say it’s essential or barring anyone from making a switch and yet people like me wrankle. I’m disappointed no one ever put the honest time into cloning Mod Organizer and its amazing USVFS. Yes I know you can do it on Fuse, I know there are a couple other mod applications for Bethsoft games. The problem is ALL of these tools need a seamless way to talk between Proton instances, which would be a security risk I guess. And Mod Organizer was such a nice tool. The clone attempts I’ve seen have had shoddy UI, lacked core features you wouldn’t even bother calling it an MO clone without (Amethyst was not storing -downloads-, just running whatever FOMOD it found immediately and deleting the archive), or were done heavily with LLM AI which I don’t trust around proton instances.
It’s the absolute lowest priority right now and if you’re willing to accept a lot of potential suck you can eek by. I don’t use EMACs or I’d probably be the kind of person using that as mod manager, but hearing it described I’d liken my agony over lacking good mod tools to trying to use EMACs on a broken cellphone screen, or a keyboard missing half its letters. I miss the tools MO set the industry standard for.
That’s fair, some games are a pain to mod on Linux, or more cumbersome than it needs to be
My disappointments are few, and are outweighed by the fact that if I update the computer doesn’t suddenly grow new advertisements or try to force new subscriptions onto me, or even break that many things? The skill floor is slightly higher sure, but the skill ceiling is so much higher, it doesn’t feel like a thinly veiled Eldritch monster.
Not being able to use middle click as a scroll tool. For an OS that’s supposed to be about user choice, this option is stupidly baked into the depths of the kernel.
It’s because X-Window, the original Unix (and thus Linux) desktop system, supported 3 button mice WAY before Windoze did. It used it for the clipboard paste operation; you highlight some text in one window, and it’s immediately put on the clipboard; then when you middle-click, it’s pasted into whichever window is under the mouse pointer. Most old hand Linux and Unix users like this behaviour.
It’s been optional, and configurable for a long time. It’s mainly controlled by the receiving window’s configuration, but you can set it globally to do just about anything supported by your version of X-Window, including to scrolling. It’s been like this since about the late 1990’s, but it’s just not the default behaviour, probably because for much of that time, most Linux users preferred the X-Window behaviour.
‘Kernel’ is probably the wrong term to use. ‘Not easily user accessible setting’ might be more accurate.
but you can set it globally to do just about anything supported by your version of X-Window, including to scrolling
I’m not aware of any way to get Windows-style autoscroll on any distro without a lot of hacking. That was my takeaway from when I spent several hours researching this a year ago.
TBH the only time I’ve ever got involved with autoscroll was when a user accidentally clicked the wheel, and got “stuck in a funny mode” and the mouse was no longer working. I’m not sure how many regular users know it even exists - there are a lot who still don’t even use the scroll-wheel at all.
In Linux, the scroll-wheel works as I expect it to anyway, so I’ve never wanted to change it.
Dynamic middle mouse scroll is something i miss
It’s not a kernel thing, more like a libinput thing. Libinput has an option to make it autoscroll, and if you’re on KDE, you can find the setting under mouse settings.
Libinput allows you to activate omnidirectional scrolling by holding the middle mouse down, which is not the same behaviour as windows / (mac?) . It’s confusing since both features have the same name.
What’s the behaviour on windows?
Click to toggle enter / exit vertical scroll mode. While in that mode, moving the mouse up or down from the original position will scroll in that direction, speed depending on the amount of offset.
The amount of issues I’ve had with sound on Linux, I’m currently running Cachy and I’m still not getting it through my laptop speakers. Bluetooth on Arch is tempermental at the best of times too…
Windows isn’t much better, especially with Bluetooth involved. Audio never seems to get the attention it needs
How could I be disappointed in FOSS? Conduct of people involved, maybe, software? Never.
Yep, people involved are the biggest problem sometimes.
I’ve had to figure how to fix many issues myself, because quite often upon finding a thread where someone already had an issue that I had, folks were tryna gaslight the OP why it’s not actually an issue, eventually turning the thread into shit flinging contest. Or the good old “don’t do that, you’ll break something” (that I proceeded to do and was absolutely okay).
Not to mention how FOSS developers have to deal with entitled assholes every now and then.
Me: Ugh, X problem!? Fine, let’s google it and find the answer…
OP: I have X problem, which is stopping me from doing Y.
Answers: Oh, you don’t need X to do Y. Here’s a solution for your Y problem!
Me: I don’t care about Y! What about X problem!?
Not to mention how FOSS developers have to deal with entitled assholes every now and then.
entitled assholes, and more recently waves upon waves of un-reviewed SLOP code from morons who can’t even write a Hello World program.


















