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.
Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I’m using at the moment) demanding the root password to install the updates it’s blinking at me about in the tray all the time. In this context, demanding a password at all is rather silly (Windows doesn’t require your password to install updates in a single user environment, and it doesn’t even pop up a UAC prompt) and this is going to be yet another one of those things that prior Windows users will moan about, declaring that “Linux is complicated and hard” and drive them back to the comfort of the devil they know when they feel like their own computer is actively trying to stymie them at seemingly every turn.
My user account is a sudoer so there is absolutely no technical reason my own password shouldn’t work. And, in fact, if I run updates via apt in a terminal it does. But allowing updates to install from the desktop environment, something ostensibly ought to be a routine userspace kind of operation, requires everyone using the system who might want to do this to know the system-wide root password. This is a monumentally stupid idea.
I am well aware there are myriad ways around this but they all involve hand-editing config files and come with stern warnings about “this may break your system so proceed ‘carefully,’” as if anyone who is not already an experienced Linux nerd will know just what the hell “proceeding carefully” is supposed to look like.
The inevitable XKCD comic succinctly sums this up:
The UNIX permissions and administration model may have made great sense on glass teletypes in the '70s and when nobody knew any better, but it’s certainly long outmoded now. It’s going to make a lot of people very angry to read this, but that’s actually one of the few things that Windows does much better, at least starting from NT onwards.
While I have switched from Windows to Mint with most of my PCs, permissions are the single most annoying thing I still deal with on Linux. And have been over the last decade of trying out distros over the years. I truly detest the way permissions work and were the main reason it took me so long to switch. The current political world and tech company garbage is what did it.
Doesn’t Ubuntu disable the root user out of the box and expect these actions to be performed via sudo/polkit. There is clearly a precedent for not needing a root password and being able to use your own user’s password for these kinds of things. So it is a monumentally stupid idea to require the system-wide root password, but not one that is done by all of linux, and seems to be a decision made by your distro to not use the modern solution.
The fact is though, you’re right and the pain point is that distros are still doing things the silly way.
- Distros should be using sudo/polkit/anything other than root user password to do things like this
- Modifications to the sudoers file should be easier
- The distro setup process should just be able to have some prompts about smart default things (“Passwordless updates?”) even if they include strongly discouraging comments.
If I can
sudo apt installwithout requiring a password, I could generate a package that installs a custom sudoers config file that allows me to do anything, so “passwordless sudo, but just for apt” is potentially easily exploitable to gain full access. But that also still assumes A) you care and B) someone has access to your account anyway (at which point you may already have bigger problems)
Energy management is the part that still complicates things most for me. Rfkill not being managed correctly. Machines that suspend but don’t hibernate, or that hibernate but don’t suspend. Laptops that de-suspend during transport. Batteries that overdrain during suspend. Bluetooth. And most annoying of all, NVidia (insert Torvalds iconic scene).
On my phone. I would love to be able to run a Linux system or at least a de-googled android. But some apps I need access to don’t seem to be working without Google services and stuff like that si I’m stuck using a stock Google (Pixel) android.
Beside that, everything is and has been working smoothly on my computers since I switched from Apple to Linux Mint, 5 or 6 years ago. My only regret is to not have switched way earlier.
I do miss Spotlight. All the alternatives I have tested fall short one way or the other but giving up on Spotlight is not that bad of a deal considering all what Free Software, GNU and Linux have offered me in exchange. I would not want to switch back.
Have you tried GrapheneOS (since you have a Pixel)? I put it on mine, and it works great. It treats Google services as just another app, so you can control what it has access to while also putting it into a sandbox. Plus, with the user profiles, I have further segregated Google away from my data. I have a profile solely dedicated to apps that require Google services, and so far, I’ve had only minor issues (which may just be how I’m setting my security, so it could just be a me issue).
Literally the only issues I have with Graphene are that my banking app won’t work and I can’t add my debit card to the wallet app. But my bank has a website, and I can still carry my card in my real wallet so I’m not really fussed.
I have not personally encountered a Google-based app I could not run within Sandboxing google play services on a GrapheneOS running Pixel phone. So, fwiw, it is working in my experience these last three-ish years.
Power management could still be a lot better for Intel laptops (though admittedly over the past decade it’s come a VERY long way). On my Chromebook running Ubuntu the powersave governor noticably stutters as it decides whether to boost the clocks, but all the other governors significantly hurt battery life. Somehow Windows managed to solve this battery problem with all its bloat, and Chromeos also has while also ultimately running Linux under the hood. Laptops could really benefit from the same level of driver maturity as desktop platforms.
I’d also point out touchpad gesture support as a secondary point which is lacking. I love that pixel perfect scrolling and gestures are integrated into many desktop environments now, but they lack configuration for sensitivity and in some cases leave it to the applications themselves to control. Scrolling in Chrome is way too fast and Firefox way too slow for my trackpad, but unlike the cursor speed/acceleration, there is no setting to adjust the sensitivity of pixel perfect scrolling in supported applications.
As much as if saddens me to write it: the enterprise bullshit.
I’m not allowed to use Linux at work because it’s more complicated than the out of the box experience of MacOS and windows in terms of remote management, encryption enforcement, company certificates and all this useless bullshit.
yeah corporate environments continue to be a pain point. IT wants centralised management a la intune/GPE, i want to be able to use proper terminal tools for automation.
last time it came to a head i moved into a vm and refused to come out for two years.
And I’m not sure why Linux doesn’t excel in a centrally managed environment, since it descends from an OS that was designed from the ground up to be used by many users in an enterprise environment.
Desktop management wasn’t, and isn’t, a priority. Managing fleets of servers has been the focus, and the Linux vendors make most of their money selling server distros.
It can be done, but it has to be built using the raw tools available. This is a strength and a weakness. Strength because it’s super flexible, and a weakness because random IT person has to know what they’re doing.
There are some projects like FreeIPA, Gnome FleetCommander, SaltStack, and Foreman which have parts. There’s nothing turn key like Intune or Jamf though. Plus this is all based on on-prem stuff. We’re not even touching on Entra replacements.
There are a few closer to turnkey solutions available now, scalefusion & 42gears to name a couple of providers.
Often times it’s more about visibility rather than absolute control - tools like osquery support Linux as well.
Interesting. I’ll check those out. 🙂
I’ve looked at osquery. It was all the rage for a minute in the monitoring industry when Facebook released it, and then it didn’t really go anywhere.
Games with anti-cheat don’t work.
Secureboot doesn’t like GRUB.
Solidworks doesn’t run natively on linux, neither does my Sketchup Pro program.
SteamVR doesn’t run well on linux
What does work that I use regularly? My older DVD drives work fine, ripping my music and dvd/blu-rays works well and seamlessly with multiple instances of the programs running simultaneously. The typical FOSS stuff I use is a no-brainer, from Gimp to Blender to Libreoffice.
But for the stuff I work with most and the games I play most often? It just doesn’t work well or at all.
Which games, which anti-cheat? protondb.com can be a good source for quick fixes for running things in Steam, most of the time if I have an issue with a game, someone will have already posted a solution in there.
EA’s battlefield is what I’ve been playing, which requires Secure Boot.
When my PC goes into sleep or hibernate, my keyboard won’t work after it wakes up. I have to unplug and reconnect my keyboard every… single… time…
Except for this issue, my PC works perfectly fine and better than Windows in nearly every way.
For me it’s the fact that there’s no “perfect setup” for anything. This likely only applies to my specific machine (kids, don’t buy an asus rog strix, trust me) but I can never get the “ok this setup is perfect, everything works exactly how I like it, I can’t complain”
What I mean by this is for example KDE Plasma 6. All my apps and everything work on it. games work flawlessly, all my dev tools, great. so I should be happy right? no. workspaces suck on multi-monitor setups, no native auto tiling and the third party script that does it is kinda wonky. Ok fair enough lets use something else like say Niri or Sway or Hyprland whatever. cool I got my tiling, I have my vim nav, awesome right? no certain games don’t work with these WMs as they all have issues with mouse constraints on certain xwayland stuff that KDE has managed to solve.
OK fair enough lets try an x11 WM. nope can’t do it on my laptop as I have both an integrated AMD gpu and and discrete Nivida gpu therefore x11 can’t handle it as far as gaming goes.
There’s a few other things like that. Like I want to use something that isn’t packaged for whatever distro so you go with the app image of it but it’s pretty much useless since it won’t integrate with your system. i.e. the appimage of Tabby. Or waiting on a package to get approved but the maintainer drops out at the last minute so either you have to pick it up or wait on someone else to which essentially resets the process (yay nix pkgs).
Essentially with linux in most cases the focus always seems to be on fixing the complicated things while ignoring the easy user experience things. Like workspaces shouldn’t suck as much as they do on Plasma and the “fix” coming next month isn’t going to improve things that much. oh boy I can pin a single app on my second monitor…that doesn’t fix the dreadful workspace experience on Plasma. ALL they have to do is allow independant sets of workspaces per monitor. that’s it. that’s all I want. but the devs at KDE, just like their opinions on tiling, will say “well we don’t use workspaces like that so you won’t either”.
Bluetooth.
Its always been an issue and it remains an issue.
I had issues with Bluetooth on Windows. Been having none since I switched to Debian + KDE.
I had a ton of issues on Arch/Artix, but Debian + KDE works as expected OOTB in terms of functionality and UI.
It depends HEAVILY on your chipset. I have a costco HP i bought as a backup that works seamlessly. Literally seamless at all times. Its a commodity piece of hardware. Millions of these things made.
My bleeding edge, new machine, cuts out, audio stutters, sleep issues; you name it: looking at you mediatek.
TL;DR: I’d recommend getting a bluetooth dongle!
I’ve got an Asus bluetooth 4.0 dongle, and it works perfectly for bluetooth. PS5 controllers, Airpods Pros, they’ve all connected to it really nicely.
I used to have issues on Windows with bluetooth, but then I found out why. My Windows was using my motherboard BT instead of the dongle. I added a PS5 controller while that was in effect, and once I eventually got the bluetooth dongle (poor BT module in the motherboard sucked ass), I noticed I couldn’t remove the controller from the settings menu or through the old control panel way.
I had to turn on the BT module on my motherboard again, boot into Windows, remove the BT entries, then turn it back off. I’ve never had an issue in either Windows or Linux after that.
Ditto to this, I was having huge problems with the rpi4/5 modules, when I bought a dongle everything worked instantly.
Printing.
Windows drivers are so fancy, with previews and a billion options, while Linux gets a randomly ordered list of raw options in a drop-down menu and that’s it
Exhibit A:
The same, but in Windows:
My HP Deskjet 1110:
The only other option the driver provides is Color or Grayscale. It’s pretty clean.
I always liked the Linux ones over Windows. No random bullshit depending on who made the drivers, just a solid set of options.
Could do with being prettier through.
This is heavily dependent on the printer driver used.
My bother does this until I install the CUPS PPD from brother.
Newer process are moving to a driverless IPP model, which should help with this.
For me it’s that ‘can make it work’ != ‘want to spend hours researching to make it work’
If you have a well supported use case Linux is great, if you need to do some things that rely on proprietary drivers, old software, etc it’s a pain
I like the ux in some common windows utilities a lot more than I like their Linux alternatives. I prefer nano zip over the default app that came with my distro.
Default video settings caused going to console to be use a comically oversized font for my large monitor. I remembered how to change fonts sort of, but couldn’t for the life of me remember how to change the resolution. Internet searches had results of mixed quality. Pretty difficult to distinguish instructions for the old boot loader versus the current one. Set the res finally, but it didn’t work. One of the commands I tried did seem to work, but then it caused the advanced graphics to disappear and video transcode suffered. Finally I found the answer I should have used all along: sudo dpkg reconfigure (some package I can’t remember now)
And everything is like that. You want to do something, you better get educated. It’s great for hobbyists, but I find as I get older I just want it to look right and do the thing, so I choose windows from the grub menu and forget I even have it for weeks.
It’s great when everything is supported and works and you like the application and you’d spent sixteen hours theming your desktop and and and … but ain’t nobody got time fo dat
Thermaltake Riing fan controller needs special python software. It worked fine from RPM in Fedora 42, but it hasn’t been updated for Fedora 43 yet. Tried installing with pip, and creating a systemd service, but it didn’t work immediately, and haven’t had time to fuss with it again. Probably just going to get new fans I can control through mobo.
Was using default Fedora gnome, but it started getting into hibernation loops. Swapped to KDE, but I’m not sure I cleaned up the gnome install perfectly.
I find it very difficult to run windows programs that don’t have an automatic steam/lutris compatibility setup but require manual configuration. Havent had any luck getting stuff like game/map editors or obscure modding tools to run so far.
Aside from that i am pretty fine, excluding the keyring app. Wish there was an alternative because it never works for saving or providing login data any more.
Modding tools is also a pain point for me. If I need to use an external tool, it’s hours of frustration followed by throwing my hands up and swearing off mods.
That’s odd because I’ve had a ton of luck adding random crap to Lutris including obscure model railroad software
Could you elaborate on your process/give me a link to the guide you use(d)?
I would love to be able to mod certain games again.
I generally prefer to manually install and update my own mods so I’ve never tried running a mod manager in Lutris, but generally the thing you want to be mindful of is if you have everything running in the same wine prefix that needs to interact with each other. Each wine prefix is kinda isolated from another, so when you change which wine version (and therefore prefix) launches a given software, it loses all of its stored data from the appdata folder because that was left in the old prefix
I always use protontricks if I need to install something additional to a Steam game or Heroic Games manager, it can run arbitrary .exe files in a wine/proton prefix.
Just submitted a bug report to KDE for Discover where
apt updatefailed behind the scenes due to Synaptics changing some value in their repo. It just needed a confirmation [y/n] to continue, figured someone would want to do it.
