We love to praise linux constantly and tell everyone to change to it (they should) but what are your biggest annoyances ?
Mine would be, installing software (made even more complex by flatpaks being added, among the 5 other ways there already were to install software) and probably wifi power management issues.
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Oh! Came up with a new one, though it’s more of a unixism than a Linux specific thing.
I really wish that the core utils and other cli tools had a standard structured output option, like yaml, json, or toml so that it would be easier to parse rather than all of the random regular expressions needed when piping output around.
Edit: And it would be great if we also picked that same format for config files instead of all the bespoke stuff in /etc.
Its users
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audio - Most of the time it works, but there have been plenty of times that after an install, I have to go in and make a handfull of changes to get it working.
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“you are using it wrong” developers - Lookin at you, Gnome, Mozilla and Pottering. Yes, you are donating your time, and I appreciate that, but don’t be dismissive of people if they bring up valid issues. If you just don’t want to fix problems, that’s fine, but just be honest about that, instead of blaming the user.
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sleep/hibernate - I’ve never depended on sleep or hibernate to work properly. I gave up on that years ago, and whenever I come back and try it again, I remember why I gave it up.
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documentation - As a seasoned linux person, I love man-pages, but they are soooooo obtuse and hard to parse for newbies. I also hate it when the website has mountains of documentation, but they couldn’t be bothered to put that into the man-pages.
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video/wifi drivers - Yes, I know that this is mostly a problem because of the manufacturers. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem.
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unsympathetic users - Just because it works for you, doesn’t mean it works for other people. I can’t wait for year-of-the-linux-desktop, but it just isn’t there yet. As soon as you have to tell a non-tech to open a terminal, the vast majority of them are out. You and I know that ‘editing /etc/somedir/somefile and running /usr/sbin/somecommand’ is easy, but sooooo many of them don’t know what that means, nor will they care. I hear that windows is pretty bad nowadays, but people will often stick with the devil they know.
Last point is the most important in my opinion
So much this!
Please, if I don’t know how to build this from source, please tell me what I need to do.
Please say “open a terminal and type git clone [URL]” instead of “clone the repo.” Anything to be more verbose. This might be my first time.
Agreed. Even something like: “Read up more on this here at someurl.com for more info”. The assumption that everyone knows how your repo works, as well as the 3 different build-tools that you use, is quite a lot. I feel like a of the instructions are like how you draw an owl: https://kstarr.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/draw-the-owl-300x257.png
Great summary! Longtime Linux users and tech people in general tend to forget what it’s like to be a layperson, and take for granted all the skills it takes to daily drive Linux without trouble.
The audio stack is just just a nightmare, it’s not even funny. Sometimes, at random, when my PC boots, it will output white noise at full volume through my headphones. The is fine if I turned it on and went to get something, make a coffee, whatever. I can still hear it in the other room though. If I’m sitting at my PC and I was just rebooting, wearing the headphones: that isn’t ok. It damn near blows my eardrums out when it happens.
The unsympathetic/pedantic users and obtuse man pages are why I’ve abandoned Linux attempts in the past. The reason I am trying to move to Linux now, isn’t because those were fixed. It’s because windows is becoming the more annoying option. I’ve prevented my computer from updating win 10 until I can leave the platform. But I’m not looking forward to dealing with Linux frustrations. Especially the fucking users. I hate asking Linux people for help. 95% chance I just get a pedantic dickwad.
I think things are getting better. I’m not going to lie and tell you that it’s no longer a problem, but I think you can do a lot more with a little patience. I know there’s a lot of different implementations, so you might need to experiment as well. Good luck!
You can ask me for help, im pretty nice :) not a linux pro tho
Lol thanks, I appreciate the gesture
You can ask me for help, im pretty nice :) not a linux pro tho
Great summary, too many Linux elitists like to claim Linux to be without flaws and every other OS to be the devil.
I’d love for Linux to become more mainstream. But as long as those elitist are pulling the strings, it will never become user friendly enough for a regular user.
“But I moved my granny to Linux and she can use it” is their argument. When in reality every time this granny had an issue, the Linux user came around to fix it. The majority of people do not have a tech savvy user in their direct circle capable of fixing Linux. So the only option they have is to bring it back to the store they bought it from.
Sleep and Audio are definitely my most annoying, and prominent, issues that I run into. Devices like USB audio interfaces I find tone temperamental. Oftentimes they will not be recognised on startup and I have to unplug them and replug them back in. I also gave up on hibernate, my PCs are now either on or off…
To be fair, my colleagues have audio issues on Windows more often than I do.
The classic “oh, windows reset all my audio configurations after an update… again…”
Idk man it all works for me.
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The community’s general overestimation of the average person’s tech capabilities.
Not necessarily fair to pin this on Linux per se, but there’s hardware that doesn’t work well or at all still and alternative solutions still aren’t there. So this would be mostly on companies making software for Windows but not for Linux, but it’s still part of the Linux experience that I do not enjoy.
I have to troubleshoot things on Linux more than I did on Windows.
I disagree honestly
I think the biggest strength of Linux is that it gives people power over their own computing. That has and probably will be its best selling point.
I personally wish that there was something Linux based and Foss that is closer to Chrome OS/Android. I want to have a desktop experience that is hassle free and dead simple. Dahlia OS was promising for a while but it has now seemingly been abandoned.
You disagree with… the things I personally find annoying about Linux?
Terrible documentation that is written assuming far too much prior knowledge.
I’m pretty technologically literate but just don’t have a lot of experience with Linux, in the last year of trying properly to switch over the most frustrating part is trying to fix problems or follow peoples “guides” to various things. There is plenty of information out there for sure but when I have to keep looking up a string of things to try and get to my desired end result then the original documentation I’m trying to follow is not adequate.
I can only imagine what it might be like for users who are less inclined to learn about this stuff and just want to use it / solve a problem.
I think that a lot can be said for well written documentation that describes necessary processes to get a desired result in a way that everyone can follow regardless of their prior experience or knowledge.
When I first got into tech, one of the first things I noticed was how deep the knowledge base was, layers upon layers of knowledge dependencies, and how poorly tech people explained things.
I remember learning about how to write clear, easy to follow manuals in IT classes when I was 13 in the late 90s. What ever happened to that skill, did it die along with physical manuals?
I think just the phrase “IT classes when I was 13” is enough to convey just how far outside the norm your experience was.
I have a CS degree from a top-10 university, and they taught me approximately fuck-all about writing good documentation. There was only one course on technical writing, and I don’t remember it being very rigorous or difficult.
If anything, what few writing requirements we had in the rest of the curriculum were typically more similar to academic research papers than user manuals.
Must have. I sure as hell didn’t get that training in school a couple years ago. My teachers sure as hell didn’t either
It did. The thick manuals of the 90s needed to actually document things.
When I was running a Linux distro regularly (1995-2015), audio output would break every couple of upgrades.
It was frustrating, because I was pretty happy with the rest of the OS.
Ironically, it’s only gotten better since 2015ish. For the most part I’ve used pulseaudio like most others, but I’ve also used jackd when I need to do audio stuff. After pipewire became usable it’s more or less flawless for me.
Audio output doesn’t “break,” but it’s easy for it to get redirected to the wrong device (e.g. by plugging something in, like headphones or an HDMI monitor, and the system trying to be “helpful” by automatically reconfiguring). With so many layers (OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, JACK, PipeWire) it’s hard to figure out how to fix it.
After switching my gaming PC from Win 11 to Linux Mint earlier this year, audio is the only thing I consistently have issues with. I have the PC connected to my living room TV via HDMI via an Onkyo AVR. I have pipewire installed (correctly, I think).
Whenever audio starts, there’s a couple second delay before I can hear it. Haven’t been able to solve that so I just live with it.
The more annoying thing is after an update earlier this week, the audio output is now defaulting to “Dummy Output” instead of HDMI. I have to manually switch it via pipewire. It randomly switches back and I haven’t figured it out either.
Whenever audio starts, there’s a couple second delay before I can hear it. Haven’t been able to solve that so I just live with it.
That can be because of a power saving feature - basically PulseAudio puts your sound card to sleep when nothing is playing, and then there’s a bit of lag before it wakes up. In my case it was really annoying because I use the optical output, so when PulseAudio put the sound card to sleep, my receiver would also go to sleep after a bit, and resulted in quite a bit of a delay when it was time to get it come back up.
This fixed it for me (see part 4.8): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting
I tried this and it worked for about a day haha.
I’ve gone through a couple pulseaudio configuration tutorials, but nothing is working consistently. Seems to work fine after initial reboot, but almost every time after waking from sleep I have to reconfigure the audio outputs. I swear this all worked fine until I updated something last week.
When I was running a Linux distro regularly (1995-2015), audio output would break every couple of upgrades.
It seems to go hand-in-hand with bluetooth breaking.
Bluetooth is still… not great.
I didn’t even try Bluetooth. That would have been too frustrating.
That’s exactly why I hopped back on windows for my desktop. I’ve put off fixing it for longer than I should.
I’ve amazingly not had a single audio problem, and i mess with inputs and outputs on the front and back panel often, as well as use usb audio devices. Mint and pulseaudio
I just find it annoying that I have to manually change audio output device every time I connect or disconnect HDMI to our TV. Annoying, but at least not difficult.
That’s awesome! I’m not sure if/when I’ll go back to Linux as a daily driver, but I that I have your experience.
This does need some attention from the Pipewire profiles perspective. It’s mostly a hardware combo thing though. Even if you’re using an audio code that has kernel support, the speaker configuration from manufacturers changes CONSTANTLY, really causing problems. They need to break this out into its audio profile IMO.
I hope image-based distro can solve this issue. In general I feel a lot of these breakages are caused by repeatedly migrating configuration files, yet fresh install usually fixes these issues.
I think one of the advantage of image based distros is that they are much more principled in migrating config files.
I don’t like LibreOffice as the only open source Office software that seems to compete with Microsoft. It feels bloated and outdated and for years and years I have display problems with it. The community answers to problems are often written by arrogant pricks.
However, at the pace Microsoft Office is deteriorating with all that copilot crap LibreOffice begins to look better every day. They don’t even have to do anything for it.
Have you tried OnlyOffice?
Isn’t it Russian?
It’s in english for me (hah! jk) Dunno about it’s origins. I just installed the flatpack.
OnlyOffice is another shit clone of Office 2007. Fight me.
I am close to adopting LibreOffice but their excel equivalent lacks some table functions that I use almost any time I use Excel.
Have you tried Proton? It works like a charm for videogames.
I was able to get Office working without issue through Proton, but I couldn’t get my reference manager to work with Office within Proton. Ultimately I ended up acquiescing to LibreOffice, and I’ve ended up liking it more than the bloated monstrosity that is M$ Office in the latest iterations.
I’ve also found SoftMaker Office to be great (faster than OnlyOffice and even better docx compatibility) but it doesn’t respect Linux’s cursor blinkrate when you build from source (it’s supposed to respect the default, per the devs), and instead uses a really fast rate. I’m weird, but that issue is damning for me, and idk how/where to fix it. So, I stick with LibreOffice.
Suspend/sleep. I bought a specific laptop so it works, but these manufacturers need to let our developers know what the fuck is going on in the hardware
The sleep/hibernate is specifically designed to work only with windows, especially on modern hardware. It’s a known problem and it’s not easy to reliably get around it.
That stuff doesn’t even work right on Windows anymore.
It’s kind of sad, 10-15 years ago I’d say everyone (both Linux and Windows) more or less had the whole sleep/hibernate thing figured out. But it’s all gone to shit in the past few years.
Presumably, it’ll work in a few years. Which is when Microsoft will change it to something else.
Snap. The very existence of it.
The fact that there is NO agreed single package standard across distros.
This is probably the biggest barrier to mainstream linux adoption - devs have to choose between supporting 5+ package formats or just say “screw it” and make a windows/mac app instead.
This is my own opinion, but I think Flatpak and Flathub need to be universally adopted as a standard. It’s already growing that way organically, even if major distro projects haven’t recognized it yet.
With usage of Flatpak growing over time, I think we are heading towards that way.
This has its pros. If all agree to use, say, deb, then some of the users will complain, “I downloaded package XYZ from Arch and it doesn’t work on Fedora!”
No, not really true, IMO.
If all distros come together and agree on a single package format (e.g. deb), then if arch makes a package available in .deb, it can be downloaded and installed on Ubuntu or Fedora, as it becomes an universal package format like flatpak.
Currently we have to compile the source code in such situations.
If flatpak is universal doesn’t it solve the issue ? Is it the sandboxing people dont like?
My system is a mix of .Deb, manual compiled, and flatpaks. As im sure many are. Im not an organized person.
Yep, it’s sandboxing that I don’t like. They feel “tacked on” and don’t integrate properly.
Same for my system which is also a mix of deb, flatpak and Snap.
The main complain of flatpak being size and performance in comparison to ‘native’ installations.
I recently began hating devices and how each distro does it slightly differently. /dev is the worst. I plug in a usb, look for it under /dev/usb, not there, oh it’s /dev/serial I suppose that makes sense. Plug in a different usb, not in either, no by-path or by-id, oh, I can only find it by the bus… but that path changes each time I plug it in, and that’s the only place I can find it. Permissions are black magic on devices. I’ve been root and can’t open a cdrom, get permission denied. Other times I can give a user 777 and it seems like they have it all, but still can’t open that drive. Everytime I reboot my coral usb changes bus paths and breaks my frigate docker, but I can’t find any stable path to it. Fought for days trying to get proxmox to forward a cdrom drive to a container then a vm. Went through half a dozen tutorials and threads of people getting it working and I couldn’t. Spin up my laptop and do it bare metal, and STILL can’t get it to work. VLC can play the disk just fine, but not the docker container. Switch to ubuntu instead of my arch distro, and boom everything works… most of the time. Other times I have to do a ritual of removing the database, logs, reboot, start the container, unplug usb, plug in usb, and then it works.
Just out of curiosity, what are you doing in 2025 with a CDROM drive?
Let me burn my CDs in peace!
I’m considering getting one again to rip audio cds.
I’ve got a bunch of old dvds and bluerays I’m ripping to my NAS. Automatic Ripping Machine works great… when it works. I’ve given up and now I’m using VLC.
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The lack of a universal application installation method which 98% of developers use. Windows has .exe and it makes it so much easier for developers to release one application which is dead simple for users to install. No instruction manual with different methods per distro. Just double click. This results in less support for Linux in general. Fewer games and applications an drivers with fewer features.
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Poor backwards compatibility. Yes it results in bloat, but it also makes it much cheaper to develop for and maintain applications, and this results in more developers for Windows. More hardware and driver support. More applications. More games.
It is no mystery to me why developers don’t focus more on Linux support. It’s more expensive. They tell us this. What is so frustrating is that Linux fans are so quick to blame developers instead of focusing inwards and making Linux a more supportive platform for said developers.
The lack of a universal application installation method which 98% of developers use. Windows has .exe and it makes it so much easier for developers to release one application which is dead simple for users to install. No instruction manual with different methods per distro. Just double click. This results in less support for Linux in general. Fewer games and applications an drivers with fewer features.
That’s not true. .exe isn’t an installation method, it’s just a binary, the better equivalent would be .msi. Also you also have to consider (some) dependencies on Windows, e.g. you can’t assume the required vcredist is available on the target.
Poor backwards compatibility. Yes it results in bloat, but it also makes it much cheaper to develop for and maintain applications, and this results in more developers for Windows. More hardware and driver support. More applications. More games.
Not super sure about this. I was able to run an over 10 year old binary only game when I last tried (UT 2k4 in 2016 or so) and it worked after providing a single missing library. Yes, it did require manual intervention, but I think the situation is much better on Windows where compatibility also isn’t granted anymore.
10 year old binaries are only an achievement on Macs.
I have been able to run Lotus Organizer on Windows 11, 20-30 years old and only runs on a FAT formatted partition of maximum 4GB.
That’s not true. .exe isn’t an installation method, it’s just a binary, the better equivalent would be .msi. Also you also have to consider (some) dependencies on Windows, e.g. you can’t assume the required vcredist is available on the target.
I think one could argue this but it’s immaterial. My point remains the same. The lack of a universal installation method makes deployment expensive on Linux, and confusing for users.
Not super sure about this. I was able to run an over 10 year old binary only game when I last tried (UT 2k4 in 2016 or so) and it worked after providing a single missing library. Yes, it did require manual intervention, but I think the situation is much better on Windows where compatibility also isn’t granted anymore.
I can run a 1998 copy of StarCraft designed for Windows 98 on Windows 11. It’s true there are degrees of backwards compatibility here, but Windows is king. They invest a lot of dev time into ensuring applications remain operational for decades. Their API deprecation policies are legendary.
I think one could argue this but it’s immaterial. My point remains the same. The lack of a universal installation method makes deployment expensive on Linux, and confusing for users.
If you’re fine with an executable just writing stuff to your system, then .sh is Linux’ universal installer format.
It’s true there are degrees of backwards compatibility here, but Windows is king
I agree, Microsoft has invested a lot into backwards compatibility and some nifty tricks to deal with DLL hell which was a huge issue in the past and as a result, provide the best backwards compatibility, as long as you stay on x86-64. Nowadays, each .exe basically sees its own sets of dlls in the filesystem. I agree it’s best there. My point was rather that it’s not as bad on Linux as people make it out to be if the application was packaged correctly. Going forward, I think stuff like Valve’s Linux Runtime can provide compatibility.
If you’re fine with an executable just writing stuff to your system, then .sh is Linux’ universal installer format.
I would be, but it’s not enforced. Few developers use it. Any method needs to have almost total universal adoption. Then libraries get built around that standard instead of the other way around.
My point was rather that it’s not as bad on Linux as people make it out to be if the application was packaged correctly. Going forward, I think stuff like Valve’s Linux Runtime can provide compatibility.
That’s fair. It’s getting better. Linus Torvalds agrees with you. Valve might have to save us from this fragmentation.
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Flatpaks apps & their runtimes is taking 20 gb, was 80 gb before I realize it and start cleaning up. That’s annoying. But I also like Flatpak. I may just prioritize DNF first (I’m on Fedora) to minimize Flatpak bloats.
60 gb is very significant for me being in 256 gb ssd.
As someone who started getting into Linux on a Raspberry Pi (and now dual-booting Mint and Windows on the bigger machines), I still have no idea what Flatpak is. I always used to hit the terminal with “sudo apt install” and got what I needed. Except for the occasional proprietary software.
It’s a separate package tool that works on every distribution. Usually Debian derivatives use
apt, Redhat ones usednfetc. Flatpaks work everywhere.And its sandboxed, with permissions.
What do you install for that much space to be taken up??
carelessly lots of stuff. kde & gnome developmnt runtimes. nvidia driver duplicates. Firefox, Librewolf & Ungoogled Chrome. full latex packages. Ardour and various syntesizer.
I eventually cleaned up most packages out of Flatpak to DNF, especially the one that require big runtime and gtk/qt apps or does’t need sandboxing. I may also avoid electron apps since they also tend to be big lol.
Do
flatpak remove --unused, it will clear up unused dependencies.It never work. I’ve always done
flatpak remove --unusedevery once in a while. At one time I checked my root filesystem using gnome’s disk analyzer to see what takes the most space, that is when I found out/var/lib/flatpak/repo/ate 80 gb of my disk.As per several suggestion from github issues & forums, I did
sudo flatpak repairand finally it did clean them up down to around 40-50. Several months later I kind of gone mad and delete everything in therepodirectory. I noticed my apps still works. Until few days later when I wanted to update, Flatpak complained and redownload most of the deleted stuff 🤣But after redownloading, it only took around 20 gb now, and after that Flatpak also pinned every package lmao so I have to unpin unimportant stuff any case they can be deleted using
flatpak remove --unusedand I seem to be not the only one, like this person has their Flatpak directories almost 100 gb https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=435450
I realize I may also just remove all latex stuff, I was only using it to graduate. I’d just typst now for smaller things.
Sometimes I dislike how most distros are against proprietary and closed source code. But then I remember all of the money those companies are making off of war, genocide, and slavery and I feel better about it.
Sometimes it’s a legal thing. They are not allowed to distribute proprietary software in their repositories.
I’ve only ever had moral problems installing proprietary software on Linux. Haven’t had technical problems for a long time, at least not since switching off of Ubuntu.
Games that just open on Windows require extra work to play on Linux. Sometimes it’s just a few extra clicks, sometimes it takes a whole afternoon to figure it out, especially if you’re like me and not very experienced with Linux.
I love gaming on my Linux machine, and for the most part it is a pleasant experience. By far the worst outcome is when an update breaks a game that was working perfectly fine. This seems to happen regularly, especially with online games.
I’m curious what games you’re playing. Back when I started using linux regularly (~2017) this was absolutely the case, and even for a few years after proton first released it still was. But my experience now is games fall on either two extremes of working out of the box or being completly unplayable.
I just ran into a new crop of problems with Linux games.
Apparently Unity 5.4.0 has a bug where it will crash (or rather close the game) if Chrome is running. (Or any Electron app like oh, say … Steam) Kudos to Unity for fixing it, but shame a bunch of old Linux-native games will never get fixed.
https://discussions.unity.com/t/bug-in-unity-when-running-chrome-on-linux/646017
I’m curious what games you’re playing. Back when I started using linux regularly (~2017) this was absolutely the case, and even for a few years after proton first released it still was. But my experience now is games fall on either two extremes of working out of the box or being completly unplayable.
