I can’t figure out how to run game mods that are arbitrary .exe programs that are meant to hook into a running game. Specifically, otis_inf camera tools with, for example, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I’ve tried protontricks but its so damn complicated and poorly documented I don’t really know how.

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.

Secure boot and wireless controllers are basically mutually exclusive. Unless I compile and sign the drivers myself, which is certainly a “do at your own risk” operation. Most people don’t use secure boot, so the error doesn’t pop up unless you dig for a while.

My biggest problem with Linux is security. I want a relatively idiot proof setup like in Microsoft and Apple products. I do not to have to minutely setup the firewall or have to go into the terminal to run a virus scan.

Other than that I am not too demanding of my system I nearly never have a problem although recently the game A Hat in Time makes my pc kernal panic.

Multi monitor still has some quirks from time to time. Don’t take me wrong, it’s already much better than just 2-3 years ago even, but…still has quirks. Specially with different DPI. Sometimes apps get very…wonky when moved from a monitor with a normal 100% scaling to one where it has 150% scaling or so. And on return, it’s already messed up. Some start already in the wrong scaling with super tiny text. Or text double the size. Let’s just say, sometimes scaling gets tricky.

There’s also still a lot of games that don’t like being moved to another monitor, and don’t even give an option for it. Even when pushed to the non-main monitor by OS key combo (meta-shift-left, for example), they tend to rearrange themselves again back to the main monitor when changing from title screen to in-game screen, and things like that. So…still slightly wonky. Light years ahead of where we were just 3 years ago…but still wonky sometimes.

All my games work like shit :(

And it’s kindof my fault because my hardware is outdated but while on Windows Hogwarts Legacy worked, in pain but worked, and Fallout 76 was fully stable and smooth.

On linux (Nobara), Hogwarts CTD’s on startup (shaders or something fails) and I had to lower setting in fallout to get it stable enough to play.

Bit I just began my adventure with linux as main OS so there’s still a lot to learn. One of stabilising things for Fallout was, for example, forcing dx12. Without it it froze my whole os sometimes. :(

Oh and KDEConnect reports it crashed for some reason if it cannot immediately connect to my phone. Which was funny until notification spam.

Is this feedback for devs?

My 144hz monitor randomly runs at 60hz with no way of changing it apart from restarting several times.

I have a TV connected in addition to my monitor (for lazy gaming or watching series), but this causes various small but annoying problems. I can’t unlock my PC without moving the mouse over to my monitor, which invariably spawns on the TV, and I have to guess how to move it over (left/right alignment is also inconsistent). It also turns the mouse pointer massive on the monitor, presumably because the TV has a higher resolution. Despite marking the monitor as the main display, more than half of my applications launch on the TV. Except the ones I actually want there, of course. If my tv is off before booting is complete, and I turn it on later, my background disappears, and sound is routed to the terrible built-in monitor speakers instead of either the tv audio I use while it’s on, or the actually good headphones I use when it’s not.

At some point my kernel randomly broke because the driver of my WiFi adapter was somehow incompatible. It was a massive pain to figure out the problem and fix it.

As a causal user these are definitely points that came out worse than the competition functionality-wise, and since most of the general public will not opt for a lesser experience for the sake of idealism, this type of issue probably prevents other people who just want to use their PCs from switching.

Edit: it was also a massive pain to set up a Korean keyboard layout, in Windows you just select it and you’re done. In Ubuntu, you do the same and nothing changes. I don’t even remember what it was that actually fixed it, but I tried a lot of guides that didn’t work.

Backing up my BTRFS file system. I’m on day two of reading the docs, and I still feel like I have tenuous grasp of the ins and outs. To be clear I’ve used ext4 and timeshift for years with absolutely no problem at all. I’m just looking to make generic backups of my system once a month(most the time I do it manually), and I feel BTRFS is overkill for what I need. I also feel like I’m not far away from it “clicking”. Guess we’ll see, I still don’t ever see myself leaving Linux, but I may switch back to ext4.

I need office and affinity.

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.

Bluetooth is very buggy, but it’s not too much of a deal breaker.

Less problems with Linux specifically, but they are minor issues that are annoying

Streaming to discord causes slight stuttering. It may have gotten better recently honestly, I haven’t been streaming anything performance heavy enough to notice. Could try one of the 3rd party clients, but then can’t have a universal mute/deafen bind so I’m not worrying for now.

I can’t boot sunshine because I went with 25.04 and they don’t have native builds for that, flatpak is not being nice with compatibility either. Technically I probably could make it work, but too much effort when steam is good enough for streaming metaphor refantazio to the tv for now.

Nvidia. I ordered a refurbished ThinkPad P1, and it showed up with a Nvidia card. There are problems waking up from sleep and sessions crashing that I don’t have with the iGPU devices which have FOSS drivers.

Electron apps. They eat RAM, but it’s the only way some apps are delivered.

MacOS can setup independent virtual desktops on each monitor, but Gnome has independent virtual desktops on only the main monitor with the others static. It can be set for all the monitors to change at the same time, but that’s not what I’m after.

LUKS is Linux only. There isn’t a cross platform way to do FDE on removable media.

Efi partitions use FAT FS. Why is this in the spec?

Only some manufacturers support LVFS. There isn’t a standardized mechanism for firmware updates, and many manufacturers don’t bother.

Gnome doesn’t have a profile export feature.

BTRFS is still a work in progress after all these years. Subvolume space quotas still aren’t recommended for use and encryption is “coming soon”. The tooling is a mess, no per subvolume mount options, no converting an existing folder to a subvolume. It mostly works, but ZFS is still nicer.

LibreOffice doesn’t have an “easy” mode similar to Google Docs and it doesn’t have a vim mode. Sometimes I just want to write, and not fiddle with every little detail.

Just a few odd chinese windows programs to flash random devkits. They run in WINE but can’t pass USB through to actually flash them. Keep an offline windows 10 laptop around for such scenarios. I don’t want that shit on my system in any form.