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.
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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
I always do that and it still happened, probably because I had a drive as NTFS for compatibility. Last I checked (after failed attempts), the fix was “fix it with Windows” so I still have a borked external drive.
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.
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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
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.
One word:
systemdHonestly, what’s disappointing about sysd? I know it violates the whole does one thing principle and then the whole age bs, but overall I’ve never had anything major with it
Since “do one thing principle” is pretty abstract, I’ll give you one example of a downstream consequence.
I wanted to set up a NixOS microVM using docker sbx. Turns out, it was basically impossible (nothing is actually impossible, it just depends how much you want to modify/rebuild things).
Much of NixOS depends on systemd to manage lifecycles of this or that, but systemd only works properly if it’s the first PID, and when it runs in that mode it also wants to initialize hardware.
But the hardware is all managed by the microVM, so systemd blows up. All it needs to do is nothing, but that turns out to be very difficult to achieve.
If these were like 3 or 4 distinct utilities, there would be obvious seams where I could separate them and only activate the stuff that’s relevant to my use case. But it’s all one big ball of mud.
- It violates the whole does one thing principle. this is of course much more than a beauty-related offense. Modular design is central to good software engineering.
- Log files are no longer simple text files you can watch, grep, or work with – again violating a major Unix principle and making a zillion other things that would “just work”, have to be done with special systemd hooks/options/yadda
- The problems it solves could have been solved with a reasonably well contained change to SysV init, and probably made optional. Single-user setups don’t need server-farm complexity.
Single-user setups don’t need server-farm complexity.
True, but Linux devs only have a limited amount of time. It’s far easier to take a system that can handle server-farm complexity and apply it to a single user use case, than it is to take a system meant for single users and try to scale it up to a server farm, or to maintain two separate systems.
I’m saying that complexity could easily be modularized inside SysV init, not requiring a restructuring of things like “logfiles are no longer files in /var/log”
that complexity could easily be
That phrase has proven to be a source of endless headaches any time someone in charge is stupid enough to believe the person that tries to sell them that.
Systemd (along with the various add-on services that come with it on most major distros) meddles with and tends to break critical functionality quite often, except on boring systems where the needs being served happen to be handled well by systemd’s happy path(s).
If the computers you maintain fit Lennart Poettering’s idea of how to do things, then you might never notice a problem. On the other hand, if you’re responsible for systems with unusual or complex configurations, or have need of the flexibility that makes unix so very useful in the first place, then you might very well discover that systemd is a pushy, invasive, poorly considered, buggy, and in some ways just pain broken collection of software, maintained with a level of arrogance and carelessness not often matched in the unix community, and you might rightly come to despise working with it.
Sadly, my experience has been the latter. In the years since the systemd suite was adopted by Debian distros, I have been burned more times by it and spent more weeks of my life troubleshooting it than I can count any more. Because of this, I have come to resent systemd. And I know I’m not alone in this.
So, dear readers, when you see people complaining about systemd, please try not to be like the zealots out there who routinely cry “luddite” and demand proof when they encounter folks who dislike it. Try instead to remember that one size does not fit all, that some of systemd’s detractors are very skilled and reasonable people who happen to run systems that are necessarily different from your own, and have encountered problems that you have not. It has been over a decade. Some of us are tired of it, and tired of talking about 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!?
The worst annoyances of Linux are nothing compared to basic use of Windows or MacOS.
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…
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
Having to actually manually mount network shares to my filesystem in KDE in order to do simple stuff like drag-and-drop files from them to a browser window, which just works in ol’ Windows.
But really, I’m generally very happy with my experience with Linux in 2026. Most problematic things are because of the behavior of shitty OEMs or publishers, not Linux developers. Things have improved in leaps and bounds over the past few years.
