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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To this day, I still grumble about the lack of universal middle-click autoscroll support in applications that aren’t browsers or Electron/Chromium-based.
“But middle-click pasting is better!”
Well I’m not a fan of it, and I’d like to be able to use my middle mouse button to autoscroll everywhere instead. After all, isn’t customization one of the main reasons to use Linux in the first place?
Yes, in 1995, I was very disappointed that red hat 2.0 made me compile my own goddamn disk images before I had to write them to floppy. Which took several days on my 486SX 25 MHz processor, and that’s after almost a week I spent downloading all of the damn source code on a 28.8 baud modem. 7 disks, 13 if you wanted printer drivers. At least it had a somewhat helpful installer, not that it was capable of helping with much.
It wasn’t until red hat 2.5 that they started distributing pre-compiled disk images
Edit: tbf, nobody else did at the time, and at least red hat was one of the first start distributing it software in packages (rpm) like debian (deb), although both soon began offering software pre-compiled as they noticed people other than software developers were beginning to use Linux, and there was legitimate demand to put in the effort. By late 1995 in early 1996, pre-compiled install disks were available for both red hat, Debian, and SuSE for x86, RISC, and DEC/ALPHA, IIRC. It took a while for Slackware to come around.
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.
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.
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.
I ran Arch on my rig in 2023 and didn’t use it for a few months. The next update broke a ton of shit including KDE.
Next time I might go with Bazzite. Or Manjaro and just take better care of it.
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 in a bunch of situations where the best available software is 0.x and hella buggy. (Which I discovered after building the software and its dozen dependencies from source because of course no one had packaged it.) But I’m not mad, I’m just “oh well, the situation will improve in the future, I hope”.
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
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.
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.
I’ve been using Linux for long enough to have been disappointed multiple times. And 90% of the time it’s about regression. In no particular order:
- Liferea losing the ability to start hidden.
- KDE 4.0, a trainwreck that made me leave KDE altogether back then.
- Network Manager bug forcing my local IP to change, even if I need it static and predictable.
- Ubuntu ads. I think it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and forced me into Debian.
etc.
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.
Dynamic middle mouse scroll is something i miss
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.
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.
Sure, I wanted nanokernels for massively parallel small-memory hardware since 1990s.
If you’re not disappointed at something with Linux, you’re lying to yourself.
And I love Linux and wouldn’t use anything but.
