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.
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.
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.
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 mean i’m currently in a learning process with Linux, i would like to be a power user like in windows, but i’m just not yet. I don’t know if i would say disappointed, but i tried to use KDE first and would say my experience was rather bad, it was a bit buggy here and there and i didn’t found out how to fix my problems. I’m surprised by it because i though i would like KDE for sure more, but i’m happy i switched to Gnome. So as the op said, part of the experience is choosing the right distro or in my case desktop enviroment is part of the experience.
Sure had few driver issues, or installing japanese was a bit of a struggle, but i have fun solving problems.
Every couple of years I give KDE Plasma a spin, and I’ve found it disappointing every time. Nothing terrible, just a lot of tiny bugs and inconveniences. I find it strange that it gets recommended as a beginner DE so often just because the layout resembles Windows a bit more. Gnome is so much more consistent and aesthetically pleasing… not that I use it, but it’s always my strong recommendation for beginners.
Good luck on your Linux journey!
It doesn’t run on old 2010 year Intel/AMD laptop, while FreeBSD does.
Maybe because of the philosophy of destroying the old to build something completely new (
pipewire,ip, firewalls etc.). Maybe I should spend more time finding working distro. Still I really like Linux.I’m a bit disappointed with packaging/updates. Specifically Arch, I have slow-ish shared internet and didn’t update frequently enough now my system is too outdated (1050Ti, them moving legacy nVidia drivers to AUR is another reason I haven’t updated in a while).
Looking at alternatives.
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Void (I still might want something more user-friendly) musl? (but optional and interesting for creating static binaries)
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Tumbleweed/Slowroll might be perfect if it weren’t for patterns (and I wish update structure were smarter* than just scheduling).
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NixOS is a fun idea but not with declarative desktop settings (I have my own XFWM window theme not uploaded anywhere) and extra mess when it comes to compiling/exporting also running non-packaged executables (especially if I decide to stop using Steam, running what library I can w/o client)
User packaging is also generally questionable, too. I know not to rely on it too much, but I’m also not going to be inspecting package scripts especially not every update.
Other package distribution is a neat idea, but needing to download another graphics driver for Flatpack sort of ruins the point for me (redundant data too). That, and less integration+more manual updates.
* it probably doesn’t exist, but I’d like something that has some sort of awareness of compatibility (be it simple/explicit versioning, build bot troubles, user reports etc). If I haven’t updated in a while, give me a safer update (hold more Major.Minor.newest packages to known-good). If I’m updating regularly, tell me if an update on tuesday might not be great and remind me on friday if it seems better. Let me mark software with some general issues (stability, rendering, features) and alert based on potential fixes.
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How could I be disappointed in FOSS? Conduct of people involved, maybe, software? Never.
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
- 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.
The one recurring unsolveable problem I run into is not being able to kill a process that’s stuck in D state. If something has broken in the layers between that process and hardware (not uncommon when working with old cheap “box of scraps” hardware, as I like to do), it can get stuck forever and you have to kill the whole system, sometimes forcibly. Not the end of the world, but it sucks when it happens.
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.
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 had some sound issues here and there, but those are largely resolved. My only issue at the moment (which I suspect is mostly a skill issue) is figuring out an easy way to install games to the drive I want. With Epic for example on Windows it was easy to pick which drive I wanted to install the game on, but since Epic runs in WINE on Linux I haven’t figured out an easy way to do that. It works fine on Steam since the Steam client is Linux native.
Most of my disappointments with Linux come from the proprietary bits to be honest. Both the hardware drivers, and the games and other apps. And even the few times I’m let down by open-source apps, it’s because of abilities from their proprietary counterpart that they are yet to implement.
Power management on a laptop.
Use a 10 year old Logitech mouse out of the box.
Mint’s stupid annoying print monitor.
Dealing with cached samba creds though the box to save creds wasn’t checked.
The lack of real competitors to office. And no, Open Office doesn’t come close to replacing MS office.
There’s lots that’s annoying.
But Linux is excellent as my servers, as my VM host, as my dedicated systems. Still has it’s issues, but works great for always-on systems with very specific tasks.
Linux and Windows serve different purposes.
What do you mean with regards to the Logitech mouse? I’ve been using M185’s for two decades now without issue. The only issue I have is with the newer version of them which doesn’t drop an easily readable battery state in /sys/class/power_supply/hidpp_battery_{0…9}/capacity_level .
Also; Libre Office exists.
having used windows long enough to know what the .11 brought you and having gone windows-free for well over a decade i can say i have never, ever thought “i wish i was on windows cuz this would be better/easier/faster/possible”
When I first started using it I had the issue that every install would throw up a new thing not working. I suspect that was the hardware rather than Linux though.
