Some permissions got messed up in my KDE install the other day after an update, I’m really not sure how. I tried to fix it by recursively changing ownership of /usr/ to root. Don’t do this. This kills the OS. It was technically repairable but like, I don’t wanna go through that rigamarole, I just nuked it and restored from a backup.

Sometimes I’m reminded that I often know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be safe.

On Bazzite.

Programs often take a concerningly-long time to load. Like 30 seconds+. But it’s intermittent. Haven’t been able to put together any patterns as to when this does or doesn’t happen.

About 1/3 of the time when I try to open a PDF file (which open in Firefox), they just… don’t. Plasma will just spin with the Firefox icon on the mouse cursor for like 10 seconds and then silently do nothing. No errors of any kind reported. No idea where I might look for logs or whatever to help diagnose the issue.

Dolphin is definitely lacking in the UX department for frequent actions I’m used to in Windows, like mounting SMV shares with non-default credentials (basically impossible in Dolphin, only doable in CLI), creating new folders (I’ve been spoiled by having a dedicated toolbar button), and working with elevated permissions (Windows will just seamlessly prompt you when additional permissions are needed, Dolphin will just error, sometimes with useless error messages, and make you go elevate your session separately).

Windows (the UI concept, not the OS) do not remember and restore to their prior locations, which Windows (the OS) always handled pretty seamlessly. I know I can supposedly make this happen via the “window rules” settings, but I haven’t been able to find ANY good resources on how that system actually works, and when I tried to just do it intuitively, I fucked up things like where the Application Menu and Open File dialogs appear. No, I don’t want to have to configure it specially for every app I might use, I want there to just be sensible defaults that I don’t have to fight against.

Those are the ones that’re coming to mind. All very nitpicky, but I’m largely a UI/UX designer at work, so I’m pretty sensitive to nitpicky things. No regrets, though.

App stores are always terrible no matter which distro you use.

• Images don’t load
• Stuck waiting 30 seconds for a page in the app store to load (if it loads at all)
• last rating is 7 years old
• random utilities written 12 years ago are at the top of the page
• “featured” apps haven’t even been tested on that distro

Umm… not much to be honest. It’s overall pretty great. I switched my main rig fully to Linux about 2 years ago.

First year was Manjaro w/xfce which got a little janky around the edges, probably due to how they avoid using the AUR directly. Can’t remember specific problems that couldn’t be attributed to old RAM or my own tomfoolery.

Past year has been on EndeavorOS w/KDE Plasma. Took a little time on the Arch wiki to get my Mesa install fully operational, but wasn’t bad. And I think at one point yay tried to compile electron32 from scratch which was kind of insane (probably wasted 80 GB of download for that one night) but eventually I found forum posts saying it was fine to just remove. Besides that, it’s been fantastic. It’s rare now that I even find a game that doesn’t work well, and half the time I forget to even check protondb like I used to.

Oh here. I guess combining PDFs could be a better experience. Had to use pdfunite in the command line which worked well but felt a lot more awkward than just using Acrobat to drop in pages and rearrange them. But there’s probably a GUI utility I just didn’t find.

Ah, and printer support. Wifi printing worked once for no apparent reason then never again. But printers are terrible in Windows too so I blame the OEMs.

The 4 year upgrade cycle is too short on one hand. On the other, critical software like Firefox is too old even then so I have to use a flatpack for that which does not integrate well. I am using Debian 12. The other option is that Mozilla does have a debian repo but that is harder to setup.

The current Virtual Keyboard solution on KDE ( maliit ) isn’t working quite as much as i’d like. It only works on GTK apps, and only sometimes shows. When it does, it won’t relaunch after dismissal untill you kill it. Add to that it’s not as feature-dense as its windows alternatives.

I hear that they are working on their own plasma-keyboard, and I hope that will fix most of these issues, but I haven’t had the tim to update my system.

The biggest difficulty is music production plugins. Some have a Linux version, some work via yabridge and wine (with some GUI bugs), and some don’t work at all.

On top of that, my initial attempt was using Mint with all of the audio optimisations (including kernel) but it was stuttery and slow. Unfortunately, oving to another distro is not painless when you have to move all the plugins too but CachyOS has been much better so far.

I guess the biggest thing I’m missing right now is VR gaming.

But since my VR googles need WMR to work, I wouldn’t be any better off with Windows 11 either.

I use Rustdesk and remote into my work PC. The lag is horrible and my windows key and alt keys don’t translate into the remote desktop.

Same PC running win 11 is buttery smooth.

I’m using Fedora KDE, and for the first time in my life, an upgrade (42 to 43) completely borked the system, in a way that I couldn’t boot to anything else other than a kernel panic.

I had to boot up a live USB, mount and chroot into the old system, and manually fix each duplicated / corrupted package. And it still caused every now and then some weird issue with dnf, so in the end I just reinstalled the entire OS.

I feel like updates “offered” via a nice and convenient gui shouldn’t really do this out of nowhere - and I wasn’t the only one to report this in the past half year.

I can’t cross play on Ghost of Tsushima.

I can’t get my MT7927 wifi chip to work

I still have issues with Snap… But I switched to an Arch distro to fix that problem

I don’t like that I get zero feedback when typing in my boot-time decryption password. Like, I can’t even tell if my keyboard is even working. Did I press Enter or am I wasting my time staring at the prompt: “enter password for drive whatever (random guid)”.

I’ve literally sat there with my keyboard not even plugged in, not realizing it wasn’t dong anything because there’s no feedback. Like, you cant even show some asterisks? Or maybe “attempting decryption” after I press Enter, or anything? The only feedback is: it will either boot or say “invalid password” eventually.

It’s a minor frustration, but it’s every day that it bugs me.

(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. LUKS2 or whatever, using the built-in encryption when I first installed it on my laptop.)

I have a pair of Bluetooth earbuds that I sometimes use with my laptop. The actual BT connection goes smoothly in the KDE ui, but they don’t show up as an audio device until I restart the audio service in the terminal.

Fingerprint reader: that thing looks at me every day, obscenely suggesting I boot up Windows instead of Linux so I can stroke it gently and login conveniently.

Oh, also battery life. Windows always has managed to extract more uptime from a single charge in my laptop.