this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100

Thought I'd create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people's pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.

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[–] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Honestly right now there's no way to use 90% of the industry standard audio plugins and most popular DAWs on Linux. FL Studio and Ableton do work on Linux but very unstable and as long as they're not stable you can kinda skip the latency talk, because stability is quintessential. You are bound to native plugins and as long as alternatives are way harder to use and take longer to learn configure, there's a massive overhead, not even talking about the ones that genuinely do not work even with wine and or winetricks, bottle, etc..

The same goes for video and photo editing as well as post effects. Although I have to admit you genuinely have more options and some setups even though not much more stable to technically work already.

Games are also annoying but I just don't play valorant or battlefield 6 or any other games that are kind of incompatible by design, so if that was the only thing I could manage.

And lastly (but everyone knows), office compatibility is still an issue because sometimes I need to do something in Microsoft office to ensure it still works when I send it over.

Honestly the real deal breaker for me is the first paragraph. I currently mix & master a band and produce music by myself, with friends and do small audio jobs for other people. Gimme an environment I don't have to pour another decade into and I'll switch. In it's current state I will not place a bet that if I give it my all things will still work when I need them to and that's the bare minimum.

[–] kiol@discuss.online 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I find Reaper is great. And Bitwig works well as a replacement for Ableton.

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[–] skibidi@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

As someone with an Nvidia GPU on Wayland, unfortunately quite a few places.

Resuming from sleep requires power cycling the monitors.

Glitchy transparent artifacting down to the desktop if windows are overlapping next the task bar.

Widgets in the system tray (KDE Plasma - I have temperature readouts) disappear and reappear randomly, and sometimes switch which taskbar they live on.

VRR support is pretty bad, causing black screens when using full screen applications.

2D-heavy games are flooded with thousands of vulkan draw calls, leading to abysmal performance and massive current spikes (and therefore coil whine). This is mitigated per-game with dxvk settings - often removing the whine without improving performance.

HDR is .. technically available.

Overall I'm happy, but I cannot recommend this experience to anyone I know because it would drive them insane.

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[–] FierroG@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
  • A udev rule that won't work in my new distro (cachyos) for no apparent reason when it worked fine everywhere else

  • Obs using way too much cpu for no reason even in a clean setup at idle

  • Having to select what window will be captured to the obs canvas every time

  • Having to swap active audio outputs until volume stops being too low at every restart.

That's about all of it, I think.

[–] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

waking from sleep
like 75% of the time it just... didn't
tbh since turning sleep off i haven't really missed it at all, but weird that i had that issue consistently on multiple distros on different hardware

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[–] Nomad64@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have been using various Debian-flavored Linux variets for several years in both desktop and server.

Recently I got a System76 laptop for work because they are food quality, repairable, and mostly "just work". The main issue I have run into is Cisco Secure Client (formerly AnyConnect) simply breaks in Ubuntu/PoP. If I do get it to install by ignoring Cisco's shitty instructions, it either won't route traffic once connected or corrupt itself attempting to auto-update.

It is purely a Cisco issue because they don't put much effort into their Linux VPN software. Other VPNs not only work easily, but can also integrate into PoP Cosmic. Cisco and their restrictive nature just make the process impossible.

Heck, you can't even download their VPN software without a Cisco contract. So if my company doesn't provide the correct version or distro package, there is no way for me to get it. Since most people on the helpdesk don't know anything about Linux, they simply provide the generic Linux.tar.gz file instead of the DEB or RPM files.

I gave up and installed Windows on a second NVMe.

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[–] Boneses@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My bazzite PC in my living room stopped recognizing the Bluetooth built into my motherboard which is annoying but easily worked around with a USB Bluetooth dongle.

[–] Luffy879@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Turn off the power supply, wait a minute, turn back on

Its not a Linux Problem, happens with MBS in general

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[–] UntouchedWagons@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My desktop PC running Fedora 43 goes to sleep in a weird way. When I was running Windows and the computer went to sleep the power button would blink and I could wake the PC with my keyboard or mouse. On Fedora the power button doesn't blink (no big deal) and I can't wake the PC with my keyboard or mouse, only the power button works.

Another issue is if I have the option to turn the monitor off after a certain amount of time I cannot get it to wake from sleep. If I turn the monitor off and on there's no signal. If the monitor goes to sleep because the PC goes to sleep it's fine.

Something randomly causes Firefox to hoover up all my computer's RAM. I can tell my system is going to lock up because the fan on the CPU cooler ramps up. When Firefox finally sucks up all the RAM the entire desktop is unresponsive. I had to enable the system rescue keys and I sometimes have to manually trigger the OOM killer.

Raw photo editing on Linux sucks. I've tried DarkTable, RawTherapee and some other program and didn't like any of them. The UI is incredibly complex or blurry.

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[–] eagerbargain3@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Apps, always with apps, most app in ubuntu store are not the latest version, nor reviewed or crypto signed for safety. Then you still have to deal with RPM or Deb or flatpack ...

There is no good frontend for the clamav antivirus that is maintained! yes we may not need an antivirus but if you want one, you have to go command line. As an old ace developer, this is not an issue for me, but yeah at home I don't want to use that knowledge nor can recommend linux to newbies.

Maybe a easy to use frontend for docker app is missing (nono I use portainer) but something more easier like the defunct CasaOS for beginner to install decentralized apps is also something that could promote Linux a lot. Ubuntu could also hide docker app in its store, just telling users that they should not let their notebook or computer go to sleep if they install server app like immich or jellyfin

[–] planish@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

dist-upgrade must die.

I spent like three hours I didn't have the other day trying to bring a Debian Unstable system up to date, it decided to stop every few packages to tell me it failed because the t64 libraries conflict with the regular ones and nobody taught apt how to figure that shit out for me and install the right ones.

Even Ubuntu is like "oh hey there's a new release, you're available for three hours straight to, every two to fifty minutes, explain to a TUI dialog that you don't have an opinion, right? Oh also can you resolve this merge conflict on this config file we think you edited, but you didn't, by being shown the diff once and then opening nano?"

This is not an acceptable way for this to go.

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

Screen blanking, or rather screen blanking not functioning properly.

I have literally spent 9 months researching every possible angle and even going as far as buying some of those Edid Emulator passthroughs for each monitor to see if those helped. Tried disabling the Kscreen manager in KDE. Tried manually controlling it via CLI and DPMS. Tried different mice and keyboards to see if it was my inputs waking it up. Tried making sure all the monitors had their auto-select input option disabled. Nope, my monitors blank for a second or two and then unblank immediately. The issue is present in both X11 and Wayland.

I have had to jump through hoops to enable a screen saver in wayland. I have to turn my monitors off manually every night. It's really frustrating. It seems like a really simple thing, but it's like, literally all I want is consistent screen blanking and I have spent the better part of 9 months on and off trying to find a fucking solution to no avail. I still have no explanation for why they wake instantly, they don't seem to be triggered by anything on the system, based on the logs.

I even made a post asking for help regarding it here on Lemmy about six months ago. No luck.

It drives me up the wall because I'm actually really good at researching and finding solutions for problems I've run into online. This one mystifies and eludes me and while seeming minor I feel like is a genuine pain in my ass.

Related: Have an old laptop running a server OS with no GUI and have no ability to disable the monitor since technically there isn't any monitor rendering set up, so all commands to screen blank the monitor fail because there's technically no monitor to turn off according to the system.

[–] Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Had a problem like this a year ago, figured out it was because I was using display port. Some weird quirk of its protocol basically fubars it.

Switching to hdmi cables fixes the problem.

But HDMI cables have bigger issues so I just learned to deal with the problem.

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[–] doleo@lemmy.one 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I still have to use MSoffice for work :(

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[–] bless@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Mine is pretty ridiculous, but if solved the presentation would improve tenfold:

The booting process, specifically the different screens.

Screen 1: select boot Screen 2: some text Screen 3: brief logo Screen 4: black Screen 5: login Screen 6: black/splash Screen 7: desktop

Some of these could be consolidated.

I'm aware that this depends on the distro, but it still looks ugly

[–] mech@feddit.org 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I always set the timeout to 0 in /etc/default/grub, that gets rid of the first screen.
And with plymouth installed, add "quiet splash" to the kernel parameters in the same file, that improves the rest (although it's still not perfect).
Some distros have this set up out of the box. Ubuntu even compiled their own grub version to make booting look better (and Mint uses it too).

[–] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 months ago

Use quiet splash grub options or change bootloader?

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[–] underscores@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I'm not sure why but SDL wants to change to sdlcompat and this is a breaking change for another application I'm running and I don't know why this package change is needed when I just keep hitting no each time and everything works as expected

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[–] LazerDickMcCheese@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago (6 children)

As far as my novice knowledge understands, this isn't a fixable "issue". But I'd love to use Debian as my main OS for everything, but I know there's gonna be issues with Steam/GOG games and GPU drivers. My patience and tolerance with "daily drivers" is much lower than my servers, so as far as I know that pretty much limits me to Mint (which isn't as cool)

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[–] tyrant@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I thought of another gripe. Mint works great but the logo is horrible. Sorry to whatever graphic designer I just insulted. I literally jumped distros because I was sick of seeing it.

[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago

That default background is a horrible first impression too.

[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago

The only real thing that's consistently annoying for me is UI scaling on high-DPI displays. Between the DE, GTK, and QT all needing different settings that all act differently.

But I guess generally once you get it set it's mostly fine.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I started playing Warframe again recently, after a many years break (something like five years). There's an app that shows you the value of random rewards that open, so you know what to choose (WFInfo) I have not been able to get it to work. There's also Linux alternatives, one of which I've been messing with trying to get it to run, and the other is much more limited.

Other than this, I have no recent issues. I've been full-time Linux for like three years now, so I've got everything sorted, and I usually can get anything running that I need, even when people say it doesn't work.

Edit: for anyone who wants to help, I'm on Garuda (an Arch based distro). That probably won't matter, but who knows.

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[–] sunth1ef@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

My primary use case is for audio production. I love that my DAW is native (Bitwig Studio), it runs like a charm. I ran into a lot of issues implementing it with Wine and yabridge with the flatpak install to still use my windows only plugins (I have a large collection of really cool tools)

After building Bitwig in a distrobox with Wine and yabridge I was successful, almost all of my windows plugins work - some as smoothly as Windows, some with some wrinkles. A few of my favorites just dont work at all unfortunately, and after looking into this, its an issue with JUCE8 and wine - specifically,

full support for Direct2D feature level 1.3 in Wine.

I'm novice level with Linux and pretty advanced in Audio production, I'm hoping we can get some folks from the audio world together to contribute to wine to try to make this happen... I want me Aberrant DSP and Eventide plugins working properly!

Thankfully, many whose GUIs are broken can still be somewhat utilized due to Bitwig exposing plugin parameters in their own wrapper - I can tweak from there, but it's not ideal.

I'll continue to pressure developers to offer Linux native support as well, but so far its mostly crickets with a few noticing an uptick in requests and considering adding it...

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[–] Nugscree@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Fingerprint reader does not work as it does on other OS. You can log in, but the key ring stays locked causing programs in user space to break, so I always need to log in with my password before it works. The fingerprint prompt blocks input access so you can't type in the password and you have to wait for it to time out, also the prompt does not always appear. And the developers actively refuse to fix the not unlocking the keyring because it's "not secure".

Fingerprint scanners for both Windows and macOS, you can log in and it just works.

Second thing is the still broken bluetooth drivers on Debian based distro's where it randomly just fails. No such issues on Fedora (KDE) as of yet, but I use both.

[–] PeroBasta@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (10 children)

In my Linux mint I downgraded to playing only 1080p because 4k is very laggy and filled with artifacts.

I have a mini optiplex 7070 with 32GB of ram, Intel processor (not a powerful one).but in windows 11 I could play 4k content with no issue.

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[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The biggest problem for me right now is FreeCADs control scheme is atrocious. Trying to use it to do even basic shit takes forever because it's not intuitive at all. Even when I pick the option that's supposed to be closest to Fusion360 (which is what I'm used to). I shouldn't have to google how to select things because left clicking does nothing. The other stuff I've tried so far has been relatively painless but that app pisses me off so bad every time I touch it.

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[–] Xenny@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

On my specific setup (5700x3d, 5700xt) with the Vive gen 1 I can't get it to run VR nicely. There is huge performance hitches compared to Windows. Only VR is like this most my non VR games see performance gains across the board.

Also, steamvr takes prohibitively long to load and frequently crashes. Half-Life, Alyx can't get past a certain point in the game on Linux but runs past just fine on Windows. This feels like just a Linux driver issue. I've tried several distributions with the same problems.

[–] jaalu@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Peripherals...

• A document scanner with pretty great Windows software that has features that are not nearly as easy to do with FOSS Linux software (splitting documents, auto cropping and alignment, OCR, etc)

• A 3D printer that doesn't have Linux software, so I can't easily send prints to it from Linux

• A webcam that supports device-level configuration (zoom, cropping, etc) but doesn't have Linux software to control it

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[–] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

Mouse sharing, but I also failed it to set it up on my Mac.

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