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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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.
With Linux itself or with the broader realm of ‘Linux software’?
By itself, Linux is a fantastic family of operating systems. Has never failed me and probably never will. At least not until I care enough about differences in userland handling in Linux vs FreeBSD, for instance. And even then, I might just switch out of preference, and not because one or the other disappointed me.
As for broader Linux software, or GNU software, or just FOSS in general - by far the biggest potential issue is probably systemd, and it’s still meaningless for the vast majority of users. Other than that, my personal biggest issue was Hyprland breaking completely after updating. But it’s not a super major issue, because I can just use Plasma instead.
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?
Nah I’m alright.
Is it perfect? No. It does have bugs and issues which can be hard to track down. But it is free, respects my privacy, respects my choices, doesn’t use dark patterns, doesn’t contain ads, has lots of options to configure it, it’s super fast… so I love 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.
Just a little bit with the direction of GTK and Gnome. Yes, I’m still salty about that. I miss GTK2 and Gnome 2 where everything could be customized and there were thousands of different themes. Of course, I switched to MATE and I’m still using it, but all my favourite GTK2 themes eventually stopped working and now my desktop looks very generic, like all the others.
Again, I know I’m free to be nostalgic as I want and install any project that wants to try to revive or keep GTK2 alive. There’s apparently a few. But I’m just a bit disappointed that it went this way. I switched to Linux more than 25 years ago because I could customize it to look like I wanted, and the more time passes, the more those features are getting hidden or removed and now everything looks the same.
When Pulseaudio and Wayland were still kind of rough I migrated to Macs for like 5 years.
The failure to properly protect against file access between programs is kind of disappointing. Flatpak has made great progress here, but it isn’t quite universal.
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.
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.
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 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”
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.
The worst annoyances of Linux are nothing compared to basic use of Windows or MacOS.
No not really. Just people.
I find Linux to be very bad at recovering from freezing. If something freezes on linux I almost always need to shut the entire PC down or go into TTY to kill the app. I expected it to be way more sturdy.
Is it your display driver that’s freezing? I’ve never had issues with one thing freezing the PC. The only time I’ve had it seem like that was the case was when it was the nVidia drivers that were having issues. But, that situation is much better than on Windows because I was able to SSH into the machine and everything seemed normal over an SSH connection. It meant I could shut things down gracefully and then eventually do a clean reboot. Meanwhile, the screen still looked as if the computer was locked up.
Not sure whats freezing. I think its KDE plasma that freezes then everything dies.
Hmm, yeah, if it is the desktop environment that’s having issues, that could be hard to recover from. I’ve never had that happen, or even heard of it happening. Maybe try out Gnome? Or try reinstalling? it doesn’t sound like a normal problem, and if it’s not a driver issue it could be just reinstalling will be enough to get things working.
Its not common enough for me to worry. Most versions are perfect sometimes i update and the new version is bad but after the next version its fixed and if next version is far away or its to bad i roll back.
I am deeply disappointed in the Android flavor of Linux. 17 years of development, and your phone still does not have a terminal app built into the OS.
Also lack of cron is extremely limiting
It does have one built in, you just have to enable it in developer settings
Available only on select Pixel phones, and the virtualization API that makes it possible is available only to preinstalled system apps.
So no, you cannot install Ubuntu image onto your Samsung phone, you specifically need to buy the newest Pixel.
You can use termux and some other thing to run Ubuntu on a Samsung, it’s just not built in Iirc Samsung has some Linux thing with dex
Yeah I can, but soon I won’t, because Google will block all apps not installed from Play Store, and Termux cannot be compiled for new Android versions because of Android ‘security’
It can absolutely be compiled, and you can install it but you either have to use adb or wait 24 hours
Isn’t the 24 hour wait a one-time thing anyway? Or did they change that?
I thought it was per apk, but I could be wrong
I mean, yes it can, but installing any packages won’t work. Every binary that you wish to run on Android 10 or higher must be included inside the app, so
aptnaturally fails, and compiling your code inside Termux will also fail.
