
Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2020 edition - spekcular
https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html
======
nihil75
This list exaggerates many issues in an attempt to inflate the list.

It's totally bloated, full of baseless personal opinions.

A few examples:

\- "Nvidia open-source driver nouveau.." \- why include it if not to bloat the
list?

\- "Under Linux, setting multi-monitor configurations especially using
multiple GPUs running binary NVIDIA drivers can be a major PITA" \- Bollox.
Gnome/Mate Display-Manager does an excellent job. If you're still using X11
manual configs than what do you expect..

\- "Linux drivers are usually much worse (they require a lot of tinkering..)"
\- Broad statements are usually wrong. Especially this one based on an opinion
from the 90's.

\- "Resume after suspend in Linux is unstable and oftentimes doesn't work." \-
Bollox. Resume from Hybernate - maybe. But suspend works perfectly most of the
time.

\- "X.org is largely outdated" \- duh... the whole list on this topic is dated
issues resolved by WM.

\- "Adding custom monitor modelines in Linux is a major PITA." \- Is it? a one
line command? and how do you do it on Windows? oh you can't...

\- "Applications development is a major PITA" \- this is ridiculous.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
I use Linux every day. I love it. But I don't think your list reflects
reality.

> Bollox. Gnome/Mate Display-Manager does an excellent job. If you're still
> using X11 manual configs than what do you expect..

I have to go from multi-screen configuration to configuration because of my
job. I happen to try a lot of combinations of connectors, dongles, screen
brands/resolutions...

And no, this is really, really not solved. I have problems 1 time out of 3.

> "Linux drivers are usually much worse (they require a lot of tinkering..)"
> \- Broad statements are usually wrong. Especially this one based on an
> opinion from the 90's.

They are, here. For BT, Wifi, graphic cards and printers at least, I attest
that I most of the time have less features and/or stability using Libre
drivers.

Does it work well enough for day to day use? Certainly. Can I use my "scan"
button on my Epson laser? Absolutly not.

> "Resume after suspend in Linux is unstable and oftentimes doesn't work." \-
> Bollox. Resume from Hybernate - maybe. But suspend works perfectly most of
> the time.

Most the time is not enough for sometime like suspend. The whole idea is that
you _trust_ the computer to restore you work space the way it used to be. If
you can't, if sometime it may not boot, or disable the network card (common
problem), then it failed.

Can you imagine if VSCode would restore your file tabs, but only, most of the
time?

In fact, one of the first thing I do on a fresh install is to go the the
"close lid" settings, and disable suspend, because I'm afraid to lose state by
mistake.

> "X.org is largely outdated" \- duh... the whole list on this topic is dated
> issues resolved by WM.

X is largely outdated. That why we still have flickers when booting a linux
desktop, which means you will never ever make a Mac lover use Linux because
they will not trust it.

Yes, appearance matters.

> "Applications development is a major PITA" \- this is ridiculous.

If you talk about web or cli apps, yes. But desktop apps, no.

It IS harder to dev a desktop app for linux, because you have to support a
HUGE diversity of configurations: distros, versions, desktop managers. Want to
add a system tray icon ? Well, are you targetting Gnome 2, Gnome shell or
Unity? Want to make a package ? rpm, deb, snap, flatpack or appimage? Want to
use QT4? Not installable from the official repos in the last Ubuntu LTS.

Meanwhile, apps that worked in Windows XP often still works on Windows 10.

The alternative is to limit yourself to a weak % of users from something that
is already a niche.

I love Linux, but being in denial doesn't help getting it in better shape.

Not to mention this lists is tiny compared to the actual article.

~~~
fsflover
>Most the time is not enough for sometime like suspend. The whole idea is that
you _trust_ the computer to restore you work space the way it used to be. If
you can't, if sometime it may not boot, or disable the network card (common
problem), then it failed.

I do not undertand what you guys are talking about. It works flawlessly 100%
of the time on my Librem 15 and Lenovo T400 both in Debian and Qubes OS. Just
find proper harware to run GNU/Linux.

~~~
AsyncAwait
> Just find proper harware to run GNU/Linux.

I suspect this is indeed the root of the problem; people tend to just pick any
hardware first and then try to run Linux on it, whereas in reality they should
pick hardware to run Linux on.

They seem to get this when it comes to Mac, but not Linux for some reason.

~~~
elcomet
> They seem to get this when it comes to Mac, but not Linux for some reason

The reason seems pretty obvious.

~~~
AsyncAwait
Care to elaborate?

~~~
elcomet
Sorry, I thought your post was sarcasm.

Well, you have literally no choice for macOs supported hardware. Only apple
devices.

Whereas for Linux, you can in theory buy any laptop (there is no official list
of supported laptops).

So it's not that they get it for Mac, it's just the lack of choice.

~~~
AsyncAwait
But that's precisely my point.

You don't _really_ have a choice of just any random hardware anywhere, not on
Linux, not on macOS, not even Windows.

The only difference is that most BestBuy laptops come preinstalled with
Windows, so of course they're going to support Windows. The support is often
not excellent either, but in Windows world that's somehow just dismissed as
expected or something.

Also, try picking a TALOS II POWER9 workstation and installing Windows on it.
Would not go well.

My point being, people should buy Linux-supported hardware, preferably from a
reputable Linux-friendly vendor, which would spare them a lot of trouble.

They're already doing this with macOS and they're doing it with Windows too,
just not realizing it because that's what comes with the majority of PCs.

~~~
elcomet
My point is that no-one is doing it _on purpose_ for Mac or windows. They
either have no choice (for Mac) or it comes by default (for windows).

What you're asking is for people to do it on purpose, which is harder, and
requires a lot of thoughts into it, reading about hardware vendors, ..

~~~
AsyncAwait
I agree it's harder, but my opinion is that at this point we should market
Linux on the desktop as being a very specific thing requiring hardware
explicitly for that purpose and should try to work with vendors to make it an
option for more hardware, rather than trying to support everything and it not
being the best experience as a result.

~~~
elcomet
Yeah, I agree with that.

------
jstanley
> Numerous people report that Broadcom and Realtek network adapters are barely
> usable or outright unusable under Linux.

This links to a 5-year-old thread on reddit.

I have personally used both Broadcom and Realtek wifi cards in Linux and while
they used to suck 10 years ago (i.e. go to a different computer, find the
firmware blob you need, stick it on a USB stick and then come back to the
computer you're trying to use and try to work out how to load the firmware
blob), I don't recall recently having to do anything to get them to work. They
just work straight away in the Ubuntu installer and you can select your
network and connect, and this has been the case for several years. I'd say
more than 5, but the reddit thread suggests otherwise.

> X.org is largely outdated, unsuitable and even very much insecure for modern
> PCs and applications.

I don't have any comment to add to this, other than that the word "modern"
links to a slashdot thread from 2012. Are we sure this article is 2020
edition?

> Web fonts under Linux often look horrible in old distros.

2 of the linked pages here have dates of 2013 and 2014, the 3rd link is to a
Google+ page which no longer exists because Google+ no longer exists. And how
are problems in "old distros" a 2020 problem anyway?

> As much as Ubuntu might be commended they still distribute their downloaded
> ISO images via HTTP in 2020

Aha! Something about 2020. I went to ubuntu.com and tried to download the ISO
and it came over https. I tried 3 times and got a different mirror each time,
but each one was with https, so I do not understand the complaint. Maybe some
of the mirrors aren't https?

~~~
itvision
Inherent X.org issues have never been solved. Why does it matter what the date
of the linked article is?

------
lewiscollard
> All native Linux filesystems (except ext4) are case sensitive about
> filenames which utterly confuses most users. This wonderful peculiarity
> doesn't have any sensible rationale.

There is in fact a solid rationale behind this.

> No polish, no consistency and no HIG adherence (even KDE developers admit
> it).

See also: every operating system. It's unfair to pick on Linux for this since
pretty much every Windows and Mac program seems to want to invent its widgets
& unique behaviours, and this has been the case since at least the late 1990s
when I got into computers.

~~~
jstanley
Lol, I missed that. Is the article claiming that ext4 is _not_ case-sensitive?

~~~
lewiscollard
The author may be thinking of this work from last year:
[https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/](https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/) I do not
know if this has since been merged.

------
syllogism
There are so many legit problems to be sad about, but he ruins the list by
bloating it with like 20-30% crap/bullshit entries. Why? Would be so much
better and more productive if he kept it tight.

He actually doesn't even have the issue that got me the most when I switched
back from OSX (I hadn't been using Linux on laptops).

libinput is developed by one guy, so instead of real usability testing, he
just sort of plays around locally and asks a few friends to record inputs so
he can analyse them. This results in really terrible defaults for the trackpad
acceleration and clicking, that I could only override with xinput commands
that referenced the device IDs, but the device IDs would often change on
reboot.

~~~
ornornor
You might have already solved that since then, but you can also add config
files to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-mytrackpad.conf and that will set the
properties you want for libinput devices at startup. Works on my xubuntu so I
can disable the trackpad and use only the track point with custom acceleration
and sensitivity values.

~~~
kasabali
I'm not the parent but when I go through the trouble of creating a custom
config I go one step further and switch to using synaptics driver instead of
libinput.

------
vkazanov
Like 80% of the issue go away if you buy a machine with linux preinstalled.
All the hardware issues are solved, all things just work. And there choice
too: Dell, tuxedo, system76 and others

I have bought like 4 Dell xps 13 developer edition machines so far, never had
any problems.

Why do ppl expect software to work on random crap windows-only machines?!
There problems that can only be solved by vendor good will.

At least do you homework and check if your favourite distro supports the
hardware you buy. Arch has a wonderful hardware-related wiki, ubuntu certifies
machines, etc...

~~~
pjmlp
It kind of helps until you get a Linux update and a perfectly working driver
gets replaced by some WIP alternative in name of FOSS.

Had that experience with an Asus laptop sold with Ubuntu LTS.

~~~
vetinari
That's the risk when the perfectly working driver is binary only and the
original vendor has just thrown it over the wall, with no intent of
maintenance.

Speaking of ASUS, I've yet to buy something from them that doesn't have some
quirk. The last thing I bought from them, a GPU, had never updated it's
firmware, despite AMD releasing it to OEMs and other OEMs releasing it to
their customers. Unlike your laptop, my GPU at works with the FOSS driver, its
just limited while UEFI is running.

------
laumars
> _No high level, stable, sane (truly forward and backward compatible) and
> standardized API for developing GUI applications (like core Win32 API - most
> Windows 95 applications still run fine in Windows 10 - that 's 24 years of
> binary compatibility). Both GTK and Qt (incompatible GTK versions 1, 2, 3, 4
> and incompatible Qt versions 4, 5, 6 just for the last decade) don't strive
> to be backwards compatible._

So just install the previous version of those toolkits with the application
(or use your package manager which will do that for you).

Windows gets around this by installing basically everything in the base
install and that causes the OS footprint to be grossly inflated. Where as
Apple basically stick their middle finger to backwards compatibility and tell
devs they have to update their applications.

Personally I think Linux has the right approach here: being new features but
allow old libraries to be installed _when_ required.

~~~
sz4kerto
Try and run an app relying on Qt4 on the most recent Ubuntu. It's a total
PITA. You'd need to compile Qt4 yourself.

(Not joking.)

~~~
AsyncAwait
Last time I used Ubuntu, there were PPAs for this, but Qt 4 is outdated and
does not even support HDPI, coming from a Mac user it is rich, because macOS
software tends to support at most 2 releases of macOS at any given time.

------
pdimitar
I wonder if a semi-centralised -- and hopefully curated -- list of Linux-
approved hardware can be maintained somewhere?

Even though I am generally sceptical towards desktop Linux due to a multitude
or really weird issues some people report, I also know that it works quite
rock-solidly for much more others. So I'd say nowadays "vet your hardware
before investing in a Linux station" is a fair and balanced advice --
especially in a world where most hardware vendors just make a half-done
Windows driver and peace out.

Furthermore, I wonder if something can be built on top of such a curated list
of approved Linux hardware like, say, troubleshooting tips for multi-monitor
setups, or multi-sound-card setups, or general weirdnesses that occasionally
happen only to some?

At this point I believe it's really fair for the Linux community to give up on
most of the hardware. But IMO if Linux is to have some mindshare of the
desktop segment it should have a curated list of approved hardware and tidbits
for addressing rare issues and improving the general quality of life.

(And let's not forget X11's scandalous ability to allow every program to
capture keystrokes. This _has_ to be addressed in an ergonomic matter one day.
Qubes is quite nice and all but it's a pain to setup. Somebody has to wrap
this stuff in the usual brainless Next->Next->Next GUI wizards sometime.)

~~~
nabla9
There is

For Ubuntu see:
[https://certification.ubuntu.com/](https://certification.ubuntu.com/)

------
fierarul
Oh, this paragraph is good, especially in light of the Corona impact on OSS
too:

> Money, enthusiasm, motivation and responsibility: I predicted years ago that
> FOSS developers would start drifting away from the platform as FOSS is no
> longer a playground, it requires substantial effort and time, i.e. the fun
> is over, developers want real money to get the really hard work done. FOSS
> development, which lacks financial backing, shows its fatigue and
> disillusionment. The FOSS platform after all requires financially motivated
> developers as underfunded projects start to wane and critical bugs stay open
> for years. One could say "Good riddance", but the problem is that oftentimes
> those dying projects have no alternatives or similarly-featured successors.

------
ianbooker
You can compile such a list for any operating system in 2020.

Recently I evaluated three randomly selected HDMI capture devices, Ubuntu
supported each of them out of the box, while Windows and MacOs struggled. With
the printer in our office its the other way around. The printer at home is
old, so its just Linux supported. And so on..

------
heinrichhartman
Tangent: What are people using for thin clients / terminals? E.g. stuff that
is deployed at e.g. airport displays for showing connections flights or self
service cash-registers?

Linux seems like the obvious choice as a base OS. However, running X+Firefox
ontop of it seemed too clunky (slow) and unrelieable to me?

\- How do I make sure you recover from crashes reliably?

\- How do you secure the inputs, to avoid escapes from the application?

~~~
SyneRyder
Considering the times I've seen airport connecting flight displays replaced
with bluescreen "Your Windows 7 PC is out of support", shopping mall digital
ad displays showing that a QuickTime 7 & iTunes patch is available, or the
self-service grocery shopping terminals displaying a Windows XP style
"Ethernet cable is unplugged" notification, I'd guess not as much thought is
going into those kinds of concerns as we might like.

I think I have heard of some retail chain stores using FreeDOS with a
dedicated keyboard-driven accounting package to run the business, though. (In
this case I'm thinking of one of the larger Luxottica owned optometry chains.)

------
oliwarner
The _only_ problem with desktop Linux these days is there still not being more
companies throwing some effort in.

Adobe and Microsoft could make serious money here. Their tooling aren't just
standards, they're —in many ways— the best available tools, that Linux does
not have viable solutions for. Clawing our way along with alternatives, and
Wine and VMs isn't sustainable. Not forever. We just need a couple of big
names to start things going. But it perpetually never happens. Maybe 2021. I'm
bizarrely optimistic about Microsoft.

Once software support comes, and people can carry on doing their work, the
weight of demand forces hardware support for oddball wifi chips, RGB mice,
whatever. I can buy another mouse today, I _need_ Illustrator and Photoshop
for professional interop.

As for TFA, everybody derives their annoyances from different places. Desktop
Linux isn't perfect, but it's the best I've got, by some distance, for my
workloads.

------
roenxi
There is a flavour here that although the individual points are subsystem
specific the overall view is very much the Linux Desktop as a whole.

The Wayland commentary is especially interesting and solidifies my view that
Wayland is never going to replace X, and quite possibly this is intentional on
the part of the Wayland devs. Reading through the X Server and Wayland
headings, some of those issues sound so structural that the most viable long
term path might be containerised mini-displays under some as yet unpublicised
meta-manager that rethinks how applications play with together to manage
keyboard and mouse.

The Wayland experiment remains a source of great entertainment. The devs are
doing amazing work lightening the dependence of the Linux ecosystem on X11.

------
djhworld
I installed Fedora on my Macbook Pro 2015 a few weeks ago to try it out,
mainly because of one killer app - the i3 window manager.

It's been a blast, albeit not without some frustrations.

The good

\- WiFi worked out of the box

\- i3 is awesome

\- battery life seems fine

The bad/annoying

\- took me a while to get a reliable way of setting sufficient Xrandr settings
to allow me to extend my desktop onto a 2nd monitor.

\- took me a while to find out the right commands to use to switch keyboard
layouts when I plug in an external keyboard.

\- I've seen suspend not work properly a few times when closing the laptop lid

\- have to get used to new keyboard shortcuts for copy&paste and other things,
this is more of a problem with switching from OSX -> Linux rather than a fault
of Linux

\- firefox performance is really really bad. like horribly slow switching
tabs, and all the items on a website seem to load in really slowly, especially
on resource hungry websites (e.g. YouTube). I've tried installing nightly,
enabling webrender etc, but it's just been dogshit slow. In comparison, Chrome
feels lightning fast so sadly, I've had to switch.

\- hardware video decoding in web browsers doesn't seem to be supported? i've
been reading around, apparently there's a patched version of chromium out
there that supposedly supports it - but it doesn't like that's ever going to
go mainstream. I was shocked loading a video and seeing my CPU fan maxing out!

I'd imagine the xrandr/keyboard issues are mostly because of the manual nature
of i3wm, over say Gnome where it might be more fluid

The depressing

At work I have a 2019 MBP which won't support linux out of the box (well - I'd
imagine it boots, but it seems like there are horrible audio/wifi/input issues
and problems with the T2 chip) and I really want to use i3wm at work. I'm
tempted to get a VM going as a substitute...

~~~
markosaric
Have you tried using SwayWM? It's compatible with your existing i3
configuration but uses Wayland as the display protocol so some of your issues
could be solved by that switch (Firefox performance, hardware video decoding,
multiple monitors...).

See [https://fedoramagazine.org/setting-up-the-sway-window-
manage...](https://fedoramagazine.org/setting-up-the-sway-window-manager-on-
fedora/)

And [https://fedoramagazine.org/how-to-setup-multiple-monitors-
in...](https://fedoramagazine.org/how-to-setup-multiple-monitors-in-sway/)

------
viraptor
Some of those points seem taken a bit too far. For example:

> When people purchase a Windows PC do they research anything? No, they
> rightly assume everything will work out of the box right from the get-go.

That's how I ended up with an Epson printer which works just fine with macos
and Linux, but not with windows 10.

I also really enjoy the fact that printer drivers in Linux have no extra
features. They normally support printing from a chosen tray with chosen
colours and dpi. That's all I want from a driver. I hate every single value-
add option stuffed into windows drivers.

------
tda
I just want to say that after upgrading to 20.04 from 19.10 something went
wrong so I clean installed it. Then my Intel WiFi stopped working (even though
the Bluetooth did work) and my multi monitor setup kept getting screwed up on
reboot where a mousclick on the left screen would register on the right
screen. I tried to file bug reports with canonical but the process seemed so
convoluted I just gave up and am back to Windows and MacOS again. Maybe I'll
try again in a few months, maybe not. WSL2 is working pretty well for me

~~~
neurostimulant
Ubuntu 20.04 seem to get a lot of heat compared to previous LTS releases. IIRC
18.04 release was relatively uneventful (in a good way).

------
eql5
Get yourself a Tuxedo and be happy for the rest of your days:
[https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en](https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en)

~~~
seqizz
Until you need support, according to reviews:
[https://www.trustpilot.com/review/tuxedocomputers.com](https://www.trustpilot.com/review/tuxedocomputers.com)

~~~
eql5
Support was excellent in my case. They responded quickly, and solved my issue
competently.

I agree that not all of their laptops are top quality, but mine is just
perfect for me, couldn't be more satisfied.

------
guggle
I used to develop on a macbook. Then I changed employer and consequently,
changed laptop too. I won't name brand and model but it was running ubuntu out
of the box with the following problems:

\- couldn't suspend/resume properly when folded

\- very low battery life

\- overheat, a lot, and of course noisy fans then

\- couldn't make use of all the ports of the dock

I actually liked the OS (eventually I switched to Debian/XFCE though), but
should I be the one to pay for this, I would be pretty pissed off. We're
talking about a 2500€ machine here.

------
yyyk
This list is too sprawling and too detailed. If the author used the same
format he used for the summary or for his summary of Windows issues, and then
put the detailed list under the summary, it would be far more useful.

Most Linux problems on the Desktop aren't the result of individual
bugs/issues, but of structural problems, and highlighting these problems first
would be much more accessible and useful than the bug reports.

~~~
itvision
> If the author used the same format he used for the summary or for his
> summary of Windows issues

But there is one:

[https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...](https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html#Summary)

~~~
yyyk
I noticed that (that's the "Summary" I mentioned).

But reading it after the very long text about individual bugs is much less
useful. Most position/research papers put the executive summary/abstract
_first_ with good reason - that helps the paper be better received. Maybe even
organizing the lists as collapsible items could help the presentation be
better* .

As for the summary list, it too can benefit from a more probing look which
tries to look at the issue more deeply, much more than listing individual
issues. For example, ABIs and APIs are often unstable on purpose, especially
on the kernel. Linus has long arguments supporting the unstable model and some
Free software proponents like that this encourages GPL code.

Do we want the Windows model? Maybe a shim could supply that? Or maybe we
shouldn't have even that due to Free software reasons? (RMS tried that which
gcc and it was one of the reasons that led to LLVM gaining traction). Or
development speed?

* That doesn't require JavaScript. One could use HTML5's simple summary/detail elements.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/details)

There are css hacks which can achieve the same result on HTML4, but they are
much more complicated and I suspect a list on Linux issues shouldn't care
about supporting Internet Explorer.

~~~
itvision
The article was meant to be read in full.

Yeah, the modern generation of people is mostly capable of consuming 140/280
chars tweets and has severe issues with the attention span but if you're wanna
get deep into it, you'll read it all. Or just dismiss everything because you
didn't like how the article is organized - that'll work as well, as it has for
the past 30 years which means Linux on the desktop will remain a hobby OS for
geeks.

~~~
yyyk
Your tone is unwarranted.

I did not dismiss anything. Nor did I ask you to remove any information. I
merely wished you'd organize it in a better way.

The better way IMHO is to emphasize the structural
economical/sociological/technical reasons. Why? Because even fixing all the
small technical bugs in that long list would help only for a little while.

For example, if Linux Desktop somehow got to magically all items fixed case,
it is way underfunded. So it will either stagnate in place or try to innovate
and introduce new bugs... On the other hand, find a workable revenue model,
and then devs would be paid to fix bugs, and that would be sustainable.

Another example, fixing current NVidia incompatibilities would help, but the
unstable Linux ABI/API would remain, and that would cause issues in the future
with any other future NVidia or other manufacturer which balk at putting their
code under OSS. This issue needs a decision which balances all the competing
interests.

~~~
itvision
> Why? Because even fixing all the small technical bugs in that long list
> would help only for a little while.

Totally agree with that.

> For example, if Linux Desktop somehow got to magically all items fixed case,
> it is way underfunded.

Kinda disagree with "the underfunded" part. The biggest issue with Linux is
that it's not a platform like Windows, Android, iOS, etc. All of them feature

1) Rich stable APIs/ABIs, including for device drivers 2) Strong backward and
forward compatibility 3) Strong cohesion between system components (e.g.
kernel and userspace) 4) Excellent support for hardware 5) Universal packaging
mechanism (the same 'exe' can be installed on any supported version of
Windows/MS-DOS/OS/2, the same APK can be installed on any supported version of
Android)

(See the Solving Linux part of the article).

There's just one distro which ticks almost all the checkboxes and that's RHEL
and it's not exactly meant to be used on the desktop. Besides its hardware
support leaves a lot to be desired as RedHat sticks to the same kernel release
for all the support period (10 years or something) and regularly backports
only certain drivers from mainline.

If someone created a Linux platform, even with the same number of bugs/missing
features that we already have and it would still be a hundred times more
successful than Linux has ever been.

------
harha
I think linux works reasonably well on the desktop as long as you stick to the
standard settings, i.e., running only linux, accepting the way things were
set, not worrying too much about loud fans, etc.

The big issue I have is the mixed quality of documentation for "normal users"
(those between just accepting everything on the one side and going through all
man pages on the other), which always gives me an uneasy feeling that I didn't
quite set something up the right way and that it could lead to issues
somewhere along the way.

While it would be nice to have, I don't necessarily need a graphical/terminal
configuration tool (though it would be nice when I'm setting up things that I
only set up once and don't want to go through the trouble understanding how it
works, e.g. wifi). What I really need is a good wiki that is up-to-date and
useful posts on stack exchange.

Now this is where I run into problems: Arch for instance has a great wiki, but
many posts, articles, etc. are for Ubuntu, which doesn't have a very useful
wiki.

~~~
swiley
The man pages are the documentation for users?

I would say stay away from gnome if your fans are running all the time, it’s a
terrible DE and you don’t need it. Just install eg fvwm or xfce (or lxde or
whatever you like.)

>I only set up once and don't want to go through the trouble understanding how
it works, e.g. wifi)

That’s going to cause issues no matter which OS you run. Just read the
wpa_supplicant man page (or the appropriate documentation if your distro uses
something else and you don’t want to change it.) You can skim for just the
things you need and grab an example config, it’s not a hard tool to use and it
only takes a couple minutes. After you do this you won’t be surprised when it
breaks in a way you don’t understand.

------
blickentwapft
The biggest most obvious slap you in the face problem with the Ubuntu desktop
is cut and paste.

This is the key thing a desktop should get right but it’s so wrong.

It uses different keys to both OS X and windows, whereas it really should
seamlessly offer both key combinations. And it’s inconsistent between
applications.

We’re so far down the Linux desktop path for cut and paste to be this broken.

~~~
panpanna
> It uses different keys to both OS X and Windows

Why should this be a problem? You are on a different system, learn to use it
the way it was intended.

Ctrl-C has a different meaning in Unix. It has been so before windows and Macs
existed.

~~~
blickentwapft
This is so precisely a representation of Unix think, and why Linux has such a
problem competing as a desktop.

------
mnm1
> Under some circumstances the system or X.org's GUI may become very slow and
> unresponsive due to various problems with video acceleration or lack of it
> and also due to notorious bug 12309

Anyone know what he's talking about. It sounds a lot like the issue I was
experiencing, but the ticket is not accessible, even when logging in. Would
love to read the details. The constant, sometimes multi-minute stutters where
the system became unresponsive is one of the main reasons I stopped using it
last time. Every few years, I give it a shot, love it, and then something like
this (or external displays no longer working 90% of the time) that just makes
me give up. I've never had an install run for more than about six months
without something catastrophic happening that requires a complete reinstall /
restore from backup, usually due to some desktop environment issue preventing
it from loading/displaying.

------
pizza234
I take the chance to report that, embarrassingly, Bluetooth is broken by
default on Ubuntu, and has been since 18.04, due to wrong settings in the
Pulseaudio configuration file.

This has been reported against 18.04, and has been ignored.

What are users going to think when they try such a basic functionality?

~~~
hawski
I have lots of bad experiences with Bluetooth. On Moto G1, Nexus 5x, Pixel 1,
Aquaris X, Dell laptop with recent Windows 10, ARM Chromebook, x86 Chromebook,
Ubuntu. While connecting between those devices, connecting to a Jabra headset,
Lenco soundbar, noname mobile speaker, OneAudio headset, Renault Laguna audio
system. Issues varying between: can't see any device at all; can't see the
device I'm trying to connect to; can't connect; can connect, but the device
freezes and needs a restart; can connect, but the sound still comes out of an
internal speaker; can connect everything works, but then it stops working and
above apply; everything works, but have to pair every time.

It's dreadful everywhere. I think I had somewhat better experience with a
Macbook, but at this stage I use bluetooth as little as possible, so can't
really say.

Sorry, I guess I'm just venting...

~~~
yrro
This is a generalization, but these devices are very likely only tested until
they barely work on Windows and Mac OS. And if they have to choose between a
quick fix that makes it work on those two, and implementing the spec properly,
they'll pick the first option. So it's on Linux to discover and work around
all the brokenness (in the bluetooth host device as well as the speakers,
phones, peripherals, etc...)

------
bengalister
I have to agree with the post that explains areas of improvement.

I have been an ArchLinux/Gnome user for 1.5 years on my home laptop but I am
pondering switching back to Windows since WSL2 support. I am currently writing
this message from Windows10 partition. Windows10 has also its painpoints like
Telemetry, default apps that I don't want, not following Unix philosophy
(configuration with simple text files) and ability to customize but it is
improving also.

For me the remaining painpoints for Linux on the desktop even if it improved a
lot over the years are:

* bluetooth/pulseaudio not snappy and reliable. Sometimes my bluetooth headset connects instantly, sometimes it takes 30s to 1mn, sometimes it never connects automatically and I have to do it manually. I did not have that issue on Mac OS X/W10. Also I have yet not figured out why an audio profile is added with gnome bluetooth but not when I use sway as desktop environment

* resume from suspend reliably. Sometimes my network connectivity is broken after resume and cannot be recovered easily. I need to reboot.

* Graphic drivers support even if not running Nvidia simplifies it a little bit. For Intel IGpu, it is ok but it seems still less performant than on Windows/Mac

* lack of full featured drivers and software for some hardware especially for printers, scanners or fingerprint readers, the available ones lack proprietary features but it is obviously not Linux's fault.

* lack of default video acceleration for browsers. Even if it is now possible with Firefox on Wayland with some configuration and Chromium but with community managed VAAPI support

* Multiple screen and especially switching from Hidpi and low dpi. It is a really mess here due to different GUI toolkits being used and lack of standard. GTK has its own way, you can do with X or Wayland fractional (but blurry) scaling too. For instance what I do now on Gnome wayland is not doing any fractional (blurry) scaling but text scaling of 1.22 by default and using systemd udev revert to 1.0 when I plug my external display...

as for Gnome I like it, I find it to be a MacOS GUI clone with a lack of
customization that can be circumvented with extensions except for performance
(still laggy even if it improved also a lot).

~~~
arronax
> bluetooth/pulseaudio not snappy and reliable

Without patching of pulseaudio, microphone on a bluetooth headset doesn't work
anyway. I'd take not snappy but working any day, really. Maybe in Pulseaudio
14 this will get resolved, there are a couple of proposals/drafts already.

------
me551ah
It doesn't have to be Windows or Linux, it can be Windows and Linux. I just
use Arch Linux on my Windows machine using WSL 2. Arch is my favourite linux
distro with a really brilliant package manager and because of it being
bleeding edge. By running it inside of WSL2, I don't have to bother much about
stability since it's running inside Windows. But at the same time I get a full
blown proper linux distro for my development work.

~~~
ubercow13
And similarly, Windows runs incredibly well under QEMU if you want to do it
that way around, though that kind of setup really requires a second GPU to be
performant so is better suited to desktops.

------
BearOso
> Linux has a 255 bytes limitation for file names (this translates to just 63
> four-byte characters in UTF-8) - not a great deal but copying or using files
> or directories with long names from your Windows PC can become a serious
> challenge.

Most file systems on Linux like ext4 have a 255 byte file name limit. There’s
no limit in the kernel.

I think Windows’ effective 260-char total path limit is worse.

~~~
itvision
> Windows’ effective 260-char total path limit

was lifted a few years ago.

------
speedgoose
It still hurt me a bit to say it, but I have a really smooth experience with
Linux on Windows 10 thanks to WSL2, the new Windows terminal, and the
integration with VS Code. I use Linux a lot on desktop through windows and I
have almost none of the issues listed there. Windows has other issues but not
as annoying or time consuming to fix for me.

------
stragies
It's 2020, and I still have to manually enable Wifi Mesh Networking (802.11s)
and recompile in Debian, even Buster. But that is a minor inconvenience, and
takes 5 minutes. I do that for some other package too, for some niche options,
but it's very easy to do in Debian.

------
jokoon
Money and corporate influence and culture is a big cause of most of those
problems.

If Linus Torvalds had been born american (just discovered he is naturalized
american since 2010
[https://lwn.net/Articles/404729/](https://lwn.net/Articles/404729/) ), I'm
pretty certain Linux would be quite a different beast today.

Generally, computing works best when the software dictates the homogeneity of
hardware, something Microsoft managed to do. Microsoft is able to influence
the hardware industry, which is why windows is a success.

I'm also suspecting microsoft got some kind of relationship with hardware
vendors, to help them write drivers etc.

If you look at android, it's exactly the same scenario: the hardware follows
the software, not the other way around.

Hardware will always be the problem, especially as long as hardware tools are
also proprietary, and generally all you need to do is follow how the US
maintains its grip on the industry.

------
m4r35n357
My desktop is a Raspberry Pi, you insensitive clod!

------
imedadel
Considering Microsoft's recent investments in OSS, it would be awesome to see
a Linux distro developed and/or funded by Microsoft that makes the adoption of
Linux an easier process.

~~~
yellowapple
The meme from way back when was that openSUSE was basically "Microsoft Linux",
but I don't know what triggered that (maybe YaST making AD domain membership
relatively painless?).

------
caro_douglos
I don’t recommend Linux as a desktop anymore (free99 sold me for a while
though).

Still beats windows on older hardware..when it comes to minimal browser boxes
Linux is still the best.

~~~
pizza234
That's a bit throwing the baby with the bathwater. There is a significant
amount of people who use their machines in extremely simple ways, ie. web
browsing. Desktop Linux is perfectly fine for that.

~~~
Xolvixica
Unfortunately I have to disagree with even that. Firefox (the default browser
in most Linux distros) can't do hardware accelerated video, so you tend to get
tearing/stuttering or at the very least a higher CPU load when watching
YouTube for example, compared to say Windows, resulting in increased battery
consumption if a laptop or at the very least increase fan speeds.

I know it's being worked on with Firefox having acceleration worked on in
Wayland, but right now, if even the simplest and most common use-cases have
major downsides compared to Windows/OS X, it's hard to justify moving to a
worse experience. Windows rules with vendor support, that's just how it is.
I've grown tired of having to compromise.

~~~
ubercow13
AFAIK OSX hides from userland the support for VP9 decode acceleration present
in the Macbook's hardware, Youtube's primary codec these days, so now Firefox
supports VAAPI under Wayland it is already ahead of OSX/Macbooks in this
regard.

------
yellowapple
Most of the problems are valid, but some of them are... very much not, and
haven't been for years (and others are "problems" but absolutely not "major"
by any stretch).

> NVIDIA Optimus technology which is used in most laptops often doesn't work
> well in Linux.

Then stop buying them. My laptop (Intel + AMD) works fine w/ Mesa, regardless
of which GPU I'm using (Intel iGPU by default, and AMD if I set DRI_PRIME=1
for a given application, e.g. in a game's launch options in Steam).

NVIDIA's terrible. This whole section of the article seems to only describe
issues with NVIDIA. If you buy hardware that's not shit, then lo and behold,
you'll have a better experience.

> Open source drivers have certain, sometimes very serious problems

If "sometimes" means "basically never", then sure. I've "basically never" have
had issues with Mesa on Intel or AMD hardware (I'm indeed running AMD hardware
w/ Mesa on the very desktop on which I'm typing this comment, and it's been
absolutely painless out-of-the-box).

> PulseAudio is unsuitable for multiuser mode
    
    
        sudo killall pulseaudio
    

Wow, so hard. Plus, the hyperlink for "multiuser mode" describes exactly how
to launch PulseAudio system-wide to address this very concern (even if they do
nonsensically advise against it, because of course they do).

PulseAudio's shitty, but this ain't a reason.

> There are still many printers which are not supported at all or only barely
> supported

And there are many more which work just about perfectly out-of-the-box, namely
almost everything by HP or Brother.

> Resume after suspend in Linux is unstable and oftentimes doesn't work.

On a wide variety of old and new laptops on which I've installed Linux this
has simply not been an issue for years.

> I have personally reported two serious audio playback regressions, which
> have been consequently resolved, however most users don't know how to file
> bugs, how to bisect regressions, how to identify faulty components.

Most users will report bugs to their distros' maintainers, who hopefully know
how to file these bugs against the kernel.

> X.org allows applications to exclusively grab keyboard and mouse input. If
> such applications misbehave you are left with a system you cannot manage,
> you cannot even switch to text terminals.

Alt+SysRq+R, then Ctrl+Alt+F1

Wow, so hard. Like, this works for even the absolute worst lockups (it's the
first step of the "REISUB" maneuver to cleanly reboot a locked-up Linux
system).

> X.org has no means of providing a tear-free experience, it's only available
> if you're running a compositing window manager in the OpenGL mode with
> vsync-to-blank enabled.

Sounds like a "means of providing a tear-free experience" to me.

And, like, does this _really_ warrant the double-exclamation-marks? God forbid
you see a graphical artifact every once in awhile.

> Applications (or GUI toolkits) must implement their own font antialiasing

Applications might have different anti-aliasing needs. I see no problem with
this. And again, this absolutely does not warrant double-exclamation-marks.

> Wayland doesn't allow XWayland applications to change display resolution

Good.

> Wayland doesn't allow applications to exclusively grab mouse/keyboard which
> is required for games and applications like VMs.

Were you _not_ just complaining about X11 allowing this in the previous
section?

> Traditional Linux/Unix (ext4/ reiser/ xfs/ jfs/ btrfs/etc.) filesystems can
> be problematic when being used on mass media storage.

Okay, so don't use them. JFFS2 has been in the kernel since 2001. F2FS has
been in the kernel since 2013. Both are commonly used for flash media. You're
also free to use FAT like you would on Windows; that's been in the kernel
since forever.

Not that this seems like a real issue anyway, given that I've used ext2/3/4
and XFS on thumb drives with no problems at all. ext2 is particularly useful
if you're concerned about journaling shortening the drive's lifespan.

> For the same reason you cannot modify your partitions table and resize/move
> the root partition on the fly.

I've resized my root partition on-the-fly multiple times with zero issues
whatsoever. The fact that I use LVM on all my desktops/laptops might help with
that.

> No unified installer/package manager/universal packaging format/dependency
> tracking across all distros

The whole point of a Linux distro is to be able to differentiate on things
like package management or system configuration. No package manager is perfect
for all use cases.

And besides, AppImage works on pretty much every distro that uses a
reasonably-modern glibc, and literally doesn't care about the distro itself.
If your concern is "well I don't want to have to build packages for each and
every packaging system out there", then AppImage is your tool, so use it.

> It should be possible to install any software by downloading a package and
> double clicking it

Which is totally possible, thanks to things like AppImage (well, you download
it somewhere and mark it executable, but wow, so hard). Hell, most distros
support this even for .deb and/or .rpm packages.

openSUSE also has 1-click installers, but it seems like they've fallen out of
fashion (which is a shame, since they address this issue pretty dang
elegantly).

> Applications development is a major PITA.

Compared to Windows? Linux (and Unix in general) is a breath of fresh air in
comparison. A PyQt5 app (for example) takes me a few hours (total) to design
and develop in Linux... and then _days_ of nitpicky troubleshooting to get it
working on Windows in a way that's reasonable for end-user distribution.

> Packaging all dependent libraries is not a solution, because in this case
> your application may depend on older versions of libraries which contain
> serious remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.

And yet this is exactly what Windows and macOS encourage, specifically to
avoid the need for users to manage libraries. Like, you can't have your cake
and eat it too; either you're gonna be dealing with dependency hell or you're
gonna need to package libraries with applications.

\----

Continued below...

~~~
yellowapple
Continuing from above:

\----

> No plug-and-play support for a lot of input devices like joysticks and
> steering wheels. Many require editing of cryptic configuration files.

My Logitech F310 and my Saitek X52 both work out-of-the-box without any such
"editing of cryptic configuration files". At most, I might need to set
bindings in the game itself. This applies even with Wine/Proton (I'm able to
play Ace Combat 7 with a controller - like God intended - with exactly zero
configuration on my part).

> Many anti-cheat protections fail to work under Linux.

Tell that to Valve Anti-Cheat.

> There's no concept of drivers in Linux aside from proprietary drivers for
> NVIDIA/AMD GPUs which are separate packages: almost all drivers are already
> either in the kernel or various complementary packages (like
> foomatic/sane/etc).

Good. Like, how is this a _bad_ thing? It's the very reason (well, one of
many) why I prefer Linux over Windows for my desktops and laptops.

> There's no guarantee whatsoever that your system will (re)boot successfully
> after GRUB (bootloader) or kernel updates

That's much less of an issue with UEFI (where you're not mucking with boot
sectors and such). And kernel updates haven't been an issue for me for years.

> Samba is not native

How is it not native? Just because it's "reverse-engineered" doesn't mean it
doesn't ship with most/all modern distros and can be used for filesharing.

> Steep learning curve (even today you oftentimes need to use a CLI to
> complete some trivial or non-trivial tasks, e.g. when installing third
> [party software]).

The link is to a question that specifically asks how to do it through the
command-line. The user didn't _have_ to do it that way (Google has provided
.deb and .rpm packages on chrome.google.com for as long as I can remember, and
nearly all distros using either package format are able to graphically install
such packages with a double-click).

> Most well written GUI applications for Windows 95 will work in Windows 10
> (24 years of binary level compatibility)

And most "well written" GUI applications for Linux 1.2 (which is when Linux
switched from a.out to ELF) will work in Linux 5.4.31 (24 years of binary
level compatibility). The problem is that applications are rarely "well
written"; there are plenty of poorly-written Windows applications that don't
run on more modern versions, and Linux is no different.

If your (statically linked) Linux 1.2 compiled application doesn't run on the
latest-and-greatest Linux, then that's a bug of the "Linus will verbally abuse
someone on the LKML" variety.

> No standard way of software deployment (pushing software via SSH is indeed
> an option, but it's in no way standard, easy to use or obvious - you can use
> a sledgehammer to crack nuts the same way).

So? There are plenty of options here, ranging from "pushing software via SSH"
to widely-used and industry-standard tools like Puppet and Chef.

> No CIFS/AD level replacement/ equivalent (SAMBA doesn't count for many
> reasons)

Why doesn't SAMBA count? I've literally used SAMBA 4 as an AD domain
controller in production (with Windows, macOS, and Linux domain members).
Works fine.

There's also FreeIPA, but I don't have as much experience with it (besides
trying it out when it was first announced, during which point it was pretty
buggy, though Fedora was probably just as much to blame).

> No filesystems at all to support per-file encryption
    
    
        gpg --encrypt --sign --armor -r my@email.address wow-so-hard.txt
    
        openssl enc -in wow-so-hard.txt -out wow-so-hard.txt.enc -e -aes256 -pbkdf2 -pass 'pass:WOW SO HARD'
    

Like yeah, I guess it's cool if the FS itself supports encryption, but this
seems like it's best left to the application (and obviously end-users
shouldn't be expected to run these commands themselves, but applications can
certainly do so or - better yet - use the actual underlying libraries).

~~~
itvision
Can your grandma do everything that you've just written? Is she even able to
find all these solutions in the first place?

Yes, many (but not all, including compatibility, regressions and lack of
proprietary software) Linux issues might be solved or worked around. This
doesn't make the OS any more suitable for the average tech-illiterate Joe.

