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.
I miss start menu ads, intrusive bing searches, copilot upselling, MSN news, and uninstallable things I’ll never use on my PC like Xbox.
Linux is better for audio production than it’s ever been. That said, the plug-in support is still severely lacking. Even the VST bridges are hit or miss because a lot of plugins install via .exe installers which may or may not run well via wine. Getting a raw .vst file is actually pretty rare. And that’s for free plugins that don’t require DRM. Most professional quality plugins are more complex.
Have you tried LSP? I’m super impressed by it and it can be a drop in replacement for many pro-grade technical plugins. That and reapak have pretty much replaced everything for me.
LSP seems neat from what I’ve used. I think Reaper’s stock plugins are higher quality compared to the stock plugins in most other daws as well. I’m specifically in the market for modern metal drum sampler and amp sim plugins. The open source stuff is great compared to what it used to be. Just nowhere near what I can get pretty easily on Mac or Windows. It’s the finally itch I need scratched to really whole heartedly use Linux full time
Just last night I was playing around with the Tukan plugin collection and they are mental. Lots of very good sounding clones and models. I haven’t checked the drum stuff, but I did play around with the bass and guitar stations and managed to dial in some serious high-gain wall of sound type tones very easily.
Another way of getting good tones is simply obtaining high quality IR-s and just loading them in a suitable plugin. If you have a reamp box and access to some nice amps you can even create your own.
You could also do something similar for the drums. Just get some nice samples, load them into any old sequencer and you got yourself a drummer who’s never late or drunk. Then again, you lose the out of the box experience, but you only have to do it once.
I regret not switching my audio workflow to linux much earlier. A few years ago I got rid of everything Microsoft and started working with Reaper stock plugins exclusively. Not as pretty, but basically anything can be done with some fiddling. Only now I’m exploring the JSFX and LSP options and I’m hard pressed to find anything that I miss from the days of expensive plugins. Made me a better engineer as well. Less distractions, more listening and measuring.
I think security wise linux can do better, I’d like to see more isolation of processes. I find accessibility is lacking as well, particularly translation and ocr software. I think this is actually something local visual ai models would be very good at but are not leveraged for in open source.
Not my pain point, but my friend’s.
He recently installed linux mint to try, mainly because of the dubious quality of windows 11. After using it normally for many hours (maybe for 2 ~ 3 days), his system just froze, the audio entered a loop, and he was only able to shut the computer down pulling it from the plug.
I have no idea why this happens, this used to happen to me as well on arch, but then it just stopped (maybe some package update fixed it?).
I’ve seem people pointing to proprietary nvidia drivers causing it, but I never understood how the driver could freeze everything in the computer.
Bazzite. Internal Bluetooth sucks so I have an external USB Bluetooth. Certain devices refuse to respect that I don’t want to use internal Bluetooth and bazzite frequently turns it back on. I shouldn’t have to go into config files to fix this. I get it, it’s Linux, sometimes you need to but for mass adoption things like this should be a toggle in gui. Hell, maybe it’s in the gui somewhere. I fiddled with it long enough to give up for now
Using Mint for some years now, there are two main pain points for me. Both do not stop me from using Mint as my daily operating system, but they reduce convenience.
Default package repositories contain software versions that are long outdated (e.g. tmux, claws mail, neovim, libreoffice). Although this can usually be fixed by custom ppa or manual installation it decreases the benefits of a default package repository and causes additional maintenance efforts.
Laptop hardware / driver issues:
- When using nvidia graphics driver, FN+Fx keys do not change display brightness (although brightness hud is shown). When using xorg driver instead, these work, but the input for unlocking my luks volume at boot freezes and I cannot enter the password.
- FN+Fx does not enable/disable touchpad. I was able to fix this with a custom script and keybinding.
- Keyboard lighting cannot be controlled by OpenRGB and some other tools I tried, because the specific keyboard is not supported (yet?).
Things have gotten A LOT better since I started using it, but here’s a list of things I hate after using Arch with KDE as my main OS for almost 7 years:
- Not having an archive manager as good as 7-zip was on Windows. Ark is a good replacement but it supports less formats, has less options when compressing, and most importantly if you close the archive while extracting it silently fails (reported in 2019, still not fixed)
- You can’t make an account without a password (yes, I know I can configure the sudoers file and polkit to skip password prompts, but that’s not user friendly). For the average user, having to type the password after login is incredibly annoying, I would like to have something like the UAC prompt in Windows
- Wayland: it was made mainstream waaaay too early, causing a lot of issues with both Qt and GTK applications, some of which persist to this day, especially with fractional scaling and HDR
- Developers seem to think that I enjoy using the terminal: I don’t, I hate it. Why isn’t there a GUI for pacman supports the AUR and doesn’t suck?
- Random broken commits being pushed to stable. I’m talking about “how the f did you not notice this?” kind of bugs, like how I had to rename files twice in Dolphin before it would actually rename them. It was fixed quickly but how did this get into stable in the first place?
- Flatpak having its old ass version of mesa in the runtime, causing all sorts of issues if you have a newly released GPU. I stopped using it because of this
7-zip does have a linux CLI, which works well.
The most basic command you need to use is
7zz x archive-nameto extract an archive. Building a GUI around it doesn’t seem like it would be too much trouble honestly, wonder if anyone has done that.
Linux kernel or distros?
Assuming distros, my pain point is that it is not popular. For Linux to actually take over, UI/UX for everything without a single touch of CLI (akin to Windows and Mac OS) needs to be normalised. And everything just needs to work (see LTT), be snappy/instant (looking at you file browsers, Firefox, etc.), and use established behavioural norms within Windows and Mac (looking at you middle click paste, and it not being a universal scroll) as basics. Just give any distro to any Asian population. They won’t even be able to figure out how to type their own language as if they are exiting Vim.
and use established behavioural norms within Windows and Mac
Even when they fucking suck some times?
Minor issue is the vulken shaders that load before I play a game. Most of the time it’s quick and only done after an update but some games do take a long time.
Also having issues where Wine freezes up when running applications. Sometimes for close to two minutes before responding. I haven’t looked into this one yet as it just happened recently.
Bazzite with Nvidia GPU of this matters.
Non pain point not having the system install updates during my “focus” time and bringing the system to a crawl until I let it finish.
With the advancements in wine and proton, I’ve found a lot of games do well with adding -dx11 or -dx12 in the launch options.
Maybe a ticket could be made about considering changing the default for one of those programs
Flatpack and password managers. They’ll oil and water.
Keepassxc works great for me
I miss notepad++ so much. I miss musicbee so much.
Oh and I miss TagScanner so much too.
I’m using Notepad++ on CachyOS.
Notepadqq or Kate are supposed to be pretty good replacements!
Kate is okish. But all my reflexes and habits are on Notepad++ :(
I miss musicbee so much dude, tauon is great but it still isnt the same
Oh. I’ll check tauon, I didn’t know it. But yeah, when I first installed linux like 5 years ago, I looked for a Musicbee alternative for months. Still miss it.
Its pretty good if you are mainly looking for that simple itunes grid and left list style. It doesnt show the artwork of the current track and I wish it let you customize more than it does but its p damn good. Hope that dev is doing well lol.
Can’t stream peacock to watch my motorsports. Resolved by unsubbing but I still wanna watch sometimes.
Peacock doesn’t work in the browser?
Probably not if you use Firefox.
Correctamundo. I use chrome to stream all those types of services. Waterfox for everything else. Even agent switcher doesn’t help.
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 hardwareHad to think about it… The answer is nowhere. I built my digital life around Linux for 23 years.
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
Take a look at systemd boot then plymouth for a nice splash. I find it to be much better than grub for just simply booting 1 distro quickly. Try systemd-analyze blame to see whats slowing down the boot. Sometimes there are drives that take awhile to mount and speed can be improved by adding them into fstab by UUID.
