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.
Noob take.
Yes, when I first tried it out in 2005 I was kind of disappointed. Mostly because back then nothing worked as I expected. Since 2018 I’m running Linux full time and since then I haven’t been disappointed a single time.
Yes, I installed Fedora and everything was working OOTB. Nothing to tinker with, no issue with sound, WiFi, Bluetooth or external screens. Then I moved this SSD to a new AMD laptop and it worked perfectly. It even switched from Intel to AMD utils by itself.
So disappointing.
During the early days of Pulse Audio. Sound sometimes would stop working for inexplicable reasons.
More the people behind it than the distro, but CachyOS. Aside from the performance improvements only being marginal, I was happy with the convenience after a decade of using Vanilla Arch. It was the first distro ever to tempt me away in that decade. I was really, really disappointed by the response to the age verification bs. The mods did a terrible job with discussion on the forums and the devs never made a formal response. The upside is I learned more about Systemd and now happily using Artix. So at least some good came out of my disappointment.
I’m annoyed at modern Gnome’s hostility towards user customisability. Their refusal to support server side decorations has trickled down to Cinnamon’s Wayland compositor and it looks like it’s going to be a barrier in Wayland Cinnamon.
I like gnome’s approach to a unified and opinionated human interface design. I think it makes a nice cohesive user experience. If other projects don’t want that then they probably shouldn’t be building off of gnome.
The moments I have been disappointed by Linux were the moments I learned most about hardware and software.
Linux made me switch the WiFi card of my computer, which is something I’ve never done before and would have deemed “impossible”.
Linux is like a teacher that sometimes slaps you on the hands, but who is always helping you to expand your knowledge.
I usually blame this on the hardware manufacturers for being secretive gatekeepy fucks that make things only work with shitty drivers
The biggest thing I fought with since getting started has been audio. First figuring out how to make an Elgato device cooperate (not exactly the most linux-friendly company to say the least), then setting up virtual sinks and routing everything appropriately, and finally getting my mic to not sound like actual garbage.
Frustrating as hell and a very long process to get all of that working out, but definitely learned a lot from it.
It’s always interesting for me to read other people’s stories like this because I never ever had any audio issues with Linux. Can’t say the same about Winslow.
I am disappointed we still don’t have a solid FOSS smartphone OS that can compete with the 2 monopolies who have cornered the market.
I don"t want ro sell my soul to Google or Apple just to use my bank (even on my computer thanks to mandatory 2fa apps) or to renew my government issued ID or to buy a train ticket on European public transport.
That disappointment isn’t with Linux
postmarketOS, LineageOS, GrapheneOS?
I know they have limited hardware support but that’s only a matter of involvement at the end of the day
Unfortunately only postmarket is actual Linux os from these and it’s far from daily driveable, lineage and graphene are android roms and are therefore dependent on Google’s decisions with AOSP.
Out of curiosity, what about PostmarketOS is not daily driveable? Postmarket is a vague umbrella OS with a lot of DE options, all of which have vastly different user experiences. KDE mobile, phosh, and GNOME mobile have all come a long way and provide everything a smartphone OS needs. The only thing I’d argue that could prevent daily driving is lack of app support and lack of good mobile Linux hardware, but that’s not PostmarketOS’s problem.
Technically AOSP also runs a Linux kernel. Lineage and Graphene are like this only for compatibility reasons, no one stops them if they decide to fork. And AOSP itself is still not that bad though
Yes because Linux encourages you to make it your OS by customizing it, but it’s not easy as it should to create a backup of all that work so that you can easily deploy it on another computer.
I know that Clonezilla works in some situations or that NixOS coulb be a solution, but it’s not should be easier.
Isn’t everything in dot files in home? Create package lists and export them, add dot files.
Or keep home on a seperate partition or drive.
New installation, import package list.
This seems straight forward to me.
I’ve never tried it, even if I know people are using it.
Still it’s not an easy solution like the one people are using when upgrading from an old to a new iPhone.
I know Linux doesn’t have Apple behind, but it’s better than Windows/Mac in every other way, so why not try to improve this?
Yes, but to folks accustomed to using SuperDuper to create bootable backups, it does not seem so straightforward.
That seems like a completely different issue, if you just want a clone then clonezilla, which is also easy.
Oh sure, all the time.
A computer running public auditable software refined by some of history’s top computer scientists…is still just a computer.
We taught spicy electrified rocks how to help us fill out tax forms.
It’s going to fall short every so often.
Gestures vaguely at Ubuntu…
I am disappointed at professional application support, but not with Linux specifically. In my professional life I have needed to use products like Visio, Adobe Suite, Autodesk software, and others.
I am often forced to use Windows for my work computer because of these limitations, and while I realize its not the fault of Linux, the lack of install base demanding professional applications run on Linux is a community issue. While I always prefer FOSS over PROP software, sometimes I really do need to run PROP software on linux, and that means convincing enough people to demand that support from the developer.
that means convincing enough people to demand that support from the developer.
I think it means convincing people to drop the proprietary platform and telling the sales rep that both lack of Linux support is why you’re dropping them and what application you’re switching to. As long as you’re still a revenue stream for them they’re not incentivized to change. I do recognize, though, that this isn’t always professionally possible as the end user.
Edit: not the kernel or the GNU utilities themselves, but rather some people on the various affiliated forums. While most people have been kind and helpful, a handful of bad apples don’t know how to behave. They are hostile to the point where one could easily lose the will to have anything to do with Linux.
I have only ever been positively surprised. Just a few of all the good habits that Linux has made me adopt:
- RTFM
- Reading logs
- Keeping/reusing old hardware
Sounds like an Arch user.
Woopsie🤪
Artix btw
Yes, the packaging mess that Atomic distros cause.
I want a couple of functional things:
- To be able to safely upgrade my system silently, without interruptions, and rollback of necessary
- To know my system is not drifting away from upstream defaults and to restore it to a “factory” state
- To sandbox applications
I’d like to be able to do all that efficiently and cleanly too. Atomic systems generally fulfill those first two while traditional distros struggle, which is why I stick to Atomic distros.
But whereas you can use a single package manager on Arch and get everything (albeit without easy sandboxing), Atomics keep adding more and more. Here’s your rpm-ostree, flatpak, toolbox, homebrew, sysexts, etc.
I find sysexts particularly insulting because they regress so much on traditional packages for so little upside. Doesn’t even have dependency management.
I would wish we would stop creating so many package managers and just focus on improving existing ones.
In a more ideal world we would have something like
- Distro based on Freedesktop runtimes
- Flatpak that officially supports both GUI applications, CLI applications, and even daemons/services
- Flatpak would also be able to reuse the Freedesktop runtimes of the host system
Idk why people at flathub decided not to allow CLI programs.
And no alisses to the names of the programs.
Two very frustrating decisions. I would get rid of snap on my system if not for those few CLI tools I need.
Before Proton, I wasn’t able to consider Linux as a viable solution for home computing at all. I could set up and manage a pihole, and salvage an old laptop to use for word processing and email, but couldn’t run anything my family or non-techie friends were familiar with.
Sure Wine was a thing, but I think for most casual users it wasn’t worth the hassle.
My first attempt with Ubuntu 15ish years ago was horrible; almost nothing worked, GPU support was trash, it was just an all around miserable experience.
With proton, stuff just works. It’s like a whole new ecosystem now.
