6 ms·

can you please talk about what linux refuses to do that you are trying to make it do? or in general what is wrong with it, i am sincerely curious

lupusreal 2y ago
It doesn't have the button exactly where Windows has it.
- keyringlight 2y ago
  I'd say the core difference for those migrating is that they evolved with different 'evolutionary pressures'. Broadly speaking there's equivalent functionality for a lot of things, but windows has a lot of GUI while linux has a lot of config files and terminal commands to accomplish things. Where I think the friction is the distance between new migrants coming to linux with glowing advertisements of it mostly being a drop-in replacement for windows but the GUI not offering everything, and crucially not hinting where to go to find things, so people head off to do web searches and play the lottery of if they get good/recent information appropriate to the distro and version they chose. Linux seems to be polarized between great for simple use cases (browser, gaming within the steam walled garden, etc) and those willing/able to dive into the terminal, but between those can be a wide gulf which is hard to cross.
jsheard 2y ago
For one the Nvidia drivers are still a pain, and Nvidia has 83% discrete GPU marketshare per the Steam survey, so the majority of Windows users venturing into Linux are immediately going to run into whatever the Nvidia issue of the week happens to be. Those who are already sold on Linux know to just get an AMD card in the first place, but that requires the benefit of foresight.
- trashburger 2y ago
  Blame Nvidia for that one. They have actively refused to work with the community for the longest time.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    I don't think the average person cares whose fault it is, they just want their computer to work, and Nvidia has incredible mindshare over on the Windows side of the fence so most people are going to keep buying their hardware and almost immediately running into problems when they give Linux a shot.
  - WiredSlumber 2y ago
    Wayland is being pushed out more and more, and it still has many problems for me on my Nvidia card. I know it is mostly Nvidia fault, but at the end of the day, I am not here to assign blame, I just want to use my PC.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      You can just... not use wayland. The "push" is easy to defy. Just don't use it.
      - redserk 2y ago
        So just switch to Linux from Windows and immediately start deviating from distribution-supported defaults… This suggestion comes up implicitly in a lot of weird hardware cases. It really isn’t a selling point for a user wanting a good first (or recurring) impression. Just to call out: X11 isn’t all rainbows and unicorns either. Wayland (for the various defects I’ve encountered) is a desperately needed improvement.
        lupusreal 2y ago
        If you're scared to deviate from defaults you're not going to ever see wayland in the first place, so relax.
        oefnak 2y ago
        I thought it was default on Ubuntu
- lillecarl 2y ago
  Are they really a pain still? The average user doesnt change his kernel, so the package driver will work. NixOS plug: If you swap kernels it'll automatically build the nvidia bridge code for the kernel and it'll work. I wouldn't buy nvidia for Linux still, but it's hardly the issue it was
- pjmlp 2y ago
  In theory, in practice AMD also has its own share of surprises.
bluesign 2y ago
The problem is, which distro?, which DE? Even which drivers? Every distro usually has some missing pieces, when you raise that, people would say: ‘ oh you are using X thats why, it works on Y’
dmonitor 2y ago
For me, Linux is capable of doing everything productivity-wise much better than Windows, but my home PC is practically a toy for me to use Discord and play video games. Screen sharing on Discord is an open issue with lots of third party solutions, but none of them are perfect. Video games is around 95% of the way there (thanks, Valve/Proton!), but that 5% can be annoying for a device that is essentially my alternative to buying a Playstation. I think a large share of "PC enthusiasts" fall into this category. The two main use cases for a $700 graphics cards are to play Elden Ring and run an LLM, and you can guess which one is more popular. Then there's the minute ambiguities that continue to perplex me, which are mostly down to lack of standardization across distros. Most distros come with a bunch of premade user groups, but good luck figuring out what each of those groups give access to. The actual purpose of various root level folders is inconsistent, making manually installing programs confusing, and oftentimes figuring out where the package manager put an installed program is vague as well. The other day I installed openSUSE on a server, went to disable password access in /etc/ssh_config, only to find it doesn't exist. Had to google around before finding out they moved it to /usr/etc/ssh_config. I am used to googling as part of how I navigate daily life (so much so that I pay for it with Kagi), but most people don't want to be arsed with googling things. Dotfiles are also annoying, and I think that is a universal complaint among users given how many dotfile management solutions there are around. The fact that you have to edit config files at all is a turnoff for many people (I prefer the benefits config files bring, but not everyone is so easily convinced). Things like this are navigable with enough experience, but people have gotten so used to Windows' quirks and error resolution process that learning a new system with a whole new set of pitfalls just isn't worth it.
mystified5016 2y ago
For reasons we won't discuss, I want the caps lock key on my keyboard to map to the 'end' key instead. On Windows, it's just an AutoHotKey script. On Linux? Literally impossible. I've spent days dicking with various config files, rebooting and relogging dozens of times. Even got so desperate I asked chatgpt. Gave up after a week or two. To anyone else reading this: this is not an invitation for fixes. Whatever you're going to suggest, I've already tried it and I'm super not interested in any opinions about it.
- btreecat 2y ago
  Fortunately posting about it publicly is akin to asking for more engagement. No mention if you tried to compile the firmware, or use the custom mapping configuration available to your keyboard, what kind of keyboard you have, or what specifically hasn't worked.
- KptMarchewa 2y ago
  AutoHotKey is a godsend.
- j-bos 2y ago
  No fix, just a hope spot, I did this with mutiple keys, including caps key.
- FragenAntworten 2y ago
  I wanted this exact thing (Caps Lock -> End), and https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd works. It runs in the background as a systemd service, and the config is just: $ cat /etc/keyd/default.conf [ids] * [main] capslock = end (I got excited that someone else likes the same keybinding I do and wanted to share, and only then saw "not an invitation for fixes". Well, maybe it'll help someone else.)
Spivak 2y ago
Windows for all the terrible imposed by the business is actually pretty nice. * Active Directory / Group Policy has no equal to the point where FreeIPA and sssd threw in the towel and supplement AD and support group policies directly. * RDP is the better technology full stop. X forwarding is really cool and VNC is… there but RDP got the abstraction right. * SMB for all its warts is better at file sharing than anything that Linux has to offer and FUSE, while great, is a band-aid over the wrong permission model— why Linux does mounting a filesystem have security implications? Why after 30 years do we still pretend the filesystem is reliable and paper over the reality that it isn't. * NTFS got the permission model right where for the most part Linux is still clunking along with chmod. You don't have to deal with user ids sharing a single global namespace. Directories only being able to be owned by one group. NFSv4 even adopted NT ACLs wholesale as well as NT's identity model. * Windows has undergone truly heroic efforts to make remote home directories work where Linux you will never stop dealing with issues. I think the, deserved, Microsoft hate has blinded folks a bit to the good things Windows has going for it. I know, tragic, the worst person had some good ideas.
HideousKojima 2y ago
How do I get a drive to mount during boot (during boot, not after like FUSE does it) without having to look up the command to get the drive's UUID, look up the syntax for a new fstab entry, and edit fstab manually? A few distros/DEs have straightforward ways to do this with a GUI but there's no universal solution, and this is something almost anyone using Linux for a home media server is going to run into.
- o11c 2y ago
  Both GNOME and KDE have GUI disk/partition managers in their control panels. If you aren't using one of the big two, it's your own fault (or the fault of whoever sweet-talked you into trying their non-mainstream DE).
  - HideousKojima 2y ago
    It isn't sweet-talking, it's using XFCE because it's a weak little machine that lags like hell if I use KDE or Gnome.
yongjik 2y ago
Linux didn't support per-monitor fractional scaling until fairly recently. I only got it after I changed to Wayland about a year ago (not sure if X supports it these days), and then it turns out Wayland doesn't support color profile (or at least that's what I learned from random Reddit posts). So I guess I could either go back to X and have uncomfortably large letters or stick with Wayland and tolerate slightly off colors. Yay. The IME shows Korean characters in slightly wrong size whenever I type and gvim keeps throwing UI error messages in the console. At least it allows the input to go through, so I guess it's fine? Hibernation used to work, and then stopped working for about two years, and then started working again after the latest upgrade. No idea why, I'm not gonna question the system when it works. (BTW, I think the last time I had to worry about IME or hibernation in Windows or Mac was about twenty years ago.)
- coreyburnsdev 2y ago
  not a fan of linux font/text rendering either. doesn't look too bad on my 4k but the 1080p monitor is unusable for me. fonts also look so airy and thin, and white on black looks weird as well.
anymouse123456 2y ago
I've been using Linux for decades on workstations, servers and laptops. I love Linux. I'm super grateful for Linux. I can't imagine living in Windows. I don't want to be trapped by Apple. Even through my gratitude-colored glasses, Linux leaves a lot to be desired. I had 2 Linux Dell laptops in a row that either had Wifi OR bluetooth, never both. I swapped the radio in the second one and things were okay for awhile. Neither of these, nor the Asus laptop I later purchased supported sleep/hibernate when the lid closes. Out of 4 laptops in 7 years, the only one that supported this incredible future technology was my Lenovo Carbon X1, the two Dells and the Asus all repeatedly tried to commit head-death suicide in my backpack. My current workstation that runs Ubuntu 22.04 and now 24.04 was going great until I got some update that swapped me back from Wayland to X11. Now things are weird and I've got to make time to fuck with it to figure out how to make this RTX 4080 work with Wayland. It's the worst operating system in the world, except for all the others.
- novaleaf 2y ago
  if it makes you feel better, I only use windows, and none of my computers (laptops or desktops) sleeps/hibernates properly. Most of them work most of the time. Some none of the time, and none all the time.
  - com2kid 2y ago
    Hibernate worked amazing on Windows XP. Back then of course it was simple, closing the lid instantly wrote RAM out to the HDD and shut everything down. In the name of copying the iPad's instant on, we've killed countless batteries and made countless laptops completely useless. Progress!
  - ido 2y ago
    This is the thing that annoys me most about my Windows laptop (the highest end dell "desktop replacement" that cost me more than my MacBook did). I've never had this particular issue with any Mac I've ever had (I've lost count how many these were, but surely double-digit by now).
- tcmart14 2y ago
knowitnone 2y ago
This annoyed me today. Does a Linux distro highlight newly installed software? I'm not going to say it doesn't because it may in a different DE or distro.

lupusreal 2y ago

It doesn't have the button exactly where Windows has it.

keyringlight 2y ago
I'd say the core difference for those migrating is that they evolved with different 'evolutionary pressures'. Broadly speaking there's equivalent functionality for a lot of things, but windows has a lot of GUI while linux has a lot of config files and terminal commands to accomplish things. Where I think the friction is the distance between new migrants coming to linux with glowing advertisements of it mostly being a drop-in replacement for windows but the GUI not offering everything, and crucially not hinting where to go to find things, so people head off to do web searches and play the lottery of if they get good/recent information appropriate to the distro and version they chose. Linux seems to be polarized between great for simple use cases (browser, gaming within the steam walled garden, etc) and those willing/able to dive into the terminal, but between those can be a wide gulf which is hard to cross.

jsheard 2y ago

For one the Nvidia drivers are still a pain, and Nvidia has 83% discrete GPU marketshare per the Steam survey, so the majority of Windows users venturing into Linux are immediately going to run into whatever the Nvidia issue of the week happens to be. Those who are already sold on Linux know to just get an AMD card in the first place, but that requires the benefit of foresight.

trashburger 2y ago
Blame Nvidia for that one. They have actively refused to work with the community for the longest time.
- jsheard 2y ago
  I don't think the average person cares whose fault it is, they just want their computer to work, and Nvidia has incredible mindshare over on the Windows side of the fence so most people are going to keep buying their hardware and almost immediately running into problems when they give Linux a shot.
- WiredSlumber 2y ago
  Wayland is being pushed out more and more, and it still has many problems for me on my Nvidia card. I know it is mostly Nvidia fault, but at the end of the day, I am not here to assign blame, I just want to use my PC.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    You can just... not use wayland. The "push" is easy to defy. Just don't use it.
    - redserk 2y ago
      So just switch to Linux from Windows and immediately start deviating from distribution-supported defaults… This suggestion comes up implicitly in a lot of weird hardware cases. It really isn’t a selling point for a user wanting a good first (or recurring) impression. Just to call out: X11 isn’t all rainbows and unicorns either. Wayland (for the various defects I’ve encountered) is a desperately needed improvement.
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        If you're scared to deviate from defaults you're not going to ever see wayland in the first place, so relax.
        oefnak 2y ago
        I thought it was default on Ubuntu
lillecarl 2y ago
Are they really a pain still? The average user doesnt change his kernel, so the package driver will work. NixOS plug: If you swap kernels it'll automatically build the nvidia bridge code for the kernel and it'll work. I wouldn't buy nvidia for Linux still, but it's hardly the issue it was
pjmlp 2y ago
In theory, in practice AMD also has its own share of surprises.

bluesign 2y ago

The problem is, which distro?, which DE? Even which drivers? Every distro usually has some missing pieces, when you raise that, people would say: ‘ oh you are using X thats why, it works on Y’

dmonitor 2y ago

For me, Linux is capable of doing everything productivity-wise much better than Windows, but my home PC is practically a toy for me to use Discord and play video games. Screen sharing on Discord is an open issue with lots of third party solutions, but none of them are perfect. Video games is around 95% of the way there (thanks, Valve/Proton!), but that 5% can be annoying for a device that is essentially my alternative to buying a Playstation. I think a large share of "PC enthusiasts" fall into this category. The two main use cases for a $700 graphics cards are to play Elden Ring and run an LLM, and you can guess which one is more popular. Then there's the minute ambiguities that continue to perplex me, which are mostly down to lack of standardization across distros. Most distros come with a bunch of premade user groups, but good luck figuring out what each of those groups give access to. The actual purpose of various root level folders is inconsistent, making manually installing programs confusing, and oftentimes figuring out where the package manager put an installed program is vague as well. The other day I installed openSUSE on a server, went to disable password access in /etc/ssh_config, only to find it doesn't exist. Had to google around before finding out they moved it to /usr/etc/ssh_config. I am used to googling as part of how I navigate daily life (so much so that I pay for it with Kagi), but most people don't want to be arsed with googling things. Dotfiles are also annoying, and I think that is a universal complaint among users given how many dotfile management solutions there are around. The fact that you have to edit config files at all is a turnoff for many people (I prefer the benefits config files bring, but not everyone is so easily convinced). Things like this are navigable with enough experience, but people have gotten so used to Windows' quirks and error resolution process that learning a new system with a whole new set of pitfalls just isn't worth it.

mystified5016 2y ago

For reasons we won't discuss, I want the caps lock key on my keyboard to map to the 'end' key instead. On Windows, it's just an AutoHotKey script. On Linux? Literally impossible. I've spent days dicking with various config files, rebooting and relogging dozens of times. Even got so desperate I asked chatgpt. Gave up after a week or two. To anyone else reading this: this is not an invitation for fixes. Whatever you're going to suggest, I've already tried it and I'm super not interested in any opinions about it.

btreecat 2y ago
Fortunately posting about it publicly is akin to asking for more engagement. No mention if you tried to compile the firmware, or use the custom mapping configuration available to your keyboard, what kind of keyboard you have, or what specifically hasn't worked.
KptMarchewa 2y ago
AutoHotKey is a godsend.
j-bos 2y ago
No fix, just a hope spot, I did this with mutiple keys, including caps key.
FragenAntworten 2y ago
I wanted this exact thing (Caps Lock -> End), and https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd works. It runs in the background as a systemd service, and the config is just: $ cat /etc/keyd/default.conf [ids] * [main] capslock = end (I got excited that someone else likes the same keybinding I do and wanted to share, and only then saw "not an invitation for fixes". Well, maybe it'll help someone else.)

Spivak 2y ago

Windows for all the terrible imposed by the business is actually pretty nice. * Active Directory / Group Policy has no equal to the point where FreeIPA and sssd threw in the towel and supplement AD and support group policies directly. * RDP is the better technology full stop. X forwarding is really cool and VNC is… there but RDP got the abstraction right. * SMB for all its warts is better at file sharing than anything that Linux has to offer and FUSE, while great, is a band-aid over the wrong permission model— why Linux does mounting a filesystem have security implications? Why after 30 years do we still pretend the filesystem is reliable and paper over the reality that it isn't. * NTFS got the permission model right where for the most part Linux is still clunking along with chmod. You don't have to deal with user ids sharing a single global namespace. Directories only being able to be owned by one group. NFSv4 even adopted NT ACLs wholesale as well as NT's identity model. * Windows has undergone truly heroic efforts to make remote home directories work where Linux you will never stop dealing with issues. I think the, deserved, Microsoft hate has blinded folks a bit to the good things Windows has going for it. I know, tragic, the worst person had some good ideas.

HideousKojima 2y ago

How do I get a drive to mount during boot (during boot, not after like FUSE does it) without having to look up the command to get the drive's UUID, look up the syntax for a new fstab entry, and edit fstab manually? A few distros/DEs have straightforward ways to do this with a GUI but there's no universal solution, and this is something almost anyone using Linux for a home media server is going to run into.

o11c 2y ago
Both GNOME and KDE have GUI disk/partition managers in their control panels. If you aren't using one of the big two, it's your own fault (or the fault of whoever sweet-talked you into trying their non-mainstream DE).
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  It isn't sweet-talking, it's using XFCE because it's a weak little machine that lags like hell if I use KDE or Gnome.

yongjik 2y ago

Linux didn't support per-monitor fractional scaling until fairly recently. I only got it after I changed to Wayland about a year ago (not sure if X supports it these days), and then it turns out Wayland doesn't support color profile (or at least that's what I learned from random Reddit posts). So I guess I could either go back to X and have uncomfortably large letters or stick with Wayland and tolerate slightly off colors. Yay. The IME shows Korean characters in slightly wrong size whenever I type and gvim keeps throwing UI error messages in the console. At least it allows the input to go through, so I guess it's fine? Hibernation used to work, and then stopped working for about two years, and then started working again after the latest upgrade. No idea why, I'm not gonna question the system when it works. (BTW, I think the last time I had to worry about IME or hibernation in Windows or Mac was about twenty years ago.)

coreyburnsdev 2y ago
not a fan of linux font/text rendering either. doesn't look too bad on my 4k but the 1080p monitor is unusable for me. fonts also look so airy and thin, and white on black looks weird as well.

anymouse123456 2y ago

I've been using Linux for decades on workstations, servers and laptops. I love Linux. I'm super grateful for Linux. I can't imagine living in Windows. I don't want to be trapped by Apple. Even through my gratitude-colored glasses, Linux leaves a lot to be desired. I had 2 Linux Dell laptops in a row that either had Wifi OR bluetooth, never both. I swapped the radio in the second one and things were okay for awhile. Neither of these, nor the Asus laptop I later purchased supported sleep/hibernate when the lid closes. Out of 4 laptops in 7 years, the only one that supported this incredible future technology was my Lenovo Carbon X1, the two Dells and the Asus all repeatedly tried to commit head-death suicide in my backpack. My current workstation that runs Ubuntu 22.04 and now 24.04 was going great until I got some update that swapped me back from Wayland to X11. Now things are weird and I've got to make time to fuck with it to figure out how to make this RTX 4080 work with Wayland. It's the worst operating system in the world, except for all the others.

novaleaf 2y ago
if it makes you feel better, I only use windows, and none of my computers (laptops or desktops) sleeps/hibernates properly. Most of them work most of the time. Some none of the time, and none all the time.
- com2kid 2y ago
  Hibernate worked amazing on Windows XP. Back then of course it was simple, closing the lid instantly wrote RAM out to the HDD and shut everything down. In the name of copying the iPad's instant on, we've killed countless batteries and made countless laptops completely useless. Progress!
- ido 2y ago
  This is the thing that annoys me most about my Windows laptop (the highest end dell "desktop replacement" that cost me more than my MacBook did). I've never had this particular issue with any Mac I've ever had (I've lost count how many these were, but surely double-digit by now).
tcmart14 2y ago

knowitnone 2y ago

This annoyed me today. Does a Linux distro highlight newly installed software? I'm not going to say it doesn't because it may in a different DE or distro.