[PuppetSoup]

> Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it,

I'm genuinely interested what Linux is missing for you? I've been daily driving it for years and do all my work and gaming on it. Is it specific software or?

[rafaelmn]

It's just general polish. Like I was daily driving fedora last year and :

- fractional scaling did not work in Gnome with Wayland for X11 Apps

- I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1

- Screen sharing was very buggy - in Slack especially - it would constantly crash the slack app during calls, ditto for camera, but even in Google meet and Chrome I've had desktop crashes

- When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling it was extremely unstable

- Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support delay

- Guitar Amp simulator software I use does not support Linux, neither does Ableton (which supposedly can run on proton but with many glitches)

- The audio DAW situation was way too complicated and buggy

- I spent days to get the distro functional and usable with Ardour and it would still crash constantly - I just wanted to run some amp sims :(

It's just the little things and rough edges, but for example the fractional scaling stuff already improved because more apps that I use added Wayland support. And the emulation is getting better, with more users I could see larger DAWs supporting Linux as well. Not sure about the audio progress - JACK was a complete mess.

[kuschku]

> Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support delay

You can install AMDs driver from their repo directly, it works just fine (using it every day).

> I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1

That will never be possible. To prevent pirates from breaking it (lol), HDMI has decided to keep HDMI 2.1 secret. No open source version of HDMI 2.1 can exist.

That said, AMD's driver repo includes both the open source drivers and some proprietary versions of the driver, maybe that'll work for you.

Another option would be using a displayport output and a DP to HDMI converter, as e.g. Intel is using for their GPUs.

[scq]

- Fractional scaling: That's because X11 itself does not support it. Many older Windows apps also have problems with fractional scaling.

- HDMI 2.1: The HDMI Forum blocked it, as they don't want the details of HDMI 2.1 publically available. If you can, use DisplayPort, which is an actual open standard, and is better anyway. Nvidia works because they implemented it in closed-source firmware instead. https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected

[promiseofbeans]

If you're happy to dip your toes into another DAW, Reaper has excellent first-class Linux support, works with all your plugins, and has a 60 day trial* for you to get used to it.

* The free trial is enforced as heavily as WinRAR's, and it's pretty cheap (~$60) to buy a licence if the nag screen makes you feel bad enough

[commoner]

> When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling it was extremely unstable

KDE Plasma 6 made major improvements and has excellent fractional scaling, the best I've seen in a Linux desktop environment and comparable to scaling in Windows 10-11. I encourage you to give it a try.

[asimovfan]

you can use Carla in linux to run windows VSTs, i do it all the time. Works great. Midi and audio routing is also quite good. Ableton also runs with Wine.

[skissane]

Our 12 year old recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu…

and now I’m constantly getting these complaints “I can’t get screen capture to work under Wayland… I switched from lightdm to sddm and I can’t work out how to switch back… I accidentally started an i3 session and I can’t work out how to log out of it.”

It makes me kind of miss Windows, in a way. It is good he’s learning so much. But the downside is Linux gives him lots more ways to break things and then ask me to fix them for him. And a lot of this stuff I then have to learn myself before I can fix it, because most of my Linux experience is with using it as a server OS, where desktop environments aren’t even installed

[noAnswer]

Well, don't help him. People(me) grew up without the Internet or Smartphones and broke Windows on the family PC all the time. In 2000 when I got SuSE it only slowed down the breakdowns. He can always fix stuff himself by reinstalling the OS. As long as he doesn't format the /home partition he will not lose data. And he will learn his lessons.

[lolinder]

12-year-old me installed Linux on an old desktop tower and I also broke things constantly. The difference is my parents were both humanities majors and I knew full well there was no point in asking them for help. Even at the time, the resources were all there for me to teach myself to Linux. Sure, I spent many many hours troubleshooting things instead of doing whatever it was I had as my end goal, but I was a kid—learning is the point!

It's harder as a parent to know that you're capable of solving their problem and still say no, but by age 12 that's pretty much your primary job: to find more and more things that they can start doing for themselves, express your confidence in them, and let them figure out how to adult bit by bit. Breaking a Linux install and fixing it again is among the lowest stakes ways that dynamic will play out from here on.

[sgarland]

> Ubuntu

Well, there’s your problem ;-)

This is great, though, really. I broke our computer so many times growing up, I couldn’t possibly count. I don’t think I ever lost anything of import, other than some savegames of mine. I keep telling people who ask, “how do I learn Linux?” that they need to use it, tinker with it, break it, and fix it, ideally without anything other than man pages and distro docs. It is a shockingly effective way to learn how things work.

[pmontra]

I'd say that screen capture probably works under X11 no matter what your graphic card is. However this kind of confirm your general feeling: there is no only one blessed and enforced way to do things so everything can break because of combinations.

Examples (I've been on desktop Linux since 2009): shutdown actually reboots except for a few months with some lucky combination of kernel and nvidia driver. The brightness control keys didn't work for at least half of the years. They currently work. All of that has workarounds but I understand that some people legitimately fold and go using another OS.

[MSFT_Edging]

> i3 session

Oh he'll figure it out eventually. This kid might be going places.

[ohgr]

My Linux desktop experience...

I started with Linux installing it from floppy disks in about 1996.

In 1995, I was back on Windows 95 within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2000, I was back on Windows 2000 within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2005, I was back on Windows XP within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2012, I was back on Windows 7 within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2015, I was back on macOS within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2020, I worked out I'm wasting my time on this.

I watch my colleagues and friend struggling with it. Lots of small papercuts. Lots of weirdness. Lots of regressions. Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.

[PuppetSoup]

That sounds amazing, well not for you but for your kid :) It has been very valuable for me that I messed around windows and linux as a kid

[frainfreeze]

Put him on debian stable with xfce and no sudo if he is such a bother. Sounds to me this is a people problem, not Linux problem. Do you miss windows or do you miss not having to spend time with kid on things that bother you?

[nfriedly]

Not the OP, but hibernate support is one thing that sent me back to windows on my Framework laptop.

In windows, I can just shut the lid and not worry about it, because it will sleep first, and eventually hibernate. Ubuntu would just sleep until the battery dies.

I found instructions for enabling hibernate in Ubuntu, and they did make it show up in the power menu, but it didn't seem to work. (Which is presumably why it was hidden to begin with.)

I also tried NixOS, but I couldn't even get it to boot the installer.

[RMPR]

> In windows, I can just shut the lid and not worry about it, because it will sleep first, and eventually hibernate. Ubuntu would just sleep until the battery dies.

It's really funny because this is one of the things I absolutely do not like about Windows. I absolutely hate it that I put the computer to sleep and when I come back the next day it has hibernated. That said, I agree that hibernation has always been finicky on Linux, however, I would say Ubuntu is not the best distro for this use case. I have been using Fedora and they even publish official guides for it[0] that's how seriously they take it.

0: https://fedoramagazine.org/update-on-hibernation-in-fedora-w...

[horsawlarway]

Just have it suspend to disk and shutdown on lid close.

I do this for arch Linux on my framework and it's fine. Startup time is under ten seconds, essentially zero battery drain, right back in your session with all apps/docs open.

Hibernate is definitely better but still finicky even on Mac/Windows, machines can and do fry themselves, or require a hard reset if you unplug a device at the wrong time. Or unexpectedly continue draining the battery.

It's a terrible, funky, poorly documented, exception filled world down in the low power states for hardware.

[pyr0hu]

Anti-cheats are not really compatible on Linux IIRC. Maybe there have been improvements on this front but I think this was the main issue for a lot of gamers. This and there were cases when they were getting banned for playing through Wine.

I once tried to set up a GPU passthrough setup to a Windows VM to play WoW but there were a ton of report that Blizzard just banned players for using QEMU VMs because they were marked as cheaters.

[wafflemaker]

Could some game programmer say if it's true that kernel level anti cheat is just bad programming?

Primagean recently said that in a video commenting PewDiePie's "I switched to Linux" video. While he's apparently a good programmer (he worked at Netflix), he uses Vim, so I don't trust him. Edit: part about vim is an edgy joke.

[akimbostrawman]

The two most widely used anti cheat application battle eye and easy anti cheat both natively support linux but game developer have to check a box to enable it.

About 40% of games that use anti cheat currently work on linux. Getting banned for using wine is very rare because anti cheat that don't support linux would complain about not running an prevent you from even joining a game to get banned.

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

[bobmcnamara]

Frontend stability.

I've been through enough KDE, QT, and Gnome API changes. It's just not where I want to burn my limited time.

My first GDI programs still compile.

[wkat4242]

Compile sure, but they really had some bad ideas in those days. Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.

OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.

Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)

There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)

[esskay]

For me its the UX. It just feels off, amaturish, messy. I can't really put my finger on it. I think the frankly crap fonts a lot of distro's choose to have as default dont help. And then the very "designed by a developer" feel to a lot of the UI.

And I know someones franticly typing away right now - yes, I am fully aware you can customise things, but out of the box it should be pretty damn well polished so that you don't need to.

Ubuntu's probably got the closest but it still just doesn't quite feel like they've nailed the experience.

[keyringlight]

One of the things I wonder about recently is whether there's too many distros, which is dividing effort and there's less drive to find consensus on certain issues when everyone has the freedom to do things their own way and experiment to explore their niche. That freedom is the point of free software to a large extent, but there's costs to it. It also divides the userbase so when something doesn't work you may need to dive deeper into the details than you'd like to see if there's anything particular about your species of the linux animal kingdom.

It'd be interesting if there was a "Ubuntu v2" type effort, over 20 years later. Before ubuntu it's not as though desktop linux was an impossible dream or there was a lack of distros, but Canonical cleaned up a lot of rough edges to the extent it became a lingua franca. It's to the extent you can rely on ubuntu being in instructions for linux software, for example if there's any differences to required package names it'll be the ubuntu names over debian's.

[kjellsbells]

Yes, exactly. To be fair, projects like GNOME and distros like Ubuntu do publish human interface guidelines, but I dont think there is any enforcement and so jankiness creeps in. I suppose it's no different from Windows 11 still having programs that have UIs dating from Win2K. But at least the icons and colors and window chrome are professional looking.

[os2warpman]

I am extremely experienced with Linux. Every single one of my servers is running RHEL/Rocky. I daily drove Linux back in the early 2000s. I have spent more time in sysctl.conf testing tunables than I have spent with my family, so it seems.

1. My capture card doesn't work reliably in any distro. I'm not a gamer so I can't use a cheap and ubiquitous USB V4L card, I capture retro computing screens at weird resolutions and refresh rates so I have to use an enterprise-grade solution that can handle strange things like sync-on-green from 13w3 connectors and extremely rare outputs from UNIX workstations from the 80s and 90s.

2. If someone sends me a link on my phone it is difficult to copy and paste it to a Linux system.

3. Battery life on laptops, despite decades of improvements, is atrocious on Linux. If my laptop gets twelve hours of real-world use under OS A and six hours under OS B, I've got to use OS A.

4. All of my screens are 4K. Today, in 2025, a full decade after 4K became standard, the way various DE/WMs handle scaling is embarrassing.

5. Nvidia. Yeah, it "works" for about 2-3 kernel upgrades then you're greeted with a blinking cursor upon boot because of DKMS or some random reason like patching the system and not rebooting for a couple of days and then patching again.

6. There's little consistency across devices. When I log in to system A I want every single icon, file, and application to be the same as system B. iCloud/Onedrive do this. You can do this on Linux while on a LAN with remote home folders. I don't work exclusively on a LAN. Or I can set up puppet/ansible for my non-infrastructure systems and that makes me throw up in my mouth.

Almost none of that is the fault of the kernel. That's irrelevant.

[archvile]

Regarding 3. Battery life - I’ve had a ThinkPad Nano for several years that, on Windows 11 would get roughly 4-6 hours battery, and this was optimized (very few running apps, no junk on startup, power saving settings on, etc). I switched it to Ubuntu (I was surprised that everything worked out of the box too, all of the hot keys and everything), and it will get about 8-10 hours doing the same tasks (primarily Chrome). So there is something to be said about Linux in general just being so much more “light weight” so to speak vs windows, which has become such a bloated mess. But the main issue I had was your point 4, since the thinkpads screen is 2K, everything was either too small (with no scaling) or too big (with scaling on).

[sgarland]

Fully agree that Desktop Linux isn’t nearly there. If I need a Linux DE for something, I spin up a Debian VM with XFCE, because that seems to suck the least, and I already have prebaked Debian images.

For headless servers, I want nothing else. For a daily driver, as much as it pains me, nothing comes close to the Apple ecosystem. Apple Silicon is years ahead of everyone, and their interop with (admittedly only their own) other hardware is incredible. Universal Clipboard is magic. The fact that I can do nothing more than open an AirPod case and my phone registers it is magic. Finally, the fact that MacOS is *nix is absolutely icing on the cake.

[sehansen]

I'll echo archvile here, in that I get excellent battery life running Linux. I've been getting 10-12 hours of battery life from the assortment of Asus and Thinkpad laptops I've had the past 15 years.

To give a very concrete example, I have two identical Thinkpad T14 at work, one running Linux (Debian Bookworm with KDE) and one running Windows 11. When doing normal office work, the Linux laptop easily lasts a whole workday with >20% battery left at the end. The Windows laptop runs out of battery in less than 2 hours.

[throwaway2037]

    > Today, in 2025, a full decade after 4K became standard, the way various DE/WMs handle scaling is embarrassing.

Generally, I agree, but Qt (KDE) is the standout to me, primarily because it is "commercial first, and open source second" in my mind. Do you have HiDPI scaling issues with Qt apps?

[2Gkashmiri]

Use kdeconnect. It is a universal app and works seamlessly

[NortySpock]

Regarding 6 You can do this on Linux while on a LAN...

Perhaps Syncthing would partially cover this? Not the applications, but the files ....

[mr_mitm]

Same here. Linux has been my daily driver for over twenty years now, at home and at work. (Not a gamer though.)

[magicalhippo]

Not OP but for me it's a solid remote desktop alternative that can compete with Windows' remote desktop experience. There's been some movement there, so perhaps in 5 years time.

Also I really dislike how out of memory conditions just causes everything to grind to a halt for 5 minutes before something, typically Firefox, crashes. On Windows at least just Firefox gets very slow, but usually I can just nuke the process that eats too much memory. Not so on Linux as the whole desktop becomes unresponsive.

And every now and then I still need to fiddle with some config files or whatnot. Not game breaking but annoying.

[AlienRobot]

Not OP, but my experience with Linux is that seemingly absurd usability issues just keep piling up the more you use it and at some you just kind of give up and abandon any expectation of even a decent level of common sense from whoever is developing the system.

I've listed some of which I encountered on Mint here https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/folders/273/usability-iss... Among them: AppImages just don't run unless you know how to make them run. This could be fixed with literally a single dialog box. There is no way to install fonts by default other than knowing where to put them and knowing how to get there. Every app that uses Alt+Click, e.g. for picking a color, won't work because that's bound by default by the DE.

These issues may sound small at first but think of it this way: did nobody making this OS think about how users were going to install fonts? Or ever used an application that used the Alt key? Or did they just assume everyone would know what to do when they download an appimage and double click on it and nothing happens?

And you can just feel that the whole thing is going to be like this. Every single time in the future you want to do something that isn't very extremely obvious, you'll find a hurdle.

I even had issues configuring my clock because somebody thought it was a good idea to just tell users to use a strftime code to format the taskbar clock. I actually had to type "%Y-%m-%d%n%H:%M" to get it to look the way I want. And this isn't an advanced setting. This is right clicking on the clock and clicking "Configure." When I realized what to do I actually laughed out loud because it felt like a joke. Fellas, only programmers know these codes. Make some GUIs for the normal people.

[wltr]

Not to argue with you, but is that Linux Mint specifically? I never used it, and its DE looked very unprofessional to my liking. Personally, I prefer modern Gnome, but I also like KDE. Everything else looks very unfriendly to an average user, I won’t ever install it. I’d go Gnome for Mac users and KDE for Windows refugees.

[jimnotgym]

Microsoft Office