For me it’s the fact that there’s no “perfect setup” for anything. This likely only applies to my specific machine (kids, don’t buy an asus rog strix, trust me) but I can never get the “ok this setup is perfect, everything works exactly how I like it, I can’t complain”

What I mean by this is for example KDE Plasma 6. All my apps and everything work on it. games work flawlessly, all my dev tools, great. so I should be happy right? no. workspaces suck on multi-monitor setups, no native auto tiling and the third party script that does it is kinda wonky. Ok fair enough lets use something else like say Niri or Sway or Hyprland whatever. cool I got my tiling, I have my vim nav, awesome right? no certain games don’t work with these WMs as they all have issues with mouse constraints on certain xwayland stuff that KDE has managed to solve.

OK fair enough lets try an x11 WM. nope can’t do it on my laptop as I have both an integrated AMD gpu and and discrete Nivida gpu therefore x11 can’t handle it as far as gaming goes.

There’s a few other things like that. Like I want to use something that isn’t packaged for whatever distro so you go with the app image of it but it’s pretty much useless since it won’t integrate with your system. i.e. the appimage of Tabby. Or waiting on a package to get approved but the maintainer drops out at the last minute so either you have to pick it up or wait on someone else to which essentially resets the process (yay nix pkgs).

Essentially with linux in most cases the focus always seems to be on fixing the complicated things while ignoring the easy user experience things. Like workspaces shouldn’t suck as much as they do on Plasma and the “fix” coming next month isn’t going to improve things that much. oh boy I can pin a single app on my second monitor…that doesn’t fix the dreadful workspace experience on Plasma. ALL they have to do is allow independant sets of workspaces per monitor. that’s it. that’s all I want. but the devs at KDE, just like their opinions on tiling, will say “well we don’t use workspaces like that so you won’t either”.

Energy management is the part that still complicates things most for me. Rfkill not being managed correctly. Machines that suspend but don’t hibernate, or that hibernate but don’t suspend. Laptops that de-suspend during transport. Batteries that overdrain during suspend. Bluetooth. And most annoying of all, NVidia (insert Torvalds iconic scene).

Audio is always the final straw for me. I usually have multiple devices, multiple headsets, whenever i want to switch it’s a mess and things don’t always work. Also have hit or miss support for higher bitrates.

Also moved to a rodecaster for my audio and it does not support all the bells and whistles in linux.

When my PC goes into sleep or hibernate, my keyboard won’t work after it wakes up. I have to unplug and reconnect my keyboard every… single… time…

Except for this issue, my PC works perfectly fine and better than Windows in nearly every way.

Not a real big issue, but sometimes (not all the time) when my Ubuntu OS (24.04.3 LTS) puts my desktop to sleep (automatically after 2 hours idle) when I go to wake it up it’s as if I’ve rebooted. All my applications are closed, I have to login etc, but it doesn’t really do a full boot sequence with the option to enter BIOS etc.

Like I said, not a big deal as I’m not (usually) dumb enough to leave unsaved work sitting around, but it is kind of annoying.

I have to turn on my screen before turning on the PC otherwise Linux doesn’t appear on the screen.

Also if the screen goes into standby In often have to restart my computer.

I have Nvidia so not sure if thats the reason

I can’t figure out how to run game mods that are arbitrary .exe programs that are meant to hook into a running game. Specifically, otis_inf camera tools with, for example, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I’ve tried protontricks but its so damn complicated and poorly documented I don’t really know how.

Games with anti-cheat don’t work.

Secureboot doesn’t like GRUB.

Solidworks doesn’t run natively on linux, neither does my Sketchup Pro program.

SteamVR doesn’t run well on linux

What does work that I use regularly? My older DVD drives work fine, ripping my music and dvd/blu-rays works well and seamlessly with multiple instances of the programs running simultaneously. The typical FOSS stuff I use is a no-brainer, from Gimp to Blender to Libreoffice.

But for the stuff I work with most and the games I play most often? It just doesn’t work well or at all.

Permissions management. I recently tried creating a new exfat partition on my external HD using the default KDE Partition Manager. When finished, I found that only the current (admin) user had write access to the drive. I tried changing this using the Dophin file explorer. It appeared to let me change these permissions through the Properties menu and the drop downs within the Permissions tab, but nothing changed after hitting OK. I was eventually able to fix it using the chown command in the terminal, but I feel like I should have been able to set this when creating the partition as well as in the file explorer.

remote desktop is pretty much useless. i can do most things through ssh, but some things i just want a gui for, like changing gnome settings or something. i can’t figure out how to remote-login a gnome session or vnc. of course, i can pass a firefox session or similar, but that’s not really enough.

Nvidia drivers (I assume) cause random freezes requiring system reboot, maybe once or twice a week.

Tempered by the modern miracle that it runs windows games at all! I barely game on windows now except for a couple troublesome titles and the lack of wireless xbox controller support.

My biggest problem with Linux is security. I want a relatively idiot proof setup like in Microsoft and Apple products. I do not to have to minutely setup the firewall or have to go into the terminal to run a virus scan.

Other than that I am not too demanding of my system I nearly never have a problem although recently the game A Hat in Time makes my pc kernal panic.

All my games work like shit :(

And it’s kindof my fault because my hardware is outdated but while on Windows Hogwarts Legacy worked, in pain but worked, and Fallout 76 was fully stable and smooth.

On linux (Nobara), Hogwarts CTD’s on startup (shaders or something fails) and I had to lower setting in fallout to get it stable enough to play.

Bit I just began my adventure with linux as main OS so there’s still a lot to learn. One of stabilising things for Fallout was, for example, forcing dx12. Without it it froze my whole os sometimes. :(

Oh and KDEConnect reports it crashed for some reason if it cannot immediately connect to my phone. Which was funny until notification spam.

Multi monitor still has some quirks from time to time. Don’t take me wrong, it’s already much better than just 2-3 years ago even, but…still has quirks. Specially with different DPI. Sometimes apps get very…wonky when moved from a monitor with a normal 100% scaling to one where it has 150% scaling or so. And on return, it’s already messed up. Some start already in the wrong scaling with super tiny text. Or text double the size. Let’s just say, sometimes scaling gets tricky.

There’s also still a lot of games that don’t like being moved to another monitor, and don’t even give an option for it. Even when pushed to the non-main monitor by OS key combo (meta-shift-left, for example), they tend to rearrange themselves again back to the main monitor when changing from title screen to in-game screen, and things like that. So…still slightly wonky. Light years ahead of where we were just 3 years ago…but still wonky sometimes.