For me its the nuance of things.
Like quality of life settings. Turn Bluetooth on automatically at boot. Yeah, you can do it, but not by looking at settings and turning that option on. No, you need to recognize that’s a problem then search for an answer, determine which of the 2 or 3 answers you find are right, then do it. Is it a deal breaker? Absolutely not. But I don’t want to “solve problems” for every thing I want to do.
My other gripes would be lack of software support. As great as some apps are, others there are no support for Linux.
This stuff unfortunately depends by the desktop environment and because there are hundreds of them, it’s inconsistent.
On gnome it remembers it correctly, although there are a handful of times where the gamepad doesn’t connect automatically and I have to manually do that
My main issue often boils down to the amount of people still on Windows. The huge market there pulls developer attention that way so much that often my choice in software is narrowed down to “the one that has a Linux build”. And sometimes that isn’t even the case and now I need to find a way to simulate Windows for this piece of Software to work in some capacity.
Now, that’s not all that often that this is true, but when it is, it’s annoying.
Last time I tried (Mint) the dealbreaker for me was battery management. I tried various utils and settings but I couldn’t get as much juice of of the same charge using Mint and still have good performance. If anyone has any suggestions I’d be grateful!
There isn’t a default beginner distro anymore.
There are a dozen good choices with half a dozen different default desktop environments, all with their pros and cons.
But as a beginner, you have no idea what’s best for you.
It used to be a lot easier to choose your first distro, back when Ubuntu was still good (looong ago).IMO Mint could be it, if they used Plasma instead of Cinnamon, which still doesn’t support Wayland.
I don’t know about Cinamon as I’ve never used it, but I would never recommand KDE Plasma to a beginner.
It’s way too messy even if it’s really customizable.
Gnome is great, but I also think it’s too different from Windows for a beginner.
Plasma desktop is totally usable out of the box to a beginner, especially if they come from Windows.
Distrohopping
Honest answer from someone who’s used Linux as a daily driver for years:
Actually annoying:
- Fractional scaling on mixed DPI monitors is still painful (getting better with Wayland but not there yet)
- Bluetooth audio can be flaky, especially with multi-device switching
- Some professional software simply doesn’t exist (looking at you, Lightroom/Premiere)
Annoying but solvable:
- Printer setup — CUPS works great once configured, but that first setup can be rough
- Gaming anti-cheat — some competitive games flat-out refuse to work
Not actually problems, just different:
- The “too many choices” complaint — you pick one distro and move on, same as picking iOS vs Android
- The terminal — you can absolutely avoid it in 2026, but it’s genuinely faster once you learn the basics
Printer issues are so dependent on the printer.
Mine sets up in a couple of clicks and everything just works.
On the other hand I never have been able to make it work with windows.
Bonus points for no driver garbage software.
Does not bake delicious lasagna
Set your machine to Prime95. Bake for 30min.
It doesn’t have a simple “paint” or “paint.net”
We have simple paint programs. MyPaint, PyDPainter, Tux Paint, KolourPaint, off the top of my head.
Pinta
optics. people don’t realize how much its grown up. its kinda like when mac went to osx. people did not realize how much better it was and it took awhile for people to switch from windows but the apple store helped a lot with that stuff.
Small thing: There doesn’t (to my knowledge) seem to be an easy way to manage mountpoints/fstab with an easy gui interface.
Gnome Disk Utility lets you manage the mount points from a GUI. There are probably other programs that can do it too.
KDE Partition Manager also does this.
Hardware support is either non existent>generic driver>manufacturer driver that never gets updates
This sucks because on windows you’d be getting manufacturer driver support with updates and software tool support for additional configuration.
All the other “problems” are double edged because yes they are a problem for some but for others its a huge positive. For instance having all the files like .bashrc .compose .desktop as a way of configuring things is cool when you know an arcane when you dont. It should be in the settings gui.
On the plus side, for example, there are thousands of printers and scanners where the manufacturer never released a 64bit windows driver even if some of them were sold during the vista 64 bit era or even windows 7.
In that case Linux it’s the only way to make them work on a modern computer (unless supported by paid third party drivers like vuescan or printfab)
This is more about open source in general than Linux specifically, but anyway.
Minor details.
I get the impression that often the developers are passionate about getting things working, but once it works it’s hard to keep going to fix ‘papercuts’: minor UI issues, documentation, small usability improvements, consistency, etc. They want to move on to the next big feature.
Of course commercial products can suffer from the same, but if large enough they may have a program manager who assigns people to specific areas like that which get less coverage when it’s based on the devs’ desire to work on them.
This was my experience in the before times but over the last 5 years or so I’m consistently pleasantly surprised that everything just works, and works well at that. I guess I’m talking about hardware, docks, monitors, peripherals, printers, et cetera.
Software can be a mixed bag but that’s really those software projects rather than “linux”
Exactly that. Drivers don’t generally have much UI (I guess module load parameters count) so getting it working is most of the job.
It’s the user facing applications which sometimes feel a bit unpolished. That has definitely improved over the years though.
I can’t really help my Windows friends anymore when they need troubleshooting for things like: why their audio channels aren’t working in OBS, or why their config is suddenly corrupted. I used to be able to when I was on Windows, but now I just have to watch helplessly while they struggle to make things work.
This is what I aspire to be, but I’m not quite there yet. How long did it take you to forget the windows stuff?
It’s not so much forgetting, but waiting until Windows “changes it” - the “yeah, just go here in the settings… oh… there’s not a setting any more… there used to be an option for this…”
Oh, I have just written a comment about that. I forced a friend to install Fedora, as I couldn’t help him with Windows.
the confounding tribalism behind its modularity. options are great, but they also bring out the absolute worst in many of us.
it’s not much of a problem until those options actually manage to fragment the desktop and server ecosystems, but the attitudes at play surely drive prospective newcomers away a bit.
the confounding tribalism behind its modularity. options are great, but they also bring out the absolute worst in many of us.
Exactly. Parts of the Linux community, and FOSS in general, are extremely hostile. And for some new users, that’s the first (and probably only) impression they get when they have an issue trying it out for the first time. It’s a very small minority, but they are loud and aggressive, and are not ostracized by the community nearly enough.
Telling a new user that is going out of their way to figure out how to find and post an issue or feature request to Github, telling them to just fix it themselves isn’t a solution, it’s just being a dick. 99.9% of this planet doesn’t know how to code, just because they’re making a post on GitHub doesn’t mean they know how to code. Especially not at a level to fix an issue like that.
they used to be a much larger part of the community when i first got into linux in the early aughts; i’m glad RTFM is no longer considered a reasonable response.
And that some programs are extremely opinionated.
Ignoring requests with thousands of posts, or even pull requests where the changes are already implemented
“No. I won’t add tabs, it’s better UX to have separate windows”
“No, I won’t allow the user to save the password, even if it’s local or not important”
“All the temporary shit will be saved on the hardcoded directory ~/.fuckyou and not /tmp”
“All the temporary shit will be saved on the hardcoded directory ~/.fuckyou and not /tmp”
.fuckyou 😂😂
A recent bugbear of mine has been hardcoded icons.
Employers some don’t like you using non MicroSlop.
Thats not a linux problem.
Microsoft gives my execs nice all inclusive all expenses paid retreats to think it over.
My department just gives them a PDF explaining with cool graphics how Linux can save more money, how more secure it is, how we can avoid the constant force fed bug filled updates that MSFT pushes, how we can customize it exactly to our and users needs, we can actually own our own keys… The goes on and on.
But they’ve already decided which OS we use and they never even open the email we sent them.
My department just gives them a PDF explaining with cool graphics how Linux can save more money, how more secure it is, how we can avoid the constant force fed bug filled updates that MSFT pushes, how we can customize it exactly to our and users needs, we can actually own our own keys… The goes on and on.
No, because there is no simple point and click group policy/active directory equivalent in Linux that allows a group of 5 IT techs to manage 2000 desktops. And if you get your shit together and actually use the tools that Microsoft provides, you don’t get surprise updates, you can image PCs via a gui over network booting, you get bitlocker keys backed up in your domain etc etc etc etc etc.
All the things that allow a business to manage hardware and software with the minimum amount of expensive employees, Microsoft provides it, for money of course. That money is offset by the reduction in IT guys needed to look after everything.
It’s that simple. CorporateLand won’t touch Linux on the workstation until that’s possible.
I know Linux can’t do that as well, I just don’t get WHY. It descends from an OS that was literally designed from the ground up for managing shared resources accessed from multiple clients.
