So first of all, this is not a “help me like linux” post but desktop linux specifically and it’s not a “linux is shit” post either.

I run a whole bunch of linux servers (including the one that hosts the instance I’m posting from), the first thing I install on a Windows machine is WSL and I’ve compiled my first kernel about 20 years ago so that’s not the problem we’re facing here. I understand how linux works and considering the end of support for Windows 10 this is as good an opportunity as ever to fully make the switch.

My problem is more that specifically linux on a desktop still feels more like an unfinished prototype than like something I’d want to use as a daily driver. About once a year I challenge myself to try it for a while and see how it feels. I look around for a distro that seems promising, put it on a spare SSD, put it either into my Framework laptop or my gaming machine and see where the journey takes me, only booting Windows in an emergency.

And each time, I get fed up after a few days:

  • Navigating a combination of the distro’s native package manager (apt, pacman, rpm, whatever), snap, flatpack and still having to set up the maintainers’ custom repositories to get stuff that’s even remotely up-to-date somehow feels even messier than the Windows approach of downloading binaries manually.
  • The different UI toolkits, desktop environment, window manager and compositor seem to be fighting each other. I feel like even for something simple as changing a theme or the UI scaling, I have to change settings in three different places just to notice that half the applications still ignore them and my login screen renders in the top left corner of the screen but the mouse cursor acts as if the whole screen was used.
  • All of that seems to be getting worse when fractional scaling is involved which is a must for the 2256x1504 screen in my Framework 13.
  • The general advice seems to be “just wait until you run into a problem, then research how to solve it”. For my server stuff, this works really well. But for desktop linux, it feels like for every problem I find five different solutions where each of them assumes an entirely different technology stack and if mine is even slightly different I eventually run into a step where a config file is not where it should be or a package is not available for what I’m using.
  • I do a lot of .NET programming and photo editing. I could probably replace VS with VScode or Ryder but it’s an additional hurdle. For photo editing, I haven’t found a single thing that fits my workflow the way Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop do. I’ve tried Gimp, Krita, Darktable, RawTherapee and probably a couple more and they all felt like they were missing half the features or suffer from the same unintuitive UI/UX that Blender had before they completely overhauled it with 2.8.

Sooo… where do I go from this? I really want this to work out.

  • actionjbone@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 day ago

    I’ve been “Linux-adjacent” for years, and recently switched my main gaming computer over to it. And I’ve seen exactly those frustrations so many times.

    The good AND bad part about user-managed software is that the developer-users decide how things work, then things stay that way until other developer-users do things differently.

    My most recent frustration? Drive automounting on boot.

    On Windows or Mac, all physical drives mount when the system boots up.

    On most, but all, varieties of Linux, it seems ONLY the system drive is mounted.

    This gave me trouble when I tried to set a second drive as the default location for Steam.

    Every time I rebooted, the Steam client forgot that I had a second hard drive. I didn’t realize why, because in system settings I told the computer to mount all drives on boot.

    But. But.

    By default, Bazzite seems to set secondary drives as external, rather than internal. Spork knows why.

    So I had to sift through forum posts until I discovered that the internal drive was being seen as external. Then I had to figure out the combination of partition management tools and console commands to tell the system to mount the drive as an internal drive, rather than external.

    It now works perfectly - after over an hour of research and a couple days of frustration.

    There are two problems: 1. An extremely basic thing doesn’t work the way the majority of users expect it to, and 2. A majority of developer-users apparently think it works fine as it is and doesn’t need to be changed.

    So I feel your pain. I’d rather be using Linux now for gaming and for my 3D printing related hobbies.

    But for my day job, I’m on PC or Mac. I have to be, because I can’t stop working for two hours while I troubleshoot and find a solution to an obscure problem.