cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
Surface camera doesn’t work.
I think that’s it.
My biggest challenge is really around Podman on Bazzite. It is just different enough from Docker to be annoying. I had the system lock up, and the Podman containers / pods (whatever you want to call them) would not launch. In fact, the system claimed they didn’t even exist. I was looking for the files and logs all over to try to figure it out. I ended up doing a clean shutdown and restart and then the container started without issue.
The second issue I have is also related to my Jellyfin container/pod. I have gone through all the recommended settings and troubleshooting, adding permissions exceptions, all the podman settings, and I still cannot get it to take advantage of the Nvidia acceleration unless I put SELinux in permissive mode, which the Internet says is a bad thing.
Other than, honestly Bazzite has been great as my daily driver for about 4 months now.
unless I put SELinux in permissive mode, which the Internet says is a bad thing.
I am also The Internet, and I say unless it is an internet-exposed service, just do it. More security is never bad of course, but process isolation and privilege escalation prevention is pretty low on the list of security measures you should focus on. First thing, unless it’s meant to be a “public” service (one that someone without pre-authorization may access), it shouldn’t be exposed to the internet at all, and that alone brings the threat model from “definitely will be scanned and automatically attacked, decent chance it gets pwnd if you don’t have good passwords and update often” to “someone needs to be both skilled and targeting you”. Spend an afternoon or two setting up a VPN so you can access your services from wherever, and share them with select people.
SELinux is the cause of many headaches, and its main proposition is against untrusted code or in a shared system. If it’s your box, in your network, and you’re not aiming for a Red Hat certification, it’s ok to disable it.
Bazzite. Internal Bluetooth sucks so I have an external USB Bluetooth. Certain devices refuse to respect that I don’t want to use internal Bluetooth and bazzite frequently turns it back on. I shouldn’t have to go into config files to fix this. I get it, it’s Linux, sometimes you need to but for mass adoption things like this should be a toggle in gui. Hell, maybe it’s in the gui somewhere. I fiddled with it long enough to give up for now
I have similar issues with even edited bluetooth config files occasionally being overwritten with a system update. Suddenly the way I had it set on purpose by editing the config file has been reverted back to the way I don’t want it.
You may be able to disable the internal Bluetooth entirely via BIOS.
Yeah my bios is dumb and that isn’t an option unfortunately
I still have to use MSoffice for work :(
Flatpack and password managers. They’ll oil and water.
What do you mean by that? I use the Keepass flatpak and even got autofill to work by adding some kind of launch option of I remember correctly.
I hear you. Kinda by design though. Its supposed to be difficult for containered applications to interact.
I think i installed keepassxc native. Then some config magic I’ve forgotten.
My D drive doesn’t auto mount on boot. Fixing isn’t worth the effort if clicking two buttons.
For anyone else, fstab is probably your friend.
And if editing fstab yourself is too daunting, there is also gnome-disk-utility which has a nice GUI for setting auto-mounts that edits fstab for you.
The only real thing that’s consistently annoying for me is UI scaling on high-DPI displays. Between the DE, GTK, and QT all needing different settings that all act differently.
But I guess generally once you get it set it’s mostly fine.
It is probably because I am a moron and just took a long time to figure it out, but its always harder to set up network shares with my linux desktop than any other machine in my house. At this point I know how to do it pretty well, but its a LOT more involved because none of the GUI tools seem to really work right.
Like I will share a folder from my server (also running linux BTW) and its instantly viewable on my windows laptop and even my streaming devices, but to discover it on my other linux machine is always a chore that involves editing a few config files and just kinda randomly poking around until it works.
but to discover it on my other linux machine is always a chore that involves editing a few config files and just kinda randomly poking around until it works.
What’s your desktop environment? On KDE you can just enter
smb://serverhost/pathin the Dolphin navigation bar and it will open it.Haha, you can! But other programs which don’t have built in network share support can’t use those. Also a bit annoyed by this, but it’s an easy fix.
Yes, that’s still a bit annoying unfortunately.
Editing the fstab to properly mount a network share also currently has no UI available in KDE and has to be done manually.
Can’t mount flashdrives since the last Ubuntu update…
Any clues in the dmesg output?
I have been using various Debian-flavored Linux variets for several years in both desktop and server.
Recently I got a System76 laptop for work because they are food quality, repairable, and mostly “just work”. The main issue I have run into is Cisco Secure Client (formerly AnyConnect) simply breaks in Ubuntu/PoP. If I do get it to install by ignoring Cisco’s shitty instructions, it either won’t route traffic once connected or corrupt itself attempting to auto-update.
It is purely a Cisco issue because they don’t put much effort into their Linux VPN software. Other VPNs not only work easily, but can also integrate into PoP Cosmic. Cisco and their restrictive nature just make the process impossible.
Heck, you can’t even download their VPN software without a Cisco contract. So if my company doesn’t provide the correct version or distro package, there is no way for me to get it. Since most people on the helpdesk don’t know anything about Linux, they simply provide the generic Linux.tar.gz file instead of the DEB or RPM files.
I gave up and installed Windows on a second NVMe.
I dont know your specific network topology, but I’ve always been able to use
openconnectrather than Cisco’s clientnetwork-manager-openconnectfor NM support
Had to think about it… The answer is nowhere. I built my digital life around Linux for 23 years.
On a surface level, it works fine for me, i installed pop os a few months ago and i’m happy. There is a lot i haven’t really figured out yet, and i don’t know if i ever will or have to. There is an UEFI update that has been pending ever since i installed it. It says i may have to hit the power button multiple times to install it, no idea what that even means, and i don’t really want to read 2 pages of documentation to make it work. Most peripherals i have are straight up not supported on linux. They work, but i have to use windows to configure them. I tried to install a razer software for linux, but the hurdles i had to go through and the amount of: now go to this website to install this flatpak is kinda nuts, just for it not to work at the end. I still don’t really know what a flatpak is, so that doesn’t help. On one of my mice, the muddle mouse button just straight up doesn’t work on linux. Every other works, it works on windows, this just doesn’t.
The weirdest thing that sometimes happens is that i play a game and i think when i plug in my headset or mouse, something freaks out and i can still use M1 to shoot for example, but i can’t use M1 in the game menu. Or any menu at all. I can use M2 to put the PC to sleep and then it works again.
I tried to use Wine to try some windows programs to see if they work, but i don’t even know where to start, i installed them, and everything looks like it should just work (or not) but it just does nothing.
Can’t stream peacock to watch my motorsports. Resolved by unsubbing but I still wanna watch sometimes.
Peacock doesn’t work in the browser?
Probably not if you use Firefox.
Correctamundo. I use chrome to stream all those types of services. Waterfox for everything else. Even agent switcher doesn’t help.
On my specific setup (5700x3d, 5700xt) with the Vive gen 1 I can’t get it to run VR nicely. There is huge performance hitches compared to Windows. Only VR is like this most my non VR games see performance gains across the board.
Also, steamvr takes prohibitively long to load and frequently crashes. Half-Life, Alyx can’t get past a certain point in the game on Linux but runs past just fine on Windows. This feels like just a Linux driver issue. I’ve tried several distributions with the same problems.
reading all them pain points, I had to type this up. free advice, worth what you paid for it.
you know how in life you’re supposed to pick your side, your team, and stick to it? like, no tifosi is changing their allegiance because the rival got a fancier kit or a new power forward or whatever; in fact, you’ll root harder for your underdog darlings. you don’t become a nazi overnight because they’re flooding the aether or their spokes is a dead ringer for scarjo. etc.
here, you gotta do the opposite. you gotta anticipate where the major development effort goes to and go there now. you can’t cling to X11 and xfce4 and sysv init and whatever and then removed that you can’t nicely alt-tab out of games or have functioning HiDPI or you audio stack from 2006 is crapping out and such.
the largest linux hardware manufacturer at present is valve. they went with plasma, they went with wayland, they put in a lot of work to make it better, and with new steam hardware that’s likely to continue. in addition, there’s a smorgasbord of activity in that sector and that’s your best - and I contend, only - bet.
so that’s what you’ll run, and like it. I’ve ran close to everything prior to plasma and have occasional nostalgic flashbacks and miss a feature or two over here. but this is the thing with the most hands on and your best bet that someone already solved your issue or is aware of it and working on it.
Are you really complaining that community effort and team work are a bad thing…? I’m confused here, it sounds like you are. But that can’t be right.
