• audio - Most of the time it works, but there have been plenty of times that after an install, I have to go in and make a handfull of changes to get it working.

• "you are using it wrong" developers - Lookin at you, Gnome, Mozilla and Pottering. Yes, you are donating your time, and I appreciate that, but don't be dismissive of people if they bring up valid issues. If you just don't want to fix problems, that's fine, but just be honest about that, instead of blaming the user.

• sleep/hibernate - I've never depended on sleep or hibernate to work properly. I gave up on that years ago, and whenever I come back and try it again, I remember why I gave it up.

• documentation - As a seasoned linux person, I love man-pages, but they are soooooo obtuse and hard to parse for newbies. I also hate it when the website has mountains of documentation, but they couldn't be bothered to put that into the man-pages.

• video/wifi drivers - Yes, I know that this is mostly a problem because of the manufacturers. That doesn't mean it isn't a problem.

• unsympathetic users - Just because it works for you, doesn't mean it works for other people. I can't wait for year-of-the-linux-desktop, but it just isn't there yet. As soon as you have to tell a non-tech to open a terminal, the vast majority of them are out. You and I know that 'editing /etc/somedir/somefile and running /usr/sbin/somecommand' is easy, but sooooo many of them don't know what that means, nor will they care. I hear that windows is pretty bad nowadays, but people will often stick with the devil they know.

Terrible documentation that is written assuming far too much prior knowledge.

I'm pretty technologically literate but just don't have a lot of experience with Linux, in the last year of trying properly to switch over the most frustrating part is trying to fix problems or follow peoples "guides" to various things. There is plenty of information out there for sure but when I have to keep looking up a string of things to try and get to my desired end result then the original documentation I'm trying to follow is not adequate.

I can only imagine what it might be like for users who are less inclined to learn about this stuff and just want to use it / solve a problem.

I think that a lot can be said for well written documentation that describes necessary processes to get a desired result in a way that everyone can follow regardless of their prior experience or knowledge.

Flatpaks apps & their runtimes is taking 20 gb, was 80 gb before I realize it and start cleaning up. That's annoying. But I also like Flatpak. I may just prioritize DNF first (I'm on Fedora) to minimize Flatpak bloats.

60 gb is very significant for me being in 256 gb ssd.

The community's general overestimation of the average person's tech capabilities.

Not necessarily fair to pin this on Linux per se, but there's hardware that doesn't work well or at all still and alternative solutions still aren't there. So this would be mostly on companies making software for Windows but not for Linux, but it's still part of the Linux experience that I do not enjoy.

I have to troubleshoot things on Linux more than I did on Windows.

The fact that there is NO agreed single package standard across distros.

Middle click to free scroll not working in nom-FF browsers

Linux needs a shared API framework for all desktop apps for them to succeed. It’s ridiculous that gnome apps and other apps look different and have different theming conventions. I’d love to get into theming and application building, but I’m so afraid that I’ll waste my time on something that won’t apply to everything. macOS solved application cohesion perfectly.

Suspend/sleep. I bought a specific laptop so it works, but these manufacturers need to let our developers know what the fuck is going on in the hardware

The norms on where files belong are really dumb.

Similarly, programs being entitled to strew files all over kingdom come.

Ten different ways to install software and maybe one or two of them actually keep track of where all the files are and clean them up properly upon removal.

Politics. Let me grab some 🍿 for all the arguments about how "Linux is inherently political" and all that nonsense that I don't care about. I just want to use the damn thing, that's all.

Snap. The very existence of it.

No SIGINFO. Barbaric.

People having politics arguments on FOSS fora or mailing lists. We have a basic interest in open source in common, why are there additional purity tests being applied to people who don't act "sufficiently" left wing? Or, equally as often, why are you throwing around playground insults like a 14 year old and discussing conspiracy theories?

Basically people not behaving respectfully to others.

You want to do some cool thing and you find instructions online.

But that shit only works when t every single aspect of the s is the exact same version.

Which will never be the case, so now you’re at co desperately trying to improvise the steps that, if you inherently knew how to do, you wouldn’t have needed instructions for in the first place.

Not a Linux thing directly but something that bothers me a lot: The complete lack of support from professional applications.
Wanna use this tool that cost hundreds of bucks on Linux? Lmao fuck you.
You’d think companies that actually make money could afford to support Linux and hobbyists doing FOSS stuff for funsies can only focus on the OS they use themselves but somehow we live in a world where the opposite is true.

This is what makes switching to Linux for me personally and probably a lot of other people completely unviable because it means having to give up on thousands of dollars of stuff for “freedom”.

And the onus is 100% on the companies developing software. They have to offer Linux versions first, so people can switch to Linux, giving them more Linux users. Doesn’t work the other way around.

Oh also psst don’t ever mention spending money on proprietary software around Linux people, they will have a heart attack.

vendor support

Libinput. I want to use wayland. I would use wayland. I will not use wayland because libinput is the antichrist.

Every now and then I update my system and go to move my cursor and say (aloud) "wow, this is ass!" And that's when I know that I'm in a wayland session or libinput has otherwise been selected as my touchpad's input driver. And it's not like other Linux things where I can just change some settings to tune it, noooo, because why would you need to do that?? Let's just make an input driver that shakes the cursor with my every heartbeat and a hardcoded acceleration profile that is simultaneously too sensitive to click small things and not sensitive enough to move a window across the screen without multiple touchpad strokes because that's perfect on every system and everyone should just be okay with that because it's the standard and good and I hate it hate hate hate hate

Hate hate hate hate hate

Hate

(I very much appreciate you, libinput developers, you do great work and I am grateful for it, and I just have some (kind of maybe very strong) suggestions about configurability in your design philosophy)

Unreproducible, random bugs that can be temporarily solved by repeating your actions a bunch of times until it works. Drives me nuts, and they show up all over the place.

No easy/simple kiosk mode. One of the very few things Windows does well, you can turn any computer into a kiosk in less than 5 minutes.

With Linux, you have to jank a bunch of stuff together and it's a huge pain.

This is a good question. There's nothing I hate about Linux there are things I hate about some projects, and some communities, and some distributions.

Maybe zombie processes. I guess I dislike that Linux isn't a microkernel, but I doubt it'd have a huge impact because the kernel has been incredibly stable for my uses for years. I can't actually remember the last time I saw zombie processes, but it was within the past two years, and their existence is just a fundamental stupidity in Linux, and closely tied to the monolithic kernel architecture.

But, still... it'd be hard to stretch that to "hate."

CUPS is a terrible piece of software that almost everyone needs, and needs somebody to come along and do a pipewire on it. I guess I hate CUPS, but that's not Linux.

nuts could be much, much easier. It's designed for power users and is a PITA to configure. Quite capable, but could be a lot more simple for simple use cases.

I'm really reaching here. There's little in Linux + BSD userspace (or even GNU) that's not far worse on a Mac or in Windows; maybe I'd feel stronger if there was a better option.

I'm really, really hoping Redox makes it. I'd love to see an end-user oriented, non-research microkernel with broad hardware support - something good enough to run on modern bare hardware. Then I might jump ship, especially if I get to jettison systemd in the process.

I know this is petty, but title bars in apps. Please, remove it entirely. It's not necessary and it feels so 2007. I don't need to be reminded which application I'm using when I can use that screen real estate for other things.