Had to think about it... The answer is nowhere. I built my digital life around Linux for 23 years.

I thought of another gripe. Mint works great but the logo is horrible. Sorry to whatever graphic designer I just insulted. I literally jumped distros because I was sick of seeing it.

As far as my novice knowledge understands, this isn't a fixable "issue". But I'd love to use Debian as my main OS for everything, but I know there's gonna be issues with Steam/GOG games and GPU drivers. My patience and tolerance with "daily drivers" is much lower than my servers, so as far as I know that pretty much limits me to Mint (which isn't as cool)

I have a few windows programs that don't play nice with wine. Otherwise I do everything on Linux when I can

Well, this is more of an I should probably learn how to thing, but even with all the customizations I've made to Cinnamon, I'd love to be able to do more customizations.

I cannot switch off Cinnamon on my desktop since I'm technically running tech support for my dad, also running Mint w/Cinnamon. Would if I could.

Game support.

Also arm support, I really wanted to use asahi but a lot of my apps just dont support it. I was going to look into recompiling some of the open source apps I use like my authenticator but havnt gotten around to it yet.

Flatpack and password managers. They’ll oil and water. 

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 miss start menu ads, intrusive bing searches, copilot upselling, MSN news, and uninstallable things I'll never use on my PC like Xbox.

Support for higher levels of ARM SystemReady seem like they're poorly supported in the Linux ecosystem right now.

ARM boards nearly always require a devicetree entry for that specific board.

This may not be entirely a Linux problem, but my understanding is that some of the x1 elite laptops we've seen DeviceTree entries added in the Linux kernel are using SystemReady ES or SystemReady SR on Windows

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.

My D drive doesn't auto mount on boot. Fixing isn't worth the effort if clicking two buttons.

Not my pain point, but my friend's.

He recently installed linux mint to try, mainly because of the dubious quality of windows 11. After using it normally for many hours (maybe for 2 ~ 3 days), his system just froze, the audio entered a loop, and he was only able to shut the computer down pulling it from the plug.

I have no idea why this happens, this used to happen to me as well on arch, but then it just stopped (maybe some package update fixed it?).

I've seem people pointing to proprietary nvidia drivers causing it, but I never understood how the driver could freeze everything in the computer.

My desktop PC running Fedora 43 goes to sleep in a weird way. When I was running Windows and the computer went to sleep the power button would blink and I could wake the PC with my keyboard or mouse. On Fedora the power button doesn't blink (no big deal) and I can't wake the PC with my keyboard or mouse, only the power button works.

Another issue is if I have the option to turn the monitor off after a certain amount of time I cannot get it to wake from sleep. If I turn the monitor off and on there's no signal. If the monitor goes to sleep because the PC goes to sleep it's fine.

Something randomly causes Firefox to hoover up all my computer's RAM. I can tell my system is going to lock up because the fan on the CPU cooler ramps up. When Firefox finally sucks up all the RAM the entire desktop is unresponsive. I had to enable the system rescue keys and I sometimes have to manually trigger the OOM killer.

Raw photo editing on Linux sucks. I've tried DarkTable, RawTherapee and some other program and didn't like any of them. The UI is incredibly complex or blurry.

Linux is better for audio production than it’s ever been. That said, the plug-in support is still severely lacking. Even the VST bridges are hit or miss because a lot of plugins install via .exe installers which may or may not run well via wine. Getting a raw .vst file is actually pretty rare. And that’s for free plugins that don’t require DRM. Most professional quality plugins are more complex.

Been using it for a couple years, my main ones currently are:

• VR. SteamVR is a broken mess, Monado is pretty much functional, but I haven't switched yet. Mesa or the kernel sometimes forget about VR and break it in an update.
• QT5 to QT6 transition for my favorite Matrix client, Nheko. Scrolling is a pain, and the clipboard randomly stops working.
• Wayland freedom and featureset is nowhere close to X11. I can't choose a window manager without locking myself in to a specific featureset on my display server. Stuff like global hotkeys isn't supported in most applications. I'm still on the godawful GNOME desktop portals, which is most annoying for file picking. I have no HDR support because my window manager isn't from KDE or GNOME.
• GTK4 apps looking like shit (there are patches luckily), I try to avoid them just because of libadwaita and GNOME's awful design.

On the note of Wayland, I have switched, and for good reason. Besides unimplemented features, things "just work" a lot better than X11. Still wish I could have effectively bspwm window management with kwin featureset though. (Plugins for tiling are not the same experience)

My latest project is a NixOS based NAS, with the goal being to make something super reproducible I can help friends setup for themselves to build out a decentralized backup/media/adblock/fileshare/communication tool for me and my loved ones.

I understand the concept and use case of flakes and home manager but every time I have attempted to install these, down to just fully copying provided configs, something doesn’t work, and then uninstalling them is a bit of a nightmare. I’ve yet to find a truly accessible NixOS tutorial as someone coming from an Arch from scratch install and tinkering with some 6 other Linux based operating systems.

I’d love for either a fully flake free setup, that is just simple “default style” config files, OR an actually useful tutorial that discusses the generic process of installing these in a way that I can actually understand, because I clearly lack some important piece of knowledge to make it work as intended. So many pieces of software I’m interested in simply say “install the XYZ flake and you’re good to go”. People make Nix seem so simple (and when it works it feels that way) but there’s some disconnect between the author of every tutorial I’ve followed and me as a relatively new to Nix end user.

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

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.

Touchpad: No matter what I did, the touchpad is always so bad on Linux (tried on different devices, different hardware, different distros). Two finger scrolling is not consistent, movement doesn't feel right, gestures are not precise enough. Tried to get the "two finger swipe back" on the browser on my old Intel Macbook Air and it was just horrible. Could only get three finger swipe to work and recognition of that was just not very consistent. At the moment I have a old notebook sitting here to set up for one of my family members and could only get somewhat smooth scrolling to work on Mint by using some arcane workaround... but only in Firefox, scrolling anywhere else still sucks. Apparently touchpads on Linux are still my nemesis.

I would love to use Linux on my notebook too, but I also don't want to fight with my main input all the time. :( Will try Asahi linux on the M1 Macbook as soon the battery issue improves, but I have a feeling that the touchpad problems will drive me back to Mac OS again (which sucks, because they keep locking Mac OS down more every year...).

One thing that is really annoying is that for working with plugging in and out SD cards in my internal SD card reader I always have to go to standby for it to properly remove and then again to properly detect a new one being inserted. This does not seem to be a problem with external readers.

Also I mostly keep my laptop in standby but have to restart every two weeks since some small things like fingerprint sign in seem to just randomly stop working after a few days of usage.

Otherwise it's smooth sailing but I think that's mostly because I have an older Thinkpad and they are just really well supported and I'm not trying to do very special things and mostly stick do default workflows in my distro.

I fully switched to Linux in 2024, my last desktop Linux experience before that being at least five years prior.

• Windows behaves a bit more gracefully then Linux when the VRAM is being exhausted. On Linux I can get graphics artifacts and sometimes Steam crashing. That mainly becomes relevant when doing GPGPU stuff, though; gaming works fine.
• Some apps use GTK4. Since GTK3, GNOME has been moving away from a "regular" desktop experience and towards this weird pseudo-mobile thing that goes against all established conventions. That might be nice if you really like their style and use nothing but GNOME, but it's really annoying if you don't. I long for the good old days where action buttons weren't crammed into title bars.
• Occasionally having to manually fix package updates. Only an issue because my distro is Arch-based and that kind of stuff is to be expected there.
• I haven't managed to get three-finger swipe mapped to PgUp/PgDn so far but I use the trackpad rarely enough that I haven't bothered investing time into it yet.
• Occasionally the system just shits itself when rapidly switching between different users' desktop sessions. Again, that happens so rarely that I haven't bothered trying to deal with it yet.

On the other hand, I'm happier than expected with Wayland and PipeWire. They just work with little fuss. Sure, I'm a KDE user and Wayland is reportedly less fun outside the big DEs, but for me it just works.

I still have to use MSoffice for work :(

I have a Thinkpad with integrated graphics I basically use as a launcher for Firefox and Steam.
Attached to a docking station with an external monitor connected via HDMI. Nothing fancy.
In several different distros, I can't play my Steam games on Gnome with Wayland, because the game window won't open properly.
It's either bigger than the screen so I only see part of it, or smaller and windowed. A lot of the time it will just show a black screen inside the window.
Tried all available Proton versions, laptop lid open or closed, laptop monitor active or deactivated. Makes no difference.
It works fine on Xfce (X11), KDE 5 (X11) and Plasma (Wayland), so I'm not too bothered.
I'd prefer Gnome, though.

Other issues that don't bother me much: I had to disable the fingerprint reader in BIOS to get rid of error message spam during boot, and the monitor configuration isn't applied on the login screen so I have to type my password in blindly.

What bothers me more is that the laptop doesn't receive an IP address from my DHCP server over WiFi, while my wife's Windows PC and my phone do. But that's more likely due to a misconfigured DHCP server than the OS.

Screen blanking, or rather screen blanking not functioning properly.

I have literally spent 9 months researching every possible angle and even going as far as buying some of those Edid Emulator passthroughs for each monitor to see if those helped. Tried disabling the Kscreen manager in KDE. Tried manually controlling it via CLI and DPMS. Tried different mice and keyboards to see if it was my inputs waking it up. Tried making sure all the monitors had their auto-select input option disabled. Nope, my monitors blank for a second or two and then unblank immediately. The issue is present in both X11 and Wayland.

I have had to jump through hoops to enable a screen saver in wayland. I have to turn my monitors off manually every night. It's really frustrating. It seems like a really simple thing, but it's like, literally all I want is consistent screen blanking and I have spent the better part of 9 months on and off trying to find a fucking solution to no avail. I still have no explanation for why they wake instantly, they don't seem to be triggered by anything on the system, based on the logs.

I even made a post asking for help regarding it here on Lemmy about six months ago. No luck.

It drives me up the wall because I'm actually really good at researching and finding solutions for problems I've run into online. This one mystifies and eludes me and while seeming minor I feel like is a genuine pain in my ass.

Related: Have an old laptop running a server OS with no GUI and have no ability to disable the monitor since technically there isn't any monitor rendering set up, so all commands to screen blank the monitor fail because there's technically no monitor to turn off according to the system.

For some reason my webcam is squished to a 16:9 format on Teams through Vivaldi for work. Other than that, both work and private use and gaming has been fairly flawless. Oh, except for Star Citizen that was a hassle to set up, but once the community guides were found, it was easily figured out.

Need proper replacements for:

• AirPlay/Sonos (SendSpin has made a huge splash in recent months)
• Easy wireless display sharing to TVs à la AirPlay mirroring and Windows Cast