Personally I haven’t. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it’s whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.
To this day, I still grumble about the lack of universal middle-click autoscroll support in applications that aren’t browsers or Electron/Chromium-based.
“But middle-click pasting is better!”
Well I’m not a fan of it, and I’d like to be able to use my middle mouse button to autoscroll everywhere instead. After all, isn’t customization one of the main reasons to use Linux in the first place?
Trying to find the path of a mounted USB stick is painful as well. Is it at /mnt, /media or /run? Who the fuck knows.
At least with windows you just have drive letters
Oh god this one, I never understood why mounting drives in Linux needs to be so convoluted. It’s the whole reason my NAS is running on LTSC. Adding drives to my NAS under windows is literally plug and play where as with linux theres always some bullshit.
I have neither the time nor the inclination these days to troubleshoot that bullshit.
If we’re comparing Linux to Windows, then it should be noted there’s Plasma and Gnome that will auto-detect any USB stick in existence and show you its path in the GUI.
Oh yeah, totally, but when using the terminal it’s a pain
Does
lsblknot work? I checked on my machine and it shows the correct path, assuming you know your stick issdbor whatever. Something likelsblk -o MODEL,MOUNTPOINTis (generally) a bit more clear but admittedly getting into the ‘pain’ territory.
Been using linux for more than 10 years as a less technical user, and yeah pretty regularly.
Its still my OS of choice, but theres a fair bit of jank around the corners you interact with less and places where the GUI methods for things just kinda fall short.
But I like having an OS that shows me tech treating me with dignity and respect is possible. So many problems in this world are hard to know how we might solve, but technology that treats me justly is a thing I can have today, and given its actually able to meet my needs, thats pretty cool ☺️❤️
There’s an insane amount of jank people are just used to with windows that blends into the background since that’s just the way it is. I notice it more and more at work. Simple things like quality of life features just don’t exist in windows, and the usual reasons are:
A) backwards compatibility jank
B) we’re a monopoly, get fucked
C) fuck you! that’s why.
And there’s simply no way to circumvent it. At least on Linux I have multiple solutions typically since I am person # 9431007 to have this exact problem, and someone deeper into the autism spectrum than me made a FOSS solution to it.
Yes, in 1995, I was very disappointed that red hat 2.0 made me compile my own goddamn disk images before I had to write them to floppy. Which took several days on my 486SX 25 MHz processor, and that’s after almost a week I spent downloading all of the damn source code on a 28.8 baud modem. 7 disks, 13 if you wanted printer drivers. At least it had a somewhat helpful installer, not that it was capable of helping with much.
It wasn’t until red hat 2.5 that they started distributing pre-compiled disk images
Edit: tbf, nobody else did at the time, and at least red hat was one of the first start distributing it software in packages (rpm) like debian (deb), although both soon began offering software pre-compiled as they noticed people other than software developers were beginning to use Linux, and there was legitimate demand to put in the effort. By late 1995 in early 1996, pre-compiled install disks were available for both red hat, Debian, and SuSE for x86, RISC, and DEC/ALPHA, IIRC. It took a while for Slackware to come around.
Yeah, it’s usually quality of life misses. An example: if I mount a network drive (mine auto-mounts upon login) and then that NAS goes down for whatever reason, if I open Dolphin it’ll hang trying to connect to the offline network drive and never timeout. I can restart my NAS and then as soon as it’s online again, my file manager will open 😅.
I’d have to manually unmount in terminal if that NAS became non-functional. Windows just times out and marks it as offline so File Explorer still works.
I’ve been using AutoFS and that’s no longer an issue for me. How did you mount the NAS?
SMB mount via fstab, hadn’t heard of AutoFS. That’s usually how it goes, I learn about something better after going through the pain of doing it an inferior way.
Ah yes I did it like that before. At home it’s not a problem since my NAS is always connected but taking my laptop outside would be problematic unless I had the VPN enabled.
i think if you have it in fstab that forces kio to wait. instead of adding to fstab i just right click and add smb to places in dolphin for a direct link. dolphin doesn’t hang on load anymore, auto mounts and even sends wol, might comment it out from fstab or set noauto to see if it speeds up dolphin
kde got over a mil to fix network drive issues and I have no doubt they’ll be best in class next year
The amount of issues I’ve had with sound on Linux, I’m currently running Cachy and I’m still not getting it through my laptop speakers. Bluetooth on Arch is tempermental at the best of times too…
Windows isn’t much better, especially with Bluetooth involved. Audio never seems to get the attention it needs
I ran Arch on my rig in 2023 and didn’t use it for a few months. The next update broke a ton of shit including KDE.
Next time I might go with Bazzite. Or Manjaro and just take better care of it.
Been in a bunch of situations where the best available software is 0.x and hella buggy. (Which I discovered after building the software and its dozen dependencies from source because of course no one had packaged it.) But I’m not mad, I’m just “oh well, the situation will improve in the future, I hope”.
The worst annoyances of Linux are nothing compared to basic use of Windows or MacOS.
Not being able to use middle click as a scroll tool. For an OS that’s supposed to be about user choice, this option is stupidly baked into the depths of the kernel.
Dynamic middle mouse scroll is something i miss
It’s because X-Window, the original Unix (and thus Linux) desktop system, supported 3 button mice WAY before Windoze did. It used it for the clipboard paste operation; you highlight some text in one window, and it’s immediately put on the clipboard; then when you middle-click, it’s pasted into whichever window is under the mouse pointer. Most old hand Linux and Unix users like this behaviour.
It’s been optional, and configurable for a long time. It’s mainly controlled by the receiving window’s configuration, but you can set it globally to do just about anything supported by your version of X-Window, including to scrolling. It’s been like this since about the late 1990’s, but it’s just not the default behaviour, probably because for much of that time, most Linux users preferred the X-Window behaviour.
‘Kernel’ is probably the wrong term to use. ‘Not easily user accessible setting’ might be more accurate.
but you can set it globally to do just about anything supported by your version of X-Window, including to scrolling
I’m not aware of any way to get Windows-style autoscroll on any distro without a lot of hacking. That was my takeaway from when I spent several hours researching this a year ago.
TBH the only time I’ve ever got involved with autoscroll was when a user accidentally clicked the wheel, and got “stuck in a funny mode” and the mouse was no longer working. I’m not sure how many regular users know it even exists - there are a lot who still don’t even use the scroll-wheel at all.
In Linux, the scroll-wheel works as I expect it to anyway, so I’ve never wanted to change it.
It’s not a kernel thing, more like a libinput thing. Libinput has an option to make it autoscroll, and if you’re on KDE, you can find the setting under mouse settings.
Libinput allows you to activate omnidirectional scrolling by holding the middle mouse down, which is not the same behaviour as windows / (mac?) . It’s confusing since both features have the same name.
What’s the behaviour on windows?
Click to toggle enter / exit vertical scroll mode. While in that mode, moving the mouse up or down from the original position will scroll in that direction, speed depending on the amount of offset.
If you’re not disappointed at something with Linux, you’re lying to yourself.
And I love Linux and wouldn’t use anything but.
I find Linux to be very bad at recovering from freezing. If something freezes on linux I almost always need to shut the entire PC down or go into TTY to kill the app. I expected it to be way more sturdy.
Is it your display driver that’s freezing? I’ve never had issues with one thing freezing the PC. The only time I’ve had it seem like that was the case was when it was the nVidia drivers that were having issues. But, that situation is much better than on Windows because I was able to SSH into the machine and everything seemed normal over an SSH connection. It meant I could shut things down gracefully and then eventually do a clean reboot. Meanwhile, the screen still looked as if the computer was locked up.
Not sure whats freezing. I think its KDE plasma that freezes then everything dies.
Hmm, yeah, if it is the desktop environment that’s having issues, that could be hard to recover from. I’ve never had that happen, or even heard of it happening. Maybe try out Gnome? Or try reinstalling? it doesn’t sound like a normal problem, and if it’s not a driver issue it could be just reinstalling will be enough to get things working.
Its not common enough for me to worry. Most versions are perfect sometimes i update and the new version is bad but after the next version its fixed and if next version is far away or its to bad i roll back.
My Thinkpad X260 TrackPoint and mouse buttons under the spacebar still don’t work. I have lost my mind trying to figure it out and gave up. I don’t use the laptop that often.
I’ve had that Laptop and ran Arch (and other distros) on it with those working no issue. I’ve since passed it to a friend who also uses it with Debian and hasn’t complained about issues. Are you certain this is a Software issue? Are the TrackPoint and buttons actually plugged in? Do they show up?
I haven’t ruled out a physical hardware issue. The OS was detecting the device. Its not a USB device, its a PS/2 device which isn’t something I work with often. This was a few months ago so don’t recall much of what I was tried.
I’ve had Endevor then Mint on that device over a few years. I consider myself competent with Linux.
One of these days I’ll make a post and ask for help. Making a Lemmy post that Linux isn’t working with a old Thinkpad hardware is like dumping chum in shark infested waters.
My disappointments are few, and are outweighed by the fact that if I update the computer doesn’t suddenly grow new advertisements or try to force new subscriptions onto me, or even break that many things? The skill floor is slightly higher sure, but the skill ceiling is so much higher, it doesn’t feel like a thinly veiled Eldritch monster.
Sure, I wanted nanokernels for massively parallel small-memory hardware since 1990s.











