I have not really had anything. I do have a thing where my mouse goes wonky but I think its the my touchpad and not linux.

A handful of sites that decide because I’m on Linux, I must be a bot and I’m blocked from opening sites.

Linux kernel or distros?

Assuming distros, my pain point is that it is not popular. For Linux to actually take over, UI/UX for everything without a single touch of CLI (akin to Windows and Mac OS) needs to be normalised. And everything just needs to work (see LTT), be snappy/instant (looking at you file browsers, Firefox, etc.), and use established behavioural norms within Windows and Mac (looking at you middle click paste, and it not being a universal scroll) as basics. Just give any distro to any Asian population. They won’t even be able to figure out how to type their own language as if they are exiting Vim.

Surface camera doesn’t work.

I think that’s it.

Honestly right now there’s no way to use 90% of the industry standard audio plugins and most popular DAWs on Linux. FL Studio and Ableton do work on Linux but very unstable and as long as they’re not stable you can kinda skip the latency talk, because stability is quintessential. You are bound to native plugins and as long as alternatives are way harder to use and take longer to learn configure, there’s a massive overhead, not even talking about the ones that genuinely do not work even with wine and or winetricks, bottle, etc…

The same goes for video and photo editing as well as post effects. Although I have to admit you genuinely have more options and some setups even though not much more stable to technically work already.

Games are also annoying but I just don’t play valorant or battlefield 6 or any other games that are kind of incompatible by design, so if that was the only thing I could manage.

And lastly (but everyone knows), office compatibility is still an issue because sometimes I need to do something in Microsoft office to ensure it still works when I send it over.

Honestly the real deal breaker for me is the first paragraph. I currently mix & master a band and produce music by myself, with friends and do small audio jobs for other people. Gimme an environment I don’t have to pour another decade into and I’ll switch. In it’s current state I will not place a bet that if I give it my all things will still work when I need them to and that’s the bare minimum.

dist-upgrade must die.

I spent like three hours I didn’t have the other day trying to bring a Debian Unstable system up to date, it decided to stop every few packages to tell me it failed because the t64 libraries conflict with the regular ones and nobody taught apt how to figure that shit out for me and install the right ones.

Even Ubuntu is like “oh hey there’s a new release, you’re available for three hours straight to, every two to fifty minutes, explain to a TUI dialog that you don’t have an opinion, right? Oh also can you resolve this merge conflict on this config file we think you edited, but you didn’t, by being shown the diff once and then opening nano?”

This is not an acceptable way for this to go.

I can’t connect a GameCube controller. There’s some ancient thing on GitHub that claims to do something but I feel over my head trying to do it and it hasn’t been updated since like 2016. On Windows, you download Zadig and run it and you’re good to go. I’ve had to switch to an Xbox controller for Rivals of Aether 2 online.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.