• 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.

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.

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.

When I was running a Linux distro regularly (1995-2015), audio output would break every couple of upgrades.

It was frustrating, because I was pretty happy with the rest of the OS.

I don't like LibreOffice as the only open source Office software that seems to compete with Microsoft. It feels bloated and outdated and for years and years I have display problems with it. The community answers to problems are often written by arrogant pricks.

However, at the pace Microsoft Office is deteriorating with all that copilot crap LibreOffice begins to look better every day. They don't even have to do anything for it.

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

Snap. The very existence of it.

Sometimes I dislike how most distros are against proprietary and closed source code. But then I remember all of the money those companies are making off of war, genocide, and slavery and I feel better about it.

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.

I recently began hating devices and how each distro does it slightly differently. /dev is the worst. I plug in a usb, look for it under /dev/usb, not there, oh it's /dev/serial I suppose that makes sense. Plug in a different usb, not in either, no by-path or by-id, oh, I can only find it by the bus... but that path changes each time I plug it in, and that's the only place I can find it. Permissions are black magic on devices. I've been root and can't open a cdrom, get permission denied. Other times I can give a user 777 and it seems like they have it all, but still can't open that drive. Everytime I reboot my coral usb changes bus paths and breaks my frigate docker, but I can't find any stable path to it. Fought for days trying to get proxmox to forward a cdrom drive to a container then a vm. Went through half a dozen tutorials and threads of people getting it working and I couldn't. Spin up my laptop and do it bare metal, and STILL can't get it to work. VLC can play the disk just fine, but not the docker container. Switch to ubuntu instead of my arch distro, and boom everything works.... most of the time. Other times I have to do a ritual of removing the database, logs, reboot, start the container, unplug usb, plug in usb, and then it works.

Sleep seems to work nine times out of ten.
In that 1 time it hangs when resuming, so the computer is on but in a zombie state where it doesn't do anything (won't even power on USB devices).
Maybe my motherboard just sucks tho.

Also someone pretty please with a cherry on top make a VNC or RDP server that works on Plasma Wayland, I'm so sick of using Sunshine+Moonlight, it just isn't built for non-gaming usecases at all

Having to install apps manually and figure out dependencies myself because a popular piece of software only officially supports Ubuntu and Debian. No normal human would ever do this. They would go back to Windows. Hell, I still haven't even gotten one piece of software to work on my new OpenSUSE system yet: Beyond Compare 4. [UPDATE: I got it from work. Either I was blind or they just added OpenSUSE instructions. ]

Why are there so many package managers with such different syntaxes? And why does one repo maintainer decide to call a package "package" and another calls it "package4"? Or some entirely different name! It's maddening. I've had to create empty proxy packages that translate package names just to install some RPM file. Again, the average person is not going to do this.

In KDE plasma, the first thing most people do is set up Wi-Fi on their computer, but you need to set up KWallet first or else the password gets stored in some other dimension. I accidentally typed my Wi-Fi password wrong, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to clear it out and make it ask me for the proper password when I try to connect. I even went into network manager and switched the network to say, "ask me every time". It wouldn't! It would just sit there and hang on "authenticating". I never did figure it out. I ended up forgetting to encrypt my system partition, so I simply reinstalled the OS.

I hate that nobody recognizes Linux as a legit OS. But that is the same with many FOSS projects like LibreOffice. The format is not recognized in a lot of places, which is insane. Microsoft really have their marketing prefected

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.

Ubuntu and GNOME

I'll be nice in case the developers are reading.

I just think they're both pretty misguided in their goals.

Ubuntu used to be Debian plus your laptop's Wi-Fi works out of the box. The hardware support has improved and now Debian in 2025 is better than Ubuntu, plus Debian never shows you terminal ads or prompts you to snap install something that obviously isn't going to run well inside the default Snap sandbox.

I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu to any new users now. I'd sit and install Debian stable with them, and if something is missing, I'd try Debian unstable or the proprietary repos.

No offense to on-the-ground Ubuntu devs, but Ubuntu really feels like Debian plus a billionaire's desire to make money reselling Debian.

GNOME... Wants the desktop to look like a phone. Got rid of the system tray and then you have to do a little dance t re-install it. I don't know why. I've had useful stuff in the system tray since Windows XP.

I think GNOME might have also spearheaded the trend of ruining SEO and documentation by naming apps what they do instead of with real names? Like "Movie player" or "Web Browser". I don't know if they did any studies or if it helps new users but it's real weird for advanced users. Most people know that "Chrome" is a brand of web browser, so why would you name your web browser "Web Browser" and make things weird? I like KDE's thinking. Pick a name and wedge a K into it. And then make an anime furry its mascot. Can't beat that!

There was a conspiracy theory years ago, because someone from Microsoft was making decisions at GNOME, that GNOME was going to be eaten inside-out by MS, like Nokia was. They were rolling .NET Mono stuff and some kind of object model... I don't think it got far but I don't care. I switched to xfce on my desktop and KDE looks great on the Steam Deck and laptop. KDE used to be heavy, but hardware got bigger.

I actually love the package managers on Linux. Apt would be better if you could install multiple versions side-by-side, but I get why that's hard. Whenever I use Windows it's like, gross, I have to use MSIs again? I can't just apt install git curl wget screen lua? And on macOS I can install brew but a lot of apps use that funny pattern where you drag it into the Applications folder, and then you must remember to unmount the disk image, and also some apps aren't in the Applications folder.

I actually love systemd and everyone can fight me on this. Systemd is really nice.

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.

The communal infighting.

Why has Wayland taken more than a decade to get to a somewhat acceptable state, but still lacking standardization?

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

vendor support

Games that just open on Windows require extra work to play on Linux. Sometimes it's just a few extra clicks, sometimes it takes a whole afternoon to figure it out, especially if you're like me and not very experienced with Linux.

Hibernation should really soon work out of the box with Secure Boot on. Afaik chromeos was looking into that

Also paranoid people saying that e.g. all TPMs are made by the devil and will spy you to death lol

It is not Linux itself but:

• I dislike when something goes wrong with a program and the documentation is not clear on how to fix it. But I do not complain because it is understandable when developers write documentation they have to choose who's hand to hold, if they choose to help everyone then the documentation can get long and perhaps redundant.

• When one is a beginner and installs a distribution for the first time one can get scared by the splash screen showing errors which are 99% of the time safe to ignore (e.g showing that a device was not found). I know its important for developers and advanced users to know all this info but it can make beginners feel so damn scared (like me).

• Naming, like in the general sense, it seems like many software have some ridiculous names (dolphin, ncmpcpp, gimp, foot, gnome). Very subjective, I know, but in the end I love and hate these names.

• Bluetooth... yeah.

Having to use the terminal even once

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.

Same reason as the rest of the world: too complicated to use. Also pretty much all the DEs are ugly and dated, save for GNOME, in my opinion.

Total lack of stability, not in "crashing programs" but in the entire idea of "throw it all out and start over" that seems to 100% infest every single Linux developer every few years.

Not to mention the total loss of every single bit of UNIX philosophy over the years.

"Everything's a file." ? Not according to Linux, not any more.

All the various *ctls necessary to run and inspect your system have completely gotten out of control.

We have awesome distributed systems like Kubernetes (rke2, or k3s as easy distro examples) BUT no desktop usage.

I want a distributed desktop dang it. My phone, my smart tv (media PC), my gaming computer, my SOs gaming computer, my router, my home lab, etc, etc should theoretically all be one computer with multiple users, and multiple interfaces.

I hate that I've got to the point that if something goes wrong, I know it's 99.9% user error and can't blame anyone else.

All the different window top bars/UI elements not lining up.. especially for stuff that has nothing up there.. extra annoying when disabling window decorations don't disable them

I don't know if I agree with the issue of installing software. Sure, there are a lot of ways to do it, but it's better than navigating to a website, downloading an executable, and having it install for you. There's too many points for error to cause issues. Plus, you have to do that for every update usually.

Is it perfect on Linux? No. It's better than Windows though.

Smug and condescending users that started using Linux 2 months ago.

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)

My one major complaint is audio in general. I've had so many audio issues. If you need an eq or noise canceling it's a pain to get it working. There's always a bug somewhere, always a random distortion.

Voicemeeter is the only thing I miss about Windows. I really do.

Honestly, not much.

The first would be that the webcam in my work laptop goes in and out of working pretty regularly. It happens to the whole team so I know it’s not just mine. I end up using an external one pretty regularly. Mostly I’m annoyed at Dell for not providing proper driver support.

The second is that there are a very small number of applications that I occasionally use where I need to fire up a VM. But even that is more of I’m annoyed at the organization that forces me to use an obsolete proprietary file format once a quarter.

No three finger drag on Wayland