Mobile… I want a Linux phone 😭

I only really have two pain points, one of which isn’t the fault of linux, and the other that probably is.

First: Adobe shit. I depend on Adobe Lightroom. This is entirely on Adobe. I know about the alternatives, but apparently I suck and can’t get good at them. I keep a Mac laptop around just to use this application. I tried screwing around with Wine and VMs to get it working, but it’s pretty useless without GPU acceleration, and so far the only way to get that in a VM is to have a second dedicated GPU just for the VM. Plus, that still requires keeping a Windows installation around.

Second: Wake from sleep. Just doesn’t work properly on my desktop PC running Fedora 43 with KDE. AMD CPU and GPU, etc. The computer does wake up but the display never does, and nothing short of a hard power cycle seems to make it recover. Works just fine on my Thinkpad which is running the same environment, also all AMD but with just whatever AMD integrated graphics came with the CPU in that case.

Having chatted with some other people experiencing the same thing with similar hardware setups and F43 with KDE it apparently doesn’t manifest if using GNOME, just KDE. For now I just have the desktop set to turn off the display when idle but to not put the machine to sleep. I am a KDE enjoyer, GNOME does not float my boat.

I’m using Fedora KDE, and for the first time in my life, an upgrade (42 to 43) completely borked the system, in a way that I couldn’t boot to anything else other than a kernel panic.

I had to boot up a live USB, mount and chroot into the old system, and manually fix each duplicated / corrupted package. And it still caused every now and then some weird issue with dnf, so in the end I just reinstalled the entire OS.

I feel like updates “offered” via a nice and convenient gui shouldn’t really do this out of nowhere - and I wasn’t the only one to report this in the past half year.

Umm… not much to be honest. It’s overall pretty great. I switched my main rig fully to Linux about 2 years ago.

First year was Manjaro w/xfce which got a little janky around the edges, probably due to how they avoid using the AUR directly. Can’t remember specific problems that couldn’t be attributed to old RAM or my own tomfoolery.

Past year has been on EndeavorOS w/KDE Plasma. Took a little time on the Arch wiki to get my Mesa install fully operational, but wasn’t bad. And I think at one point yay tried to compile electron32 from scratch which was kind of insane (probably wasted 80 GB of download for that one night) but eventually I found forum posts saying it was fine to just remove. Besides that, it’s been fantastic. It’s rare now that I even find a game that doesn’t work well, and half the time I forget to even check protondb like I used to.

Oh here. I guess combining PDFs could be a better experience. Had to use pdfunite in the command line which worked well but felt a lot more awkward than just using Acrobat to drop in pages and rearrange them. But there’s probably a GUI utility I just didn’t find.

Ah, and printer support. Wifi printing worked once for no apparent reason then never again. But printers are terrible in Windows too so I blame the OEMs.

I guess the biggest thing I’m missing right now is VR gaming.

But since my VR googles need WMR to work, I wouldn’t be any better off with Windows 11 either.

I don’t like that I get zero feedback when typing in my boot-time decryption password. Like, I can’t even tell if my keyboard is working. Did I press Enter or am I wasting my time staring at the prompt: “enter password for drive whatever (random guid)”.

I’ve literally sat there with my keyboard not even plugged in, not realizing it wasn’t dong anything because there’s no feedback. Like, can’t it show some asterisks? Or maybe “attempting decryption” after I press Enter, or anything? The only feedback is: it will either boot or say “invalid password” eventually.

It’s a minor frustration, but it’s every day that it bugs me.

(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. LUKS2 or whatever, using the built-in encryption when I first installed it on my laptop.)

The biggest difficulty is music production plugins. Some have a Linux version, some work via yabridge and wine (with some GUI bugs), and some don’t work at all.

On top of that, my initial attempt was using Mint with all of the audio optimisations (including kernel) but it was stuttery and slow. Unfortunately, oving to another distro is not painless when you have to move all the plugins too but CachyOS has been much better so far.

Fedora: requires some rework of Nvidia drivers to wake the screen back up from sleep. Updating GPU drivers does nothing to improve game rendering so frame rates for games of yesteryear on a RTX3080 were single digit. Required some changes to h264 drivers just so I could see videos on YouTube or Dailymotion while simultaneously messing with my VLC install. My VPN blocks off my subnet whenever it’s on so I can’t access my NAS.

CachyOS (Arch fork): drivers for my printer aren’t available without compiling them myself which did not go well. My preferred 3d printer slicer is difficult to install but that’s because I’m a total noob when it comes to installing anything from GitHub. My VPN blocks off my subnet whenever it’s on I can’t access my NAS.

So far ChachyOS has given me the best experience out of a few other distros like Mint or Bazzite.

Mobile

I use Linux daily for work and personal tasks, but I sometimes have to resort to either a Windows VM or Windows running natively for the following:

Hardware

• Gaming with the Oculus Rift S
• My third-party Xbox One wireless controller adapter for the non-bluetooth models
• Brook controller adapters

Software

• Microsoft Office. I absolutely need the documents, spreadsheets, and presentations I work on to be interoperable with Windows users who exclusively use Microsoft Office. I am no position to ask them to change what software they use. OnlyOffice is the closest to achieving interoperability and its UI is very similar, but it still falls short. Multiple animations on 1 slide don’t carry over, none of the macros my coworkers have made seem to work, slide formatting may look different, and transformed cells don’t seem to automatically update.
• Some games, such as Fortnite and CastleMinerZ either have bug-breaking issues or the publisher/anti-cheat sucks and blocks Linux. I don’t particularly care for these games, but I’m also not willing to give up game nights with lifelong friends over these. I’ll play them, suck at them, and have a good time. Then there are games such as Halo: MCC that mostly work, but then co-op campaign de-syncs.
• Original Xbox and Xbox 360 development and modification tools/programs don’t work. I can’t even FTP a file over from Fedora without it being unrecognized. I obviously don’t expect any of this to change.

And I desperately miss the native Stream Deck software. StreamController’s page-changing is very slow, in general is finicky, buggy, and less intuitive.

Why am I seeing like 5 different posts like these, all of the sudden? They’re all the same, literally same title, just posted by different users.

1. It’s annoying to set up hibernate on Kubuntu and I can’t seem to figure out how to add it to the UI.
2. i really miss the login UI of W11, just select pin, fingerprint, fido key or password. On kubuntu I have to unplug the fido key so it fails if I want to use my password. The UI also has no indication of wether I am entering the pin for the fido key or my linux password.

I really wish there was a good remote desktop method that supported attaching to my “local” session but keeping the displays locked. Similar to how windows RDP works.

If I have to remote into my work machine from home, I have XRDP setup to make a separate session that I can have run simultaneously to my local session. It’s fine, but if I could use the existing local session that would be superb (without unlocking my local displays while I’m not there is the big point)

GNOME has RDP/VNC abilities, but in my experience a) the screen has to be awake, or else it becomes none responsive, b) it only worked with one monitor IIRC, and c) it unlocks the local display. x11vnc has issue C.

I think KDE is working on improved Wayland RDP? Haven’t seen if it satisfies this. Sadly though, my work IT doesn’t support Wayland

App stores are always terrible no matter which distro you use.

• Images don’t load
• Stuck waiting 30 seconds for a page in the app store to load (if it loads at all)
• last rating is 7 years old
• random utilities written 12 years ago are at the top of the page
• “featured” apps haven’t even been tested on that distro

The 4 year upgrade cycle is too short on one hand. On the other, critical software like Firefox is too old even then so I have to use a flatpack for that which does not integrate well. I am using Debian 12. The other option is that Mozilla does have a debian repo but that is harder to setup.