Well with the name KaiLikesLinux, you would most likely assume I feel everything about Linux is perfect. No. I love Linux, it is 100% better than macOS and Windows 10 combined, but I have about 5 things I hate about Linux that need to be said and would love to see fixes too.
5 - Installer Tools
Linux has come a long way since even 2004 when Ubuntu 4.10 released. This first edition of Ubuntu made the installation of Linux EASY and quick. Now we have even cooler tools like Ubiquity and Calamares. However, these tools... to say they are far from perfect is an understatement. Still ten times easier and faster than Windows 10, but horribly imperfect. I tend to dislike installers because of the other dependencies. Calamares uses the Qt libraries for development. However since it is built by people from KDE, it has pretty much everything KDE and impossible to install. I will talk about KDE later. However, do note that Calamares is an easier tool to get working for distribution devs. Except for Ubuntu respins, and even then only to an extent. Ubiquity is what Ubuntu uses and I absolutely do not recommend it if you plan to ship off a distribution. It tends to install bloat unless you install it from source, which that is even more confusing than that of Calamares.
4 - Multimedia
Multimedia support on Linux is... meh. Quick fix for anyone who wants to use other media formats, especially online. Install FFmpeg, then basically everything works just fine. Even with that I still wish there were better standards. I mostly blame FFmpeg for this as it is not allowed to be shipped with NVIDIA things, which makes some sense technologically but I still feel very annoyed with that idea.
3 - Specific Driver Support
Here I talk about Broadcom, Realtek, and NVIDIA (to an extent). On some distributions, NVIDIA works fantastically, whether installed manually or gotten with a specific version of the distro. Pop!_OS has my favorite implementation of this. Ubuntu has other fantastic tools for NVIDIA drivers too. The issue mostly lies in Realtek for every driver and Broadcom for some drivers. Broadcom drivers haven't been too much of an issue for me, so let's focus on Realtek. I have an RTL8723DE WiFi/Bluetooth driver. Name a useful and easy driver for it. I'll wait. Let me guess LWFinger's RTLWifi_New with the extended branch? I mean it's the best but it is not exactly the nicest. Oh, the SMLinux made driver? That's dead and outdated. Not a lot of people forking it either as far as I can tell. Anyways this is only for these three and two of them are great, one has meh solutions.
2 - The Desktop Environments
Yeah, I am pretty picky about which environment I use. I tend to like GTK better as a framework. However, my favorite desktop, other than Lumina, is GNOME. GNOME, Cinnamon, and Lumina combined. I also believe those three are the best desktops for everyone. Lumina is lighter than both GNOME and Cinnamon in terms of RAM usage and included parts. I wouldn't say as light as LXQt but the better tools surely make up for that. I like a lot of desktops. But for every Paris, there is a Pueblo. (I live in Colorado, so it's okay for me to make fun of Pueblo).
There are desktops I genuinely hate, some I hate for how impossible it is to get them. Others I hate because they are garbage, maybe not all the tools in them but the items themself. KDE is one I hate, I feel like it would be so much better as a GTK desktop. All the KDE tools are fine and wonderful, but KDE is still slow, even being the speed of XFCE now as some are claiming. XFCE still feels snappier and faster, and with some minor tweaks looks SO much better than KDE ever will. Pantheon I hate it because it is impossible to install. Budgie I hate because... well let's make it clear, I specifically hate the set up on Ubuntu Budgie. The distro itself is wonderful and just a couple tweaks and it's fine. But there is a stark contrast between this:
credit Wikipedia
and:
credit Solus
I mean Solus has a clear win here. Especially as desktop creators. Again, not to hate on Ubuntu Budgie but it doesn't FEEL like the Budgie I know and love.
Now I am passionate about the desktops as most of them are meh or just flat out suck. But something really makes me angry. Something so unbelievably painful to deal with. With every solution given so far is terrible and insane.
1 - Package Management
I hate package managers. The worst of these? All. all are just bad. RPM is just APT with different files. Pacman is rolling release and a little weird on commands. APT is a nightmare for packaging as it works with Deb files which are the worst things ever. Snap auto-updates and is just easier Flatpak. Flatpak is painful and the apps are... below average in quality. None of these are solutions and no one has a solution to this issue. At least no one sane. Flatpak is made for front-end situations, that is clear. Plus the apps on it being below average are the developers' fault but it does hurt Flatpak. None of these are solutions by themselfs.
What is the solution? We need the power of Flatpak, the ease of APT, the easier packaging of Snap, added with options of rolling release supported by Pacman.
Top comments (15)
The driver support is soo painful. I had been daily driving fedora 31 up until a week ago. When after updating my NVIDIA driver, GNOME refused to start. Had to do a bunch of reverts to get it working again.
Driver support is perhaps the main reason I left Linux a few years ago. That, combined with certain rolling releases meant that my hardware stopped working every six months. I had whole desktop systems built around Linux-recommended hardware and that didn't help.
The other was the package manager situation. I don't know what the situation is now, but back then, being forced to upgrade my OS every six months just so I could get the latest FireFox became a nightmare (see my first paragraph).
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux as a concept. But the day-to-day made it too difficult to use.
A lot of that has changed a TON over the years. As long as it isn't NVIDIA off Ubuntu, Realtek because that doesn't even work well on Windows 10, and Broadcom because Linux isn't a focus for them, the driver is most likely just fine and working. Also, editions for software can go back to multiple-year-old releases. Much better than in the past.
Well, don't expect a smooth ride with a rolling release distro
I wish it were that simple. Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Gentoo and Mint all had the same issues (yes, I distro-hopped while trying to find a good solution). Every six months a new update came out and, if you wanted the latest security patches, you had to update, which meant a day or two of fixing all my hardware.
I'm going to conduct an experiment with Ubuntu 19.10 this week. I realize it will be better than it was. Hopefully I can make it work for me this time.
You still get the latest security updates with Ubuntu LTS (and derivatives of it) - though Mint can be a pain due to the way the devs deecided to hold back some updates, which is why i don't use Mint
I mean Fedora is, in general, a poorly built distribution especially to use anything closed source like NVIDIA drivers. Pop!_OS has a version that comes with them out of the box.
Other than those specific drivers, Linux driver support is god-like compared to windows.
A point of view from a outsider:
Linux and Javascript suffers from the same problem. Too many people trying to solve a problem that does not exist or can be managed.
PS: A non gamer and a Ubuntu user for almost 2 years now, who just uses Ubuntu with what comes as default installation with some additional editors, npm packages etc.
"I also believe those three are the best desktops for everyone." Well you're wrong. KDE is great, sorry, it's faster than Gnome, and it doesn't control me. I control it.
Now I hate KDE, it is a terrible DE with no real good to it. It is still a slow feeling compared to LXQt, a much better Qt-based environment, still even behind Lumina (other than speed and size). Last I used KDE (when they started pushing the insane and wrong claim of it being "as fast or faster than XFCE) it was a stable but unpleasant mess with idiotic tools and broken setup that makes no logical sense other than to forcibly look like Windows 10. It is still slow and a system resource hog, that is a simple fact of life.
(Sorry if I got a little hostile, but I cannot ever understand people who like KDE. It has always caused headaches and anger every time I install it.)
point 3 - you seriously saying Gnome is more customisable than KDE? Wut? Oh and Gnome addons tend to die a lot because Gnome devs do not like customisation, their attitude sucks.
"forcibly look like Windows 10." I think you'll find that when Windows 10 came out, it looked like KDE 4, not the other way round. Also it's customisable enough to make it look how you want it. I dunno what distro you've tried KDE on but I have been using KDE for at least a year and it has been stable and usable all that time, with no show stopping bugs. I have tried using other DEs including other qt based desktops but went back to KDE because Dolphin is the best file manager for me, and it works best in its native environment
My personal experience with enough know-how, GNOME looks like whatever you want. KDE has always fought me on Customization.
I can get where my wording is a bit... weird. But I meant to describe it as a bad clone of Windows 10's look, not that it is an actual clone of Windows 10. I take that fully as my fuck-up. I also used KDE for a year after leaving Fedora with Kubuntu and cannot say the same. Mind you Kubuntu is stable, I just wasn't used to it and the limits I found. Also, I hate Dolphin, I prefer Insight (used by Lumina). I don't care if you like KDE, I just hated my experience with it. Glad you can not experience absolute pain with it. Just my personal opinion.
" a bad clone of Windows 10's look, not that it is an actual clone of Windows 10. " but it isn't, as i said, Microsoft copied KDE not the other way round, besides as i said, you can change everything about KDE, move panels where you want them, all sorts. Gnome is restricted to a few easily broken addons.
i don't like Kubuntu much because their version of KDE is usually out of date. i don't like Fedora because of it's slow package manager and it being a very Gnome-centric distro.
i can understand personal preferences but no way is Gnome more customisable than KDE.
I will agree to disagree,
well yes KDE is mess and is hard to customize, gnome is much more customizable and easier at that.
O and windows 10 look being a copy of KDE is being generous to KDE first of all KDE copied windows in creation of KDE4 then because microsoft failed to get that start screen good enought and make poeple like it they combined the old start menu witht he start screen to create start menu of windows 10 and i admit they probably used many sources which probably includes KDE