What’s the most annoying Linux behavior you still deal with?
Posted by PsyOmega@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 64 comments
Overall Linux works really well for me, but there are still small things that occasionally annoy me. Nothing major, just little quirks that haven’t changed for years. Curious what minor frustrations other Linux users still run into.
cyb3rofficial@reddit
People putting their political beliefs in-front of everything else for the past 3 years.
DL72-Alpha@reddit
This should be expanded to include crusades for your favorite programming language.
Nevyn_Hira@reddit
The bike shed pattern. I've seen projects rise up and collapse because, instead of worrying about the functionality of the application, people are more concerned about what language they should use to make it.
The bike shed problem is basically people decide there's a need for a bike shed and instead of building it, they argue about what colour it should be.
FlagrantTomatoCabal@reddit
The way most configure scripts default to nano.
I hate nano.
blokelahoman@reddit
Suspend/resume consistency. You think it’s okay and then it randomly decides no t to resume one day.
Yeetyeetskrtskrrrt@reddit
I just had this happen the other day on Debian 13 with KDE 6. I assumed it had to do with some pretty extreme hardening and full system apparmor confinement (still could be this) but interesting to know it’s happened to others too
What are you running?
FaultWinter3377@reddit
One thing for me is wireless earbuds on my dual booted system. Neither a Linux nor a Windows issue. They won’t reconnect if I switch OSes without manually reconnecting them. Windows kind of tries, and a notification pops up so all I have to do is click “yes”. But on Linux (KDE), I have to go into settings, forget them, then reconnect.
donut4ever21@reddit
Try to find earbuds that allow connecting to more than one device at a time. Some soundcore models allow that like the one I have, P40. It's a toggle in their app that tells the buds it's ok to connect to more than one device.
AnsibleAnswers@reddit
Bluetooth peripherals in general are just terrible to use with multiple parent devices.
MaybeTheDoctor@reddit
Does Bluetooth exchange some key material the two OSs just can’t share
r3dk0w@reddit
if the ear buds supported two devices they should work in the way you expect. mine need the app on my phone to setup the second device
macius15@reddit
In the described case they're dual booting. It's the same controller, it's the same device.
Unless some kind of many to one is supported in what you're saying, but I don't know how the association would be distinguished.
macius15@reddit
Others bear me to it, but no you don't need to reconnect.
I almost forgot I did this, but you can just extract and share the key after pairing with the device in one OS.
I think I followed this guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bluetooth#Dual_boot_pairing , should have an admin log, but not by my computer at the moment.
I think some parts of the guide were wrong or misleading, iirc I started with Windows. Paired, extracted the key and manually configured the connection using it in Linux.
Enjoy
iLike80sRock@reddit
You can (or could at one point) work around this by manually updating the Bluetooth records to look for the same device signature. It’s pretty deep and I never got annoyed enough to do it but allegedly it’s possible.
donut4ever21@reddit
I can't let my monitors turn off while the PC is still on, because they'll never wake up again and I'd have to force it off and lose all of my work. So I always set it to never. It's the most annoying shit ever. Same on the steam console. Something to do with AMD GPUs that I can't figure out.
viciousDellicious@reddit
Have you ever tried to use an epson photo scanner on linux?
well... it sucks so much i have a VM with windows just for that
Nevyn_Hira@reddit
OH! Yeah some of this stuff can be annoying. Canon printers I'm looking at you!
Objective_Egg_5343@reddit
Won't Epsonscan2 work out of the box? unless it's a firewall setting that prevent the network scanner to work.
viciousDellicious@reddit
only for basic scans, not high res for photos
JagerAntlerite7@reddit
nanoas the default editor 😡za72@reddit
it used to be ed for solaris... I don't understand what the hate against vi/vim
Nevyn_Hira@reddit
I think it's just that it's a bit esoteric. You need to know a bunch of magic codes and sure, when you know them, it's easy. But dump a new user into vi/vim and chances are they'll be stuck.
shockjaw@reddit
vim/neovim for life.
Free_Break8482@reddit
I have to unplug one of my monitors when I reboot and then plug it in again once system is up. I think it's the Nvidia drivers.
ButterflyMundane7187@reddit
Fragile update engines always have to keep atlest 2 stable kernels and one backup display server and 2 backup window managers and pray to got after each reboot after a update. And pray that nothing breaks this is the case on desktop on the server i make sure i can go to site to fix the mess
Law_hacker_1000@reddit
Linus
todd_dayz@reddit
Having to enable my CPU iGPU and plug my fourth monitor into it, otherwise my NVIDIA/Wayland setup completely stalls out unless I hack around with kwinoutputconfig.
subz_13@reddit
Is there a meaningful equivalent to ctrl alt del? I feel out if luck whenever my computer freezes up
ibeerianhamhock@reddit
I mean honestly idgaf what anyone says Linux desktop is ages behind windows (even with its faults). Only reason I've never completely switched.
For me Linux headless is where it's at for servers but for desktop it's years behind.
Some things are better ofc but overall it's just not there yet
supersmola@reddit
After sleep, the last screen is shown before login screen.
shockjaw@reddit
What DE does this happen on?
r3animate@reddit
It’s kind of wild that these are all different (and minor) issues..
Mine is lack of AMD/Nvidia control panels. Steam application launch options are great but they’re a chore to manage.
shockjaw@reddit
There’s an old school NVIDIA X Server panel. I do wish they made their App Center for Linux.
2rad0@reddit
All the weird system calls you cannot easily disable as a config option.
External_Try_7923@reddit
Bluetooth
DFS_0019287@reddit
I occasionally hit a little bug when resuming after suspend-to-RAM. I have four monitors, and sometimes after I resume, one monitor is no longer seen. I need to power-cycle the monitor and run a little script that calls xrandr to fix things up. Not a major problem, but slightly annoying.
ProfessionalMrPhann@reddit
Video editing is horrible for me. Resolve has a barely functional port, and Kdenlive feels clunky
KnowZeroX@reddit
Out of the big video editors, there is also lightworks and blender.
ProfessionalMrPhann@reddit
Blender does video??
shockjaw@reddit
Indeed it does!
TapEarlyTapOften@reddit
Today I spent an annoyingly long amount of time trying to find a way to disable the Gnome keyring that was acting as an ssh-agent (I wanted to use the OpenSSH ssh-agent instead). On Debian, this is not an easy thing to do without breaking a lot of other things.
Middle_Medicine9469@reddit
been using ubuntu for work stuff and the audio switching between headphones and speakers still drives me crazy sometimes. like it will just decide to output to wrong device randomly and i have to go dig through settings to fix it
also why does every distro handle window tiling slightly different, makes switching between machines at work so confusing
shockjaw@reddit
You can swap your desktop environment on the fly if you want.
qwweer1@reddit
Happens to me too, but I usually just use this right angle bracket type of button on the volume meter to switch between sound devices. This is a gnome thing though, not sure what flavor of Ubuntu you are using.
ben2talk@reddit
People complaining without being specific, that's a big one.
crashorbit@reddit
Maybe not so much with Linux but firefox has been kinda fragile lately.
supersmola@reddit
FF is sensitive to custom config changes. I literally us a clean profile to browse Google maps. Also, sites are sensitive to cookie/adblock plugins.
UristBronzebelly@reddit
I have two monitors and one TV connected to my PC. After a reboot, my GPU HDMI is always recognized as an audio device, but it’s often not routed to the TV, but instead one of my monitors. So I have to use a terminal command to force the HDMI audio card profile to the correct physical output.
RIPGoblins2929@reddit
usb device support. It's way better than it used to be, but if you have anything even a little bit non-mainstream it's a gigantic pain.
the_j_tizzle@reddit
"Do you want to ask PackageKit to quit?"
directheated@reddit
KDE Plasma animations low(er) framerate. This is being extremely nit picky, as this is my work PC it's not something I notice unless I'm looking for it.
hobbes244@reddit
When my employer was switching from FreeBSD to RHEL many years ago, it was very annoying that a few various things were radically different. Usually it was because some self-identified clever person decided that some BSD thing was wrong but that really means they didn’t understand why BSD did that. So, they came up with their own uninformed mechanism. I eventually got used to it, but for a few years I would look for something where it was supposed to be to no avail. I could usually figure it out by asking where an idiot would put it, and voila! I don’t recall the specifics anymore, sorry.
AmarildoJr@reddit
The first scroll up/down still being ignored on GTK programs is one of them.
great_whitehope@reddit
Pretty much biggest problem is wine not behaving properly.
Like click the menu bar and it renders the menu at top left of screen even though the window is in the middle of the screen.
It’s a miracle everything works but quality of life changes could be made
NicoBator@reddit
"Steal My Focus Window!" instead of sending me a notification... geez 🙄
Well, it's Gnome not Linux, but this is the most annoying thing ever
CondescendingShitbag@reddit
Checked your current setting and consider options for switching? Assuming we're talking about the same issue, you can check your current setting config via:
That will simply query the existing setting, not make any changes. Depending on what the setting currently displays, consider swapping it out for an alternative. For example, my gnome install currently has that value set to 'smart', and I don't experience issues with windows losing focus.
To change it:
Options to test would be 'smart' or 'strict'.
To reset to default:
Who knows, maybe you'll find it helpful.
r3dk0w@reddit
this is my main annoyance. UI glitches that are only fixed by digging around in the forums. most of the fixes are from 2013 or older and only work in the past.
google search by date is helpful, but not always.
CjKing2k@reddit
Sound. I've been around long enough for OSS, direct ALSA, ESD, ARTS, Jack, Pulse, and now PipeWire. They all sucked for different reasons. My current problems are with Wireplumber freezing up after switching back from VT or resume, and the wrong Bluetooth profile being selected.
GladCheetah6048@reddit
Probably this:
name: Go Mod Tidy Check
on: push: branches: ["main"] pull_request: branches: ["main"]
permissions: contents: read
jobs: go_mod_tidy_check: runs-on: ubuntu-24.84 steps: - uses: actions/checkout@de0fac2e4500dabe0009e67214ff5f5447ce83dd # v6.0.2 with: persist-credentials: true
Ucyt@reddit
The caps lock. I know, I should use shift for capital letters and I do, but sometimes it is easier for me to do caps, multiple letters, caps, and one or two following letters are still like the caps lock is enabled. It doesn't happen in windows or macos though.
priyanshuz@reddit
The most annoying thing is speaker feeding to microphone .why it. Cannot be more like windows in that regards ....stable...and no I don't like windows
ScootSchloingo@reddit
Downloading a small Steam game well below 200-300MB and ending up with a Proton prefix that's 600-900MB
nobody-5890@reddit
WM Class. Either I want an app to have separate entries on my dock (say, a regular browser window and web apps) or an app unnecessarily splits into multiple entries (can sometimes happen with Steam, currently struggling with VSCodium doing it because it has two desktop entries, one for regular and one for its URL handler).
csDarkyne@reddit
It‘s not a linux issue per se and more a user issue but I use gamescope to run games in a sort of fake borderless window on my ultrawide so it looks something like this (although the image used is windows and not linux but the window sizes are mostly the same) and while it works a lot better than it did on windows it still causes issues here and there