Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
professional software not having linux builds.
A pain point from a beginner perspective is when you need to install multiple apps under the same prefix for them to communicate with each other, and then you need to have environment variables telling apps the path of your prefix. It is all very archaic in feel and still a very confusing, manual, and error prone process.
The UIs for Wine and WineTricks are so barebones and primitive - they barely help.
When you say multiple apps under the same prefix, would that be specific to Wine (or could you give another example).
I did not know prefixes had any context other than Wine. Anyway, see my other reply for context.
Do you have an example? I haven’t used wine for very much (except steam under the hood, lol), but I’ve never had apps need to communicate in any way I think
I’ve been doing some Archipelago games recently (archipelago.gg) and some of them require the game to be installed in the same wine prefix as the Archipelago client. For these games to be properly integrated with Archipelago they often need mods or servers which function as separate applications but need to hook into the memory of the running program.
Sometimes this requires a bunch of complex export scripts and cli commands to get the programs talking to each other. On Windows you can install the game and mods and it will just work - this is obviously not the case with Wine.
Ooh that’s cool, makes sense that those would need deeper integrations
My issue is not Linux’s fault but nvidia’s tbh, but I’ll say it anyway.
So I have a nvidia mx250 and when I play anything on Linux it reaches to 94°C, can’t use -gpu-target-temp flag to set desired temp, can’t set desired mem or graphics clocks. Tried to limit fps just in hope that I won’t hit that temp and it turns out that no matter what I do it’ll go to 94°C because it thermal throttles at 97°C and on windows I can do all of this and it’s set to 73°C on windows.
I’ll never ever buy a thing from nvidia in my life again. I bought this laptop when I didn’t know a thing about computers or Linux.
Would something like LACT (https://github.com/ilya-zlobintsev/LACT) help? It may not be compatible with that specific GPU model, but if it is, it can allow for TDP, clocks etc to be controlled. Maybe useful for your specific issue?
The over reliance on the terminal to fix a problem. I get it, and I know most users get it. But to gen pop when they see a terminal, it scares them. So making basic apps to handle installation of features is a good thing.
The more developers utilize flatpaks and appimages the less of an issue this becomes.
Bluetooth is still weirdly broken. On my machine, socket creation fails the second time, so I have to forget and repair every device. I’ve also seen it fail to start until the kernel module is removed and re-added, on other machines.
Literally wine and photoshop. Now its been fixed. (Photoshop has much better text handling compared to everything else as it’s vector and not raster text)
Both of mine are software support. At home, things at damn near perfect. Really the only issues are software for my peripherals, my mouse software only works on windows for max support, but I have a windows machine for written, so it’s ok for now. At work, most industrial CAD packages only work on windows too. If I could get solidworks on linux, I’d be linux only.
Wine still sucks for desktop apps.
I find bottles (https://usebottles.com/) to be rather effective, maybe something worth exploring?
The only issues I have are the somewhat hidden nature of wine things, which is pretty related to the other comment already present, and a peripheral issue which is probably solvable if I just put in the time to dig into it. (play/pause/volume buttons on wireless headphones worked once and then never again)
When it comes to the wine part, I know that it can be great to have zero feedback controls when things work, but having no feedback on anything, regardless of whether it works, makes it harder. I can hak my way through twenty error messages to get to my desired behaviour, but only if I have error messages/a readily accessible log. I would regard any system that fails to do the intended task but also fails to provide front-and-center indications, both that a failure has occurred and at least some vague error number or a location for the logs, the developer has failed in error handling. The wine system is one of the most important elements of helping people transition away from windows, so when it fails to make itself at least vaguely understandable, it is doing a huge disservice to the Linux world as a whole. Proton helped, sort of, but not really. It’s just hiding it, but just finding ways to make it more user friendly outside if steam would be much better. Bottles is a step closer, but still falls short of what we need. We need a UX that I can hand to the kind of person who calls the facebook app ‘the internets,’ but since that is such a tall order, I’d settle for one that I can hand to an average windows user.
As for the headphones… I’ll get to it… eventually… probably… if I can find some time… maybe… Shush.
Thermal label printers just do not work for me. I tried about 10 of them. Huge waste of money. At least I returned the rollo that didnt work.
I made a post about it and got lots of answers, most being brother printers. I need to save up some $$ and try brother printers next…
