Things I Hate About Linux as a Desktop

I've been using Linux since the days you had to compile it from source and there were no distros to speak of. Those were the days of altering two dozen configuration files just to get it kind of working. Ah, the olden days. Since then, Linux has come to dominate the server space, powers every commercial and private cloud, and is the backbone for my home lab. I have at least four Linux computers in my house and all have full desktops loaded on them. A lot of activities are much easier to perform using the desktop tools and, in a pinch, my Linux servers can act as a secondary desktop. That's after my Windows desktop and two Windows laptops but I digress.

Despite all that, there is still a lot of things I hate about Linux as a desktop computer. In fact, these problems are what keep me from jettisoning Windows in favor of Linux. They are also part of why Linux has stalled at its current tiny fraction of the desktop computing market.

So, here are, in no particular order, my complaints about Linux. There are more, but these are top of mind for me.

1. After all these years, some things can still only be done with the command line. Yes, it's getting better, but the command line is still unavoidable. For newbies and non-techies, this is enough to keep them away.

2. The desktop distros are different enough that they may as well be different operating systems. If the Linux community wants to fulfill the dream of being a viable desktop OS, they need to settle on one GUI. Gnome, Cinnamon, and KDE are heading there but for every distro that adopts one of them, a new GUI emerges. The fragmentation is killing the Linux desktop market. Many Linux users see this as good, favoring choice over consistency. The rest of the world is confused by it all

3. Which brings me to diffusion of energy. So many maintainers are complaining about how few of them there are to maintain all the distros, applications, and components that go into a desktop OS. That's in part because they are all working on competing products. There are hundreds of distros with a half dozen GUIs. On top of that the bundled apps are different as well. Lots of people doing the same work just spreads the butter too thin.

4. Competing package managers and app stores don't help either. No one app store interface can update packages from all the different formats. That's a problem for developers and users alike. At moment, I use scripts to update APT, Snap, and Flatpak packaged applications. Your average person has neither the ability nor desire to do write code to manage updates.

5. No matter what anyone says, none of the graphics look as good as Windows or MacOS. Look at Gnome or LibreOffice next to Microsoft or Apple equivalents. I get that that's a heavy lift. Microsoft and Apple can employ a small army of designers to tweak the smallest aspect of the user experience, and even they don't get everything right. Aesthetics do matter to the average person who looks at Linux and has a flashback to 1998.

6. Linux suffers from the "chicken or the egg" principle. Major applications, such as Microsoft Office, won't run on Linux. That slows adoption since many people need these apps. That reduces the market for Linux desktops, making it less attractive a market for major software companies. It's a vicious cycle for sure. Linux needs an iron clad Windows compatibility layer that emulates Windows behind the scenes. Wine and similar apps are still not good enough as far as compatibility and performance goes.

7. Hardware compatibility is still a problem. No matter the reasons for this, a lot of hardware, both old and new, can't run Linux well. I find this especially true with graphics hardware. It even manifests itself with strange desktop GUI behavior. And no, Wayland didn't make it better.

8. While it's great that some Linux distros can run on low-end machines, when you upgrade the software on those machines, it can either bork the machine entirely or make it act all wonky. Either disable updates when the hardware doesn't match up with later requirements or make updates that work on everything. You can't just leave it to fate. And don't tell me that it's impossible to test everything. Microsoft does a much better job with backwards compatibility and when it can't, disallows the upgrade such as the Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrade issues.

9. The ability to operate alongside Windows machines is still poor. SMB shares either can't be connected reliably or break during a reboot. It's been 30 years of Linux working with Windows machines. This needs to be fixed for Linux to be a reliable desktop machine.

10. All those configuration files are the worst. There are so many configuration files still lurking around in Linux distros. For example, to change from the Ubuntu LTS update cycle to a non-LTS one requires a change in a text file. Corrupted text files can bork your whole machine. Settings of all kinds are sitting in files that can be erased, moved, or corrupted. This needs to be a database with settings apps that change behavior. Files like these are a leftover from the 90s. That was over 35 years ago. 

11. Which leads to a lack of obvious settings available to the user. For example, a number of distros that used to use Cheese as the camera app, switched to Gnome's Snapshot. The latter doesn't have setting to invert the image. Lots of cameras don't do this automatically. Unfortunately, lenses flip the image so that it looks backwards. This is not to dish on Snapshot per se. Lots of apps are missing obvious settings such as flip the screen so that it looks true to life.

12. Gaming support still sucks. Compared to Windows, the best "Gaming" Linux distro is still much less capable than its Windows counterpart. That is partly due to graphics card support. Weirdly, we know this is possible because SteamOS is a Linux flavor. Mainstream distros, i.e. the one's that most people are likely to use, are not great for games. Meanwhile, Microsoft is doubling down on game support merging Xbox features into Windows. 

There's more, of course, but these are the ones that irritate the most. I would love to see Linux distros that are a viable alternative to Windows or MacOS for desktop/laptop computing. It's not even close and the major commercial distro players are obviously more interested in the server market. One can hope, nonetheless.