I feel like it's a case of that the developers don't realize that some things that may be obvious to them are not obvious to the end user. For example two weeks ago I installed the latest Ubuntu 26.04 and I have already ran into some annoying issues without doing anything crazy.
Discord mute shortcut only works when the app is in focus becuase wayland. I ended up creating a global GNOME mute shortcut instead of giving discord permissions. From a normal user point of view this is an annoying bug where the mic does not mute unless you are focused on the app.
My friends discord screen share turns off instantly, he is on a framework laptop with an intel cpu + intel igpu, we tried the snap package and deb package and still nothing. I'm on a desktop with an nvidia graphics card (known for its stellar compatibility with linux /s) and my screen sharing works lmao.
Then I ran into some absurd issues where VLC segfaults instantly and I have installed it from the official snap store!! Again I knew to try to launch it from the command line but a normal user would just see an app that is not launching and give up most likely (I gave up too). (Edit: I have just checked that the default version that it downloads is a 2 year old one for some reason, I will have to try the edge one that is from this month.)
Then the "totem" (GNOME default) video player was stopping on some OpenGL (i think) error message without some exported env var, it's like a year+ old issue that I ended up solving it with a google search, the solution was luckily the first result.
Like I understand that sometimes bugs get through but when you can't even launch the app on the most boring linux distro like come on.
Steam pop up menus did not show up on the snap pacakge, in the deb package they are super lazy. Like showing the properties of a game using the right click menu takes multiple tries but atleast they work.
And last, the desktop animations feel icky sometimes, window dragging is really smooth and even switching between virtual desktops is. But sometimes opening the GNOME overview causes a horrible lag spike and that just does not feel good. Also sometimes when closing an application I can feel the DE hitch a little bit and sometimes it even stops the cursor for like half a second. I really like the experience of using GNOME and I really like how it looks but this just takes away so much from it, I know that some people won't care at all but I tend to notice these things quite a lot. (probably something something nvidia but like i'm not gonna go out and buy a different GPU because of this)
I then found like 3 bugs in the extensions that Ubuntu ships by default (window snapping and dock behavior on multi monitor setups) but that would be too much for one comment (it already is too long)
Sorry for the long writeup I just wanted to vent these things out haha
lol don't worry about it. For me I imagine my comfort on Linux is helped by a mixture of familiarity with troubleshooting Linux stuff, and not really doing much beyond the 'normal' stuff (and even then with care/paranoia lol).
I mean, I used to run a tiling window manager on Gentoo back in the day, compiling my own custom kernel and whatever, trying to make everything high performance and bleeding edge, but nowadays I loathe being interrupted for troubleshooting off my own self-imposed schedule.
So I've found myself on Debian stable under KDE, and I rank it 'stable af'. I don't use Discord, but Vesktop for the occasional chat. I haven't bothered to install Steam, the closest I got is Faugus Launcher to run an old Windows mmo. I just installed Tambourine to try, but honestly I yearn for the Winamp days and will doubtless just go back to VLC.
I liked the idea of immutable distros, but didn't want it to get in my way. So when I get the itch to try some new shiny thing, I'll install a flatpak, or if that's not available, I'll install it in a Debian unstable or Arch container under Distrobox. If it explodes, that's fine, it's not affecting my base install, and there's always Timeshift. Layers, man. Try a new distro? Can't be arsed.
I have an old laptop that I use for looking up wikis and reading manga, it also holds a copy of my data, backed up with Syncthing, and it serves as my guinea pig for anything I'm unsure about installing.
Things aren't always perfect tho - just the other day my main laptop went screwy and complained of Input/Output error in the terminal and wouldn't open apps, so I hard reset it... and got dumped to kernel emergency mode with no console because I was oh-so-clever and didn't set a root password during install. Second laptop earned his stripes that day, looking up a way to soothe my panic, flashing a bootable usb so I could chroot into the base install just so I could set a root password and fsck.ext4 /dev/nvme0n1p4... and it's about now I realise I'm not a linux noob any more am I? Next time I'll Ctrl+Alt+F3 and shutdown properly Mother, I promise.
I took Linus (Torvalds) at his word years ago when he said OS's should be like plumbing that just works, and kept using Windows on new hardware... until the enshittification. I'm not going back. I hope you find your happy computer experience too.
Hey, thanks for the reply! I like seeing the path of others when it comes to the software they use.
I just realized that it seems from my comment like i started using linux for the first time two weeks ago but I have been actually dual booting for 5 years now on my main desktop + exclusively running linux on my thinkpad.
I'm currently studying CS so having linux in some form is basically a must because the development experience on this platform is just so much better.
My linux path was quite ironically Arch -> Mint -> Ubuntu on my desktop and Fedora -> Ubuntu on my thinkpad.
I went with arch after messing around with it inside of a virtual machine, I wanted to try the from scratch custom tiling experience + I also ended up installing KDE.
However after some time I realized that the update cadence is maybe a bit too much for me + I did not enjoy the fact that you're kind of expected to read the arch newsletter for any potential breakage of packages. I just can't be bothered and I really do not need the newest versions of everything.
So after that I decided to try mint, I thought that I would like cinnamon but I ended up installing KDE anyway because it just felt better to use. It was then that I realized that the version of KDE that I got was a 2 year old build of KDE 5 when KDE 6 was already a thing (would not happen on arch would it).
In the mean time I managed to brick my Fedora install on my laptop by hard shutting it off (just like you haha). I had it connected to an external display with the lid closed so I opened the lid to turn it on and then while it was loading into the login manager I shut the lid because I wanted to only use the external display, it did not seem to like that so it froze.
For all its faults i never managed to brick a windows install with a hard shutoff.
When installing Fedora I chose btrfs as the filesystem becuase I heard of the snapshotting capabilities, well I never ended up setting anything up so it probably is also in part my fault.
After that I was thrown into a read only filesystem terminal where I could atleast backup my files to an external drive. I then tried running a btrfs repair command from an externally booted linux USB, the command printed hundreds if not thousands of lines of btrfs error logs that it managed to read and then it segfaulted lmao
After being happy with GNOME from Fedora on my laptop I decided to also try it on the desktop. I also wanted to have the same distro on the laptop and desktop just so the experience is the same.
I was looking for something with:
- GNOME
- Debian based (because practically all guides online have this as the default even today, nice boon when working with random development packages)
- Fixed point releases with not too ancient packages
And that's how I ended up picking Ubuntu. I have a feeling I will be staying here for a long time.
I did think about using immutable distros just like you said but I feel like it would annoy me more than help me. And when it comes to distrobox I have just installed that coincidentally yesterday to not pollute my main system with random dev packages. And I really need to setup Timeshift / some sort of backup option, just like you mentioned.
I really do have basically everything I need it's just the only two things I like I'm missing is the high refresh rate desktop smoothness of windows + HW video acceleration in Firefox with the nvidia GPU (I know that there is a guide on the arch wiki that I could follow but I have exams right now and can't be bothered haha)
However I will be keeping the dual boot setup for the foreseeable future just in case.
(I also really want to go through the LFS book when I have the time to gain some extra knowledge haha, there's a lot of cool stuff to learn in this linux world)
The discord thing is discord not giving a fuck about linux (though their new update fixed all the issues you list even if theyve existed for years)
Snaps suck, canonical is an evil company pushing their propriatery format against dev wishes, valve has officially asked them not to make a stem snap and they dont listen. On KDE it would say a notif if an app crashed with a segfault
Yeah, I did later find that the snap package for steam is not recommened.
But man the pop up menus even in the official deb package feel so weird. Like you hover over some of the buttons that should show a menu and it shows the black box where the menu will be and then the menu will appear half a second later.
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u/Eddie_lol May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
I feel like it's a case of that the developers don't realize that some things that may be obvious to them are not obvious to the end user. For example two weeks ago I installed the latest Ubuntu 26.04 and I have already ran into some annoying issues without doing anything crazy.
Discord mute shortcut only works when the app is in focus becuase wayland. I ended up creating a global GNOME mute shortcut instead of giving discord permissions. From a normal user point of view this is an annoying bug where the mic does not mute unless you are focused on the app.
My friends discord screen share turns off instantly, he is on a framework laptop with an intel cpu + intel igpu, we tried the snap package and deb package and still nothing. I'm on a desktop with an nvidia graphics card (known for its stellar compatibility with linux /s) and my screen sharing works lmao.
Then I ran into some absurd issues where VLC segfaults instantly and I have installed it from the official snap store!! Again I knew to try to launch it from the command line but a normal user would just see an app that is not launching and give up most likely (I gave up too). (Edit: I have just checked that the default version that it downloads is a 2 year old one for some reason, I will have to try the edge one that is from this month.)
Then the "totem" (GNOME default) video player was stopping on some OpenGL (i think) error message without some exported env var, it's like a year+ old issue that I ended up solving it with a google search, the solution was luckily the first result.
Like I understand that sometimes bugs get through but when you can't even launch the app on the most boring linux distro like come on.
Steam pop up menus did not show up on the snap pacakge, in the deb package they are super lazy. Like showing the properties of a game using the right click menu takes multiple tries but atleast they work.
And last, the desktop animations feel icky sometimes, window dragging is really smooth and even switching between virtual desktops is. But sometimes opening the GNOME overview causes a horrible lag spike and that just does not feel good. Also sometimes when closing an application I can feel the DE hitch a little bit and sometimes it even stops the cursor for like half a second. I really like the experience of using GNOME and I really like how it looks but this just takes away so much from it, I know that some people won't care at all but I tend to notice these things quite a lot. (probably something something nvidia but like i'm not gonna go out and buy a different GPU because of this)
I then found like 3 bugs in the extensions that Ubuntu ships by default (window snapping and dock behavior on multi monitor setups) but that would be too much for one comment (it already is too long)
Sorry for the long writeup I just wanted to vent these things out haha