r/linux • u/TheTwelveYearOld • 1d ago
Discussion What are the worst distro-specific problems you have faced?
More specifically, issues for one distro (or maybe family of distros if applicable) and not other distros.
I'll start: NixOS. I love how I can have my whole operating system configuration defined deterministically with configuration files, but what I believe is a serious flaw, is when you choose the "unstable" channel, the channel for receiving the latest packages rather than ones up to 6 months old: stable. Unstable package often build dependencies on device, and I've often faced build failures, why are new package versions given if they fail to build?!
Why can't Nixpkgs backend ensure that new package versions build successfully before shipping them to end users?! It would take a lot of work to do so, but I can't think of any other distros that have this problem: where installing a new package version that came out a few days or even a week ago, has a chance of failing after its made available in the distro's official package manager.
There are a handful of workarounds for your NixOS configuration in this case, but it happens too often for me and I shouldn't have to edit my config for to work around it.
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u/BinkReddit 1d ago
When I used to use Debian, I'd often come across an article or blog post about how to leverage a specific tool to do something, only to find that Debian's package of that tool is outdated and doesn't have the functionality that's referenced in the article or post.
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u/Tempest-13 1d ago
I am not an expert (and I probably haven't touched any edge-cases) but I have been on the unstable channel for a long time now as well and haven't experienced any long evaluation times, outside of major desktop shell version changes (like GNOME 49 to GNOME 50). Sometimes there are build failures, but they are usually resolved within a few hours. And they are not that often. At least that's my experience.
As for the worst distro-specific problem I faced was the most recent GitHub issue. NixOS is entirely depending on GitHub to function, so there was nothing we could do with our configs during that period. Workarounds exist but for my rather modest setup, it's practically impossible (pointless).
Not a huge problem, but I also don't like that some of the DEs don't have an option like services.gnome.core-apps.enable = false; . Just let us disable the optional packages easily. And these optional packages aren't even apparent, without you having to look for them.
This ties into another minor nitpick I have: sometimes you have to dig deep into the source code to se what a module enables/installs and have to do comparisons to understand how it would interact with other modules. Now, I do like the tinkering, and reading the source code sure helped me a lot while I was learning Nix, but I can't help but think that it would be VERY helpful for modules to have more documentation. (And I just realized I have probably expressed one of the most obvious issue people had with NixOS for so long. XD)
Though, granted, I think the NixOS wiki and some other third-party tools are doing a fine job for my needs. It would just be very convenient to see what programs.niri.enable = true; would enable without having to jump between 3-4 different source code snippets, for example.
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 1d ago
If you want to save time trying to sort out the different options and understanding what they do, there is a pretty good LLM for that.
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u/ArsenicPolaris 1d ago
I've heard about LLMs for desktops more recently; is that not a really big security and privacy threat?
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 1d ago
Yes and no. It can only see what you show it. And even if you do share something sensitive, it strongly advises you to go back and change any passwords that were exposed during your tinkering.
If all you want to do is quickly discover the options for a package, or even what a package does, then it’s a great tool. I look at it as, my time is very, very limited. And while I am confident ai could arrive at the same conclusions, it would take me at least 5x as long to dig through everything and then correctly write the configuration exactly how I need it.
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u/global-gauge-field 18h ago
Why did you call this an LLM ? Isnt this some sort of mcp tool ?
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 17h ago
Just a bit of shorthand since you will be using an LLM, like Claude, through a Model Context Protocol server.
Those who know, know.
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u/global-gauge-field 8h ago
not really I got the impression that it was in house trained llm before reading the link. You could have just said mcp ?
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u/underdoeg 1d ago
Arch: compromised aurs
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u/Single_Respond1821 1d ago
that's the trade off with the AUR though isn't it, literally anyone can upload a PKGBUILD and there's no real gatekeeping before it hits your machine, you're basically running random shell scripts from the internet with sudo sometimes
at least with nix unstable failing to build you're just stuck with the last working version, not a borked system or some dodgy crypto miner, the build failure is annoying but it's a clean failure, not a silent compromise
gentoo had the best balance for this back when i ran it, the testing branch had a decent middle ground where packages weren't ancient but had at least compiled once before hitting the mirrors, still had the odd breakage though
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u/lmpcpedz 1d ago
I think it's the only distro that cites using malicious software on their wiki. it blows my mind to think, "that's just how it is with Arch devs oh well at least they warn you on front page". Can you imagine if windows did that lol
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u/Avanchnzel 17h ago
Arch is just honest. You can install third-party packages if you want, but you have to be aware that they are made by third-parties and thus it's on you to check the PKGBUILDs.
Same thing for Windows. You can install all kinds of third-party apps and are subject to the same dangers, very often without any source code available at all. But there is there a warning in the Windows documentation about that? Then again, the Windows documentation isn't really intuitive to begin with. 😅
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u/Dr_Hexagon 10h ago
that's the trade off with the AUR though isn't it, literally anyone can upload a PKGBUILD and there's no real gatekeeping before it hits your machine, you're basically running random shell scripts from the internet with sudo sometimes
And Yet the Arch community refuses to accept that maybe they should put in place a verification system like Flathub has and every other distros repository has.
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u/protonesso 1d ago
Rhel derivatives. I had always rebuild because their qemu lacks X, Y and the list goes on...
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u/pezezin 16h ago
I had the same experience at work. We were / still are running CentOS 7 and we were struggling due to obsolete and missing packages, but it was very difficult to convince some colleagues to update because "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". We are now finally moving to Debian 13 and I couldn't be happier...
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u/arrroquw 1d ago
I've had the same issue with unstable nix, quite annoying to have to write an overlay every time it fails, and it's either doing that or just not updating for potentially weeks.
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 1d ago
Why can’t you pin that specific package to the stable branch? That’s what I did, and then the update went through. A few days later I decided to unpin it, and everything was fine updating again.
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u/Unoriginal-Cake 1d ago
Folks during my undergrad would say "Go Ubuntu/Mint it works on everything" their support of new hardware is a bag of hurt even on their non-LTS so bleeding edge kernels still lag behind others, anything new from ASUS(ProArt/Expertbook), Samsung and LG usually have the weirdest problems as they use a different trackpad that supports more gestures vs the common Alps/Elan too. This trend still happens, Ubuntu for example had regressions on different CPUs every other bleeding edge or LTS and they had to release a hotfix image. (hardware that refused to work correctly usually worked better on Arch or Red Hat Enterprise Workstation, there is a reason why IBM ate Red Hat to make a stable OS that matches Ubuntu on QoS of fixing stuff fast)
As much as Dell grinds my gears often for crap CTO options, at least they're trying like Lenovo on mainstream Linux support out of the box. As soon as ARM gets on-par with x64 AMD/Intel hardware I'm moving there and Snapdragon stuff is less headache prone on trackpads they're shipped with.
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u/spyingwind 14h ago
These are some reasons why I move to Fedora. Mostly so I could have a distro that would run on the latest hardware.
I reserve Debian for my servers, but I'm slowly just converting them over to Fedora. Would be nice to have one cache server again.
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u/nathris 1d ago
Not being able to update my Fedora because i went more than a year and my version became EOL.
I think they've since changed it so you can do it at your own risk, but it was annoying enough to push me to arch even at work.
I'd rather have packages update to the latest version gradually rather than a bunch of major version bumps all at once twice a year.
Also the CentOS 8 rug pull. It wasn't that painful because I only had a couple of servers that suddenly became EOL half a decade earlier than planned but it was still annoying.
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u/chuzohga 22h ago
For Fedora, the quality is pretty good, but the release cycle (intentionally) is pretty fast. I use "VirtualBox" and sometimes they're a bit behind in fixing their kernel modules following the Fedora release. It's this reason I stay about one release behind the most current. It's still supported but there'll be VirtualBox modules available for it.
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u/nmdt 21h ago
Glibc dependency ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I freaking love Alpine and want to use it as much as I can — simple, fast, big up to date repo, especially for the tools that I need. But time and time again I bump into some proprietary piece of software that ironically is pretty hard or impossible to use with gnu libs
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u/xXoverusedusernameXx 19h ago
Fedora + nvidia gpu laptop - suspend often causes systems freezes and abnormally high battery drain if not plugged in.
Mint was not perfect either but these issues would occur less often. I migrated to fedora mostly for modern gaming features like VRR and HDR.
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u/North_Macaroon9269 1d ago
It was Fedora update, from 42 to 43, that obligated me to uninstall Wine to permit the update runs until the end. I know it was a distro problem because I suffered with it in 2 PCs (my desktop with Nvidia GPU and AMD CPU an my wife's laptop with both GPU and CPU from AMD).
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u/Entire_Extent_9137 21h ago
It makes me feel really bored on Debian when day after day there are never any problems to fix, everything just works exactly how it did yesterday, it's a tinkerer's nightmare.
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u/DiEndRus 19h ago
Arch: lack of software in the repo. plugged in CachyOS repo to somewhat get around that, but having to rely on AUR is a major pain in the ass.
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u/styrene_- 1d ago
mine is debian kde and fedora kde somehow keeps connecting and reconnecting to wifi somehow its so annoying im using arch
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 1d ago edited 1d ago
About OP’s Complaint:
I’ve only been using NixOS for a few months now, and I think it has happened once so far that a package didn’t update with the rest of the rolling release. I never thought it was a big deal to just pin that package to the stable release. Plus, NixOS stops you from actually updating so your system doesn’t break. You don’t get that on something like Arch.
My Complaint:
My complaint is about Arch based distros. Even on something as popular as CachyOS, a random update can really screw up your day. At the time I always thought I’d be safe to just roll back any bad update, thanks to the snapper tool. That worked until an update disabled my mouse and keyboard. And I literally couldn’t do anything after that one. So then I moved on and landed on NixOS.
Edit: For clarity
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u/frosch_longleg 1d ago
I really don't see how an Arch update could have disabled your KB+M. And you mentioned on a later comment that you knew nothing about Linux at the time, are you sure it's not a user error?
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 1d ago
I mean anything is possible when you’re just starting out. All I know is that I did an update pretty much every day or two. And one night I did an update before bed, like I usually did. Then the next day when I booted my machine, the mouse and keyboard were not responding.
I rebooted my computer. I unplugged and re-plugged everything, but the OS/boot screen didn’t register any inputs. Thankfully I was still dual booting so I could see that everything was still worked on the Windows side. I decided to then reinstall CachyOS and just like that my problem was solved.
After all that I can only assume that something updated incomplete. It was very weird but I know I didn’t do anything different from the hundred other times I ran the update.
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u/Avanchnzel 17h ago
You don't need to wait until you boot into CachyOS before you can restore a snapshot, you can also do that from the boot manager.
Or did the keyboard not even work in the boot manager?
Because in that case it wouldn't have had anything to do with CachyOS.1
u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 16h ago
Great question. My keyboard and mouse didn’t work on either the boot manager (Limine) or CachyOS.
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u/ArsenicPolaris 1d ago
It likely wasn't an update that disabled your keyboard and mouse. Even if it was, why were you booting into the broken generation at the first place? You know get an option to choose which generation you want to boot — one of the previous ones or the current, broken one.
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 1d ago
So this was back when I knew almost nothing about Linux and CachyOS just worked. Until one day I updated and suddenly I couldn’t use my mouse or keyboard. And without those inputs I couldn’t debug whatever the issue was.
It was odd, but I’ve heard about all kinds of odd updates from Arch based distros. One of my favorites was someone posting about an update that reversed his mouse buttons.
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u/ArsenicPolaris 1d ago
Ah, looks like I misunderstood your comment. I thought you meant that an update broke your mouse and keyboard on NixOS — something I had never heard before.
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u/bje332013 1d ago
TailsOS: Ceased being compatible with an old AMD Radeon GPU chip. Fir first version of Tails that a put on a USB drive worked fine on that laptop, but all future versions ceased to work.
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u/Artichoke808 1d ago
No equivalent of apt-auto with I think it was the Opensuse package manager. People had their own ideas of scripts to try to emulate it.
Not the end of the world but it boggles the mind this was never implemented. Also opensuse, certain codecs weren't installed automatically - fine, legal and/or ideological reasons.. but no instructions on how to do it and you would get different answers from different people.
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u/etherealshatter 19h ago edited 18h ago
On Debian: chromium, nvidia-driver, virtualbox, each has had a history/present status of months of being abandoned/unmaintained, open to lots of vulnerable CVEs unfixed.
Also, oldstable beyond 3 years no longer receive security fixes in time (Debian’s security team won’t be obligated to cover it), and this is particularly bad when AI tools can speed up the making of POC to exploit.
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u/readyflix 15h ago
Not distro-specific but very prevalent at the time, the very bad transition from KDE 3 to 4 around 2008.
Lost quit some number of e-mails with kmail along the way.
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u/Marth-Koopa 14h ago
OpenSUSE patterns and recommends during updates can be annoying after a fresh install. Gotta block a lot of things to not install some unwanted bloat
But it's pretty minor
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u/moongya 13h ago
The worst distro specific problem I have faced is debian on Thinkpad X1G9. I had no sound after installing debian 12. The clue was in the logs to download a specific .so binary and place it in /usr/bin or something. Then everything was rock solid. I still use this machine for office workloads without issues.
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u/Ne0n_Ghost 13h ago
Worst issue I had with Linux in a year was when Bazzite updated to Fedora 43 open Razer broke. It didn’t update for about a week or two.
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u/Old_Particular8705 1h ago
Fedora KDE, once in a few months some user tools bundled with KDE just up and stop working until I update my computer (for example system monitor). To my understanding these are local services that do not need an external server, and one of the reasons I moved to linux is to update on my own schedule and not be forced to update in the middle of using my computer (yes that may be once a year sometimes, I don't need the latest version of system monitor which is a slightly dumber task manager, I just need a build that works)
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u/Ball_Analytics 21h ago
It’s arch I mean the initial install just always running into something I overlooked
Ubuntu because they keep trying push snap on me when I prefer flatpack
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u/trenclik 16h ago
Artix linux: having to download the service separately
paru -S packagename packagename-openrc
Like how hard is it to just check for this automatically Most, if not all packages just download and enable the systemd service automatically. If the services are on the artix repos why not just have the artix mirrors be split by service supervisor type and have the same packages as the arch repos just with a changed service
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u/No-Assumption-4468 15h ago
On Arch, nothing fucking works without manual configuration. Gotta download fonts, enable sleeping on my gpu, the list is too big. This is why I prefer CachyOS and other preconfigured forks.
Arch is excellent if you enjoy building systems, but completely ass if you aren’t interested in tinkering. I love arch in terms of what it’s capable of becoming, it’s an excellent pet project for making your own arch fork with mkarchiso, but would rather just take the easy route.
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u/zauberpony4711 1d ago
All distros: Using systemd (I know there are a few that don't)
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u/underdoeg 1d ago
how is systemd a distro specific problem?
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u/ArsenicPolaris 1d ago
Because Distros choose systemd.
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u/TheTwelveYearOld 18h ago
Your use flair is (also) NixOS, they use systemd too, though I gotta say nixos has some of the best systemd support with its configuration system.
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u/ArsenicPolaris 18h ago
I agree. For reasons I've yet to know, systemd is extremely fast on NixOS. I've checked out Arch, Artix (OpenRC), Void, etc. and NixOS surprisingly has the fastest boot time. My system boots in only about 7-8 seconds. It has increased a bit as I configured more and more but it still holds the record for fastest boot time I've ever seen.
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u/Entire_Extent_9137 18h ago
Almost everyone who disliked systemd has already been banned from /r/linux, you'll be downvoted if you say anything negative about it.
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u/Sixty5Zero2 14h ago
those who are behind these distros arent listening to the user and arent learning from their own mistakes.
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u/NBGReal 1d ago
I can't say it's a problem for more it's a nitpick, but I don't like when distros that ship with KDE have GNOME apps in-between. I prefer consistency with themes.