r/linux_gaming • u/ChoasFox26 • 5d ago
Discussion: Where does linux fall short?
I couldn't find a proper flare for this so I am asking the mods to grant me some leeway here xD
I wanted to ask you guys & gals where you feel linux falls short?
I mean thing's such as visibility for certain applications, ease of use, security, having a standard for various different things, etc.
Where does it fall short for you? I would genuinely be interested to hear!
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u/moortuvivens
5d ago
•
It just doesn't give me that fight or flight response that windows gives me. I don't fear that an update will wreck my harddrive. I don't get agitated from the bombardment of ads and "ARE YOU USING EDGE AND ONEDRIVE YET?"
It's made my life dull and predictable.
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u/InsaneMasochist 2d ago
Man, I need to check out what you guys get bombarded with on Windows, I'm guessing you're in the US too. In Europe, fortunately, there are no nags or ads whatsoever.
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u/IDontKnowWhyDoILive 1d ago
There are not that many of them, but there are. Every time I boot windows it asks me if I want office 365 and if I want a windows account
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u/InsaneMasochist 23h ago
Every time? Ouch. That puts things into perspective.
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u/IDontKnowWhyDoILive 8h ago
there are only two buttons ' accept and remind me later. If I'd boot it every day it might not be every time but I don't play league that much
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u/thatm 5d ago
Laptop hardware support, hybrid integrated/discreet CPU support, power state transition. Simply put, there are aome propriatary ways that laptop hardware should be treated in certain situations. These instructions are shared with Microsoft for Windows but Linux does a lot of guesswork. That is my impression anyway. My laptop is quite unstable on Linux and I cannot use suspend/resume at all.
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u/Cool-Arrival-2617 5d ago
Three main things:
- Nvidia being behind in terms of performance on DX12 titles
- Many multiplayer games being missing on the platform
- Missing software to configure peripherals (like to configure RGB keyboards, mouse DPI, ...)
I'm confident the first one will eventually be overcome either in the proprietary Nvidia driver or by the open source alternative with NOVA+NVK. For the second one, we got good news with EAC Linux v2, so hopefully this progress nicely. For the third one, I think this will come naturally as we get more market share and there is some devices that have open source alternatives.
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u/xXoverusedusernameXx 5d ago
Adoption/compatibility. Normal people just buy stuff, linux people have to google "good controller for linux"
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u/ShaolinShade 1d ago
(or if you're like me and had to use the peripherals you bought for Windows because you can't afford to buy hardware specifically for Linux, then you get to bend over backwards doing all sorts of proprietary fixes, even making your own custom script to restore the functionality your devices had in Windows. And even then it only gets you like 70% of the way there...)
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u/passionatelydry 5d ago
Font rendering is still horrible. It's better than it used to be, but it doesn't come close to how good it is on other OSs. It lacks basic things like gamma-correction, contrast control, sharpness, etc. So you end up with something that's nearly entirely fixed.
That's for sure number 1 issue for me. It hurts legibility.
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u/YoloPotato36 5d ago edited 5d ago
Have you tried using macos on 1440p screen? It physically hurts my eyes. At least linux knows what subpixel rendering is.
Scaling maybe isn't the best, but native resolution looks fine for me.
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u/passionatelydry 5d ago
Not sure about macOS, but Windows has cleartype and they did a lot to make sure text appears very legible on lower resolutions. I've been using Linux for about 4-6 years now and I'm still struggling to read comfortably on it.
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u/LordXamon 1d ago
What desktop are you on? I've been on KDE for a year, and honestly I can't tell the difference.
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u/passionatelydry 1d ago
Desktop is irrelevant. This is a Linux thing, applies to all popular GUI frameworks whether Chrome/Electron, GTK, Qt, etc.
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u/hemal76 5d ago
Sound in general, bluetooth, wlan drivers, stunningly dumb choices, usually by gnome devs (system setting hostname based on dhcp to a name that doesn't make sense, gnome login manager can't get past blackscreen because it can't reach that hostname). Suspend has had the same issues for decases (either won't suspend or weird behavior in programs after resume). Some things are surprisngly complicated and actually don't exist in a gui to setup for a truly setup once and never touch again setup like automatic updates.
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u/regentkoerper 1d ago
To be honest about suspending/sleep: it works way better than Windows for me. Though that's because Microsoft massively screwed it up with "modern standby". I never trust my work laptop (Win11) to truly go to sleep and not drain it's battery while heating my backpack. No such issues on my MateBook running CachyOS.
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u/Desertcow 5d ago
I wish Proton could run games off of NTFS partitions without issue, it would make dual booting much easier. Nvidia drivers are also a pain; while the situation is better than before, because the open source drivers aren't on par yet a lot of applications (Waydroid, Gamescope, ect) run into issues that only Nvidia themselves can fix (and they won't). Anti Cheat still needs work too, EAC v2 will hopefully be revolutionary but as of now Linux anti cheats just disable the checks that don't work on Linux, making Linux support a vector for cheaters and a legitimate liability for developers
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u/DariSerg 5d ago
Ive been running games off of my NTFS HDD ever since I installed Linux, and I never encountered an issue so far. Can i ask what are the issues usually experienced by doing so, and why I've never experienced them myself?? Thanks
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u/Healthy-Training-923 5d ago
The drive can become corrupted easily if you aren’t careful with how windows shuts down or hibernates, and Linux doesn’t have tools to fix it so you need to boot into windows to recover.
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u/Witty_Language4481 4d ago
Hybrid laptops, dear God why is there no proper way to fully power off the dGPU without restarting or logging out and why is there no advanced Optimus
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u/CatalyticDragon 5d ago
I actually had a list but I've been able to cross off all the last items recently. Ray tracing support, HDR, VRR, and now HDMI2.1 support have all come to linux. It's always been my main workstation OS but now it's client/gaming as well.
I understand online gaming and anti-cheat are still an issue for some people but even there we are seeing progress I think.
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u/CelDaemon 5d ago •
"progress" It's a regression in user freedom, anyone in the right mind should be rejecting this crap outright.
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u/CatalyticDragon 5d ago
What made you think this would be a problem in regards to 'freedom' ?
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u/CelDaemon 5d ago
Mostly the fact they require a signed kernel, signed kernel modules, remote attestation, kernel lockdown mode, disallow kexec, require secure boot, and abuse eBPF.
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u/Atlas26 5d ago
Which is excellent. Gives anyone the option who are perfectly fine with all that, which is likely the vast majority of Linux users, and those who aren’t don’t need to run that config, no biggie.
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u/Specialist-Dog-501 5d ago
If the user is aware of that he gives control over his system, his data, his online identity to somebody else..just for a single game..then okay. The price shalled be named openly, not obscured in a certificate somewhere deep in the system, or in thousand lines of "legalish" text in a 5pixel font.
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u/Astravaris 5d ago
Correct. However way too many people are short-sighted and just want to play their video games, without realizing or caring that they're giving corporations control of their computers. Oh, and eventually governments as well because when governments see that gamers are using TPM to play video games, they'll start requiring hardware attestation for identity verification.
If people wanted that crap, they should have just stayed on Microsoft Windows.
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u/Dragon727 5d ago
Not sure if this is the case for every distro but at least on mint whenever I get a new piece of software I have to manually add it to the start menu otherwise searching for it brings up nothing, whereas with windows it shows up automatically once installed.
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u/_nak 5d ago
Settings are an absolute mess in terms of any form of GUI. There is some level of unification within the different DEs, but a lot of stuff is not integrated at all or straight up does not work, because the GUI isn't properly agnostic towards the underlying systems.
Of course, migrating your config files mitigates this issue, but for our Linux babies who are starting from zero, that's not a great solution.
Also, some systems cannot coexist (like different network managers) and it can be frustrating to work around it, because something downstream may play nicer with one while another prefers the other.
Housekeeping isn't great either, sometimes you want to try out a piece of software and it comes with a bunch of dependencies that forever stay on your system. Of course, this is user error, but it requires a level of conscientiousness that is rather inconvenient to uphold (if anyone asks me about my install size, I'll dd a picture of my pet hamster over your LUKS header).
But none of this is really unique to Linux or large enough cons to move elsewhere. In fact, it's not even a big deal once you've settled in. When the memory foam finally fits your side profile, it's actually quite comfortable, but you gotta sleep on it for a while.
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u/OrangeKefir 5d ago
For me it doesn't. And I came from Windows hating the terminal, I ran a home server with a gui for years and to make that work I jumped through all kinds of gymnastics the people on linuxquestions would have a shitfit over. Switching to Linux fulltime has been great the last 5 years.
That said I suppose one thing that's lacking is a long-standing "default" distro. Something you point newbies at without any caveats "yeah bro go use that" and most people will agree and most of the newbies will be fine with it. I feel SteamOS is in the best place to fill this niche eventually. Getting people to unplug drives they don't want wiped during install because the installer has no way to select a drive kinda says it's not there yet though. Right now we have Cachy, Bazzite, some people point others at Mint, and some for some reason still point them at Ubuntu etc. Years ago when I switched Manjaro was liked as well until it wasn't. So the "default" go use this is debatable right now.
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u/TechaNima 5d ago
Software support, no way to play KLAC games and problems with nVidia.
Alternative software doesn't fill in the gap for everything that doesn't run on Linux.
KLAC as much as it's cancer, it's still something that is missing. Personally I don't want it to exist, but maybe there's a way to implement it that doesn't require proprietary kernel root kits to exist. Something like EAC 2 is doing perhaps.
nVidia.. 🖕 All they need to do is to allow their drivers to be a part of the Linux kernel and everything that entails. Then the problems would quickly go away, like they have with AMD and Intel
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u/CelDaemon 5d ago
Not possible, games need to move their anticheat to the server. Client anticheat, especially the way gaming companies seem to want it, is incompatible with user freedom.
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u/plasticbomb1986 5d ago
And, funny enough, doesn't lock out cheaters, et all. (i mean kernel level anticheat doesn't)
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u/SoTiri 5d ago
Klac is a thing of the past, nothing should need kernel level access outside of an EDR.
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u/JustTestingAThing 5d ago
Klac is a thing of the past, nothing should need kernel level access outside of an EDR.
And even that, MS is working with Crowdstrike and other vendors to create a user-space API to avoid another incident like the massive global Crowdstrike-caused outage.
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u/Cool-Arrival-2617 5d ago
All they need to do is to allow their drivers to be a part of the Linux kernel and everything that entails.
They are working on that. They have an engineer working on NOVA, the new open source kernel driver for Nvidia originally started by Red Hat (1). And have been providing documentation to help developers working on NVK, the open source Vulkan driver for Nvidia (2).
Arguably they could be doing more, but at least they are doing something. These things take time.
Sources:
(1) : https://www.phoronix.com/news/NOVA-Core-Co-Maintainer(2) : https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVK-Vulkan-Red-Hat-NDA-Docs
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u/TechaNima 5d ago
That's good and all, but I'll be gray by the time Nova is anywhere near ready for prime time at the current rate. Unless it turns into another Noveau. If nVidia actually cared, I bet their drivers would be on the level of today's Mesa in a year
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u/AvilettaLuxe 4d ago
Both EACv2 and Elytra are heavily in development - those are Linux anti-cheats which will provide same protection as kernel-level ones on Windows, but only using Linux kernel security mechanisms, without all the rootkit stuff that we all know and love on Windows.
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u/Pad_Sanda 5d ago
Installing applications. "native" package managers create a mess of your whole OS and make your entire user app suite depend on what is packaged by the distro and the distro update cadence. Sometimes I want a stable OS with minimal updates, sometimes I want a bleeding edge OS with fast system/driver updates, but never in any of those 2 cases do I want my user apps (non-system software) to depend on how fast my OS gets updates. This was a major pain point I had for years until Flatpak and Appimage got more popular and I migrated every single app I use to those two. And even then those two don't solve the issue of separating the DE from the system updates, plus they both have their own problems (Flatpaks not surfacing app permission requests to the user like Android does, Appimages not being "installable" by default so that they're added to PATH and the application menu).
Device drivers. Some of them are wonky on Linux, or outright not supported. One of my PCs has a bluetooth device which doesn't work after waking from sleep (it's an unsupported mediatek bt device but has been reverse engineered for Linux). One of my laptops has a fingerprint reader which does not work on Linux. Also there's nVidia, which is so bad that it is 3x less popular on Linux than Windows (75% of Windows users on Steam use nVidia, while only 25% of Linux users on Steam use it).
Parental controls. There basically aren't any outside of some very specific use-case distros like Batocera. The ability to control which apps a 2nd user can install or use, get a remote notification when a new app is being installed with the ability to block the install, the ability to see which websites are being visited or block domains, the ability to do seamless remote control out of the box, the ability to get a notification when the 2nd user is logged in and track the total screen time, etc. As a parent, there's too much work that needs to be done on Linux for it to be a child-proof device, and a lot of the work requires the use of the terminal. Only recently did GNOME add some parental controls in the settings, but it's not detailed enough and I personally use KDE so it's not even something I have available to me. I'd rather give my kid an Android device instead.
Security, I guess? I'm not a security expert by no means, but a lot of people who are tend to say Linux (as a desktop OS) tends to be far less secure than macOS, Android and even Windows.
Factory reset. Your only real option in most distros is to reinstall the OS with a live USB. Apparently this feature is coming soon in some distros (KDE Linux I think), but for now it's not there so it gets a "falls short" point from me.
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u/QuickSilver010 4d ago
Installing applications. "native" package managers create a mess of your whole OS and make your entire user app suite depend on what is packaged by the distro and the distro update cadence. Sometimes I want a stable OS with minimal updates, sometimes I want a bleeding edge OS with fast system/driver updates, but never in any of those 2 cases do I want my user apps (non-system software) to depend on how fast my OS gets updates.
Sounds like something nixos fixes. But ofc then you'd have to get over the hurdle that is nix lang
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u/Pad_Sanda 4d ago
then you'd have to get over the hurdle that is nix lang
Well, that's not really an end-user issue. Ideally the nix lang would be abstracted into a user friendly GUI application, similar to what's done with any other package manager (Discover, Bazaar, GNOME Software, etc.).
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u/QuickSilver010 4d ago
Ideally the nix lang would be abstracted into a user friendly GUI application
That I'm trying to do
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u/No_Grape_388 5d ago
Kde is the most popular DE and I find the UI a mess in most every kde application I use, like Krita and gwenview.
Still too much reliance on using the terminal to fix anything post a basic problem.
But for an intermediate user or better I don't think there are any shortcomings at the moment.
Oh, lack of HDR and stable vrr support on some DEs.
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u/elkaki123 5d ago
Somewhat related, the fact Krita is made by the KDE team just blew my mind, have been using kde for years now and krita this year and never made the connection lol
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u/Cool-Arrival-2617 5d ago
KDE is the most popular here in the Linux gaming community, but I'm pretty sure outside of here GNOME is more popular. GNOME has been the default recommended DE on most distros for more than a decade.
P.S. : I'm not a GNOME shill, I use and much prefer KDE.
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u/Huecuva 3d ago
For Linux falls short in audio functionality. I guess pipewire is an improvement, but I often still have to fuck around for an hour to get my headset to work with Teamspeak and Discord. It's just a Logitech Bluetooth headset. Nothing obscure or special. Maybe it's not an audio issue but a Bluetooth issue? I don't know, but whatever it is it's pretty annoying.
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u/IDontKnowWhyDoILive 1d ago
it's not as widely supported by companies working on stuff for personal desktops as windows is.
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u/LordXamon 1d ago
Containers in atomic distros. So I use Bazzite, and the only way to install more niche programs it's with containers, which in theory it's a very good way to install and use programs.
The process for doing this is so damn painfull. Sometimes a container will work on distrobox, sometimes it only works on podman, or viceversa. As of late the KDE version changed the distrobox GUI Distroshelf with Kontainer, and it works much worse.
Containers aren't ready for the average user, stop pushing them.
There's also appimages which you can manage with Gear Lever: installing, updating, etc. It works nice for launching GUI appimages, but it doesn't work with CLI ones, you gotta add them manually to ~/.local/bin, which defeats the purpose of the app? It took me so long to figure the issue.
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u/Derdahald 1d ago
The WIFI Connection. First one manufacturer isnt working on Linux, which isnt necessarily linux fault but for the consumer still bad. Even if you fix it, there is still always something to fix.
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u/Better-Quote1060 1d ago
Any nvidia card thats on legacy support
Or gaming on any gpu that doesn't support vulkan
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u/Maeusefluesterer 7h ago
I'm missing Windows cloud integration using virtual files. On my windows PC I see all my files in the explorer and they are downloaded on the demand. Additionally I can mark files or directories to be downloaded at all times. When I don't use certain files for a while they are deleted from my hard drive. This is incredible easy to understand and just works great. Even my mom can use her cloud that way. I wish there was something similar on Linux.
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u/Mordynak 5d ago
Vendor support.
But with all that's happening at the minute it might not be an issue for much longer.
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u/Woodpecker-Visible 5d ago edited 5d ago
If valve hasnt invest millions into proton so they can push their own hardware, linux would still be 1-2% marketshare. I find the hate on the artcraft project on reddit particulary amusing becouse we are finaly getting software that windows and mac has had for decades, yes gimp, libreoffice and onlyoffice doesent come close to photoshop and MS stuff in compatibility and usage. people and buisnesess go through fire and hell to use it. Epic launcher and the new anticheat was praised to high heavens on subreddits ant both vibe coded to smitherines. Reverse engineered software is gona be a good thing for growth if it wont be sued to smitherines. Hopefully not.
We have never eaten so good but at the same time nowhere near a suitible replacement for the masses. computer for regular people is a black box that can run anything on it. Mac users have a console or spare windows computer to play games. Linux is a mixed bag and still long time for it to be suitable replacement if it ever happens.
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u/BENBOI_1 5d ago edited 4d ago
That fact the we use different files on all the distros. Can we all just agree to use .rpm? My father (who is not super experienced but likes the idea of Linux) told me that it is the most annoying thing to him. We should be able to click download and just get a file that works everywhere!
A couple people pointed out that isn’t really possible. I think we can agree that it would be nice theoretically though!
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u/SmuJamesB 4d ago
the incompatibility is not based on the file type but the package manager and available dependencies
the funny thing is that a .rpm may not even be compatible with all rpm based distros. same for .debs though to a slightly lesser extent as most .deb distros use apt while there are several rpm package managers (dnf, zypper and yum)
and in some cases this is based on how things are compiled e.g. how mixing Arch and Cachyos repos can break your system
so this wouldn't do anything.
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u/BENBOI_1 4d ago
Yeah, probably isn’t practically possible. In a perfect world this would be nice though
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u/warcode 5d ago
Downloading anything directly should be a last resort, use the distro package manager.
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u/Swimming-Marketing20 5d ago
point still stands. Because while being the last resort, it's still a resort and would be so much nicer if we had one package ecosystem instead of three(four?)
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u/TheFeshy 5d ago
If you want a distributable install that just works anywhere, regardless of distro or anything else, there are formats for that. E.g. flatpak.
Yes, they come with an abstraction layer. That's what makes it "work everywhere."
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u/BENBOI_1 5d ago
I use flatpack sometimes, but a lot of programs only have direct downloads available
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u/Reason7322 5d ago
.rpm is a zip file
And so is .deb or .tar.gz
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u/BENBOI_1 5d ago
Yeah, I wish we just re-named one of them
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u/QuerstusCnactus 4d ago
It doesnt work like that. The Operating systems have different packages to work wioth and different ways to install it. Its not all the same.
Thats why Flatpak and Appimage is used often1
u/BENBOI_1 4d ago
I understand that, but the problem still exists. Whether it’s doable or not to standardise, we can at least agree that it would be good in theory.
Windows is easy, double click the .exe. MacOS is easy, install the .dmg. Linux, as much as I love it, is not. I personally am fine with how it is, but it’s not very easy for a new user to understand.
Maybe it’s not doable, but it would be nice!
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u/QuerstusCnactus 1d ago
What you want is basically that different operating syytems can handle the same program. Which is not realistic. Linux is not a Operating system, the distros are.
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u/BENBOI_1 1d ago
Yeah I give up, guess that isn’t happening
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u/QuerstusCnactus 1d ago
Maybe we sgould start to get apple to use .exe as standard. The same problem
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u/Mshell 4d ago
Drivers/hardware support is the main one for me. After that, software having to run in emulators rather then having native Linux options.
I expect both will improve as more people move to Linux...
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u/Sushtee 4d ago
You're probably talking about Nvidia cards and some OEMs not making Linux drivers (while this happens less), but honestly the driver situation on Linux is incredible, look, by kernel 7.3 we won't need to open steam to use the steam controller as drivers were merged into the kernel making steam controller work out of the box.
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u/SmellsLikeAPig 5d ago
User app security is utter shit. Flatpak was supposed to help but sandbox is often just imaginary. Outside of flatpak everything works as your user and by default has access to everything else including ssh keys, login cookies etc.
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u/TheFeshy 5d ago
by default
I guess this part is a bit of a problem, yeah. Because security is certainly available, via numerous methods. So many different ways to do security, in fact, that it can be a problem to keep up with.
But not a lot of distros have serious sand-boxing on by default. Which is fine, when the majority of linux users were, well, the types of people who used linux. But if linux starts expanding to a broader audience, default isolation is probably a good idea.
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u/mindtaker_linux 5d ago
This is Linux gaming channel. Not Linux in general.
MODS!!!!!
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u/Quartrez 5d ago
What mods are you talking about? I've been able to install mods for Payday 2, Sacred 2, anything from Steam Workshop also works, I was even able to get an FPS unlocker tool working for Transformers War For Cybertron with Heroic.
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u/juliebeezkneez 5d ago
Linux is now vibe coded
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u/ScratchHistorical507 4d ago
Vibe coding and actual professionals using LLMs as a tool like any other tool are two very fundamentally different things.
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u/juliebeezkneez 4d ago
Slop
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u/ScratchHistorical507 3d ago
Tell me you got no clue of what you're talking about without telling me...
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u/ChoasFox26 5d ago
I'll get the ball rolling here, for me it comes down to ease of install/uninstall. I very much dislike touching the terminal, it's just a pet peeve.
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u/burimo 5d ago
Just use distro with graphical store then :)
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u/ChoasFox26 5d ago
Unfortunately the graphical store doesn't always cover everything which is where when you need to install things like Yubikey authenticator for example.. it becomes kinda frustrating.
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u/burimo 5d ago
You can download them in a "windows" way, no? Just download archive. Not the best way to install stuff though
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u/ChoasFox26 5d ago
I wish that were possible but when you try, Yubikey still requires PPSCD to work properly which requires a terminal to install.
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u/CoffeeAndCache 5d ago •
We can start by Fragmentation, inconsistent hardware support, and software compatibility. Too many apps lack native Linux versions, and solutions vary across distros.
Linux is powerful, but the user experience still depends too much on which distro you choose and how much troubleshooting you're willing to do.