We love to praise linux constantly and tell everyone to change to it (they should) but what are your biggest annoyances ?
Mine would be, installing software (made even more complex by flatpaks being added, among the 5 other ways there already were to install software) and probably wifi power management issues.
When I was running a Linux distro regularly (1995-2015), audio output would break every couple of upgrades.
It was frustrating, because I was pretty happy with the rest of the OS.
After switching my gaming PC from Win 11 to Linux Mint earlier this year, audio is the only thing I consistently have issues with. I have the PC connected to my living room TV via HDMI via an Onkyo AVR. I have pipewire installed (correctly, I think).
Whenever audio starts, there’s a couple second delay before I can hear it. Haven’t been able to solve that so I just live with it.
The more annoying thing is after an update earlier this week, the audio output is now defaulting to “Dummy Output” instead of HDMI. I have to manually switch it via pipewire. It randomly switches back and I haven’t figured it out either.
That can be because of a power saving feature - basically PulseAudio puts your sound card to sleep when nothing is playing, and then there’s a bit of lag before it wakes up. In my case it was really annoying because I use the optical output, so when PulseAudio put the sound card to sleep, my receiver would also go to sleep after a bit, and resulted in quite a bit of a delay when it was time to get it come back up.
This fixed it for me (see part 4.8): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting
Ironically, it’s only gotten better since 2015ish. For the most part I’ve used pulseaudio like most others, but I’ve also used jackd when I need to do audio stuff. After pipewire became usable it’s more or less flawless for me.
Audio output doesn’t “break,” but it’s easy for it to get redirected to the wrong device (e.g. by plugging something in, like headphones or an HDMI monitor, and the system trying to be “helpful” by automatically reconfiguring). With so many layers (OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, JACK, PipeWire) it’s hard to figure out how to fix it.
It seems to go hand-in-hand with bluetooth breaking.
Bluetooth is still… not great.
I didn’t even try Bluetooth. That would have been too frustrating.
That’s exactly why I hopped back on windows for my desktop. I’ve put off fixing it for longer than I should.
I’ve amazingly not had a single audio problem, and i mess with inputs and outputs on the front and back panel often, as well as use usb audio devices. Mint and pulseaudio
I just find it annoying that I have to manually change audio output device every time I connect or disconnect HDMI to our TV. Annoying, but at least not difficult.
That’s awesome! I’m not sure if/when I’ll go back to Linux as a daily driver, but I that I have your experience.
This does need some attention from the Pipewire profiles perspective. It’s mostly a hardware combo thing though. Even if you’re using an audio code that has kernel support, the speaker configuration from manufacturers changes CONSTANTLY, really causing problems. They need to break this out into its audio profile IMO.
I hope image-based distro can solve this issue. In general I feel a lot of these breakages are caused by repeatedly migrating configuration files, yet fresh install usually fixes these issues.
I think one of the advantage of image based distros is that they are much more principled in migrating config files.