Reality of living with Linux
By: Filip Risteski
Tags: Windows, Arch Linux, Linux, Workflow

I am an IT professional who is around the industry since Dial-up modems and I have about 14 years of professional experience involving a lot of IT infrastructure all these years. I’ve used Linux for 10 of these 14 years for servers. I went so far to even create custom servers for some very specific needs in the past. I have been maintaining and administering various cloud environments too. At the same time I used Windows for myself on my professional laptop and on my gaming machine as well. Even as I typed the word “myself”, my fingers went to mysql :)

Throughout the past couple of years my life took me into projects created in NodeJS, which is something that always runs better on Linux. At that time I still had some dotnet things going on, so I couldn’t just leave the Windows environment. WSL was new and it was this great savior that would let me do everything on the same laptop (yes I know NodeJS runs on Windows, but I don’t like it).

I was always itching to move my laptop (Thinkpad T480) to some Linux distro and finally the day came when I didn’t need Excel that much, my dependence on Adobe also diminished, so I could finally move. I opted for Arch Linux, because it was described as the purest experience, letting you do everything yourself. It was this great thing for me. I was so excitemed while I wiped my SSDs and proceeded to move my workflow there.

At first I was hit with all of these desktop environments, it was like discovering a whole new side of Linux I never met. Very exciting stuff, but there was this small red flag in my head. Experience made me distrust GUI’s and double check things in terminal, especially around networking. This turned out to be a thing of the past.

I went with KDE Plasma on Wayland and I was super happy. Everything works out of the box, multi monitor support was there. I could find almost any application I’m using either natively built (rare) or community built and community maintained via something called AUR packages, which is actually a nice idea. To the community keeping these things alive, good job guys, I am fascinated by the responsiveness of people who don’t get paid to do this. People who actually get paid sometimes don’t respond as fast.

But the honeymoon eventually ended and I soon started seeing problems and cracks at this great experiment.

First thing it was Zoom (conferencing app). It didn’t want to do screen share on Wayland, and there were some ugly workarounds, so I switched to X11 for my desktop environment. And the company where I work has paid zoom accounts so it’s not like I can switch that. Even today I’m not always sure if annotation on a screen share will be OK.

Then I started seeing situations where I would have one taskbar icon, but when I open the software it would create another one. Something like this would never happen on Windows. Then the taskbar icons. Since I am relying on so many applications for my daily routine (tidal, keepass, facebook messenger, slack, clickup ….) they create ugly icons in the taskbar. I hide them but after I while the settings get forgotten.

I also own Sony headphones MX4 and I have had some major frustrations to get them to work. I had to ditch pulse audio and move to pipewire. I could get them to work (LDAC codec including), but for the HFP profiles to appear I have to double tap the headset, so these profiles would show. This is after about 4 hours of tinkering, and trying various hacks presented on the arch wiki and around forums in general. The sound controls have an option to raise maximum volume to about 150%, which comes somewhat close to what is possible on my Android smartphone, but still not there. When you increase or decrease volume, the bar that appears thinks it’s on 100% setting (not 150%), so you never now how loud it is by just looking at it.

One more thing is that you can not get Tidal Master track quality to work on Linux. So my investment in expensive headset and subscription down the drain.

Then I started having problems with multi monitor setup. Sometimes the laptop forgets the other monitor. If I try to rearrange screens sometimes half of the small screen will be blank, and I have to restart.

I started looking at other desktops to avoid these problems, but people online say KDE Plasma is one of the best for multi-monitor support.

OK so far I can live with occasional multi-monitor glitches (reboot is faster) and sound problems. The OS is faster and at least professional tools don’t suffer.

Then I started experiencing problems with MYSQL Workbench. Yes, I know there are much better tools out there, but I’m used to this one, and muscle memory is there. I started being unable to see the bottom status bar even when it was turned on.

Palm rejection is not quite there yet, and I don’t think there is a rival to Windows precision drivers yet. Fingerprint reader, I could probably get it to work, I just didn’t have the time to. I then realized that I would have to graduate security to get TPM, drive encryption and secure boot to work.

Then I noticed that KDE Plasma installed a heap of apps. I started scratching my head, because people are constantly complaining about bloatware on Windows. I noticed a bunch of games, and sooo many small apps, that I would never need. How is this the pure experience?

Another problem I noticed is apps forgetting things. For example zoom always forgets that I was logged in (and on first launch it never logs in), KOrganizer (apart from being very ugly) forgets my default calendar account, when I’m creating new events. So many other instances of forgotten logins.

Another very big problem for me is that scaling doesn’t work properly. I’ve set it to 125% for my screen, but a lot of apps are running in 100% scaling and I have to zoom in every time, since they don’t remember they were zoomed in (most of them).

I tried to get the ugly grey KDE Plasma desktop better (no, dark mode is not better), but most of the stuff I found online is how to make it a bit more MacOS like. OK, let’s pretend that it is better looking, why do I have to watch videos online, why aren’t there scripts that can sort it out, reboot and give me the promised desktop? Needless to say I was quickly overwhelmed by desktop options, and the problem is that for a theme to be consistent you have to set it at multiple places, since some apps run in something I perceive as gnome something, so there is a separate theme setting for them. Another problem is I would follow a 30 min. video and half way I will notice that the video is from 2019 and some of the settings are different today. Then I would get pissed off and roll back instead of losing more time to find them.

In the end I am a father, a family person and a busy professional, and fiddling with all of these things just took way more time than I was hoping for, and put pressure on my other life obligations. I don’t want to say that all of these problems I noted are not solvable, they are. It just requires way too much time So I decided today that Windows + WSL, with all their flaws are not so much time consuming, even with the speed disadvantage. It’s way cheaper to throw money at new and faster hardware than to spend months to fine tune and fight every problem, which does not happen on Windows 10, where things just work like you expect them to.

In the end I would say that’s Linux desktops and wars around which distro or desktop is better, and all of that fiddling are probably doable when you are younger and there are no time pressures on you. But I would have loved it if the Linux community rallied behind 2–3 distros and 1–2 desktop environments. That way it would be a real alternative to the paid for stagnating operating systems that are prevalent in industrial corners today.

As I am writing this I have the Windows 10 USB ready, admitting defeat and hoping that this would be my last Sunday with my work laptop open.