Skip to content
Standard Reader
Log in
Flaky
Flaky
Linux

Why desktop Linux sucks (for me)

A long-ass post detailing the problems I've personally experienced with desktop Linux.

Flaky 🔞
Flaky 🔞@flaky.blue
Jun 21, 2026 · 35 min read · 1 read
Edits
  • July 14th 2026: Changed some wording across the board, added stuff about Microsoft’s account requirement, added paragraph about game modding, added some stuff about stress, added a bad experience with a Linux User on Bluesky.
  • July 8th 2026: Anthropic now has a beta of Claude for Linux, rendering a small part of the software problems void. I’ve also went back and made things less formal.
  • July 4th 2026: Changed title from “My Problems with the Linux Desktop” to “Why desktop Linux sucks (for me)”, added section on Linux gaming, added ToC block

Table of Contents

et’s be real, Windows fucking sucks in places. I’ve had a few nagging issues with it and I do feel like I don’t focus as well on it. The virtual desktops are so awful and it results in messy piles of windows everywhere, and I’ve had a few lockups relating to Windows Explorer that weren’t related to things like I/O. But at the same time, it’s also where I am the most productive at the moment. When people complain about Windows, particularly on “town square” platforms like Bluesky, or even places like Mastodon where this type of user is the majority and someone catches you on the federated timeline, a bunch of Linux users will come out of the woodwork to talk about how they’re free from Micro$lop and in the loving embrace of Linux or whatever. Even everybody’s favourite Swede, PewDiePie, couldn’t help himself, instilling a lot of hope that this will be The Moment for desktop Linux.

Hell, even I probably did the same, too – in a desperate attempt to cling on so I didn’t have to go through the “requirement” of a Microsoft account just to use my computer…

However, as someone who’s been trying Linux since the 2010s, and as someone who has used and donated to KDE, who would immediately jump at the chance to use KDE, and has plenty of experience with Linux? Yeah, no, Linux is not the panacea at all, and for now I’ve pretty much decided to stick to Windows at the moment. It has its own unique issues that need airing out and I want to cut through all the anti-Windows noise that strongly pervades Linux discussions. I know people are going to jump at me for this, or try to deflect the blame onto me or gaslight me, so I’ll say this: if room for criticism and pointing out what’s missing is not allowed in the Linux community, the people who are capable of and want to fix these problems simply won’t show up, and desktop Linux simply won’t get better. Part of Linux’s negative reputation is because of its community’s bad apples.

Hardware problems such as ASUS motherboards having buggy power management code leading to Intel networking drivers panicking don’t count here, as they are going to be difficult to fix at its root without solving the chicken-and-egg problem, in comparison to software which can be theoretically fixed with new contribution – whether that be in WINE or in the form of a new app. I will update this as time goes by and new things develop.

Software problems

Linux has some good software to it, but there is a reason that free and open source software gets criticised for its clunkiness. Even worse so if you’re using a specific app that isn’t available on Linux – you’re either fucked from it never being ported, fucked from having to work around bugs that simply do not exist on Windows, or having to deal with subpar alternatives.

For me, music is important, and I use MusicBee and Apple Music for that reason. I touched on Apple Music in this context already (Sidra seems to be good if you want a free Apple Music web wrapper with Discord support), but for MusicBee, I have tried it in WINE, even maintained the MusicBee page on WINEHQ for a while, and ran into the following problems that haven’t been fixed:

  • Tabs cannot be dragged.
  • Each element of MusicBee is treated by WINE as its own window, meaning windows get popped up like regular windows in KDE. Annoying when the tooltip is classed as a window and ends up stealing focus from the main window!
  • Imports are considerably slower than on Windows at times.
  • Some cover art that’s high resolution just doesn’t show up whatsoever. A notable issue for any of you obsessive MusicBrainz lot who use the Cover Art Archive.
  • Weird issues with UI repainting. (in fairness, this also happens on Windows, but happens more frequently on Linux).

One or two issues is fine, but when they pile up, it feels frustrating. Bugs in WINE can take a long time to fix in comparison to bugs that affect Proton, Valve’s variant of WINE that comes with extras to increase compatibility for games sepcifically. There is financial incentive for bugs in Proton to get fixed – less so for bog-standard applications, and even then, MusicBee will be lower on the priority list, as people yearn for proprietary creative suites like Creative Cloud and Affinity to get better due to how bad people feel the FOSS alternatives are (GIMP is common, here)

At least with Apple Music, if I so desperately wanted the best experience while using Linux, I can simply use it on my phone or the web client. MusicBee however has no viable alternative on Linux. A lot of music players on Linux are too simplistic, while MusicBee aims to be a power-user oriented digital jukebox. It’s like if Vivaldi or Zen Browser didn’t exist on Linux, and all you had were Internet Explorer-esque UIs that were too simple. Some people are power users, and their workflow works best with power user apps like MusicBee, or Vivaldi, or Zen.

All that said, I did try to use alternatives, but frankly they were all bad for one reason for another, and I always kept running back to MusicBee:

  • Quod Libet felt overwhelming for me, and had no playlist folder or tag hierarchy template support. The overwhelm came from the fact that stars are not condensed, meaning if you use the 5-star system with decimals (e.g. Rate Your Music, Google Reviews), you will have to stretch it to ten stars, which feels wrong. I had tried to convert RYM tag hierarchy template groups into queries for Quod Libet using an automated script, but this is a convoluted workaround and it even crashes the player if the group is too big.
  • Strawberry does not support multi-value tags which I make very extensive use of. This means features like the Genre Browser would combine tags into one, essentially crippling my music library. For example, Electro House; Festival Progressive House in MusicBee would be separated with a semicolon, but would become Electro House Festival Progressive House in Strawberry as if it was one genre.
  • Tauon Music Box treats ratings like a second-class feature as the developer has an aversion to them, and ratings in Vorbis comment tags are not implemented as a result. I also had major issues trying to use its “generators” feature to make auto-playlists that corresponded to common tag hierarchy template groups I used. (it was the best looking though, I’ll admit.)
  • gmusicbrowser did support star ratings the way I had wanted them, however it’s very old, and hasn’t caught up quickly enough, making its future uncertain.
  • Cantata is unmaintained, nowadays, however when I used it, I believe it only did ratings. I was used to this before MusicBee decided to implement tag hierarchies, which is a feature I make good use out of.

The truth is, MusicBee just does everything I want out of a music player. Nothing in the Linux space comes close.

The friction from WINE was noticeable enough that I actually noticed myself using Spotify more. Spotify has a native Linux client that works really well, and in some cases received updates faster than Windows did despite its less frequent cycle (I noticed that my Linux install got prompted playlists before my Windows install did lmao). Given the ideology surrounding Linux – and boy I’ll get onto that in a bit – it’s a bit ironic and funny that the best music library manager on Linux, the so-called “anti Big Tech” desktop operating system, is a Big Tech streaming service. I’ve had people tell me I should know better, but it’s not my fault there’s no MusicBee equivalent on Linux.

This isn’t just me either. A friend of mine got so sick of desktop Linux for multiple reasons that he is planning a move to macOS, but he dipped his toe in first by messing with a virtual machine and using a player called Doppler. He said that MusicBee felt a bit too overwhelming for him, but Doppler was essentially the Goldilocks player, suiting him just right. And during this conversation he even said that he noticed himself using music streaming more while he used Linux, and he even told me from his use of Doppler, that he was able to finally understand my frustrations with the Linux music player space. It’s annoying that there’s so many music players, yet none come close to MusicBee. And there are plenty of threads on the MusicBee forums dedicated to trying to get MusicBee to work on Linux, with activity as recent as spring of this year. It’s something I’ve considered throwing my hat in the ring for as a hobby, but given I’m on Windows, that’ll take much more priority than Linux.

Also, Claude doesn’t have a native Linux version. None of the big LLMs do, as far as I know. It does at least have an unofficial version, but I’m not sure how I feel about using a random package for something Anthropic should’ve done. They got Claude Code to work on Linux…
never mind lmao, Anthropic is beta-testing the Linux version of Claude Desktop. Some Linux users are probably crashing out over a piece of software they have to go out of their way to install…

The inevitable complaints about Wayland

My software woes also do not end there – I use a media organiser called Hydrus Network. It’s intended to be a local organiser styled like boorus (archival imageboards where files are organised with tags), and I use it as a giant archive/pinboard of things on the Internet that I like. Hydrus technically works on Linux – the UI uses Qt which is cross-platform and is the basis for KDE – but if you use Wayland (which, you probably are) it has issues if you use the mpv-based video player.

But, this needs a bit of context before I move on.

Desktop Linux is in a transitional state between two display servers, which are the computer programs (weird to call this type of software apps) that handle how windows work, as well as other things like keyboard/mouse input and the clipboard. X11, which was the de-facto display server on Linux, is so old that it even pre-dates Microsoft Windows by a year yet it was still used for many decades as things progressed in Windows and Mac. Because of this, it has a lot of legacy cruft and is hard to maintain and add new features like fractional scaling (e.g. scaling a UI at 150% rather than 1x or 2x) and HDR, so the developers decided to start fresh. Wayland was created as a way to replace a legacy system and future-proof it using a protocol-based system. And to say that the transitional period has gone entirely smoothly would be a lie, and I’m saying this as someone who knows that Wayland needs to replace X11.

Wayland decided to forego embedded windows inside other windows, which was how things were done in X11, and as a result mpv doesn’t know what to do when Hydrus loads it, it shits itself, and it makes Hydrus severely unstable. It’s bad enough that the developer had to warn its users on Linux about it. And it’s not like he can simply fix it alone either – to put things into perspective, UI toolkit developers have struggled with supporting Wayland until recently, so I do not expect a single developer who seems to main Windows to deal with this.

Sidenote, if you use Hydrus on Linux, use QtMediaPlayer instead. It seems like Hydrus’ developer is moving towards supporting QtMediaPlayer more. It definitely fixes the issues I ran into when using mpv.

Which leads me onto this: because of how Wayland is structured, and because disagreements happen over things like system tray icons or window positioning, developers have lamented about how complicated it actually is to support Wayland. One good example is from the developers of Avalonia UI, a UI toolkit for .NET that works across Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, who talk about how complicated it is and how they’re not just supporting a Linux, but different desktop environments that can’t agree on each other and end up making their own protocols to fill the gaps left by said disagreements.

And sometimes, what app developers need isn’t what Wayland’s developers want. This developer wrote an entire angry rant focusing on how problematic the disagreements got and they summed it up better than I ever could (they’ll be on the links at the bottom too). This is also what frustrated me about desktop Linux – genuine progress is being held back because of a wrong ideological vision of how it should be and telling users and developers to cater to wrong behaviour, and reinventing the wheel in places they really shouldn’t.

Wayland reeks of the same issue as distros, for developers – like how there’s not one distro to target, there’s not one desktop environment to target, and Wayland exacerbates this with desktop-specific protocols. It does feel like the Linux desktop, in trying to modernise itself, has taken several steps back in the name of ideology (which I’ll get to in detail later) with Wayland.

Sidenote, when Wayland is criticised, it’s common to place systemd, an ecosystem for Linux that started as a service manager/init replacement, in the same group. There’s a weird group of “traditionalist” types in the Linux and BSD communities. To weed off those fucking weirdos, I’m going to say this: systemd isn’t perfect, but damn it it’s fantastic for what I need and want, and we should have more standards like it where everything is centralised into one ecosystem. Wayland, the distro concept as a whole, is the opposite of what Linux needs. It’s fragmentation without any real purpose.

The atrocious state of desktop virtualisation hurts Linux harder

Desktop virtual machines are no longer the forefront in the virtualisation industry. They used to be back in the day, as a way to get an OS to run encapsulated inside a computer, or to run Windows apps on a Mac, but a lot of the focus surrounding virtualisation is the cloud, containers, and the datacenters. Unfortunately, when it comes to desktop virtualisation, it seems like only the Windows-on-Mac use case has survived, where both Parallels and VMware have offerings to run Windows 11 on Apple Silicon MacBooks (anything with an M-series processor rather than Intel). On Linux, it’s pretty dire.

VirtualBox has been generally unstable no matter what I use – for me, it crashed when running a Windows guest on Linux (particularly with graphics), and it crashed running a Linux guest on Windows. Hooray. VMware is actually really close and given that it’s free, it’s actually the best for virtualising Windows on Linux, but only in theory. In practice though, Wayland rears its ugly head again. A focus on privacy means that applications need your permission to access features like input and clipboard (mimicking some behaviours from iOS and Android), and given that VMware has not moved their app to Wayland and are instead relying on XWayland (which provides some backwards compatibility) this has never worked well for me at all. Passing on a clipboard from the host to the guest never works, while giving VMware the permission it needed locked up the entire system. The workaround here is to use KDE Connect inside the virtual machine. VMware is also harder to install on certain distros, as it has to build an out-of-tree kernel module (essentially a bit like a driver you download off the Internet, on Windows) which is only officially updated on a new major release, which means VMware can fail to run if the kernel gets updated.

And then there’s the native solution – KVM/QEMU, libvirt, it goes by different names, I guess. There are no drivers for the GPU on Windows like there is on VMware and VirtualBox, meaning it will be extremely slow in comparison to VMware. The solution to this is to basically attach a physical GPU to your machine, then use that on Windows while using experimental software to view the Windows screen instead of the native solution offered. This is layers upon layers of workarounds that I don’t want to ever have to do, and it is insane to suggest that people spend money on an extra GPU, and time learning how this works, just to run That One App.

Linux gaming is not as seamless as you think it is, especially for popular games

The Steam Deck has ushered in a new era of Linux gaming, however it’s worth pointing out that if anyone is making a game that is native to Linux, it might not take desktop Linux into account. This happened to me when I tried to play Marble It Up Ultra on my PC. When exiting the game, it simply just crashes. Wrapping it in Gamescope fixes it, but this exposes a major problem with desktop Linux.

If I had to hazard a guess, it’s because the game was probably built to accomodate Steam Decks (and other SteamOS devices) rather than desktop Linux. I could probably just configure the game to wrap around Gamescope, but why should I when it works natively on Windows the moment I download it and hit Play? Some games may also have entire videos missing since Valve doesn’t enable certain codecs on Proton, showing a test screen when videos play. This showing up in place of the developer logos would be fine, but this also happened in games where the video plays a part of the plot (e.g. character introduction). Deltarune is an example of this, in which Chapters 3 and 5 have character introductions using videos. Linux players would’ve likely missed the introductions of Tenna and Flowery, the latter of which was animated by the same studio behind the modern era of Evangelion btw. Apparently, the way to work around it is to enable H264 in Steam via a Chromium flag, but again – why does this need to be done? (rhetorical question, I know about patents)

I’ve also heard issues across the board with game modding, and I can relate, even if this is small in comparison. I played a game called FUSER, which was Harmonix’s music mashup DJ swansong before they rolled that mechanic into Fortnite. Adding custom songs to that game requires adding a modded DLL the game looks for, that activates the mod. On Windows, it’s understandably drag and drop, on Linux you have to ensure that WINE does not load its own version of that DLL, otherwise it’ll ignore that mod entirely. And I swear, it wasn’t even guaranteed on if it’d work…

No support for my VR headset at all

I have a PlayStation VR 2 for VR, and it works perfect on Windows, and there is a WINE fork being worked on specifically for SteamVR drivers, including that of the PSVR2. However, the developers of PSVR2Toolkit, a mod for the PSVR2 SteamVR driver, had to come out and say that Linux is not the saving grace of VR that people are making it out to be, singling out a bug in the Linux Bluetooth stack that they’re having to work around using code from their mod.

A lot of Linux VR users tend to use a Quest (at least until the Steam Frame is out) with a tool to stream the VR game contents to the headset such as WiVRn or ALVR, but even so, this is a software issue that’s worth noting for those with a PSVR2.

A thing that’s annoying with Linux dual-booting specifically is that my GPU switches off the USB-C port on my headset when soft-rebooting from Linux to Windows, and I have to re-plug the headset in. It’s definitely an issue with how power is handled on the AMD GPU drivers on Linux, because booting to Windows directly doesn’t result in this.

Mental health problems (ADHD/OCD)

Some ADHD people get along with Linux just fine, and all the power to them. However, as I’ve gotten diagnosed and treated, and I learned more about myself, I’ve found out that Linux was constantly triggering symptoms of my ADHD and OCD, resulting in chronic stress and brain fog. This is something I really want to touch on.

The first symptom I want to highlight is perfectionism, and the constant tinkering to get it right. Both operating systems require a bit of annoying tinkering to get going. The difference, however, is that in my experience using both, a lot of that annoying tinkering takes place upon install for Windows, and then you forget that it was ever done in the first place. While Windows does try to get you using an online account to sign in, once you’ve worked around their strong-handing you can stick to that local account for as long as you like. On Linux, meanwhile, I had this constant barrage of things not working, trying to tinker to make it right, and my ADHD brain getting immediately irritated when it never gets to a satisfying point. Needless to say, I just kept wasting my fucking time. There are also a good few tools out there to automatically tweak Windows to get it to behave – even without having to manually use the command line. On Linux, between the Wayland glitches, dependency on WINE and lack of a good one-stop virtual machine application, I was constantly trying to tinker it to get it to behave when it was basically impossible. It made me less productive.

The second symptom is decision paralysis, also known as analysis paralysis or ADHD paralysis. Per the ADDA:

Also known as analysis paralysis or ADHD shutdown, ADHD paralysis happens when a person with ADHD is overwhelmed by information, emotions, or their environment. As a result, they freeze and can’t think or function effectively.

I was constantly overthinking about the issues on Linux, and how to work around them, and what the best workaround was. It had put me in such an unhealthy, constantly stressful mindset to the point I was locking up and then offloading all my decision making about this to an AI chatbot (which, we can all agree is a dangerous path). Ever since my diagnosis and treatment, I’ve noticed this a lot more as an ADHD symptom, which factored into why I felt I needed to stop.

If you find yourself in this situation, take a step back and figure out what you really, actually, want. For me, I liked MusicBee more than I liked Linux, and favoured compatibility over everything else, so that factored in to why I went back to Windows. I still overthink about whether I should be on Linux right now, and the resulting stress is a clear sign I should not be using it.

The overthinking and the obsessive-compulsive perfectionism also fuelled the distro-hopping I had during COVID lockdown. I was swapping between Arch and Gentoo constantly, and there weren’t a lot of people telling me to stop. Not that I would’ve, I wasn’t diagnosed or treated for ADHD at the time, which fuelled my OCD symptoms, so it’d be like talking to a brick wall. If you’re running into this, I’d read this for advice, it’s a great little guide.

Community/ideology problems

You’re going to have problems with Linux, and you’re going to want to fix them. If you want to stay away from large language models and the current AI industry in general1, then my advice is to ironically stick to Windows or Mac, because you will find yourself reaching for ChatGPT due to how toxic and ideologically extreme the Linux community is. Even if there are great people in the community – and I’ve met them and become friends! – the toxic loudmouths will ruin the experience for everybody.

Ideological extremism, FOMO, constant user-blaming

These people jump at any moment of Microsoft slamming their penis in the car door to talk about how Linux is an upgrade and generate FOMO towards non-Linux users. Like, it’s cool that your OS has little to no forced AI on it but… can I like, do my actual work on it? This is something people need to know, and for a lot of people, Linux either doesn’t do the job, or does it so unreliably that it’s better to say on Windows or look towards Mac. When Linux is criticised, they go straight to gaslighting and insults regardless of who is actually to blame. If you don’t shine their OS in a positive light, they’ll become dismissive and deflect the blame of the problems to you specifically, saying shit like:

  • You chose the wrong distro
  • You chose the wrong hardware
  • You don’t need [app you really want to use here], [app that is nothing like the app you want] does what you need and then some!
    • (this happens a lot with GIMP and it’s caused multiple discourses on Bluesky for some reason.)
  • You’re in a Windows mindset
    • (as someone who used both and even tried to main Linux for years, this one seems the most offensive. It’s not a Windows mindset to use an app you love.)
  • It’s free and open-source so fix it yourself
    • (never mind the fact that not everyone can code, or have the money to pay people to do this.)
  • Why do you need this? You use Linux to escape [feature that you actually want]/Linux not having [feature] is actually a feature!

You get the idea. They not only want you on Linux, they also want to control your use of it. This has been something that has been highlighted on Linus Tech Tips’ 2026 Linux challenge – twice! – as well as other people like DankPods, who were trying to get support for their issues and ended up reaching towards friends (in the case of DankPods) or LLMs (in the case of Luke on the LTT video).

I even have my own example too – when I used Arch, I wanted to use a blue light filter that activated from the sunset times of my local area. I was trying to figure out why the hell it wasn’t working and ran into this thread which had a guy saying he won’t use this feature, and he doesn’t help the original poster whatsoever. Privacy is inherently a good thing, but posting like this makes you look like a fucking dickhead. I don’t see an issue with KDE wanting to use my location to check the weather or find sunset times for a colour filter, I am not threatened by a desktop pinging a web service for my location to provide real features like blue light filters and weather forecasts. That response irritated me enough to write my own post about what was happening and what needs to be done, for the odd person on Arch or Cachy or whatever flavour of the month distro having an issue with this.

I also saw a lot of user blaming from Linux users in the context of the June 2026 Arch Linux malware campaign. For context, Arch’s User Repository, which is a community maintained repository, was hit with a malware attack affecting 2,000+ orphaned packages, including that of ALVR. A lot of users were quick to blame the user for not checking the package’s scripts, and while I agree that if you do use the AUR you should be reading them, it’s worth pointing out that even careful people could potentially not notice anything suspicious particularly in the first wave, which used a malicious Node.js package titled “atomic-lockfile”. It’s ambiguous enough that if you installed an app on the AUR that required Node.js, you’d probably not bat an eye. apple-music-desktop was amongst the infected packages, and I probably would’ve fell for it even though I’m careful to read the scripts. In my opinion, the user is not to be blamed here; the blame lies on:

  • Arch Linux themselves for not implementing safeguards to prevent this attack and making it separate enough from the Arch repositories.
    • If a package was no longer properly needed, Arch’s package maintainers would boot it to the AUR, and at times this also resulted in the package being orphaned and thus hit by this recent malware campaign.
  • NPM (Node.js’ package repository) for being insecure enough for this to keep happening.
  • The programs that allow easy download to the AUR, making the AUR seem like it was a part of Arch.
  • The distros for treating it on equal footing as regular packages.

The community being so quick to blame the user for this is simply not on. There is an undeniable cult mentality, where people shape their identities around Linux and create fragile, conditional connections reliant on herd mentality masquerading as proper relationships, and I think that is part of what’s causing a lot of the toxic behaviours we’re seeing now. When Linux or [insert favourite big FOSS project here] is criticised they will see it as a personal attack against them and their tribe, and they’ll attack you for it. At the same time, they love attacking projects they feel doesn’t fit the Linux Vibe (whatever the hell that is), which in turn frustrates developers whose social skills may not be the best. It’s why I mentioned systemd earlier, to weed out those sorts of people.

Some of this mentality is also seen amongst developers of the software in this ecosystem. You can say all you want about how you can avoid the community by using an LLM, but the truth is, it’s basically impossible to avoid the community because they’re also the ones developing on and influencing the direction of desktop Linux. Alec from Technology Connections sums it up perfectly here:

Then let me leave you with this:The problem I see with Linux (and FOSS more generally) is that the userbase steers it around based on ideology.You want me to separate my criticism of the software from the community but truly I don't think that's very possible, at least at present.

— Technology Connections (@techconnectify.bsky.social) 2024-11-25T21:09:41.348Z

And it leads me to this: ideological extremism is actively hurting desktop Linux. There’s no ifs or buts about it. There is this general air of complacency with the way things are, because of the “anti-Big Tech” ideologies. I know for a fact that desktop Linux and FOSS in general can be better, KDE already proves that. A lot of progress with desktop Linux would’ve been made had the ideologues that form the community got their heads out of their asses and worked more pragmatically. It’s not just with political ideologies like with privacy either, as alluded to earlier this hurts Wayland. GNOME has a strong ideology on their vision of the Linux desktop to the detriment of its users, as well as software developers, that it’s garnered a reputation of being toxic. Some GNOME developers have gone to the development areas of unrelated software to tell its developers to stop supporting things as basic as (squints) system tray icons, which are still in Windows and Mac in one form or another to this day.

One particularly bad experience

I posted about this, and I had some twat on Bluesky say that he felt sorry for me because I had a flawed ideology and deep down, I knew it was flawed. Not really, I just got tired of ideology causing the OS I wanted to use to constantly step on rakes. To add to the twattery, he reply-gated and disabled replies, leaving me with no avenue to tell him to fuck off. This guy did this to my friend too.

It’s this behaviour that makes desktop Linux feel deeply unserious, and it’s why I’m considering myself “allergic” to ideology. There’s a reason that the drive for desktop Linux was from Valve working to fill their wallets by making their own dedicated gaming platform, but also making that code open-source so it ends up trickling down to those outside the Steam ecosystem. It’s also the reason why Fedora is as good as it is, despite its strict FOSS agenda, since they are funded by Red Hat (who have their problems, but I can’t say they aren’t doing bad with Fedora). It’s a bit like the yin-yang concept, where there is balance between two wildly opposing forces by inheriting a part of the other. Desktop Linux simply does not have that balance at the moment.

I never started Linux because of ideology, and I feel disconnected.

People may be wondering, if I wasn’t using Linux back then because of hatred for Microsoft, why did I use it? As I said before, I was on and off with Linux since the 2010s. The way I got my start was because Windows Vista decided it didn’t want to work with my peripherals, and I had a CD with Ubuntu ready from past testing (this was before USB boot became mainstream). I came for the teenage curiosity, stayed because Compiz was genuinely amazing. I don’t think I was exactly tuned in to the “anti-Microsoft” ideology that much back then. Maybe an “anti-Vista” one and certainly an anti-Apple one that I have since dropped, but I was soon testing Windows 8 later (which explains why I didn’t get the hate) and even turning my PC into a Hackintosh (PC that runs a Mac OS) back then. I was just a naturally curious teenager with an autistic fixation on computers. The GNU/Linux shit went over my head. I just liked Linux back then because my teenage brain found it cool, and Vista breaking in spectacular fashion was a convenient excuse.

And I think that’s what made the whole attitude of the community sour for me. Linux for me was supposed to be fun. I didn’t use it to make a political statement, especially back then. When I started, I was 13, and had never gotten involved in politics at all. I think as I tried to cling onto the hope that desktop Linux will Get There, I may have adopted some ideological behaviour myself, and I’m glad I’ve stopped that bullshit. Besides a small group of people I’ve bumped into on Bluesky and one guy on Reddit who says he just uses Linux because it’s what he’s used to, there’s not really a community I’ve found that isn’t using Linux ideologically, and it makes for a very toxic environment.

I will say that Microsoft’s insistent strong-arming regarding online accounts did create that drive for Linux in me, in the past. I am simply not interested in using a Microsoft account to use my computer – it offers no benefits for me, and I’ve heard people’s OneDrives getting filled up because of this when the user didn’t consent. But that is easy to ignore when I can just bypass it using Rufus, a utility for copying bootable ISO files (for installing Windows or Linux) to USB, and uninstall OneDrive post-install. Rufus will make the local account for me, and I just need to change the password. That’s a very small price to pay, compared to the problems I had on Linux, with a community insistent on blaming the user for everything when even deep down, they know that’s not the case.

Ideology will lead to development of OCD, and must be stopped.

This is going to be more about general behaviour, but it’s a point I really want to hammer home as someone who has been dealing with symptoms of OCD. I was talking to a friend who was worried about malware on Arch Linux (which aged well…) and wanted to run a Nextcloud instance to pry their files away from Big Tech, however he didn’t want to pay for a domain name, which Nextcloud requires. I told them my honest thoughts, and that if you’re not doing it for the fun of it, it’s not worth it.

This was the responsible action on my part because I noticed that this drive wasn’t coming out of anything other than anxiety, which could develop into obsessive-compulsive behaviour. I know this because again, I have symptoms of OCD and been trying to treat it myself, and I can notice mental behaviours consistent with OCD.

Ideology is a great breeding ground for anxiety disorders like OCD, and the Linux/FOSS ideology as well as the ones that surround it are no exception. The idea of self-hosting your own cloud storage like Nextcloud is rooted in data sovereignty and privacy, the respective ideas that no-one except you will be able to control your data, and that your private data stays private. I don’t want to dismiss these principles entirely as there is validity to them, but that’s also why these principles create a great breeding ground for things like OCD. OCD can be seen as a “fear of the unknown”, and uncertainty scares those who suffer from it. The way to deal with this is not to go all-in on Nextcloud (you wouldn’t be thinking straight setting it up, anyway) – the way to deal with this is to accept the uncertainty, and make a proper, calm decision later. It may not end up going towards the scenario you want, you may end up thinking it’s not worth it, but it’s the right way to go nonetheless. And that’s why I went the honesty route. If these principles were strongly driven by anxiety, this can lead to paranoia and constant “what ifs”, the latter being a core driver of OCD. I’d rather risk offending someone by saying this might not be worth it, than let them go down that path.

My problem with desktop Linux’s community and how strongly ideological it is, is that they fuel these anxieties, indirectly and especially actively. The constant proselyting of their ideology, notably with privacy and being against Big Tech, fuels paranoia that can lead to unhealthy anxiety disorders like OCD, and given how actively political and ideological this community is, and the cult mentality I mentioned earlier, this only adds more fuel to the anxious fire. I am not saying the status quo is good, and we should strive for better, but going to the other extreme instead of working pragmatically towards that goal will also make you go insane.

Conclusion

On discussions online I see people saying “I’m too dumb to use Linux” and I just want to reach through to them from my screen, shake them and say, “no you’re not, it’s simply not appropriate for you right now”. Yes, Windows has its problems, but between the awkward transition period, dependency on Windows apps, and the constant analysis paralysis, desktop Linux always felt like it was in a state of 90% there for me, and there was always something keeping it permanently stuck for no actual good reason. They should not blame themselves for being hesitant to try it, especially if their access to spare machines or even time is limited.

I remember talking to a friend about my frustrations with distro-hopping in particular. This guy has helped out on the Linux kernel, and he’s generally a pragmatic and calm guy. He raised a theory then that I was actually not satisfied with Linux, and while that didn’t sink in at the time – my brain still wanted to cling onto it – I completely get what he said now. I really was not happy on Linux. Windows is fine for me at the moment.

I’m on Windows for the time being. Right now, it’s the better – and even healthier – option. The overthinking still happens generally, but I’ve been trying to get better at it. If I am to approach Linux, dual-boot or not, I’d need to want it so much the problems and overthinking doesn’t matter, and right now that is not the case.

Could my problems be fixed? Well, some of it. Things will get better, even if slowly.

  • .NET has a chance to be the next big cross-platform SDK, with Avalonia supporting Linux and even testing Wayland support in its latest version, and Qt working on programming language “bridges” that include .NET under their support.
  • There are drivers being worked on to bring virtual GPU functionality for Windows onto KVM virtual machines, and while slow at least there’s something going on.
  • Bazzite seems the closest to a one-stop Linux OS that works, along the lines of SteamOS. There is progress being made to make it easier for new users.
  • MusicBee did have a bug fixed in WINE – a notable one being that font redirection partly works, enough so that text from East Asian scripts now show up instead of showing up as boxes.
  • Apple may not want to port Apple Music to Linux, but Sidra does close a lot of the gap while being free (as in beer and speech). I gave the Apple Music web client a go on Windows, and while there were things that were broken or not responsive (e.g. songs list playing only what is visible, playlists with 1,000+ songs not playing immediately), the experience is good enough for album/mix listening and even some light playlist editing.

However for as long as ideology overweighs pragmatism instead of any form of balance, the Linux desktop will be perpetually stuck at “90%” there for a lot of people.

Useful Links

If you liked this, you may also like:

Footnotes

  1. I’ve noticed some people – even experienced tech people – throwing agentic coding assistants on their desktops to try and fix Linux problems. In a way, we can thank Anthropic and OpenAI for helping with the new Year of the Linux Desktop. ↩︎

Did you enjoy this article?

Recommend it — Standard Reader surfaces well-loved writing to more readers across the network.

Flaky
Flaky@flaky.blue
Follow
Across the AtmosphereDiscussions