These are the problems you're facing on Linux, and I'm baffled!

Go to ground.news/TLE to to know where your news is coming from. Subscribe through my link for 40% off unlimited access this month.

Please post a short video to alert me of these polls in the future. I don't use mastadon and youtube never shows me community posts I want to see.

15:46 The need of using the CLI question needs an extra answer "I actually like using the CLI, so I don't know if it works without it"

Regarding your experience being better than the stats - I think it has to do with the fact that you're running modern hardware specifically compatible with Linux, while many people run hardware from manufacturers that don't care about Linux. Especially the devices from lesser known brands with most aggressive prices.

Nick: has the most optimal hardware vendors and software picks Also Nick: I'm really lucky, I guess :D

Another important point regarding Linux users is to ask if they are developers or not, Linux experience is often linked to people being devs

I feel like it's important to note that some of these issues might have been getting a lower amount of votes because it's not something everyone does in general. Of course not a lot of people have problems with scientific work, not everyone is a scientist

I've been using Linux for a long time now but I remember when I started I never once was able to ask a question without being told it was a stupid question. So I stopped asking questions and figure stuff out the hard way. To this day I will never ask anything on a Linux Forum. I might read them but I will never add anything.

My biggest problem with Linux is, when I encounter any issue and I can't find a solution online, I don't want to spend time to report it. I work as an API support guy and I'm tired of discussing with people at the end of the day 😂

A lot of the “surprises” here feel like they simply follow from the fact that Nick buys hardware designed to run Linux. He also uses the distribution designed to work with that HW I believe. So, of course he is not going to experience the problems NVIDIA users run into in general including what will appear to be bugs in the DE. On the office suite side, he may be right about Only Office. Again though, he is not trying to interact with people heavily leveraging MS Office. Just failing to install the MS fonts can totally screw-up PowerPoint and Word. It does not take a very complicated spreadsheet to uncover missing features. I have used Linux exclusively for years but I get what people are saying. In LibreOffice, I just had a problem where spellcheck was not working ( due to a dictionary issue apparently ) and I sent out a resume with a bunch of errors. It may have cost me a job. For office environments, Outlook is also still a big problem. I use Outlook on the web but that does not work for everyone.

Linux admin here, and I'm facing issues with the WiFi adapter that came soldered in my motherboard, it's working relatively fine, but the signal is not as stable as in windows (disconnected often in the middle of a game and download speeds were bad), I managed to have an overkill workaround with a full networking redesign in my house and connecting everything via cable, but I can see how people are still facing small issues like this. Also I had an issue with the speakers in a HP Laptop that I had to patch and recompile the kernel to get it working, not a very newbie friendly process, this is fixed now in mainline though but still not as easy as just install and forget.

Hardware absolutely does not work out of the box on linux. GPU issues are very common. Take a laptop with a hybrid GPU setup (Intel plus Nvidia) - a very common setup. Just does not work in most cases, and every update breaks something. Bluetooth is hit or miss. Device connections break on reboot often. Tons of specialised devices like audio interfaces have problems. Try using multiple monitors with different refresh rates on Linux, neither Gnome or KDE work with it. Operating systems that do not support fractional display scaling are very hard to use for me. I am a developer, and servers I work on run Linux, they work really well, but hardware support on desktop Linux has to get better if people want it to gain marketshare. Is the responsibility on the hardware device manufacturers? Sure, but they don’t care because linux users aren’t numerous enough. If you are using a computer to run Linux, then things are fine. If you are using Linux to get something done, like gaming, audio work, video work etc, you will have issues with the hardware often used for these things.

To be honest, Nick, I would hazard a guess that some of your surprise is because you've been using Linux for so long. For myself, I find that the more I use something the more I'm okay with its limitations, and that applies to Linux. Like "all the single-player games work perfectly, I guess they're trying to play new AAA titles" — I once wanted to play those on Linux and was unhappy I couldn't, and now I'm less interested in them because I've grown to accept what I can't use. In the same vein, back when I had a Mac I was totally fine with the limited controls it gave me, but that's because I had just accepted them as part of life on some level. Linux has come a long way; it also has a long way to go! Personally I don't feel the need to e.g. play new AAA games with anticheat, but plenty of people (especially newcomers) do and it's not ideal thst they can't do so easily on Linux.

I have a friend that plays competitive CounterStrike and he wanted to switch to Linux, due to Microsoft crapifying the Windows 11 operating system. I guided him to use a distro like Fedora or Ubuntu and what he struggled with was setting up a custom resolution. He plays with 1440x1080 stretched on a 1080p monitor. I did help him set that up but it involved making bash scripts with nvidia command line that are executed via CounterStrike's launch options. That's messy. You could argue that this is an edge case.... well it's not. Even non-pro players play with these wacky resolutions (it helps them see the player model better as it is stretched). In Windows you can just go to nvidia control panel and add that custom res. You'll never touch the command line. In Linux, that can be a headache for a normal user.

Today we have way higher expectations than a few years ago. 2015-2020: "Look! My favorite game now works on Linux. That's amazing!" 2020-Now: "Ohh, this game with anti-cheat and two very specific apps don't work on Linux at all. Linux is not so good." Same with hardware. Almost everything works just fine and people feel disappointed when something does not work out of the box.

Application issue here. VLC having sound issues. The fix? Go to tools - preferences - audio - output module and select ALSA audio output. After thats done, go through all the devices until you find something that works. Why is this still an issue? Most users dont want to have to troubleshoot their video/audio player. This is just one example....

For me, the biggest issue with linux does not reside in linux itself, but its alternative softwares. I tried using FreeCAD recently and good god was it painful. Im no noob to CAD work. Ive been using Inventor for several years and can crank out a fairly complex model in only a few minutes. But with freecad, i could hardly get anything to actually wotk like extrusions and revolutions, and the damn thing just kept spitting out errors constantly. Took 10 minutes to get a single tangent hemisphere in the draft with proper precision, it takes seconds in Inventor. Most of the open source alternatives to proprietary productivity applications are just bad.

Just a little bit of critic about the interpretations of results (i'm working on statistics analytics) 5:52 Here i see maybe the survivor bias. It's not because there is 7.2% of beginners saying they had problems with installing linux, that beginners don't have problems with installing linux (more than 7.2%). No. That means, the beginners who are spending time actively to search for linux information and did find the poll of the channel; didn't have much problems with installing. The people who didn't search your channel and documentation, who tried to install in a windows way for example can just say it's to difficult to install and quit. Why would you answer a poll when you are out of linux documentation or community? (I don't see many people searching for windows documentation when they want to install it) Same thing with beginners who actively use linux (like mint) but who don't have problems and don't use social media to find the poll except documentation. Yes the poll can be representative, but we have to take into account the representation of the people who can get into the poll first before making assumptions. (Btw begginers is also not defined here: people can considers themselves beginners at different levels even after years of documentation and using linux)

To answer about software problems: Yeah. Lots. The most annoying has to be when I close an application and it doesn't close. The window goes away but the process hangs around until I close it using System Monitor. And whilst I'm on there, the default "Quite Application" in KDE when something isn't responding also doesn't work. Neither does the "Quit" option in System Monitor. To actually close a program that's not responding I have to specifically do "Send Signal > Sig K*ll".

It's really amazing how you are aware of statistical pitfalls and actively inform viewers of them.