Normally I always forget why I still keep thinking about switching back to Windows. Today was a great reminder. Linux can be frustrating. This post is somewhat about awareness and partly about me learning about other peoples experiences. I updated my CachyOS as usual. There were some system packages upgraded and I got the notification to reboot. Figuring I’d do it later I left after some time and the PC went to sleep. Upon returning the screen stayed black. Even upon forced reboot. Remembering I was using Limine with BTRFS snapshots I tried multiple previous snapshots but to no avail. I remember this happened before. So now I face another reinstall… This and having to dive into the deep end of terminal commands to get drivers, programs or games working can be quite frustrating. I understand why people are turned off and go back to Windows…
Onto NixOS for me. A big dive but it seems very stable which might be just what i need. I feel like the philosophy of NixOS combined with a graphical store to install programs and what not seems like a great solution.
What would your ultimate distro be like?
Interesting, could you provide some examples? As far as I know they just add features?
I can’t blame the devs for not advertising regressions, but it’s not something that pointieststick’s blog tends to cover.
The most recent one from the current plasma version was the removal of tiled slideshow wallpapers. You can have a tiled wallpaper or a slideshow, but you can’t have a slideshow of tiled images any longer.
The justification was to reduce memory overhead, which i understand for all the Steam Decks running Plasma, but i’ve got RAM to spare (also xfce and GNOME do this just fine). Now i need to manually make new wallpapers
Another one is window shade. Worked in all apps up until 5.27 or one of the other very late 5 releases. Still worked in 6.0 and 6.1 in non-qt apps. Fully broke sometime before 6.2 and hasn’t been looked at since.
Scroll to change desktop was disabled around 6.3. Thankfully it wasn’t removed, but it’s annoying to have a core part of one’s workflow seemingly broken after an update
Vertical taskbars set to expand automatically would crash the “configure taskbar” interface from 6.1-6.5 for me. Thankfully this one has been fixed.
Window positions are no longer remembered after a restart or log out. Setting applications to autostart in specific locations has been broken for me for a while.
I can probably come up with a couple more but i’m sure you get the picture. In each case the breakage was known before the actual release, and in each case it was decided to proceed anyway.
Don’t get me wrong. Plasma is the best desktop available IMO. I’m just disappointed any time it regresses at all.