After having an affair with Windows, I ended up deciding that the development environment on Linux suits me better. At first, I tried to recover my previous Void Linux install. I was able to get it recovered fairly easily using chroot. I wanted to make things look a bit prettier. I installed Waybar for sway. I noticed that no emojis were showing, which was odd to me; emojis were definitely working before I switched to Windows. I was unable to get them working. I installed GNOME, and gdm froze my computer. I installed XFCE and their DM froze my computer as well. I decided to wipe the drive and install something else.
Installation
The install process for Fedora is very good. It’s slick, easy to configure, and makes sense. I went with all the default options and nothing out of the ordinary happened. Unlike Windows, I didn’t need to make any accounts.
Post-Install
I have had many issues. It reminded me of when I installed Elementary OS many years ago and how it barely functioned.
Wall of Issues
GNOME / Desktop
- GNOME doesn’t have maximize or minimize buttons anymore. The “solution” is to install GNOME Tweaks and enable them there.
- GNOME Software is awful. It’s slow, unresponsive, and sometimes plain doesn’t work. Installing things sometimes fails, and sometimes locks you in an infinite install process. Sometimes switching the repository helps. It’s practically unusable.
- Scaling on GNOME is bad because not all applications use Wayland and also provide the option to scale their app. Applications will look blurry. The fix for this is to use GNOME Tweaks (sigh) to increase the font size.
- GNOME couldn’t detect my mic after waking the computer from sleep, and discord was frozen until I rebooted.
- Rhythmbox (the GNOME music player) does not work right. I pointed it to my music, but it only loaded a few files instead of all of them.
Gaming
- Steam does weird things when trying to play games via Proton. I installed Sea of Thieves and the system report window kept popping up whenever I pressed Esc. I had to reboot.
- The minigalaxy client for GOG is not good. Upon installing some native Linux titles, it said the installs were corrupted. When I tried to install a Windows game, it said that Wine could not extract the game to it’s folder.
- Steam has crashed many times just from launching proton games.
- protondb.com is unreliable. Many games that are rated Gold or higher simply do not work on my system.
- Fixing Proton games often results in trying ten different things that might work sometimes. I don’t want to spend 45 minutes trying to “fix” a game that, according to protondb.com, should work without issue.
- A native Linux game called Infinifactory that worked on Void does not work on Fedora and I can’t figure out why.
Development
- The
hugopackage for Fedora is extremely out of date and therefore I can’t test this blog post. Hope it looks good! - My hostname keeps getting changed to
syn-<UUID>, and I don’t know why or how to fix it. - The massive amount of files that get placed in the
homedirectory is so annoying.
Misc
- I tried to rename one of my hard drives, but it won’t stick.
- Updates are slow. Many updates require a reboot. The first update after install took 12 minutes, not including download time.
- Flatpak permissions are annoying and require extra work just to do simple things.
- I installed minigalaxy through the terminal, and it would not uninstall through GNOME Software.
Conclusion
In the past 24 hours, I have had to reboot because of frozen or non-functional apps more times than I had to for Windows in a week. Gaming on Linux is not a good experience. The only development I have done is this blog post, and hugo (the first package I installed for development) is so severely out of date that it’s unusable. My wall of issues is much larger than the one for Windows.
Again, I must ask: what level of entropy are we operating at where the right solution is usually “just restart”? It’s a failure of the people involved that I have had so many frustrations with two popular operating systems, and in such a short period of time. I’m disappointed and frustrated. It seems like Windows is really the only place to play games on. Sure, I could try another DE or WM on Fedora, but I don’t want to configure anything. I just want things to work, especially if they are advertised as such.