Living With Linux

Linux on the desktop has come a very long way since its inception. It has been better than usable for at least a few decades. It is free, stable, fast, and (in most cases) does not attempt to show you commercial content or charge a fee for use.

However, Linux on the desktop can still be, in 2026:

• Sometimes my PrintScreen key takes a screenshot; sometimes it opens my calculator app. There is no way I can find to change this behavior. There are “screenshot” boots and there are “calculator” boots, and realizing you need to take a screenshot but it’s a calculator day means that you have to restart your computer, perhaps a few times.

• If I want to switch from my headphones to my monitor speakers, I have to sometimes go to System Settings and manually guess which one of 3 almost identically named output devices I have to switch to in order to select my speakers. Trial and error. However, sometimes the browser will also get a mysterious “stop playing” signal, and you have to re-click on the music site’s play button. And then go back to trial and error on output devices. Sometimes the name of the output device that actually powers my speakers seems to change to one of the others.

• For 3 major distribution versions of a very popular desktop distribution, I was unable to take video calls from my desktop because a phantom process somewhere would always slowly turn the microphone volume down to zero on all microphones. Using a CLI sound mixer, I was able to force the microphone volume up, only to watch the ghost process again slowly turn the volume down to zero, like a music producer fading out a track. As a result, I very technically could – but practically could not – take a call from my desktop computer. That changed magically somewhere in the last few major releases.

• I still cannot find a reliable way to open a set of applications on boot in pre-defined window sizes at pre-defined locations on screen to reproduce a working setup.

• Printing via Chrome’s print dialog just doesn’t work, I have to “use system dialog”.

• I still have to install software called “Gimp” to do basic visual image editing in professional settings.