Having to actually manually mount network shares to my filesystem in KDE in order to do simple stuff like drag-and-drop files from them to a browser window, which just works in ol' Windows.
But really, I'm generally very happy with my experience with Linux in 2026. Most problematic things are because of the behavior of shitty OEMs or publishers, not Linux developers. Things have improved in leaps and bounds over the past few years.
I’ve been running Fedora with KDE on both my Thinkpad and gaming desktop for like 6 months. I like it a lot.
It might not be my first choice to recommend to Linux-cautious friends, it stays pretty bleeding edge in terms of updates, which might occasionally cause a little chaos.
Not much. Mint generally works very well. It's not bleeding-edge fresh and is based on Ubuntu. I don't think it would cause you to be unable to do any of your use cases any more than any other Linux distro - like the kernel level anti-cheat thing for games, or Adobe Creative Suite products. Doesn't matter which distro you run, those things ain't gonna work.
I was the same as many others here, started my journey on Mint. I eventually moved to Fedora because I like KDE and wanted quicker package updates and stuff.
I only really have two pain points, one of which isn't the fault of linux, and the other that probably is.
First: Adobe shit. I depend on Adobe Lightroom. This is entirely on Adobe. I know about the alternatives, but apparently I suck and can't get good at them. I keep a Mac laptop around just to use this application. I tried screwing around with Wine and VMs to get it working, but it's pretty useless without GPU acceleration, and so far the only way to get that in a VM is to have a second dedicated GPU just for the VM. Plus, that still requires keeping a Windows installation around.
Second: Wake from sleep. Just doesn't work properly on my desktop PC running Fedora 43 with KDE. AMD CPU and GPU, etc. The computer does wake up but the display never does, and nothing short of a hard power cycle seems to make it recover. Works just fine on my Thinkpad which is running the same environment, also all AMD but with just whatever AMD integrated graphics came with the CPU in that case.
Having chatted with some other people experiencing the same thing with similar hardware setups and F43 with KDE it apparently doesn't manifest if using GNOME, just KDE. For now I just have the desktop set to turn off the display when idle but to not put the machine to sleep. I am a KDE enjoyer, GNOME does not float my boat.
I'd love if something like this existed to make Raw Therapee or Darktable look/work more like Lightroom. I've been trying to learn them but the years of time spent in Lightroom is hard to overcome.
I finally committed to the switch last weekend. My desktop PC was the last holdout still on Windows in my fleet, because of Adobe Lightroom. I decided to just force myself to learn Darktable, and nuked the Win 11 install and replaced it with Fedora 43.
Fun side note, some of my games run way better than they did on Windows, despite not having native Linux builds. lol.
What about it?