The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Side of Linux

TL;DR

A month into their Linux challenge, the hosts share honest struggles with distro instability, SMB mounting, codec issues, and software incompatibility alongside genuine praise.

Key Points

• 1.Pop OS's Cosmic desktop is technically in beta despite being labeled LTS. System76 shipped a beta environment without clear warnings, requiring users to find a September 2025 blog post to discover it wasn't production-ready.
• 2.Bazite's SMB network share mounting is broken for normal users. Clicking 'network' only creates a shortcut, not a real mount; fixing it requires manually editing fstab, and over a dozen attempted solutions still failed.
• 3.Proton lacks proprietary H.264/H.265 codec licenses, breaking pre-rendered cutscenes. The fix — community fork Proton GE — was available in the Bazite store, but highlights that Linux gaming does not 'just work' out of the box.
• 4.Cashy OS (Linux Mint with Cinnamon) was the smoothest experience. The host deliberately uninstalled the entire Cinnamon desktop and replaced it with KDE Plasma in under 20 minutes with only minor cleanup required.
• 5.Kubuntu on a laptop had day-one black screen issues and persistent OBS screen capture problems. The fix required using the Flatpak version of OBS and working around Wayland's privacy restrictions through community troubleshooting threads.
• 6.Adobe Premiere has no Linux support, and DaVinci Resolve took 2 hours to get running on Bazite. Bazite's immutable OS blocked standard installers; a community video revealed a workaround command, but video codec issues persisted even after installation.