Tell one thing that you miss after switching from another OS to Linux.
Tell one thing that you miss after switching from another OS to Linux.
For me, it's Shared GPU memory.
I switched in 2005, I miss being in my 40's. 😋
You're still cool as heck
Thanks, you just made my day. 😀
Great comment.
I switched full time in 2010, but was mostly using Linux from 2008...I don't really miss my 20's, maybe the physical side of being sub-30.
Here’s the list of things I miss:
Underrated take imho
I just miss my social life. Back when I was on Windows I had a lot of friends and was banging people constantly in my free time. As a Linux user, I've pretty much been ostracized by my local community and my mojo no longer works on the daily trimmings. I might give Mac a try, but I'm just not sure how many tide pods I could possibly eat.
Old school Mac users huff nitrous from beach balls, the tide pod thing is just iOS users.
You, too?
- Better battery life.
- Cmd based hot keys for cut, copy, paste and close. They don't collide with others as much, particularly vim based keys.
Proper, built-in, functional sleep and hibernation
Hibernation doesn't work at all on my windows HP work laptop. Sleep has gotten way way better on Linux in the past 2 years even. My desktop that would be buggy going in and out of sleep has now been flawless such that I auto sleep it after 30 minutes.
Battery life on Linux still sucks though.
My thinkpad’s battery is much happier on Linux than windows. It’s hibernate and sleep work as expected. My windows work laptop can’t even wake from sleep properly unless I I open the lid and re plug the dock each time it’s gone to sleep.
A customizable shortcut key would be so good. I've tried to set that up on my own to be alt because that's what Haiku uses but it's just impossible to get very many applications to follow it. Probably there's no way to consistently do it without getting every application to follow some standard for determining what it should be.
If you could set them system wide, that'd be a dream
I moved to Linux over 25 years ago and I miss absolutely nothing.
The joy of not having to update your OS when Microsoft forces it, even whilst you're working, or the way Apple still cannot do window tiling despite decades of examples on how to achieve this, or installing applications and finding files splattered all over the file system with no way to remove them except manually, or the endless user agreements, licence fees, expiring licensees, or the notion that you cannot run a new OS on an old machine that's in perfect working order.
So, no, it was the best decision I've made.
I wish that I'd made the same good decision when it comes to my accounting software.
I think Mac just added window tiling by default now. There were extensions you could install otherwise.
It has. I use it everyday. It's shit. Apple keeps moving windows to different desktops without user interaction, I can't snap windows to each other, full screen takes over a whole desktop and ESC inside such a window puts it back to some random state.
Better Touch Tool did a better job a decade or so ago.
Can you please “installing applications and finding files splattered all over the file system”, please kind person?
How does Linux do it better?
Central package management.
When you install a package, it keeps track of all the files so when you uninstall it, it removes them all. There's various ways to scan and remove untracked files, but on a Linux system you can basically be ask it "where does this file comes from?" and it'll just tell you "oh, that's from mpg123, and you have it installed because VLC and Firefox need it to decode some AVIs". And if you really don't want it for some reason, it can also go uninstall everything that needs it too.
It makes it pretty hard to corrupt a system or uninstall important stuff. In the reverse, it also knows what is needed, so if you install VLC, it will also install all the codecs with it, and those are also automatically available to other apps too usually.
Not a darn thing.
Honestly there too. I dual boot between windows and linux for some work stuff, and on windows I find myself thinking "how do people tolerate this shit?". That's often when deleting a large folder or uncompressing an archive :)
Firmware updates. Samsung doesn't support Linux and so fwupd gets no security updates from them, fuck Samsung
Knowing how to fix my wife's computer, or my parents' computers, or my brother's.
Actually, while it's rather frustrating for them, it's not so bad for me ;-)
- Prepare for a shock, I miss... Apple Notes.
Like, really. Imho it's a great note-taking app that is also performing really well even on large number of notes, that also natively syncs between the Mac and iOS, with full-encryption. It's also an app that, well, does not expect its user to become an engineer and/or a dev unlike some certain others text editors out there ;) - The other one basic app I do miss is Apple Photos.
Like with Notes, I miss its simplicity while still including those very few more advanced features an amateur and very occasional photographer like myself seldom needed access to. Sure, there are excellent Libre alternatives, much more powerful and more complete, but they are all also much more clunky and complex to use which make it so that I use them a lot less than I used to use Apple Photos. - Pixelmator Pro, for the even fewer more advanced photo edits I need. Here too, we have Libre alternatives but I have yet to find a one that is as intuitive to use as Pixelmator is.
- Affinity Designer. Inkscape is on its way to replace Designer for me, that's one thing.
- My spell checker/dictionaries/grammatical guides, for French and English: Antidote.
It used to run offline (no Internet required) on Linux, on Mac and Windows, and I happily paid for its license to be able to do so. But the latest version has dropped its support for Linux, unless one is willing to use the coud version, which I'm not.
All those apps are very different but they share one thing: they are not complex and unintuitive apps (I reckon it's at this point I should get flamed to death, so be it).
I mean, even the most 'complex' apps I mentioned (like Antidote or, say, Affinity Designer) most users should be able to start using them quick (not master them, but start using them) because they're not that complex and not that different. Mmm, I'm not an expert UI designer, it's difficult to explain my feelings around that notion: many things are familiar if not similar between those apps, heck some are even so simple that there is no such thing as a 'save' button. I know it's also very much a question of education and of acquired habits, but still this matters a lot to me and probably to other people like me. I'm getting old (and I'm not in good health) and I want to spend as little as possible of the time I have left learning new apps, to tweak them, or search for workarounds just so I could do what I've known how to do for many decades already. If I was to summarize what I failed to say: I switched to Linux not because I'm interested in learning new apps or in changing my desktop look (it's really cool, I just don't care much). I switched because I worry about the lightning fast erosion of our privacy in this digital world. It's the ideology that attracted me to GNU/Linux. I have no major issues using apps under macOS/iOS, I only have major issues with Apple (and MS, and Google, and Facebook, Twitter, and so many other corporations) acting like assholes willing to destroy our societies and even the world itself so they can make a few dollars more during the next quarter. F. that, that's my motivation to use G/L ;)
Also, thx for reading to that point without burning me (you will find a box of matches in the second drawer over there, you know where to find me) ;)
The problem of unintuitiveness is sadly very common in Free software, but it's getting better... in a few spaces anyway.
For an Apple Notes replacement, I would suggest looking at Joplin, which I use daily for everything from database diagrams to recipes. It has a built-in sync feature, supporting a variety of options, all encrypted. I used it with Syncthing, which admittedly isn't very easy, but there are other simpler options.
The problem of unintuitiveness is sadly very common in Free software, but it’s getting better… in a few spaces anyway.
It is getting better and even if it was not, I would still be ok with it: I may have been slow but I learned to favor my privacy/freedom over comfort ;)
That said, I know from talking with people around me (and from myself) that it can be a huge obstacle, no matter if they're older like I am or much younger people. If it doesn't just works, it plain sucks.
Thx for the suggestion ;)
I was going to say I miss nothing but you reminded me of what I really miss. Mac Preview. It was so versatile and did a lot for a little built in program.
I used to use Sushi for gnome but it never did all file types and it stopped working for me a while back. I have never gotten it to work right again since.
Yes, I could have mentioned it too. It's such a neat feature to have.
There are probably other things worth mentioning. And then a few others that have become a real pain under macOS, imho. For example, the new settings app has morphed into a Windows-like mess ;)
You can compare Apple to the same drug Factorio is usually compared to.
You can run affinity after compiling a custom version of wine,idk about the other apps I mentioned.
- Prepare for a shock, I miss... Apple Notes.
Not having to worry about games straight up blocking linux users from playing because we are supposedly all cheaters…
While this sucks, thankfully for me I didn't want to play those games to begin with
Yeh, it is such I minor thing for me that it doesn't really matter but it is probably the only thing I miss. I have avoided playing most EA, Ubisoft and Epic store games for a while but it still sucks when the one game from EA that I did own and spent some money on has just decided that all linux users are cheaters. For the most part I stick to games that I know have a high chance of always working on linux.
Windows/Games working out of the box with zero tinkering.
No amoint of proton or other software works as well for me as it seemingly does for othersShared GPU memory (as described in that article) is just how Windows decided to solve the problem of oversubscription of VRAM. Linux solves it differently (looks like it just allocates what it needs in demand and uses GART to address it, but I would like to know more).
So I'm curious what you mean when you say you miss it. Are you having programs crash OOM when running on Linux? Because that shouldn't be happening.
It's not ideal to be relying on shared gpu mem anyway (at least in a dgpu scenario). Kinda like saying you have a preference on which crutches to use.
There is one game called Cities: Skylines 2 that always fills up my VRAM, so yeah, I'm getting an OOM, but on the VRAM (I have GTX 1660super with 6 gigs of VRAM and I have 32 gigs of system RAM). I encourage you to try playing this game with a moderately sized city and with this GPU.
Assuming C:S2 uses DX and you're running it through proton/dxvk, it's ultimately the Vulkan driver's job to page to system memory correctly. This honestly sounds like you're seeing a bug. In that circumstance, it shouldn't crash, it should just hurt performance from all the paging. I see a couple of older issues where people were seeing exactly this kind of issue with DXVK+Nvidia.
- This old Witcher 3 one where they blamed it on Nvidia's memory allocator not playing well with linux THP (transparent huge pages). Disabling THP was a workaround.
- This other issue for several titles that were hitting memory alloc failures despite having tons of system memory, just as you describe. They try several workarounds, but ultimately they believe it was fixed by a driver update.
One other thing to try is, idk if you're running the game in dx11 or dx12 mode, but apparently both exist. If it's currently running in dx11 mode, try the launch flag
-force-d3d12. If you're already using dx12, maybe try swapping back to dx11. Good luck!C:S2 is a resource hog, even on Windows. The game still needs a lot of optimizations.
From Windows
Low-latency VRR that works correctly
It does not feel quite right in kwin and the rather new "proper" support in Hyprland doesn't feel right either.
In hyprland you actually have to enable a special option and set a lower bound for VRR because it doesn't handle LFC with cursors, so a game running at 1fps will make your cursor jump around once per second which is totally unusable. With LFC that would typically result in at least e.g. 90Hz.
VRR in other apps works quite well though. I'm not sure how intended it is but it allows for some nice power savings on my Framework 16; when it's just a terminal refreshing a few times a second, the screen goes all the way down to 48Hz and when I actually scroll some content or move the cursor it's still buttery smooth 120Hz.
Sway feels very good w.r.t. VRR but it cannot handle cursors at all (visible or invisible): whenever you move the mouse, VRR is deactivated and you're at full refresh rate until you stop moving the cursor. It might also not be fine because I could only test a racing game due to the mouse issue and it's so light that it always ran at a constant rate, so that's not a great test as what differentiates good VRR from bad VRR is how varying refresh rate is handled of course.
Xorg VRR also never felt right; it felt super inconsistent. Xorg is also dead.
VRR is fundamental for a smooth gaming experience and power efficient laptops.
From macOS
Mouse pad scroll acceleration.
If you've ever used a modern macbook for a significant amount of time, you'll know that its touchpad is excellent. I'd actually prefer a macbook touchpad over a mouse for web browsing purposes.
On Linux however, it's a complete shitshow and the most significant difference is not hardware but software. You might think that, surely, it can't be that bad. Let me tell you: it is.Every single application is required to implement touch pad scrolling on its own; with its own custom rules on how to interpret finger movement across the touch pad. I can't really convey how insane that is. There is no coordination whatsoever. Some applications scroll more per distance travelled, some less. Some support inertial scrolling, some don't. Some have more inertial acceleration, some less.
Configuring scrolling speed (if your compositor even allows that, isn't that right Mutter?) to work well in e.g. Firefox will result in speeds that are way too quick for the dozens of chromiums you have installed and cannot reasonably configure while making it right for chromiums will make it impossible to use forwards/backwards gestures in Firefox and applications that don't implement inertial scrolling at all (of which there are many) will scroll unusably slowly.
It's actually insane and completely fucked beyond repair. This entire system needs to be fundamentally re-done.
There needs to be exactly one place that controls touch pad (and mouse for that matter) scrolling speed and intertial acceleration, configurable by the user. Any given application should simply receive "scroll up by this much" signals by the compositor with no regard for how those signals come to be. My browser should never need to interpret the way my fingers move across the touch pad.
Accel key
Command/super is just a better accel key than control. Super is almost entirely unused in Linux (and Windows for that matter). Using it for most shortcuts makes it trivially possible to make the distinction between e.g. copy and sending SIGTERM via
^Cin a terminal emulator. No macOS user has ever been confused about which shortcut to use to copy stuff out of a terminal becauseCMD-cworks like it does in any other program.It also makes it possible to have e.g. system-wide emacs-style shortcuts (commonly prefixed with control) and regular-ass CUA shortcuts without any conflicts.
C-fis one char forwards andCMD-fis search; easy.Unified Top bar/global menu
Almost every graphical application has some sort of menu where there's a button for about, help, preferences or various other application-specific actions. In QT apps aswell as most fringe UI frameworks, it's placed in a bar below the top of each window as is usual on Windows. In GTK apps, it's wherever the fuck the developer decided to put it because who cares about consistency anyways.
For the uninitiated: On macOS there is one (1) standardised menu for applications to put and sort all of their general actions into. It is part of the system UI: almost the entire left side of the top bar is dedicated to this global menu; populated with the actions of the currently focussed application.
If you're used to each application having this sort of menu in the top of its window, having this menu inside a system UI element that is not connected to the application instead will be confusing for all of 5 seconds and then it just makes sense. It's always in that exact place and has all the general actions you can perform in this application available to you.
There is always a system-provided "Help" category that, along with showing macOS help and custom help items of the application, has a search function that allows you to search for an action in the application by name. No scouring 5 different categories with dozens of actions each to find the one you're looking for, you just simply search for the action's name and can directly execute it. It even shows you where it's located; teaching you where to find it quickly and allowing for easy discovery of related functions.
When you press a shortcut to execute some action in the app, the system UI highlights the category into which the executed action is organised; allowing you to find its name and (usually) related actions.
Speaking of shortcuts: When you expand a category, it shows the shortcut of every action right next to the name. This allows for trivial discovery of shortcuts; it says it right there next to the name of the action every time you go and use it.
This is how you design a UI that is functional, efficient, consistent and, perhaps even more importantly, accessible. Linux should take note.
I've personally always loathed the global menu bar paradigm of macOS. Having a menu bar that's wholly detatched from the currently open window that is context-aware based on which window has focus always felt like an irritating speed bump to me. My mind feels like the OS itself is hiding things from me by only allowing me to see a single app's menu bar at a time.
But then again, I have no objective qualms with it. I'm sure I could adapt to it. When have I realistically needed to see more than one menu bar at once? I can't name a time. I'm probbably just pearl-clutching at the perceived arresting of my agency to do things when in fact I'm losing effectively nothing.
At any rate, we agree it's a sure sight better than the shitshow that is GTK. "Hm? Window decorators and shit? Nahhh, those are your problem. Go roll your own." For the flagship windowing toolkit of the GNOME Project, the DE I'd consider the closest in philosophy to what macOS has going on, that was a rather strange position to take.
I use the Super key on Gnome DE all day long. Moving windows around the Desktop, moving to other desktops, going to the overview, etc. Its all configurable shortcuts in keyboard and tweaks.
Wish I knew what half these acronyms stand for.
Edit: Actually it's not that many.
- VRR
- LFC
- CUA
Two video terms: Variable Refresh Rate and Low Framerate Compensation (adjusting the refresh rate for the framerate of a slower video source). Both pertain mostly in gaming and entertainment software.
CUA is Common User Access, which just means standards such as universally implementing Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy/paste in apps. Linux devs do tend to follow common conventions, they just aren't as strictly enforced as when a corporation has near-total control over the software.
VRR is variable refresh rate. Not sure about the others
Kinto can replace shortcut with super one. It use xkeysnail to grab all key input and change on fly. Also has some default shortcut change for some program to make feel like macos.
Actually can use for modify all input on system and move accel key around on keyboard.
Fusion 360 :(
Yes i know theres wine versions But they just dont work the same. And randomly crash.
Yes i know free cad exists, but it feels so clunky and is so much diffrent than fusion/inventor
If you just want CAD without CAM then the free variant of OnShape is amazing.
I miss it too, since I need it for school. Though it is available online.
And randomly crash.
Sounds like wine is emulating correctly!
I 100% agree, and have Fusion360 in my VM. But there is a method to FreeCAD’s madness and once you get it, FreeCAD begins to make sense.
I found it hard to go back to fusion especially with the amount of control I had with my designs.
Also FreeCAD V1 is out, and it’s a marked improvement over their previous releases. Might be worth a try.
Never got down with FreeCAD. BricsCAD has a native Linux version and works well for me, but it's expensive. Recently, I've moved over to OpenSCAD. Works very well for me, but it might be hit or miss, depending on what UX you like, and what functions you need.
I do honestly miss the level of artistic and aesthetic polish that a multi-billion dollar corporation can afford to field that no Linux distro really can.
Linux as a rule is and always has been generally quite "Guys Live In Apartments Like This". Often utilitarian to a fault. UX design by backend devs, because actual frontend devs cost money. No one wants to pay the "beauty tax" for software. DEs like KDE and Gnome are trying very hard and have made great strides, but it's very slow progress.
And I imagine this comment will be a magnet for power user types who will flock to my post and retort something along the lines of, "All that stuff is bloat/a usability nightmare/clutter/gets in my way/comes at the cost of features", blah, blah, blah, waaahhhh boo hiss... Yes, it's all true, and yes, I understand. But Linux and the free software it surrounds itself with tends to be crusty, clunky, and god-awful ugly, and I'd be lying if I said that didn't frustrate me a bit now and again. Does it bother me to the point that I don't want to use it? Fuck no. Windows isn't worth the bullshit. But they do at least know how to make an OS slick and beautiful, when it works, anyway.
I'm sure people will also cherry pick examples of FOSS software that are quite ergonomic and lovely to feel. Yeah, there are many examples that exist, but they tend to be diamonds in the rough rather than exemplars of the ecosystem. For every one dev in this community who actually has a fucking clue how to make smooth-feeling and aesthetically pleasing software, there's a score of devs who slapdash together their programmer-art-tier UIs and call it a day, and a thousand other dev-brained users who look at it and go, "this is fine". And yeah, it is fine. But sometimes I want more than fine.
It's also a bit sad when it has a facade that looks like a competitor's proprietary offering, but you then peek under the hood a bit further and the finer details of polish, functionality, and taste are missing.
Love it all the same, but I can't pretend it's not a shortcoming.
Win11 feels like a half built facade placed over the Win10 interface. For example, to compress a file from the right click menu you have to click "show more options" which just switches to the Win10 menu. Also, moving away from text in context menus and replacing with an inconsistently formatted icon only menu is an assault on the user IMO.
I don't feel like saying plasma 6 or gnome is cherry picking. Plasma, at least to me, feels very polished. The theme management is incredible, diverse, and easy too. I feel it's better aesthetically out of the box, but with negligible effort a theme can be installed to exceed commercial competition.
Windows 10 felt decently fleshed out and very clean, but often you still had to use the old control panel and other menus.
Android is clean and polished but limiting in customizability. Android UI apps seem to break completely every couple updates until the maintainer patches. There's no consistency between devices/manufacturers either.
I haven't used an Apple product since 2006 so i can't speak for those.
Coming from Windows I miss the excitement and suspense of never knowing whether my click on an icon actually got noticed by the OS. And the thrill of never knowing exactly which icon you clicked on because the UI is so slow to draw and redraw itself that the icons move unexpectedly while you're aiming. Oh, and the unpredictable surprise of focus stealing.
I miss windows eating my work when it chooses to install updates and reboot automatically while I'm asleep
Edit: even after I've set registry flags and policies to "never automatically reboot" - it's always fun losing 4 days of work because windows randomly says "fuck you"
I honestly loved some of the default Windows apps, like Notepad, Paint and believe it or not, the default file manager. I find that most file explorers on Linux can't strike a good balance between simplicity and the amount of features.
Thankfully (or not, if you use Windows) they started enshittifying each and every one of them, so there's nothing to miss any more.
I've been using Linux primarily for 24 years and exclusively for like... 10-12. When I HAVE to use another OS (for work or something) I miss all my tools and feel powerless. It drives me nuts.
I’m really impressed by the fact that it’s so difficult to find something I miss even if I really try hard.
I’d say I miss being able to do a backup of my work iPhone with iTunes and not some obscure command line tool. But that’s about it and I’m not even sure I really need it since my company is trying to block reinstalling from a backup for safety reasons probably.
Linux has really become something that everyone can use day to day provided they have the right hardware and not something like my Surface Go where the bluetooth comes and goes.
I forgot about easy integration with iPhones. Tethering requires extra steps and I haven’t tried pulling files off.
Are you aware of the dedicated Surface Linux Kernel?
I haven't encountered any Bluetooth issues on my Surface, but I also barely ever use Bluetooth, so I may have simply not noticed.
I used it for a while and it helped but there were still issues from time to time so I’m just deciding to go wired for my mouse now
Photoshop and stable nvidia drivers.
Try photopea
Gimp, krita, inkscape, scribus covers my needs well
Photopea is great, but after a certain point it begins to chug. Once you have a dozen or so groups and begin to stack adjustment layers peefomance suffers. A dedicated desktop app just has more power to swing around.
It's going to take some time to get as proficient in krita or GIMP.
OS-level support for cloud storage. OneDrive, Dropbox and all the others work seamlessly on Windows through the Windows API. You can browse all the files on the file system and once you access them, the OS will call back the cloud provider to download them. It works through all applications, all cloud providers. I am aware that some tools on Linux have something similar to work around the issue in user land. Some solutions are less worse than others but none of them are as good as on Windows.
Nextcloud works that way for me. I access my Nextcloud files at
~/nextcloudwithout any hitch, and changes sync immediately. You do have to self-host, but I'm sure there are also some public instances you can use. I know Disroot hosts one.Currently we have an experimental VFS feature on all platforms that is using some suffix appended to files when they are virtual empty placeholders. https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/3668
Yeah, no thanks. It's a very hacky work-around and breaks the moment you use an application that tries to access the files directly.
Printing and scanning. I only print like one thing every couple months and scan things every 6 months, but a backlog is growing. My printer is over 10 years old but it worked well on Windows. Despite their site saying it supports Linux I just can't get it to print or acknowledge any data is being sent. I'm contemplating a newer printer since deals are going on right now.
Update: Woooo! After a few weeks of fiddling with the install scripts and CUPS config I got something to print via Linux! That being said I'm upgrading, not giving up, to a new EcoTank printer.
Word to the wise brother laser printers work great with linux, but I've heard some mention about the newer ones not taking 3rd party toner cartridges. At least toner goes further and doesn't dry up with disuse like ink!
We ended up with an HP all in one years ago because Costco had a pretty good deal and my wife had a lot of stuff to print for school.
...I...I think we're still on fhe initial toner cartridges. Or maybe we replaced black once...
Yeah, Linux support is a bit frustrating but it's there. And the scanner components feel a bit cheap.
Laser printers aren't even THAT bad for photos. You're not getting that sweet glossy "developed in my home darkroom" look, but pictures come out fine for general purposes.
Working in a public library before, it kinda blew my mind how long cartridges would last when flocks of people were printing out Wikipedia pages and photos and law documents and crap all day.
Can be expensive to service though...
I've had very good luck with my HP Smart Tank printer. It just works, in both Debian and Fedora distros. Gets automatically configured, and both printing and scanning work flawlessly. Arch based distros are another story :-(
Every game I want to play actually working first time everytime.
How to know someone hasn't gamed on Linux in years.
Not like that at all now.
I've been on Linux for 3 years now, and while almost every game works everytime, there are still a few that I either can't get to run, or when I do they are unstable and require tinkering to get right. Catherine is a big one, that has gotten a lot better with more recent versions of proton, but still has glitches especially when transitioning from gameplay to cutscene.
Oh, Linux started being like that some 3 or 4 years ago for me. Of course, it depends to some extent on the actual games you want to play. Destiny 2 is apparently never gonna run.
Look at the post I sent to prole my experience has not really been smooth sailing.
Yeah, even after owning a Steam Deck for a year and recently switching my Desktop to Linux, its very hard to get the settings right. Things Like uplay working in Steam Deck but Not out of the Box in my Desktop seems so insensical to me.
Are you sure Linux doesn't support shared GPU memory? I mean if you had an integrated GPU with no strictly reserved memory which is fairly common on cheaper notebooks the GPU has to share the memory with rest of the system. There's no other way for it to even function.
Pretty "swapping" VRAM to system RAM has been supported for a very long time too. My GPUs can use up to 16GB each of system memory (AMD), and I'd be really shocked if NVIDIA's proprietary driver doesn't either because I'm sure the AI workloads need it.
Of course the Steam Deck is a prime example of dynamic CPU/GPU memory allocation as well.
If you're running this GPU under Windows, it's fine. But good luck doing that under Linux.
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/non-existent-shared-vram-on-nvidia-linux-drivers/260304?page=2
One of the only things I miss from winblows is how I can download an exe or msi installation file and just install.
I mean, I do enjoy getting things installed via cli through a repository, but I suck at installing from source for those things that don't have a deb installer or an appimage or something similar.
Otherwise, not much right now other than the fact I cannot figure out how to get the headphone jack to work on my laptop (galaxy book 3), leading to me having to use bluetooth headphones and my OS sometimes deciding I don't need the high fidelity audio profile options, making everything sound like ass.
I can't imagine going back to having to manage my installations and software updates manually. I now have someone that downloads, tests and packages every new version with my operating system, and OS upgrades are likely to have been rolled out over a few channels until when it hits stable, it's probably known to work well (in non-cutting edge distros).
I wouldn't want to go back to having to keep track of when a package updates and download it from some site that may or may not be the authors, and then hope to hell Microsoft actually does something approaching quality control on their janky, security-through-obscurity OS before releasing an update that proceeds to brick my machine.
I'm beginning to see the value in flatpack. It brings that kind of experience.
Absolutely, as a Linux uswr if only 18 months it was a complete balls up me trying to install Signal from tje shitty instructions. Their website, a seasoned Linux user in the forum said how he could see how I was confused becase the command lines on the Singnal website to do the install all ran together, since then it's been fine but just Flatpak FFS.
When I switched from Windows to Linux back in 2002, I never looked back. I missed absolutely nothing. Linux offered everything I needed and more, with unmatched freedom and flexibility. In late 2008, I bought a unibody MacBook, and while macOS wasn’t bad per se, it just didn’t feel like home. I missed Linux too much, so I wiped the MacBook and installed Debian. From that moment on, I’ve never switched again—Linux has always been home. I'm currently rocking Arch (btw) on my main desktop & Debian on my laptop....
The CMD key. MacOS got it figured out with CMD separate from ctrl. Never have problems copying from a terminal because CMD+C is not ctrl+C
Funny, that's one of the things I dislike the most about macos. I think the keyboard shortcuts there are generally noticeably less comfortable than windows and Linux. It's not even just shortcuts, regular keybindings are also worse on macos IMO. I will never understand why the enter key still renames a file/directory instead of opening it.
It's because the gui is designed to be navigated with the mouse. The idea that someone would use the mouse to select a file then use the enter key just didn't cross anyone's mind. If someone is using the keyboard in a GUI navigation, it's probably for text entry- such as search, or renaming a file.
Can use kinto to change all shortcut on system, even application specific.
Windows Recall
You forgot the /s
Fair number of FPS games refuses to work. Apex recently just did that. Other than that, none. Really happy my personal setup works so well.
It's been so long since I used windows at home. I switched in 2009.
I use it at work, so I would say RDP is probably my favorite feature I would miss at home. But for the most part I use ssh anyways.
KRDC does a good job at RDP!
I will check that out. Thanks!
Not hassling, just curious - why do you prefer it over just a vnc?
RDP has some nice defaults that make things easy. VNC can operate pretty much the same, but it takes a bit more configuration.
I am unsure if the specs bear this out, but my personal experience has been that RDP's compression and encoding leads to much smoother interactions with the remote machine, especially when there are a lot of windows or visuals on screen. My bandwidth utilization has been lower on VNC.
Using RDP I also meet CMMC guidelines, which is probably doable with VNC, but not as easily or without some additional work on my end to prove compliance. It's also easier to convince my clients to allow me to work off-site using RDP as a trusted secure protocol. Less headache.
Seamless adaption to higher DPI when I work remotely on my work Windows machine. The RDP clients will just expand the desktop and everything is very small when I WFH. mstsc will change the size of everything but legacy apps according to the DPI of the display.
Did you set the DPI in your RDP client? I had this too with my Windows VM, and it would just reset whenever I'd change it in Windows. Changed it in the FreeRDP flags and now the scale is correct, Windows applies 150% whenever I RDP in.
EDIT: My exact command
wlfreerdp /u:Max-P /v:192.168.1.149 +fonts -aero +clipboard +decorations +window-drag +async-channels +async-input +async-update -compression /dynamic-resolution /rfx /t:"Windows 10" /w:2560 /h:1440 /sound /scale-desktop:150 /scale:100/scale-desktopis the one that controls the Windows side, whereas/scalecontrols the local side, so in this case Windows scales and I display it as-is, but you can also do the reverse and save some bandwith if the legacy app would just bitmap scale anyway.Thanks I'll look into it when I get some downtime! I already found the scaling by 125 or 150 percent options, but they really scale things pixel by pixel, which is very ugly and tiring on the eyes.
Desktop shortcuts
Depending on your DE, you can have those no problem. You just symlink to the respective
.desktopfile for the program you want to run. So for example, if you wanna start Firefox from your desktop, you'd look for a file calledFirefox.desktopon your system (probably living under/usr) and symlink to that from~/Desktop.Its not the same.
The Cmd + Space combo on MacOS was a game changer. Finds EVERYTHING on the computer.
installing programs. there's been random programs I've needed to download for school and I've sometimes spent hours running into random errors, having to find out what library or dependency I'm missing, etc. I miss being able to just click on an .exe and that's it.
I'm about to switch from Windows back to Ubuntu, which I ran for a year or two but I missed Photoshop and Visual Studio. I've been using VSCode for dev work for a while and it's fine, and I can live with Gimp. I haven't used Office in years (Google docs & sheets are great). So I really don't expect to miss anything this time.
I've been waiting for a post like this. Every single time I have tried Windows 11 I have fallen in love with the UI and UX. Sure, it can be buggy at times, but that's true with anything. It has always pained me a little bit every time I have to replace it with Linux. KDE Plasma 6 is the closest I've been able to find to Windows 11. Microsoft in my opinion did a really sleek and nice job making Windows 11 pretty, especially compared to Windows 10.
The WHAT
I feel this. KDE has done an incredible job making Plasma gorgeous and usable.
Now I feel like with Plasma 6 there's everything to gain and nothing to lose, aesthetically and usably.
On my old fun-and-games laptop I made everything look Aero-esque like my favorite aspects of XP and 7 haha. It's not practical but I'm experimenting with different toolbar layouts and stuff.
But the biggest improvement coming from Windows? Not having a "fake fisher-price control panel" and an obfuscated "actual control panel" somewhere else. Plasma does a really good job of putting everything easily within reach.
But the biggest improvement coming from Windows?
The thing that got me to switch from Windows to Linux (the straw that broke the camel's back) was Window's "Eco Mode". Eco Mode is a cute little thing that (at least at the time) cannot be disabled. It automatically slows down apps so your computer draws less power to help the environment. What did that mean for you? ChatGPT (which was just starting to boom at the time) would become barely functional because Eco Mode would slow down the browser. You could only temporarily disable it per-process, but it will enable itself right back again whenever it wants.
I haven't daily driven OSX for a few years now, but I still miss it every time I use a control panel on any other system. It's so functional, intuitive, logical, consistent, and not a pile of dogshit to look at. If I want to change my IP address, I go to network, ethernet, IP address. If it's greyed out, there is a lock icon right there. I click it, put in admin details, and then I can change the IP. All in the same window, in a consistent, logical flow.
It's a usability nightmare for me. I sure love it when I open a PowerShell prompt, and some random window takes focus instead for no reason. Or when I create a new folder in Explorer, and the address bar inexplicably steals focus.
And that right-click menu can take a long walk off a short pier
That's one thing I really enjoy about Plasma. I never even considered things like "focus stealing" or when to raise windows, but there's options to tweak.
Heck you can even change what RMB does. (Yeah my brain doesn't need THAT radical of a change lmao)
The defaults are perfectly sane, but I like that there's buttons or toggles to see if something else works better.
And that right-click menu can take a long walk off a short pier
Seriously. Why?! Who does this serve? It confuses newbies and just ticks off everybody else.
Also this google-apple-esque trend of trying to glyphize (is that a word? Lol) everything just for its own sake is kinda maddening too. (We don't want literacy to be a bar to clicking ads! /s)
/rant lol.
Good OS-native cloud syncing. The Windows Cloud Sync Engine is so useful and is now adopted by virtually every cloud storage provider, and crucially lets you keep your entire cloud drive visible as unsynced files and pulls them on-demand (ie. what Dropbox call Smart Sync).
Thanks to being freelance and working for different companies I have different files I work on in Dropbox and Onedrive as well as my personal stuff being stored on Proton and my Synology NAS through Drive, and none of these have linux integrations that even come close to their Windows or macOS equivalents. Things like Syncthing and rclone will do selective sync, so you aren't forced to sync your entire cloud drive on to your laptop's tiny SSD, but that still means half your files are missing and have to be accessed through janky browser interfaces 🤢
The carelessness. Mac OS is far from perfect, but it just happily chugs along. Linux often creates problems by just existing for too long. It's gotten much much better, but it's still not good.
I believe that's due to package drift.
Every system starts with the same packages, but due to upgrading or adding/ removing stuff, you slowly drift away from the starting point, which makes it truly "your own". But this also introduces bugs that aren't reproducible.
I especially noticed it with KDE. Every time I installed a new distro or configuration, it worked fine, but after a few months, the bugs and crashes got more and more.
Since I installed Fedora Atomic (the "immutable" variant, e.g. Silverblue), everything just works. It's extremely comfortable and just exists, so I can run my apps. When you upgrade the system, you don't just download one package and install it, you apply it to the whole OS and then basically have the same install as all the thousands of other users out there, which makes it reproducible.
Maybe that's something for you? You can check out Aurora, Bazzite or uBlue in general.
I already thought about that, but never really could justify switching.
I would argue, though, that it's not customization, but rather packages themselves changing over time and sometimes just break.
And sometimes you have crap like a full boot partition, because apt decided to keep all Linux versions for some reason.
Wallpaper Engine. Advantages Linux provides mostly are better than Windows, but man I miss clicking a few times and having an animated wallpaper working.
https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.jeffshee.Hidamari may help you?
In a similar vein I really miss rainmeter, now I've gone down the deep rabbit hole of EWW and AGS but rainmeter was way easier
Really good image noise reduction software.
That's pretty much the only thing I miss, and I don't miss it enough to suffer through Windows
I bought myself a copy of Neat Image a few weeks ago for noise reduction, and it works really well on Windows. I haven't had a chance to test the Linux version yet. I think it's proprietary, but like you say, there's not much else out there.
There's a free demo if you want to try it
Neat image is the one I use because it's the only one that works. It's not my first choice though
Plus software like that probably runs great in wine or proton or whatever the new thing is
Unfortunately not. It won't run under wine or the like. Even VMs are painful, because it needs GPU pass through to work, which requires a second dedicated video card
I don't miss anything really. All of my software already worked.
I'd say a Control Panel, I miss the plethora of authoritive knowledge and settings for every program, device, driver, network, user, and a dozen more things besides, all findable by browsing and not remembering dozens of commands. Of course I'd miss that either way, because Control Panel has been gutted every new version of windows since XP, but it was once nice.
The Start menu context menu, or SUPER+X, is still nice, although mostly for avoiding poor UI choices and slow menus. The fact that many useful options are guaranteed to be there on every windows machine is nice though.
And I would also say Event Viewer, despite how incredibly clunky it is to use. Having one place to check all system logs and track crashes of all kinds was quite useful.
Basically, windows at one point went out of it's way to centralize settings and info, and that's just not possible in Linux without a lot of setup.
Coherent theming, although you've hardly had that since Windows 98.
I've applied themes to make Xaw, Qt, and GTK software more Motif-like, but the GTK ones seem spotty and the Qt theme doesn't work for Qt6, and fonts are inconsistent.
If you want a coherent motif-ish theme, NsCDE is amazing. It themes like everything in the world and is honestly like the most consistent looking desktop I've ever used
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE/
I tried pulling in the theming from there, and while it works miracles, I still want to do the three-headed dragon meme:
- Real Motif apps
- Qt5 apps (where there's a Motif-like theme baked in)
- GTK apps, which don't honour the same fonts and the theme is far more divergent from the "real deal"
There are a few other "Solaris 9" and "Perl Tk" lookalike themes that also come close, but they're all sabotaged by GTK's lack of bitmap font support (The old bitmap Helvetica is my go-to UI font)
Use KDE.
I miss not having to worry about whether any app or game would be easy to install and work flawlessly.
edit. also printing in general, situation is so dire that I just send whatever I want to print to my phone and print it from there these days.
it's funny you bring up printing because my experience has always been better on linux. even at the office i constantly have to resolve issues with the windows and macs but my linux admin station "just works".
Same here. Both of my printers just work on Linux without any bullshit, while on Windows they each require separate software from the manufacturers
Being able to play League of Legends. We could until few months ago.
I do like that splash screen on Windows before login, where it shows me a different beautiful landscape each day.
Some of my steam games dont run, and theres some files I cant run in Davinci Resolve. So probably just those
to edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT all night long
Got to tweak dos startup menu to maximise your conventional or ems memory.
That's far too retro. No one else will get the joke.
I'm here. I'm old too.
Game pass
Hardware info (hwinfo) or similar. Be able to check all voltages, speed and temps while testing new hardware. For example my ARC A770 has little to no info, and shows running at pcie x1.
Edit: mistakingly thought link width was x4, but looking at it again shows x1
A minor but useful GUI feature on MacOS in list view is showing the size of directories as well as individual files and being able to sort by those sizes. That extra step in Linux of having to contextually click on a listed directory and choose "Properties" all the way at the bottom of that menu is a minor annoyance
Dolphin has this as an option (Configure Dolphin > View > Content Display > Folder Size > Show size of contents[...])
I miss RDP.
Preinstalled in every Windows, just allow access on the host with one click, open it, type in the IP of the remote host, and it's like you're on that pc. Sound, mic, camera, other devices, multiple screens, ... It generally just works.On Linux with Wayland, I don't even know how or if it works, or how to set it up on the host machine.
Edit: OK, it isn't that difficult, actually:
https://std.rocks/gnulinux_rdp_remotedesktop.html#WindowsI use Remmina with RDP plugin. Works great!
Being able to sync music or movies to my iPhone/iPad. More of an Apple issue than Linux, yet Mac/PC is compatible.
VLC does work, but since it’s not how Apple wants you to use your device it’s not as convincing nor flushed out.
Desktop session restore. Shut down pc, turn back on, everything like when shut down. Or on crash, sometime even kernel panic, restart and right back to work.
Support for auto cloud sync from vendors, or just auto cloud sync of setting between devices.
DE stability. I keep a Mac around for times when Gnome is kind of broken.
cmd shortcuts which don’t interfere with app shortcuts.
Powerful desktop Arm chips.
Gui to manage services.
Gui to manage firewall.
Easy fleet management tools.
A real terminal services and Remote Desktop solution.
Desktop icons.
Tighter userland security.
Tighter OS security. Mostly dm-verify and fs-verify.
Tiling support. (There are extensions, but I need to experiment.)
Not having to recompile out of tree kernel modules after a kernel upgrade.
Base and extras being cleanly separated.
Easy fleet management tools
Linux is the king of fleet management tools.
That would be Windows.
For server config management there are lots of tools. FreeIPA and Ansible will do quite a bit, but when getting into stuff to manage Linux desktops fleets there isn’t a lot of endpoint management out there.
Fleet Commander is the main effort out there, and then Red Canary.
gnome is broken but there are better DEs imo
There really isn’t.
It’s only every so often with extensions, and every release reduces the number of extensions I use.
Bansi Buddy and NetZero of course!
But really it's winamp, which of course I would still use on Linux except I've become a disciple of the streaming gods.
Audacious can still load Winamp themes and is native!
I miss the human connection with those around me who use windows. After years of using Linux almost exclusively, I now miss being able to relate to them. Sometimes I feel lonely because of it.
Colleagues get to resonate with all the windows slowness and reliability issues, and I can only stay silent.
"Hey, how can I do this obscure thing?" "Oh yes that's easy... err... no, I don't know." So many methods that are easy on Linux are basically impractical on windows. E.g. many text file processing tasks are doable swiftly with simple shell scripts or even bash one-liners; what will a windows user do? Telling them to automate something means suggesting them to create a new Java project. Opening an SSH session means using Mobaxterm which limits the number of sessions you can create.
I live and work in both worlds, and neither of your examples are true.
Powershell/cmd line/wmi is pretty deep tooling at this point. Windows being object instead of text based is a different thought process, but it is deeply powerful. Simple one line powershell scripts can do a lot.
Ssh is also a built in feature now, since Windows 10. You can just enable it, but there are also tons of clients that aren't mobaxterm like putty/kitty/royal ts/etc. Its also not the primary text interface to work interactively with other windows machines, so it doesn't have the same importance in the windows world.
I much prefer linux in general, but it's best to criticize microsoft for its actual faults, not imaginary ones.
I bet very few people know that there's an openssh client already installed in Windows.
Same with Powershell, I have heard it is quite capable but in practice Windows users tend to not know powershelI. I haven't found anybody IRL who knows Powershell.
My goal wasn't to criticize Windows, I wanted to show how much our experience is different from Windows users. It is not about windows vs Linux, but about how windows users usually do things vs how Linux users usually do things. Relatability is a powerful social force that I hadn't accounted for, and now it just bites me.
Opening an SSH session means using Mobaxterm which limits the number of sessions you can create.
Or if you're using a Windows release from some time in the last decade, opening a terminal and typing
ssh
For me it’s the Mac Finder. It’s always running so (unless it crashes) there’s no delay in opening a file manager window and, more importantly, it has built in Quicklook and Miller columns. Haven’t managed to find a good-enough implementation of either of those in Linux, so I just work around it.
nothing beats the mac finder, mac touchpad, and mac scaling/ui. other than that, linux does everything windows/mac does, but better. imo. so definitely in agreement here.
It always shocks me that Linux file mangers don’t embrace Miller columns. They’re so great.
I play and mod a lot of older games most of which aren't on Steam, so getting some of them running takes a bit more manual effort especially if they require a 3rd party patch to run on modern hardware.
Normally it's pretty simple like declaring some extra DLL files, But sometimes I'm jumping through hoops trying to get some old installer than hasn't been updated since 2009 to run...
I've had more success than failures though, Wine is pretty amazing imo.
Not something I use personally, but a super easy, #JustWorks kiosk mode.
It's the only thing I think Windows does better than Linux.
Don't get me wrong, you can turn Linux into a great kiosk device, but it takes a lot of technical labor.
In the IT space, I often need to set up a basic kiosk device for HR portals, safety training stations, etc. In Windows, this takes 5 minutes tops.
If I had the programming chops, it would be my #1 project to work on. Even if it only worked with a specific DE or distro, I would be alright with that, as long as it was as easy and quick to set up as Windows Kiosk mode.
I missed Odin 3 for a few years until I switched to Graphene and never looked back. In tried the FOSS package it didn't work for me and the documentation was beyond my skills at the time.
I miss the stupid people comradery, sometimes. People act funny when you're a normal stupid person and use Linux without the hoodie and a Matrix screen saver.
I'm honestly surprised that nobody has said anything about MS Office, but it's not like I expect anyone to miss the application itself, it's just that if your work requires you to interface with it, there really is no alternative to running Windows or MacOS. Microsoft's own Office Online versions of the apps do a worse job of maintaining DOC/PPT formatting consistency than the possible Russian spyware that is OnlyOffice, which also screws things up too often to be relied upon. LibreOffice is, let's be honest, a total mess (with the exception of Calc, which also isn't consistent with the current version of Excel, but can do some things that Excel no longer can do, so I appreciate it more as a complementary tool than as a replacement).
The level of detail and control in the Properties dialog from the file explorer in Windows. Also its ability to easily search by metadata like the bitrate of media files.
MusicBee for music management. Especially since I ditched Spotify and came back to local music. See, there are two things that I want from a music manager software: good playlists management and the ability to transfer such playlists to a phone or portable music player. Sadly, none of the Linux apps come close to MusicBee (and I think that I've tried almost all of them).
Some, like Strawberry, have decent playlist capabilities, but fail when I try to send my music to my phone: either it doesn't detect it (I'm talking about using the USB cable and MTP) or throws an error when transferring the files. And there are certain bugs that haven't been solved. Others, like Pragha or Gapless, cannot transfer music. Lollypop is the most acceptable one, but its playlist UX is awful, and is slow AF when syncing with my phone. So, for me, MusicBee is the only software that I truly miss from Windows.
And no, I don't want to just copy the music using the file explorer. As I've said, I rely heavily on playlists, and this method doesn't work fine for that. For the same reason I don't use Syncthing.
Agreed, and Musicbee is the only bit of software I've found which happily keeps a copy of your library as an iTunes library .mtl file, meaning it's compatible with other applications which want to link up to iTunes/Apple Music (like rekordbox, which is virtually the only software you can reliably use to load up your USBs if you're a DJ)
When I was using Windows, I used Adobe Lightroom with the Negative Lab Pro plugin to digitize my film negatives. I've played around with Darktable, and it does the job, but it's a lot more fiddly, and it discourages me from processing film.
The 20fps drop I have when I play THE game I have that could use it... For like 3 weeks, every 3-4 months...
Not a big deal really.
I miss all the crashes, the blue screen of death, the automatic updates that reconfigure all the personal changes you made to try make Windows work better, and all the hunting around for cracked proprietary software.
Been on Linux since 2007, so for me it's kind of the opposite. You just get settled with your OS after a while, you're used to how it works.
For me the immediately missing features is customizability in window management. I'm not a tiling fan, but I still miss basic convenience features like middle click paste, press alt and drag windows around or press alt and right click to resize windows from whichever side is the closest to the cursor. The different way it arranges windows (Linux tries hard to make them fit in unused space whereas Windows just opens it in the middle of the screen). Another big one is if you have a window focused and try to scroll another window in the background with your mouse cursor over it, it'll still scroll the focused window even though the mouse cursor isn't on it. Focus steal prevention is non-existent so if you're typing and another window pops open, it steals your keyboard input. The search bar is like, utterly useless, so is the Microsoft Store. The start menu doesn't open instantly like it has to load it every time. When you uninstall something there's still leftover crap of it everywhere.
Thankfully when it comes to Linux apps, their open nature means the majority of them just have Windows builds anyway, and what doesn't would work in WSL. So really all I can miss is the inherent flexibility and openness Linux gives me.
Focus steal prevention is the feature I miss desperately when I'm forced to interact with a non-Linux window manager.
I feel the rage of Walter from the Big Kebowski each time an app randomly pulls focus because it fucking feels like it.
It's just bassic civilized behavior to leave my cursor where I put it.
Foobar2000. Haven't found anything similar in terms of ui customization options, easy convert and ReplayGain operations built in.
afaik foobar2000 works flawless via wine. it is even in the AUR (if you are an Arch user): https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/foobar2000
In feel, quodlibet
But yeah, the extensibility.... yeah, there's nothing.
Foobar2000
Dang dude, I had just gotten over foobar2000.
Ahh! It was such a step up from Winamp. I think I started using that around 0.7… and actually used it with Wine when I started using Linux as my main OS in about 2008. But there is nothing quite like it.
Eartrumpet.
Ive been mostly on linux for like 25 years, but i was using a chromebook for a while bc it was cheap (had a linux desktop tho).
I miss easily running android apps on my laptop. I could install waydroid but its not that big of a deal to me. Just the only thing i could think of that i miss from another os...
Visual Studio. But VSCodium mostly makes up for it.
Messages.app
I'm 100% sure that Raspberry Pi has that. I can set how much of ram will go for the gpu. But raspberry pi's gpu isn't really a gpu.
Being able to operate without a keyboard. Perfect for home theatre pc
Well I installed linux the day i bought my first laptop. I just started windows, got bored after sometime, then install fedora KDE because i can't withstand windows issues
GPU performance.
Not much really. Maybe being able to download random exes for silly shit, but I could always spin up a VM for that.
Playnite
If I have to list a single thing that most irritates me on Linux then it is easily copying files to a USB connected drive.
The progress bar passes 100% and I get notification the files were copied but they were in fact not copied yet, it still takes several more minutes until I can actually unplug the connected drive or I'll lose the files.
Effort free gaming on Windows
I'll acknowledge that gaming is much better than when I entered the field 20 years ago,
but it was so nice being able to just install a game and have it function instead of install a game and play the 50/50 gamble of whether or not it's going to have some bug that forces me to go online and search the issue.
Proton DB has been a lifesaver for most issues that have occurred, but there are still so many games that have obscure problems that while not all of them prevent you from playing at all, a good portion of them have issues with them that dampen the gaming experience.
And as a bonus one, the lack of a decent Android emulator. I have tried so many different emulators for Android, and all of them work notoriously worse than BlueStacks did on Windows and a lot of times take up double the space it did. As a person who plays a lot of mobile games that require constant looking at, it was so much easier to just have it running in BlueStacks on the third monitor and then just look at it when needed
There was a lot more I missed when I switched, can't think of anything now. I was going to joke that I miss being 19. But eh, I'm doing better now than I was then.
Not much. Probably just support for some hardware that needs drivers like my 3d printer. But that’s what Vans are for right. Most other “windows only” apps work fine under WINE. If I have to say one thing: powertoys (some of them)
what 3d printer do you have that needs Windows drivers? a Formlabs?
From macOS: that the basics in UI are so much more consistent and just work. For example shortcuts across apps. This makes me insanely productive.
reboots after every update
I miss my computer's performance being held hostage by "Active Protection" feature of Virus scanner!
HP-UX was alright but it wasn't a big deal to switch to Linux.
OneNote.
That's really all. OneNote, on a windows tablet or foldable device with a proper stylus is the bee's knees for knowledge management.
You probably already know but just in case, xournal++ is a good alternative I've been using. Not quite as feature rich but does all the basics. Linux on a windows tablet is a surprisingly usable experience, if a little janky.
Wait Linux doesn't have this??!! Why the fuck not?
It works fine with my AMD GPU. Good luck with NVIDIA though.
See with my AMD card it never worked but maybe it was just a driver bug with the rx 5500
USB support is bare bones. Always has been. Been feature requests in the core for decades.
iTunes is probably the biggest, people with iDevices have a harder time with GNU/Linux
Tbf, that's by iDesign. They want you to stay in their iEcosystem and spend more money on their products, if they allowed interoperability you might say go with Linux instead of Mac, or something. So take out a loan and buy another iProduct, good iConsumer!
Well you can use iTunes on Windows, so it’s not as if it was only on MacOs.
League of Legends 🥹 But I guess I'm gonna find some kind of virtualization alternative or perhaps doing a dual boot for it with a bogus windows system
consistent middle click to scroll in all programs.
When I switched, about 23 years ago, I missed Moray - the modeller for POVRay. Now I miss nothing.
I only miss Musicbee on Windows. I've created an offline Windows VM for that one single program.
I miss the Sync software for my Palm Pilot. I also miss my Palm Pilot, anyway, as well, though.
The only time I've used windows was in school computer labs where they taught us how to use paint in windows xp and few other dumb shit.
So I don't know what I'm missing but looks like nothing important
I sometimes miss using Ollydbg and cracking software. 😅
For some reason my computer lags a lot but that might be because I have way too many tabs.
There really wasn't anything in HPUX that I miss.
Windows update holding me hostage like the slut I am
The use of my ANT+ adapter with Zwift. But Bluetooth via the phone worked for 62 miles and several hours today, so I guess that will suffice.
destiny 2
Dragging chrome tab to another screen. On windows and chrome os it works fine, i can drag a tab from one window and it becomes a separate window i can place anywhere.
On Linux, as soon as i move the tab, the new window is created but I'm no longer dragging it. It annoys me greatly because i often want to move tab to the other half of the screen, or another screen and i can't do it in one motion.
Works on Firefox if you ever get angry enough to bother switching.
Last i checked on Fedora (40) it didn't work for me. Firefox also had worse touchscreen support.
I like Firefox as it performs better and uses less resources, the main friction for me would be moving all the passwords from google password manager. I'd also like to keep them in sync with chrome as I'll still get probably use chrome on other devices, including android.
Firefox and mint - not a problem I've been aware of.
None
BBEdit.
It makes every other GUI text editor look like a joke.
IDK looks far less advanced than JetBrains editors.
But then, that looks like a text editor and not like an IDE.
Right, not an IDE. The BB stands for "bare bones", but it has a robust feature set as far as general text editing goes. Autocomplete is minimal so I tend to use an IDE for more complex coding tasks.
Keypirinha. Krunner is good but not that good.
Sharex. Spectacle is fine but not perfect.
Wifi + bluetooth connectivity simultaneous. It's my own fault, though, as the machine I run is an iMac 5k from late 2014...
Sounds like Apple's fault to me 🤷♂️
Man, I just want Foundry VTT to work on my second monitor, it used to work but all the distros that moved over to Wayland DEs exclusively mean that I can't use the thing I want and have the laptop do it's one job of displaying foundry on my table TV. I guess what I really want is for Nvidia so put out better Wayland drivers.
Isn't Foundry just a website? What's stopping you from putting a browser window on your second monitor?
I think the module I'm using, which could be Kingmaker or any number of other modules, might be gpu accelerated. Idk why exactly, but having the view for my players on the second monitor while mine is on the main causes it to dramatically slow down and freeze within a minute or so, to the point where the browser window doesn't click and drag. All I really know is that it works on xorg and not on Wayland, and no distro that runs well in this accursed laptop is stable (endeavor OS turned off my Nvidia drivers in an update and ran everything through the amd apu) or comes with an xorg version of the DE (Fedora Bazzite also doesn't have this, but at least it works otherwise). I transitioned to a purely online game at that time for other reasons, but I was looking longingly at how Windows users don't have to put up with that bullshit, or at least not nearly as much.
I had to think about this quite a bit, there's hardly anything I miss. But the nvidia control panel has more options on windows. There are probably more options available using the cli, though. Generally I'm really happy since I switched a year ago.
Shortcuts to move windows on xfce (there's somekind of python script but i don't want to bother) and discord and a few xorg wrapped apps are so fucking laggy on wayland
Hmm. I have xfce4/wm and I can move windows around (after mapping keys) with
Win(oops) Meta + arrow keys and some Shift & Ctrl combinations.Or are we talking about moving then around with the arrow keys instead of grabbing them by the title bar or something instead of tiling and moving them between monitors and workspaces?
/usr/ports&/usr/sbin/pkgSIGINFObound to^Tnative ZFS root
Ooh, I see, a true BSD user!
the only thing linux has going for it is GPU drivers. :-(
In my previous comment, I forgot to add the ability to easily clone one installation from one computer to another.
I’ve used Clonezilla on Linux but with mixed results.
Online games just working.
I know, I'm probably off better without Chinese and Korean rootkits installed, but Infinity Nikki looks so darn comfy to play.
Oh, and HDR and 144Hz. Both in X-Server as well as in Wayland, over a good DP, I can select 199.98Hz at best. Never managed to fix it. Same computer, monitor and cable used to do 144Hz just fine on Windows, before.
HDR is really gone, though, but I don't miss that as much.Nothing.
ntfs compression
btrfs compression was really cpu-heavy last time i tried it. ntfs compression just worked with little hassle
Might've been a while since you tried. There's quite a few options now. zstd is real nice and fast.
Tax software solutions with my state included. I can't use the EZ online file options.
Bug-free Skyrim. That's the only thing in the last decade I miss.
That's never been a thing, even in Windows.
