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...
I switched in 2005, I miss being in my 40's. 😋
You're still cool as heck
Thanks, you just made my day. 😀
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.
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 ~/nextcloud without 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.
any of them could make it work through FUSE
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.
Gui to manage firewall.
which one? did you try firewalld or opensnitch?
Desktop icons.
you mean the specific icons of an other OS, or something else?
Not having to recompile out of tree kernel modules after a kernel upgrade.
manually, or even automatically? if it's the first, check out DKMS
i miss some software so im writing my own
tbh it's just good incentive for me to learn c
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.
Firmware updates. Samsung doesn't support Linux and so fwupd gets no security updates from them, fuck Samsung
Linux is great when you have the opportunity to choose the right hardware upfront.
There's a few things that are outright neglected.
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 ;-)
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
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.
Nothing.
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".
Printing was horrible on Windows, and Mac uses cups too, no? I've only ever had good experiences printing from Linux
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 🤢
Eartrumpet.
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[...])
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.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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