Linux

I switched in 2005, I miss being in my 40's. 😋

i miss some software so im writing my own

Here’s the list of things I miss:

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.

• 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.

Not a darn thing.

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.

Firmware updates. Samsung doesn't support Linux and so fwupd gets no security updates from them, fuck Samsung

I miss targeted advertisements. It's important that my OS tracks what my interests are, so that I can be served more relevant advertising.

Advertising that doesn't know my interests doesn't hold my interest, and having no ads means that I have no idea what I'm supposed to purchase next. It's crazy.

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 ;-)

Not having to worry about games straight up blocking linux users from playing because we are supposedly all cheaters…

• 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) ;)

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 others

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

Shared 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.

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.

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.

HDR support and good VR support.

I suppose another way to say that while also outing myself as a real corporate shill is “better Nvidia support”

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 ^C in a terminal emulator. No macOS user has ever been confused about which shortcut to use to copy stuff out of a terminal because CMD-c works 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-f is one char forwards and CMD-f is 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.

On Windows, there used to be (possibly a third-party application) a desktop widget that had a "turtle", and if you clicked on the widget it would drop a little pixel of food, and the turtle would slowly walk over to it and consume it. I thought that was really cool.

When looking at a file knowing immediately what physical drive it is on.

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"

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.

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’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.

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.

Windows Recall

Photoshop and stable nvidia drivers.

Every game I want to play actually working first time everytime.

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.

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.

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.