I switched in 2005, I miss being in my 40’s. 😋
I switched at about the same time. I miss being in my twenties. 😋
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.
Windows’ lightweight photo editing thing. Great for highlighting screenshots.
All image editing software on linux (that I’ve tried) is 10x more clunky.
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.
Oh you mean without downloading the files. I thought you just meant cloud sync. Yeah I have my entire Nextcloud downloaded and the folder is synced by the daemon, so I do just use the files as normal local files. Never tried without downloading all the files
My (self-hosted) cloud storage is larger than the disk drive on my laptop. On demand sync is important to me. I really, really hope Linux will catch up to Windows in that regard.
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.
Thanks for taking the downvotes for the team. I laughed anyway :)
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.
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 🤢
Firmware updates. Samsung doesn’t support Linux and so fwupd gets no security updates from them, fuck Samsung
i miss some software so im writing my own
tbh it’s just good incentive for me to learn c
Out of curiosity, what software?
it’s a thing for specialised input remapping, I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t exist on Linux because Linux has so many keyboard remappers
When looking at a file knowing immediately what physical drive it is on.
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.
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.
to edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT all night long
That’s far too retro. No one else will get the joke.
I’m here. I’m old too.
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.
Im sure there are linux users that don’t ever use ssh and would look at you quizzically if you asked them about bash. The fact that linux has built more of an enthusiast community doesn’t change the operating system. I would be entirely wrong if I said you had to install a tightVNC viewer/server to connect to a remote linux system, or install golang to write a simple linux script.
You should criticize Windows, as it’s woefully user hostile, but do so in a reasonable way. Pretending that it doesn’t have excellent built in tooling doesn’t help your case.
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.
My Steam library.
What happened to it?
Oh. Half of it doesn’t work on Linux. Which isn’t really a big deal.
Never been super into PC gaming. Couldn’t afford to get my foot in the door.
Oh. Half of it doesn’t work on Linux.
That really surprises me, since Windows and macOS games can be virtualised with (almost) no performance overhead.
Online games with anti-cheat software tends to block you, such as League of Legends and Valorant, but most offline, and non-competitive online, games just work.You may need to go into the Steam settings, the tab Compatibility, and choose a Proton version.
Proton Experimental is recommended, this may sound weird but it’s just their rolling-release version and it’s very stable.
