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 othersDesktop shortcuts
- 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) ;)
- Prepare for a shock, I miss… Apple Notes.
I switched in 2005, I miss being in my 40’s. 😋
You’re still cool as heck
Thanks, you just made my day. 😀
i miss some software so im writing my own
- 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.
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-desktop
is the one that controls the Windows side, whereas/scale
controls 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.
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.
Ae 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
Fair enough, another one for the NVIDIA woes list!
Not a darn thing.
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
And randomly crash.
Sounds like wine is emulating correctly!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.