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.
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
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.
The WHAT
ntfs compression
btrfs compression was really cpu-heavy last time i tried it. ntfs compression just worked with little hassle
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.
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 🤢
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.
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!
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 :-(
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.
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.
I kind of miss being able to play League of Legends, bit I guess staying away from that crack is a blessing in disguise.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 ;-)
Firmware updates. Samsung doesn’t support Linux and so fwupd gets no security updates from them, fuck Samsung
What device exactly? e.g. i could update my Samsung NVMe firmware with nvme-cli without any problems.
Linux is great when you have the opportunity to choose the right hardware upfront.
There’s a few things that are outright neglected.
Wallpaper Engine. Advantages Linux provides mostly are better than Windows, but man I miss clicking a few times and having an animated wallpaper working.
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
https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.jeffshee.Hidamari may help you?
