I don’t necessarily miss it, but the primary reason I can’t use Linux as a daily driver at work is because our VPN doesn’t work on Linux. So I’d say that. Stupid as fuck that our IT department uses Linux for all of our servers but makes us run Windows.

Shared memory is basically using your normal RAM as swapspace for your GPU.

Not a darn thing.

I missed Odin 3 for a few years until I switched to Graphene and never looked back. In tried the FOSS package it didn’t work for me and the documentation was beyond my skills at the time.

I miss the stupid people comradery, sometimes. People act funny when you’re a normal stupid person and use Linux without the hoodie and a Matrix screen saver.

@DieserTypMatthias

reboots after every update

Really good image noise reduction software.

That’s pretty much the only thing I miss, and I don’t miss it enough to suffer through Windows

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

Wait Linux doesn’t have this??!! Why the fuck not?

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.

Wifi + bluetooth connectivity simultaneous. It’s my own fault, though, as the machine I run is an iMac 5k from late 2014…

Coherent theming, although you’ve hardly had that since Windows 98.

I’ve applied themes to make Xaw, Qt, and GTK software more Motif-like, but the GTK ones seem spotty and the Qt theme doesn’t work for Qt6, and fonts are inconsistent.

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.

Keypirinha. Krunner is good but not that good.

Sharex. Spectacle is fine but not perfect.

I had to think about this quite a bit, there’s hardly anything I miss. But the nvidia control panel has more options on windows. There are probably more options available using the cli, though. Generally I’m really happy since I switched a year ago.

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 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.

When I switched, about 23 years ago, I missed Moray - the modeller for POVRay. Now I miss nothing.

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

I miss all the crashes, the blue screen of death, the automatic updates that reconfigure all the personal changes you made to try make Windows work better, and all the hunting around for cracked proprietary software.

Bansi Buddy and NetZero of course!

But really it’s winamp, which of course I would still use on Linux except I’ve become a disciple of the streaming gods.

League of Legends 🥹 But I guess I’m gonna find some kind of virtualization alternative or perhaps doing a dual boot for it with a bogus windows system

• 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

• 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) ;)

i miss some software so im writing my own

Desktop shortcuts

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

Not much really. Maybe being able to download random exes for silly shit, but I could always spin up a VM for that.

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.

The 20fps drop I have when I play THE game I have that could use it… For like 3 weeks, every 3-4 months…

Not a big deal really.

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

USB support is bare bones. Always has been. Been feature requests in the core for decades.

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”

consistent middle click to scroll in all programs.

GPU performance.

I miss the Sync software for my Palm Pilot. I also miss my Palm Pilot, anyway, as well, though.

7-zip

The only time I’ve used windows was in school computer labs where they taught us how to use paint in windows xp and few other dumb shit.

So I don’t know what I’m missing but looks like nothing important

Playnite

Wallpaper Engine. Advantages Linux provides mostly are better than Windows, but man I miss clicking a few times and having an animated wallpaper working.

OneNote.

That’s really all. OneNote, on a windows tablet or foldable device with a proper stylus is the bee’s knees for knowledge management.

I miss RDP.
Preinstalled in every Windows, just allow access on the host with one click, open it, type in the IP of the remote host, and it’s like you’re on that pc. Sound, mic, camera, other devices, multiple screens, … It generally just works.

On Linux with Wayland, I don’t even know how or if it works, or how to set it up on the host machine.

Edit: OK, it isn’t that difficult, actually:
std.rocks/gnulinux_rdp_remotedesktop.html#Windows

Man, I just want Foundry VTT to work on my second monitor, it used to work but all the distros that moved over to Wayland DEs exclusively mean that I can’t use the thing I want and have the laptop do it’s one job of displaying foundry on my table TV. I guess what I really want is for Nvidia so put out better Wayland drivers.

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.

I sometimes miss using Ollydbg and cracking software. 😅

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.

iTunes is probably the biggest, people with iDevices have a harder time with GNU/Linux

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.

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.

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.

Update: Woooo! After a few weeks of fiddling with the install scripts and CUPS config I got something to print via Linux! That being said I’m upgrading, not giving up, to a new EcoTank printer.

I kind of miss being able to play League of Legends, bit I guess staying away from that crack is a blessing in disguise.

Foobar2000. Haven’t found anything similar in terms of ui customization options, easy convert and ReplayGain operations built in.

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.

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.

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 🤢

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.

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

Well I installed linux the day i bought my first laptop. I just started windows, got bored after sometime, then install fedora KDE because i can’t withstand windows issues

For me it’s the Mac Finder. It’s always running so (unless it crashes) there’s no delay in opening a file manager window and, more importantly, it has built in Quicklook and Miller columns. Haven’t managed to find a good-enough implementation of either of those in Linux, so I just work around it.

to edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT all night long

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.

Hardware info (hwinfo) or similar. Be able to check all voltages, speed and temps while testing new hardware. For example my ARC A770 has little to no info, and shows running at pcie x1.

Edit: mistakingly thought link width was x4, but looking at it again shows x1

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.

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.

Eartrumpet.

BBEdit.

It makes every other GUI text editor look like a joke.

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.

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)

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.

I don’t miss anything really. All of my software already worked.

Dragging chrome tab to another screen. On windows and chrome os it works fine, i can drag a tab from one window and it becomes a separate window i can place anywhere.

On Linux, as soon as i move the tab, the new window is created but I’m no longer dragging it. It annoys me greatly because i often want to move tab to the other half of the screen, or another screen and i can’t do it in one motion.

Windows Recall

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.

The CMD key. MacOS got it figured out with CMD separate from ctrl. Never have problems copying from a terminal because CMD+C is not ctrl+C

Being able to play League of Legends. We could until few months ago.

installing programs. there’s been random programs I’ve needed to download for school and I’ve sometimes spent hours running into random errors, having to find out what library or dependency I’m missing, etc. I miss being able to just click on an .exe and that’s it.

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.

Photoshop and stable nvidia drivers.

Nothing.

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…

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

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.

None

Some of my steam games dont run, and theres some files I cant run in Davinci Resolve. So probably just those

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

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 e

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.

Being able to sync music or movies to my iPhone/iPad. More of an Apple issue than Linux, yet Mac/PC is compatible.

VLC does work, but since it’s not how Apple wants you to use your device it’s not as convincing nor flushed out.

Here’s the list of things I miss:

Bug-free Skyrim. That’s the only thing in the last decade I miss.

I only miss Musicbee on Windows. I’ve created an offline Windows VM for that one single program.

/usr/ports & /usr/sbin/pkg

SIGINFO bound to ^T

native ZFS root

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

Windows has spell checking and autocomplete that works in pretty much any app and I think it works really well. I often find that I can type sentences a lot faster in Windows.

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”

Not something I use personally, but a super easy, #JustWorks kiosk mode.

It’s the only thing I think Windows does better than Linux.

Don’t get me wrong, you can turn Linux into a great kiosk device, but it takes a lot of technical labor.

In the IT space, I often need to set up a basic kiosk device for HR portals, safety training stations, etc. In Windows, this takes 5 minutes tops.

If I had the programming chops, it would be my #1 project to work on. Even if it only worked with a specific DE or distro, I would be alright with that, as long as it was as easy and quick to set up as Windows Kiosk mode.

Messages.app

I’m about to switch from Windows back to Ubuntu, which I ran for a year or two but I missed Photoshop and Visual Studio. I’ve been using VSCode for dev work for a while and it’s fine, and I can live with Gimp. I haven’t used Office in years (Google docs & sheets are great). So I really don’t expect to miss anything this time.

Bluestacks for me :(

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

Veeam endpoint backup. The GUI does not exist and the cli version does not work with Fedora 41 and btrfs. I think it is the file system that is not supported. However, I use timeshift but it is not sending it remotely.

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.

My Steam library.

Being able to operate without a keyboard. Perfect for home theatre pc

Tax software solutions with my state included. I can’t use the EZ online file options.

Game pass

Windows’ lightweight photo editing thing. Great for highlighting screenshots.

All image editing software on linux (that I’ve tried) is 10x more clunky.

Uh, Shared GPU memory absolutely exists on Linux. Mind you this only exists (regardless of OS) when you have a shitty integrated GPU with no dedicated VRAM, but I am not sure why you think this only exists for Windows (or some other non-Linux OS, you did not specify).

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.

I miss my computer’s performance being held hostage by “Active Protection” feature of Virus scanner!

I’m 100% sure that Raspberry Pi has that. I can set how much of ram will go for the gpu. But raspberry pi’s gpu isn’t really a gpu.

I’d say a Control Panel, I miss the plethora of authoritive knowledge and settings for every program, device, driver, network, user, and a dozen more things besides, all findable by browsing and not remembering dozens of commands. Of course I’d miss that either way, because Control Panel has been gutted every new version of windows since XP, but it was once nice.

The Start menu context menu, or SUPER+X, is still nice, although mostly for avoiding poor UI choices and slow menus. The fact that many useful options are guaranteed to be there on every windows machine is nice though.

And I would also say Event Viewer, despite how incredibly clunky it is to use. Having one place to check all system logs and track crashes of all kinds was quite useful.

Basically, windows at one point went out of it’s way to centralize settings and info, and that’s just not possible in Linux without a lot of setup.

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.

Games :(

From macOS: that the basics in UI are so much more consistent and just work. For example shortcuts across apps. This makes me insanely productive.

Nexusmods.

Visual Studio. But VSCodium mostly makes up for it.

Desktop session restore. Shut down pc, turn back on, everything like when shut down. Or on crash, sometime even kernel panic, restart and right back to work.

The ability to properly wake from sleep.

Not having to set my displayport version back to 2.1 upon every boot.

amd_atl                69632  1
edac_mce_amd           40960  0
kvm_amd               249856  0
kvm                  1449984  1 kvm_amd
gpio_amdpt             16384  0
gpio_generic           20480  1 gpio_amdpt
amdgpu              20111360  70
amdxcp                 12288  1 amdgpu
drm_exec               12288  1 amdgpu
gpu_sched              65536  1 amdgpu
drm_buddy              24576  1 amdgpu
i2c_algo_bit           20480  1 amdgpu
drm_suballoc_helper    16384  1 amdgpu
drm_display_helper    290816  1 amdgpu
drm_ttm_helper         16384  1 amdgpu
ttm                   114688  2 amdgpu,drm_ttm_helper
video                  81920  3 asus_wmi,amdgpu,asus_nb_wmi
[    0.330346] pci 0000:03:00.0: vgaarb: setting as boot VGA device
[    0.330346] pci 0000:03:00.0: vgaarb: VGA device added: decodes=io+mem,owns=none,locks=none
[    0.330346] pci 0000:0e:00.0: vgaarb: VGA device added: decodes=io+mem,owns=none,locks=none
[    2.202336] ACPI: video: Video Device [VGA] (multi-head: yes  rom: no  post: no)
[    3.766492] amdgpu: vga_switcheroo: detected switching method \_SB_.PCI0.GP17.VGA_.ATPX handle

When I switched from Windows to Linux back in 2002, I never looked back. I missed absolutely nothing. Linux offered everything I needed and more, with unmatched freedom and flexibility. In late 2008, I bought a unibody MacBook, and while macOS wasn’t bad per se, it just didn’t feel like home. I missed Linux too much, so I wiped the MacBook and installed Debian. From that moment on, I’ve never switched again—Linux has always been home. I’m currently rocking Arch (btw) on my main desktop & Debian on my laptop…

roblox (i miss it only a bit)

If I have to list a single thing that most irritates me on Linux then it is easily copying files to a USB connected drive.

The progress bar passes 100% and I get notification the files were copied but they were in fact not copied yet, it still takes several more minutes until I can actually unplug the connected drive or I’ll lose the files.

For some reason my computer lags a lot but that might be because I have way too many tabs.

destiny 2

There was a lot more I missed when I switched, can’t think of anything now. I was going to joke that I miss being 19. But eh, I’m doing better now than I was then.

I do like that splash screen on Windows before login, where it shows me a different beautiful landscape each day.

I’m honestly surprised that nobody has said anything about MS Office, but it’s not like I expect anyone to miss the application itself, it’s just that if your work requires you to interface with it, there really is no alternative to running Windows or MacOS. Microsoft’s own Office Online versions of the apps do a worse job of maintaining DOC/PPT formatting consistency than the possible Russian spyware that is OnlyOffice, which also screws things up too often to be relied upon. LibreOffice is, let’s be honest, a total mess (with the exception of Calc, which also isn’t consistent with the current version of Excel, but can do some things that Excel no longer can do, so I appreciate it more as a complementary tool than as a replacement).

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.

AutoHotKey

The lack of a good cad software (fusion 360), and no, freecad and openscad are not worthy equivalents.

Effort free gaming on Windows

I’ll acknowledge that gaming is much better than when I entered the field 20 years ago,

but it was so nice being able to just install a game and have it function instead of install a game and play the 50/50 gamble of whether or not it’s going to have some bug that forces me to go online and search the issue.

Proton DB has been a lifesaver for most issues that have occurred, but there are still so many games that have obscure problems that while not all of them prevent you from playing at all, a good portion of them have issues with them that dampen the gaming experience.

And as a bonus one, the lack of a decent Android emulator. I have tried so many different emulators for Android, and all of them work notoriously worse than BlueStacks did on Windows and a lot of times take up double the space it did. As a person who plays a lot of mobile games that require constant looking at, it was so much easier to just have it running in BlueStacks on the third monitor and then just look at it when needed

Windows update holding me hostage like the slut I am

Online games just working.

I know, I’m probably off better without Chinese and Korean rootkits installed, but Infinity Nikki looks so darn comfy to play.

Oh, and HDR and 144Hz. Both in X-Server as well as in Wayland, over a good DP, I can select 199.98Hz at best. Never managed to fix it. Same computer, monitor and cable used to do 144Hz just fine on Windows, before.
HDR is really gone, though, but I don’t miss that as much.