this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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For me, it's Shared GPU memory.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 weeks ago (15 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

I agree with that

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)
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[–] [email protected] 78 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

i miss some software so im writing my own

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)
  • 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) ;)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

You can run affinity after compiling a custom version of wine,idk about the other apps I mentioned.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

You can compare Apple to the same drug Factorio is usually compared to.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 3 weeks ago (11 children)
  • 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.
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Audacious can still load Winamp themes and is native!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 161 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 54 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 weeks ago

Thanks, you just made my day. 😀

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 41 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I think Mac just added window tiling by default now. There were extensions you could install otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Can you please “installing applications and finding files splattered all over the file system”, please kind person?

How does Linux do it better?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Keypirinha. Krunner is good but not that good.

Sharex. Spectacle is fine but not perfect.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

Fair enough, another one for the NVIDIA woes list!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

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