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
The lack of a good cad software (fusion 360), and no, freecad and openscad are not worthy equivalents.
This is how to trim a curve on a point in FreeCAD. Honestly hilarious. Tried using it recently, and I couldn’t follow a basic tutorial without it breaking. This is a recent fair review of FreeCAD, and it still needs a lot of work even after its 1.0 release before it is even worth using. I’m considering going back to OpenSCAD for a simple project, and then I will try using build123d in python (CadQuery is a more user-friendly alternative, at least as far as I am told).
I’m curious how well these CAD kernel projects written in Rust will turn out: Fornjot / Truck
Thanks for the detailed explanation, will definitely check those projects out!
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
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).
SoftMaker Office is what I’ve used on Linux for lots of years. Has served me well.
I had never heard of it before now–thanks!
I never thought I’d miss xlookup… But here I am. Calc isn’t bad, I hate the ui but that may just be years of excel muscle memory getting to me. But calc does 99% of what I need it to. The rest of libreoffice I never touch.
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 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 loved the constant pop-ups with offers for things I could purchase. If I don’t purchase something frequently enough I get sad so it’s nice to have an OS that cares about my well being.
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.
roblox (i miss it only a bit)
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…
Nexusmods.
They are working on a cross platform app now. I can click mod manager download on cyberpunk mods, and it will install them as easy as the windows version.
Currently takes a bit of tinkering to set up, but its promising.
Oooohhhh!
Games :(
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.
As someone trapped using windows I also miss ye olde control panel, and they lob new pieces of it off with every feature update
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.
Hokei, so. Usb “packets” are 12 bytes or something, and it’s not good for performance to stop the flow. The solution is, as always, to have a buffer. Problem is that some kernel geniuses decided that GIGABYTES is a good buffer size. This was all when spinning hdds were the standard and new fast usbs were comming, but still.
Oh, and for some reason the transfer bar sometimes works fine for me.
I run
udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdX#in the terminal. When it completes, it means the files have finished copying and the partition was unmounted.Our just run
sync, which isn’t as completely foolproof, but is easy.I’ll give that a try next time I’ll need to copy something, thanks
Here’s the list of things I miss:
