- 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.
A customizable shortcut key would be so good. I’ve tried to set that up on my own to be alt because that’s what Haiku uses but it’s just impossible to get very many applications to follow it. Probably there’s no way to consistently do it without getting every application to follow some standard for determining what it should be.
If you could set them system wide, that’d be a dream
Proper, built-in, functional sleep and hibernation
Hibernation doesn’t work at all on my windows HP work laptop. Sleep has gotten way way better on Linux in the past 2 years even. My desktop that would be buggy going in and out of sleep has now been flawless such that I auto sleep it after 30 minutes.
Battery life on Linux still sucks though.
I’m using PopOS and this works pretty well
Oh really? I’ve been thinking about making a move to Pop. I’m waiting until at least the next LTS is out though.
My thinkpad’s battery is much happier on Linux than windows. It’s hibernate and sleep work as expected. My windows work laptop can’t even wake from sleep properly unless I I open the lid and re plug the dock each time it’s gone to sleep.
Can use kinto to change all shortcut on system, even application specific.
How well does it work and how much customisation do you need to do to keep things parallel to Mac shortcuts?
Work very well, almost no bug/failure (maybe 2 year use, popos), has useful tray icon (restart, input debug tool, help, layout change, …).
I think replicate macos almost perfect from start (not remember, too long ago). Except for alt, alt not work like macos for shortcut and key modify, only shortcut or key modify. But can switch shortcut layout and individual shortcut in config file very easy (even has comment what each shortcut).
Only customisation i do make some modify alt instead of shortcut alt and make some shortcut for global shortcut (lock screen, switch to tty) in some app because kinto grab and change input before reach DE. And some shortcut i feel better with.
Kinto use xkeysnail, is full key grabber for x, probably no work on wayland.
It sounds good, but I’m not willing to give up Wayland features for it. I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed for Wayland support further down the road.
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.
- 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) ;)
The problem of unintuitiveness is sadly very common in Free software, but it’s getting better… in a few spaces anyway.
For an Apple Notes replacement, I would suggest looking at Joplin, which I use daily for everything from database diagrams to recipes. It has a built-in sync feature, supporting a variety of options, all encrypted. I used it with Syncthing, which admittedly isn’t very easy, but there are other simpler options.
The problem of unintuitiveness is sadly very common in Free software, but it’s getting better… in a few spaces anyway.
It is getting better and even if it was not, I would still be ok with it: I may have been slow but I learned to favor my privacy/freedom over comfort ;)
That said, I know from talking with people around me (and from myself) that it can be a huge obstacle, no matter if they’re older like I am or much younger people. If it doesn’t just works, it plain sucks.
Thx for the suggestion ;)
You can run affinity after compiling a custom version of wine,idk about the other apps I mentioned.
I was going to say I miss nothing but you reminded me of what I really miss. Mac Preview. It was so versatile and did a lot for a little built in program.
I used to use Sushi for gnome but it never did all file types and it stopped working for me a while back. I have never gotten it to work right again since.
Yes, I could have mentioned it too. It’s such a neat feature to have.
There are probably other things worth mentioning. And then a few others that have become a real pain under macOS, imho. For example, the new settings app has morphed into a Windows-like mess ;)
You can compare Apple to the same drug Factorio is usually compared to.
- Prepare for a shock, I miss… Apple Notes.
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.
it’s funny you bring up printing because my experience has always been better on linux. even at the office i constantly have to resolve issues with the windows and macs but my linux admin station “just works”.
GPU performance.
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)
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.
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.
full screen takes over a whole desktop
and creates it. It’s a whole new workspace just for putting an app in fullscreen and none of the shortcuts to jump to workspace x work with it of course.
The rest of the WM can be made bearable but there’s no way around that stupid design choice.
Can you use a different extension/plugin?
I’m not sure what you mean? It’s a basic feature of the macOS window manager. Pressing the fullscreen button on a window does all of this.
There is a program in the Mac App Store called Magnet, could try that. I think there are some others.
Magnet seems to be a window management shortcut thingy like rectangle but probably worse, costs money and likely to enshittify.
It cannot influence how the macOS window manager works internally, it can only ask it to e.g. place a window in a certain location.
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.
When you install a package, it keeps track of all the files so when you uninstall it, it removes them all.
lmao, do a
ls -aR ~Thanks for the explanation!
While that is true for the files that make up the programs themselves and their dependencies, it’s not true for any state files or caches that programs creates at runtime. You need to clean those up manually.
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:
https://std.rocks/gnulinux_rdp_remotedesktop.html#WindowsTry NoMachine.
That’s a for-profit enterprise offering a remote connectivity cloud service.
It’s an alternative to TeamViewer, not to RDP.Fair enough!
I use Remmina with RDP plugin. Works great!
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.
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.
Use KDE.
If you want a coherent motif-ish theme, NsCDE is amazing. It themes like everything in the world and is honestly like the most consistent looking desktop I’ve ever used
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE/
I tried pulling in the theming from there, and while it works miracles, I still want to do the three-headed dragon meme:
- Real Motif apps
- Qt5 apps (where there’s a Motif-like theme baked in)
- GTK apps, which don’t honour the same fonts and the theme is far more divergent from the “real deal”
There are a few other “Solaris 9” and “Perl Tk” lookalike themes that also come close, but they’re all sabotaged by GTK’s lack of bitmap font support (The old bitmap Helvetica is my go-to UI font)
Wallpaper Engine. Advantages Linux provides mostly are better than Windows, but man I miss clicking a few times and having an animated wallpaper working.
https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.jeffshee.Hidamari may help you?
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
Messages.app
consistent middle click to scroll in all programs.
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.
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.
I haven’t daily driven OSX for a few years now, but I still miss it every time I use a control panel on any other system. It’s so functional, intuitive, logical, consistent, and not a pile of dogshit to look at. If I want to change my IP address, I go to network, ethernet, IP address. If it’s greyed out, there is a lock icon right there. I click it, put in admin details, and then I can change the IP. All in the same window, in a consistent, logical flow.
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.
Wow that’s irritating!
That’s what bothers me too: It’s so opinionated. I guess so their “support” can suggest the same solution to every problem.
But geeze, things like fastboot, Cortana, Edge, Onedrive, or this eco-mode, or secureboot, or other features tied to deals they strike especially with laptop hardware vendors that simply assume THIS Windows is the only thing that will ever be run on this device.
That’s the worst.
At least I haven’t heard of them clobbering your bootloader with an update recently but I probably jinxed it now LOL.
I try not to just be a *nix-cultist. I grew up with Windows and had a lot of fond experiences with it. It just feels like it serves shareholders over users anymore.
I feel like it’s trying to make its users even dumber, while I feel like we learn things while using Linux.
The WHAT
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
That’s one thing I really enjoy about Plasma. I never even considered things like “focus stealing” or when to raise windows, but there’s options to tweak.
Heck you can even change what RMB does. (Yeah my brain doesn’t need THAT radical of a change lmao)
The defaults are perfectly sane, but I like that there’s buttons or toggles to see if something else works better.
And that right-click menu can take a long walk off a short pier
Seriously. Why?! Who does this serve? It confuses newbies and just ticks off everybody else.
Also this google-apple-esque trend of trying to glyphize (is that a word? Lol) everything just for its own sake is kinda maddening too. (We don’t want literacy to be a bar to clicking ads! /s)
/rant lol.
I don’t think I understand what you mean with the right click menu. Do you mean when right clicking, the menu that appears with things you can do there? Like right clicking a file, and being able to rename, or open with a different program, etc? Right click the desktop and get an option to change the desktop background? What’s the problem there?
I believe they’re talking about the W11 context menu, where most common options (like copy, paste, and delete) are replaced by icons that look almost identical to each other. They’re all soft rounded lines and have no defining features, which means you need to stop and parse the icon twice for every cut & paste. They also change position based on which options are available, so you can’t memorize the locations, and since delete is one of the options, I wouldn’t trust my memory.
Most of the interesting options like edit, run as administrator, open file location, readable copy paste options, or installed options like Edit with Notepad++ or 7zip > are hidden behind a Show more Options option, which just opens the window 10 context menu. Same styling and everything.
Basically, everything about the W11 context menu slows me down and nothing about it is more usable or helpful.
Oh, yeah, I understand now, thanks. That thing is UI/X design gone too far.
Also this google-apple-esque trend of trying to glyphize (is that a word? Lol) everything just for its own sake is kinda maddening too. (We don’t want literacy to be a bar to clicking ads! /s)
Keep in mind that 21% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate.
