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 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.
Thanks for taking the downvotes for the team. I laughed anyway :)
I switched in 2005, I miss being in my 40’s. 😋
I switched at about the same time. I miss being in my twenties. 😋
You’re still cool as heck
Thanks, you just made my day. 😀
Great comment.
I switched full time in 2010, but was mostly using Linux from 2008…I don’t really miss my 20’s, maybe the physical side of being sub-30.
Here’s the list of things I miss:
Underrated take imho
i miss some software so im writing my own
tbh it’s just good incentive for me to learn c
Out of curiosity, what software?
it’s a thing for specialised input remapping, I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t exist on Linux because Linux has so many keyboard remappers
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.
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.
Hypnospace outlawwww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQwQnsarYsY
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.
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.
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”
Valve Index works fine under Linux.
I gave it a shot and it was stuttering really bad multiple times per second. I’m sure if I worked on it more it would work better but I haven’t looked into it too much yet. That’s why I said “good support” since whatever it is right now is not as good as it could be
HDR support is there in KDE Plasma 6, works flawlessly for me
I installed Bazzite Nvidia edition and HDR worked fine (after manually configuring gamescope) and then one day the HDR options for my monitor in the display settings panel disappeared and gamescope’s HDR stuff stopped working and I still can’t figure out why.
Damn, ok that’s really weird. Have you tried asking in the Universal Blue/Bazzite forum? https://universal-blue.discourse.group/
Not on my AMD card. Using Bazzite (based on Fedora Kionite) btw.
It’s supposed to have it. I can’t get any game to do it, though; the option’s always disabled.
Functionality is a program by program thing, at least Wayland.
Hdr works on:
Kde.
Gamescope (can maybe be used for hdr if you don’t wanna use KDE)
Hdr is currently being worked on for gnome.I installed Bazzite Nvidia edition and HDR worked fine (after manually configuring gamescope) and then one day the HDR options for my monitor in the display settings panel disappeared and gamescope’s HDR stuff stopped working and I still can’t figure out why.
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…
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Pretty sure I saw on the arch wiki you can even use exclusive vram on a system
When looking at a file knowing immediately what physical drive it is on.
Can’t you just mount them on different high level folders? I got /Games for games, /Misc for tinkering with stuff and everything else on /. So I usually know what hard drive my stuff is on.
Yes, but if I am tinkering with someone else’s system I don’t know if they did that.
Yeah, that’s a point I didn’t consider.
- 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.
Proper, built-in, functional sleep and hibernation
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
^Cin a terminal emulator. No macOS user has ever been confused about which shortcut to use to copy stuff out of a terminal becauseCMD-cworks 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-fis one char forwards andCMD-fis 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 element that is not connected to the application instead will be confusing for all of 5 seconds and then it just makes sense. It’s always in that exact place and has all the general actions you can perform in this application available to you.
There is always a system-provided “Help” category that, along with showing macOS help and custom help items of the application, has a search function that allows you to search for an action in the application by name. No scouring 5 different categories with dozens of actions each to find the one you’re looking for, you just simply search for the action’s name and can directly execute it. It even shows you where it’s located; teaching you where to find it quickly and allowing for easy discovery of related functions.
When you press a shortcut to execute some action in the app, the system UI highlights the category into which the executed action is organised; allowing you to find its name and (usually) related actions.
Speaking of shortcuts: When you expand a category, it shows the shortcut of every action right next to the name. This allows for trivial discovery of shortcuts; it says it right there next to the name of the action every time you go and use it.
This is how you design a UI that is functional, efficient, consistent and, perhaps even more importantly, accessible. Linux should take note.
I’ve personally always loathed the global menu bar paradigm of macOS. Having a menu bar that’s wholly detatched from the currently open window that is context-aware based on which window has focus always felt like an irritating speed bump to me. My mind feels like the OS itself is hiding things from me by only allowing me to see a single app’s menu bar at a time.
But then again, I have no objective qualms with it. I’m sure I could adapt to it. When have I realistically needed to see more than one menu bar at once? I can’t name a time. I’m probbably just pearl-clutching at the perceived arresting of my agency to do things when in fact I’m losing effectively nothing.
At any rate, we agree it’s a sure sight better than the shitshow that is GTK. “Hm? Window decorators and shit? Nahhh, those are your problem. Go roll your own.” For the flagship windowing toolkit of the GNOME Project, the DE I’d consider the closest in philosophy to what macOS has going on, that was a rather strange position to take.
The forced menubar becomes absurd on an ultrawide monitor. Nobody needs a 49" wide menu or task bar
Well, I also tend to consider ultrawide monitors a mistake in their own right. Why would you want a 49" wide literally anything if it’s not some kind of immersive media experience where menus are irrelevant anyway?
Of course, if that is in fact exactly what you bought it for, I have no complaints. Even if I disagree with having one for other purposes, that’s still no reason for the OS to punish you for having one when you try to use it that way when that problem is completely avoidable.
It’s also great when programming. I usually have an IDE/text editor, documentation/browser, email/teams and a couple of terminals open at all times and being able to see all of them at once is really helpful.
Granted, you could get the same with two 27" monitors, but add ultrawide gaming to that and it’s pretty much a no-brainer for me.
I’d rather have multiple monitors so I have the more intuituve window snapping. But to each their own.
I’m firmly in both camps. Window snapping is much more flexible on a single monitor- I can’t really do quarters on a side-by-side setup, but I can on an ultrawide. However, I love having a second monitor in portrait.
Until they make T shaped displays that I can mount sideways, to get the best of both worlds, I guess my best option is a single massive screen, where I only use a thin strip of one half.
Until they make T shaped displays that I can mount sideways, to get the best of both worlds
Were you also a proud owner of an LG Wing? 😉
Honestly, ultrawide for spreadsheets is awesome.
A 49" ultrawide is just two 27" bezel-less basically. And games that support 5120 horizontal resolution look amazing.
I use the Super key on Gnome DE all day long. Moving windows around the Desktop, moving to other desktops, going to the overview, etc. Its all configurable shortcuts in keyboard and tweaks.
Kinto can replace shortcut with super one. It use xkeysnail to grab all key input and change on fly. Also has some default shortcut change for some program to make feel like macos.
Actually can use for modify all input on system and move accel key around on keyboard.
That’s only an option if you want to be stuck with Xorg. That’s not really a realistic option in 2024.
cannot even restart wayland session in gnome. wayland is not a realistic option in 2024.
Wish I knew what half these acronyms stand for.
Edit: Actually it’s not that many.
- VRR
- LFC
- CUA
Two video terms: Variable Refresh Rate and Low Framerate Compensation (adjusting the refresh rate for the framerate of a slower video source). Both pertain mostly in gaming and entertainment software.
CUA is Common User Access, which just means standards such as universally implementing Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy/paste in apps. Linux devs do tend to follow common conventions, they just aren’t as strictly enforced as when a corporation has near-total control over the software.
VRR is variable refresh rate. Not sure about the others
Not having to worry about games straight up blocking linux users from playing because we are supposedly all cheaters…
While this sucks, thankfully for me I didn’t want to play those games to begin with
Yeh, it is such I minor thing for me that it doesn’t really matter but it is probably the only thing I miss. I have avoided playing most EA, Ubisoft and Epic store games for a while but it still sucks when the one game from EA that I did own and spent some money on has just decided that all linux users are cheaters. For the most part I stick to games that I know have a high chance of always working on linux.
