Nexusmods.
Linux
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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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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!
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 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.
Windows' lightweight photo editing thing. Great for highlighting screenshots.
All image editing software on linux (that I've tried) is 10x more clunky.
I've been using Flameshot, and it's been awesome for just this. Tons of annotations, and very easy to copy or save screenshots.
I'll check it out, thanks!
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.
Win11 feels like a half built facade placed over the Win10 interface. For example, to compress a file from the right click menu you have to click "show more options" which just switches to the Win10 menu. Also, moving away from text in context menus and replacing with an inconsistently formatted icon only menu is an assault on the user IMO.
I don't feel like saying plasma 6 or gnome is cherry picking. Plasma, at least to me, feels very polished. The theme management is incredible, diverse, and easy too. I feel it's better aesthetically out of the box, but with negligible effort a theme can be installed to exceed commercial competition.
Windows 10 felt decently fleshed out and very clean, but often you still had to use the old control panel and other menus.
Android is clean and polished but limiting in customizability. Android UI apps seem to break completely every couple updates until the maintainer patches. There's no consistency between devices/manufacturers either.
I haven't used an Apple product since 2006 so i can't speak for those.
- 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.
Every game I want to play actually working first time everytime.
How to know someone hasn't gamed on Linux in years.
Not like that at all now.
I've been on Linux for 3 years now, and while almost every game works everytime, there are still a few that I either can't get to run, or when I do they are unstable and require tinkering to get right. Catherine is a big one, that has gotten a lot better with more recent versions of proton, but still has glitches especially when transitioning from gameplay to cutscene.
Firmware updates. Samsung doesn't support Linux and so fwupd gets no security updates from them, fuck Samsung
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'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.
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 ;-)
The ability to properly wake from sleep.
Not having to set my displayport version back to 2.1 upon every boot.
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.
Visual Studio. But VSCodium mostly makes up for it.
Game pass
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.
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.
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.