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

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.

Here’s the list of things I miss:

• 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) ;)

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.

Firmware updates. Samsung doesn’t support Linux and so fwupd gets no security updates from them, fuck Samsung

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.

Every game I want to play actually working first time everytime.

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.

I miss windows eating my work when it chooses to install updates and reboot automatically while I’m asleep

Edit: even after I’ve set registry flags and policies to “never automatically reboot” - it’s always fun losing 4 days of work because windows randomly says “fuck you”

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.

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.

Nexusmods.

installing programs. there’s been random programs I’ve needed to download for school and I’ve sometimes spent hours running into random errors, having to find out what library or dependency I’m missing, etc. I miss being able to just click on an .exe and that’s it.

It’s been so long since I used windows at home. I switched in 2009.

I use it at work, so I would say RDP is probably my favorite feature I would miss at home. But for the most part I use ssh anyways.