Desktop shortcuts
Linux
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Depending on your DE, you can have those no problem. You just symlink to the respective .desktop
file for the program you want to run. So for example, if you wanna start Firefox from your desktop, you'd look for a file called Firefox.desktop
on your system (probably living under /usr
) and symlink to that from ~/Desktop
.
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.
Printing and scanning. I only print like one thing every couple months and scan things every 6 months, but a backlog is growing. My printer is over 10 years old but it worked well on Windows. Despite their site saying it supports Linux I just can't get it to print or acknowledge any data is being sent. I'm contemplating a newer printer since deals are going on right now.
Update: Woooo! After a few weeks of fiddling with the install scripts and CUPS config I got something to print via Linux! That being said I'm upgrading, not giving up, to a new EcoTank printer.
Word to the wise brother laser printers work great with linux, but I've heard some mention about the newer ones not taking 3rd party toner cartridges. At least toner goes further and doesn't dry up with disuse like ink!
The CMD key. MacOS got it figured out with CMD separate from ctrl. Never have problems copying from a terminal because CMD+C is not ctrl+C
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....
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.
Printing was horrible on Windows, and Mac uses cups too, no? I've only ever had good experiences printing from Linux
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".
Seamless adaption to higher DPI when I work remotely on my work Windows machine. The RDP clients will just expand the desktop and everything is very small when I WFH. mstsc will change the size of everything but legacy apps according to the DPI of the display.
Did you set the DPI in your RDP client? I had this too with my Windows VM, and it would just reset whenever I'd change it in Windows. Changed it in the FreeRDP flags and now the scale is correct, Windows applies 150% whenever I RDP in.
EDIT: My exact command
wlfreerdp /u:Max-P /v:192.168.1.149 +fonts -aero +clipboard +decorations +window-drag +async-channels +async-input +async-update -compression /dynamic-resolution /rfx /t:"Windows 10" /w:2560 /h:1440 /sound /scale-desktop:150 /scale:100
/scale-desktop
is the one that controls the Windows side, whereas /scale
controls the local side, so in this case Windows scales and I display it as-is, but you can also do the reverse and save some bandwith if the legacy app would just bitmap scale anyway.
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.
Fair number of FPS games refuses to work. Apex recently just did that. Other than that, none. Really happy my personal setup works so well.
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.
Good OS-native cloud syncing. The Windows Cloud Sync Engine is so useful and is now adopted by virtually every cloud storage provider, and crucially lets you keep your entire cloud drive visible as unsynced files and pulls them on-demand (ie. what Dropbox call Smart Sync).
Thanks to being freelance and working for different companies I have different files I work on in Dropbox and Onedrive as well as my personal stuff being stored on Proton and my Synology NAS through Drive, and none of these have linux integrations that even come close to their Windows or macOS equivalents. Things like Syncthing and rclone will do selective sync, so you aren't forced to sync your entire cloud drive on to your laptop's tiny SSD, but that still means half your files are missing and have to be accessed through janky browser interfaces 🤢
Wallpaper Engine. Advantages Linux provides mostly are better than Windows, but man I miss clicking a few times and having an animated wallpaper working.
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.
Really good image noise reduction software.
That's pretty much the only thing I miss, and I don't miss it enough to suffer through Windows
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.
Being able to play League of Legends. We could until few months ago.
The carelessness. Mac OS is far from perfect, but it just happily chugs along. Linux often creates problems by just existing for too long. It's gotten much much better, but it's still not good.
A minor but useful GUI feature on MacOS in list view is showing the size of directories as well as individual files and being able to sort by those sizes. That extra step in Linux of having to contextually click on a listed directory and choose "Properties" all the way at the bottom of that menu is a minor annoyance
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.
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
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.
I don't miss anything really. All of my software already worked.
Some of my steam games dont run, and theres some files I cant run in Davinci Resolve. So probably just those