Being able to install a compiler without having to spin up WSL or fiddle with the crap that is visual studio and its associated software.
Also parts of the linux desktop stack that are really good like pipewire, it’s a pain to have to use 3rd party software to achieve the same things on windows.
Fast boot up times, computer not randomly locking up due to defender deciding to scan all the things and being able to run emacs as my window manager
You’re not kidding about the boot-up times. When I had a Windows partition on my main Linux PC, it was shocking to me just how much slower W10 was to boot-up vs Pop!_OS. And like… I use LUKS encryption which does make that process a bit slower, and it was still markedly faster than Windows booting up.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned package managers yet. I feel like a barbarian when trying to install software on other OSs. Especially macs. I feel like mac software is collectively pulling a prank on me.
Whenever I try to help my newbie friends with computer issues I’ll be like “uh just install
crocand I can give you another command to run”. But then I remember that installing software on a system without a package manager is pain. “Okay you have to go to this random github address, then download this specifically-named package, then extract that to a random directory that you’ll never move it from, then you have to put that directory in your PATH variable.” But wait, modifying your PATH variable needs its own set of instructions!On a related note, if I could just give people on other OSs one-liners to fix all their problems it would fix all my problems. I could absolutely bang out a one-liner to fix your problem, but if we have to do it through the GUI then we gotta screenshare.
In theory, Homebrew should solve this, but I’ve just had so many bad experiences with it over the years, I won’t touch it. All the problems you can imagine from trying to tell a non-techy friend over voice, without screensharing, how to do all that stuff you just listed? Brew seems to make those same mistakes half the damned time, and leave your system / the app in a weird, half-installed state. It seems like most app devs have come to the same conclusion and just make actually good installers. It’s unfortunate that it’s come to that, but there ya go. I honestly have no idea if that’s a Homebrew problem or if it’s just doing its best with what apple gives it to work with, but either way.
I’ve had better experiences with Chocolatey on Windows, but for casual / everyday use it’s just so rare I need to install something that doesn’t have its own nice installer, so I very rarely run it.
The terminal.
Hot Corner.
Customizable everything
One thing that I didn’t expect myself to miss is Zathura. Everything else always seems cluttered by comparison.
Honestly, and this will definitely be a bit abstract sounding, I miss my machine not getting in my way. On Mac, it’s the small things that bug me… You can’t use Delete to trash highlighted files, you can’t use the arrow keys to cycle through viewed images in a folder, etc. The way MacOS handles software installtions bugs me too, it feels like it’s rather difficult to ever fully delete software you’ve installed on the machine, at least using Disk Images from 3rd parties. On Windows, it feels like the OS is designed to get in your way, in particular when trying to tweak anything in the Settings it just becomes an absolute nightmare to deal with. MacOS at least does settings… Better, I guess? Linux is hardly perfect here either, and really deep settings will need the terminal, but they are there for you if you want them.
Since I do a lot of retrocomputing: support for more than a few file systems. I’m not just talking about what’s available out-of-the-box, but what’s even available at all to find and install.
