Effort free gaming on Windows
I’ll acknowledge that gaming is much better than when I entered the field 20 years ago,
but it was so nice being able to just install a game and have it function instead of install a game and play the 50/50 gamble of whether or not it’s going to have some bug that forces me to go online and search the issue.
Proton DB has been a lifesaver for most issues that have occurred, but there are still so many games that have obscure problems that while not all of them prevent you from playing at all, a good portion of them have issues with them that dampen the gaming experience.
And as a bonus one, the lack of a decent Android emulator. I have tried so many different emulators for Android, and all of them work notoriously worse than BlueStacks did on Windows and a lot of times take up double the space it did. As a person who plays a lot of mobile games that require constant looking at, it was so much easier to just have it running in BlueStacks on the third monitor and then just look at it when needed
The lack of a good cad software (fusion 360), and no, freecad and openscad are not worthy equivalents.
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.
I do like that splash screen on Windows before login, where it shows me a different beautiful landscape each day.
I’m honestly surprised that nobody has said anything about MS Office, but it’s not like I expect anyone to miss the application itself, it’s just that if your work requires you to interface with it, there really is no alternative to running Windows or MacOS. Microsoft’s own Office Online versions of the apps do a worse job of maintaining DOC/PPT formatting consistency than the possible Russian spyware that is OnlyOffice, which also screws things up too often to be relied upon. LibreOffice is, let’s be honest, a total mess (with the exception of Calc, which also isn’t consistent with the current version of Excel, but can do some things that Excel no longer can do, so I appreciate it more as a complementary tool than as a replacement).
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.
AutoHotKey
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 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.
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.
Games :(
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.
Desktop session restore. Shut down pc, turn back on, everything like when shut down. Or on crash, sometime even kernel panic, restart and right back to work.
Nexusmods.
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.
