edit: hey guys, 60+ comments, can’t reply from now on, but know that I am grateful for your comments, keep the convo going. Thank you to the y’all people who gave unbiased answers and thanks also to those who told me about Waydroid and Docker

edit: Well, now that’s sobering, apparently I can do most of these things on Windows with ease too. I won’t be switching back to Windows anytime soon, but it appears that my friend was right. I am getting FOMO Fear of missing out right now.

I do need these apps right now, but there are some apps on Windows for which we don’t have a great replacement

  1. Adobe
  2. MS word (yeah, I don’t like Libre and most of Libre Suit) it’s not as good as MS suite, of c, but it’s really bad.
  3. Games ( a big one although steam is helping bridge the gap)
  4. Many torrented apps, most of these are Windows specific and thus I won’t have any luck installing them on Linux.
  5. Apparently windows is allowing their users to use some Android apps?

Torrented apps would be my biggest concern, I mean, these are Windows specific, how can I run them on Linux? Seriously, I want to know how. Can wine run most of the apps without error? I am thinking of torrenting some educational software made for Windows.

Let me list the customizations I have done with my xfce desktop and you tell me if I can do that on Windows.

I told my friend that I can’t leave linux because of all the customization I have done and he said, you just don’t like to accept that Windows can do that too. Yeah, because I think it can’t do some of it (and I like Linux better)

But yeah, let’s give the devil it’s due, can I do these things on Windows?

  1. I have applications which launch from terminal eg: vlc would open vlc (no questions asked, no other stuff needed, just type vlc)
  2. Bash scripts which updates my system (not completely, snaps and flatpaks seem to be immune to this). I am pretty sure you can’t do this on Windows.
  3. I can basically automate most of my tasks and it has a good integration with my apps.
  4. I can create desktop launchers.
  5. Not update my system, I love to update because my updates aren’t usually 4 freaking GB and the largest update I have seen has been 200-300 mbs, probably less but yeah, I was free to not update my PC if I so choose. Can you do this on Windows? And also, Linux updates fail less often, I mean, it might break your system, but the thing won’t stop in the middle and say “Bye Bye, updates failed” and now you have to waste 4GB again to download the update. PS: You should always keep your apps upto date mostly for security reasons, but Linux won’t force it on you and ruin your workflow.
  6. Create custom panel plugin.

  1. My understanding is that the Windows terminal sucks? I don’t know why, it just looks bad.

I am sure as hell there are more but this is at the top of my mind rn, can I do this on Windows. Also, give me something that you personally do on Linux but can’t do it on Windows.

        • @BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
          2•10 months ago

          Surprisingly profound for just another windows v linux slapfight. I recently watched Cory Doctorow’s DEFCON talk on enshittification, and something he brought up is how once-good, now-shitty social media platforms held their users hostage by being the only platform with all their “friends” (or at least that specific group of people)—the alternatives being to organize dozens of people to migrate to a new service or losing all those friends.

          Real friends aren’t platform exclusive

  • @django@discuss.tchncs.de
    53•10 months ago
    • boot from a btrfs snapshot
    • run docker without running a second kernel
    • boot an older kernel, in case something fails
    • run the system completely without a gui, to save video RAM for other tasks
    • distro hopping
    • use multiple desktop environments
    • use your computer without a mouse
    • create a directory named CON
    • use old hardware painlessly
    • have your system not spy on you without extra effort
    • create weird stacks of software raid, volume manager, disk encryption and filesystems and then boot from it
    • read the kernel developer mailing list and be hyped for new kernel features like bcachefs, which will hopefully come someday
    • Naich
      8•10 months ago

      [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo Click

      Can you play Bash Roulette in Windows?

      Seriously, you can hack it with one liners and scripts to do anything. I know you can do scripting with windows, but it just doesn’t have the sheer number of nifty little tools. The Linux philosophy has always been “do one thing and do it well”, so you can chain the simple but powerful tools together and knock up a little script to do something amazingly useful in seconds.

        • @siipale@sopuli.xyz
          0•10 months ago

          Powershell seems like too much writing to do a simple thing. Is there some kind of auto-complete available?

    • Sneaky Bastard
      6•10 months ago
      • run the system completely without a gui, to save video RAM for other tasks
      • use your computer without a mouse

      To be fair you can do these things with Windows too. There is a Windows server core edition without GUI.

      • xigoi
        4•10 months ago

        But can you call it Windows if there are no windows?

      • @IphtashuFitz@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1•10 months ago

        So you have to completely reinstall Windows if you want to get rid of the GUI on an existing system?

        On Linux just edit a file & reboot…

      • @django@discuss.tchncs.de
        1•10 months ago

        Interesting, I don’t know much about current windows, so this did not cross my mind. But you have to install a separate OS for this and can’t just decide to stop your display manager I guess? So playing games and running without GUI would require to different installations?

    • @floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
      1•10 months ago

      I am an idiot. I’ve heard a lot about bcachefs and I only just realized the name is about a cache, not a bunch of cooks.

  • @NormandyEssex@lemmy.world
    22•10 months ago

    Most if not all of these seem very easily done on windows. You can create scripts as you like and set up environment variables like vlc. Control of updates I’m not so sure about, I haven’t messed with it I just let it auto update.

    • @DrM@feddit.de
      9•10 months ago

      If you own a Windows 10/11 Pro version, you can set a group policy for control of updates. If you own a Home edition, you need to change a Registry entry. It’s not hard, but just as you I like Auto update more because I tend to forget to manually update

      • @d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzM
        3•10 months ago

        And if you like, you can skip and even disable Windows Update completely, and use a PowerShell script to download updates manually and install them whenever you like. This is a good option if you don’t trust Microsoft and decide to block all their IPs via a hosts file or a firewall or something, so you could download the updates from a trustworthy computer (like a Linux machine) and install the updates offline.

    • @Holzkohlen@feddit.de
      1•10 months ago

      The joy of creating powershell or cmd scripts. I’d rather do everything by hand. I get so irrationally angry whenever I have to even look at a script on windows.

      • Hydroel
        1•10 months ago

        You may be more used to bash, but after having tinkered with both and converted some scripts from one to the other, I arrived to the conclusion that both are bad.

      • 𝓢𝓮𝓮𝓙𝓪𝔂𝓔𝓶𝓶
        1•10 months ago

        I’ve been geeking about since the 80s. BASIC on an Atari, msdos, windows, vax, *bsd, Linux. Done a ton of scripting in a bunch of languages.

        Right now, I prefer powershell above anything else. But, honestly it’s all personal preference.

    • @NateNate60@lemmy.ml
      0•10 months ago

      The procedure to create shortcuts, as an example, is rather convoluted. I originally looked this up because I was 90% sure that you could just use New-Item and it’d just work.

      The problem is that even if you install things with a package manager like Chocolatey and do not hunt for installer wizards on the Internet (the default Windows way to install software), applications don’t commonly add themselves to the PATH and it’s just a pain to get it working.

      • Treeniks
        3•10 months ago

        scoop manages the whole PATH problem when installing apps. Winget on the other hand installs with the app’s installer if I’m not mistaken, thus should also have no problems with that.

  • @Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    21•10 months ago

    Others have already answered your specific points, which are all (sort of) possible on Windows. I would like to present a quick list of things are not possible on Windows, this is split in 3 parts: Truly impossible, Possible but so convoluted it might as well be impossible, and possible but much harder than what it should.

    Truly Impossible

    • Choose your preferred program for things. Sure you can do it for simple stuff like text or video, but what about my graphical interface backend, my file explorer or my DE.
    • Choose your disk format. Again you can use an incredible array of (I think) 3 formats, and while I also only use ext4 on Linux I know BTRFS is there for me if I ever want to switch to a modern filesystem.
    • Customise your system. Again people are going to claim that this is possible on Windows via regedit, but it’s not on the same level, I can’t have a Windows version stripped of controller support or wireless support if I know I’ll never plug a controller or a wireless card on the machine.
    • Upgrade every single component of your system in one go. Because the way programs are installed on Windows you need to upgrade each one on its own.
    • Fix issues with the system, say you found a bug on Linux if you have the expertise you can 100% fix it, on Windows the best you can do is report it and hope for the best.

    Almost impossible

    • Using a tiling window manager
    • Virtual desktops that actually work

    Harder than what it should

    • Customise Super+ commands
    • Prevent auto updates
      • PupBiru
        8•10 months ago

        okay but all that “technically possible but nobody has written the software yet” is incredibly unhelpful

        it’s technically possible to run every windows app perfectly in WINE but nobody has implemented a bunch of the APIs without bugs yet

          • @h3ndrik@feddit.de
            0•10 months ago

            Wow. Didn’t know this stuff existed. Seems a bit complicated to me. Installing all that additional stuff, poking around in the registry to make it work. Necessary steps on the command line like windows users used to despise… But it’s not my world.

            I’m not sure if things like that really replace for example the compositor. Or are just a layer on top or somewhere inbetween. But I’m at least surprised people do that kind of stuff on windows.

              • @h3ndrik@feddit.de
                1•10 months ago

                Well, I think I don’t agree with some points. My personal experience is a bit different.

                more complicated […] GUI protocol design from the 70s and 80s

                While we all had annoying situations with the proprietary nvidia drivers… I had my fair share of fun with X. It was able to be a viable product from the 80s to today. From big mainframes, computers, laptops to smartphones and embedded devices. That is a crazy long time, achievement and ability to scale. I’ve once set up an internet cafe with 1 pc and a 4 people multiseat setup, we’ve fooled around with Synergy at the university. And I’ve used it the network abilities for some time to run applications on different computers but display the UI on my monitor. Both for maintenance and for something like people use Steam Remote Play or Remote Desktop nowadays. My memories aren’t “it’s complicated” but “amazing piece of software”. But I’d agree. Maybe time has come to retire. And it is a large and complicated piece of software.

                Windows […] backwards compatibility […] beats every competitor

                You’re able to execute old binaries mainly because they linked the libraries statically instead of dynamically. With Linux, dynamic linking has been more popolar because it has other benefits. And that is the main reason why there are differences. It’s not a feat of the OS, but how the executable is linked. I think you’re able to do the same thing on most of the operating systems. And in fact many proprietary programs that run on linux are statically linked. And also the games I get on Steam. (There are limitations, however. Once they swap out the sound system or replace the UI toolkit, you’ll need a compatibility layer or adapt your software. And those things have happened. But also compatibility layers exist.)

                Other than that, I don’t think it’s even true. I once had to install a windows server. And some piece of software needed the ‘ASP.net Something 4.0’ and then the next thing was something requiring the ‘Something Redistrubutable C++ 3.5’ and I remember once installing things like that for some old games. I thought those came with the Service Packs but it was a major ordeal to get the thing running with a mix of a bit older, custom software and some other current software that it needed to tie into. So the windows people also regularly pull in tons of old libraries.

                I don’t do Windows gaming myself, but people told me old games from the XP or Windows7 times sometimes don’t run on 10 or 11.

                And not to be annoying or something… But my every-day experience is stories like this: My father-in-law calls and tells me some banking device that is required to make bank transfers is dropping support for his windows version. I have bad memory. Maybe they required him to use a new device and that wasn’t supported on his old windows 8.1 machine. Doesn’t matter, he needs Windows 10. But albeit the computer being kind of still okay, the CPU is a tiny bit too old and not supported. So we buy a new Laptop. And now *drumroll* the all-in-one printer won’t work because it’s suddenly too old and HP doesn’t do Windows 10 drivers, because they want to sell new printers instead. Whereas I once bought a super old second hand b/w laserprinter for 10€ incl toner and used it for 8 more years. And I bet it’s still supported with Linux today. Next thing is the laptop updates to Windows 11 and I get to spend yet another day to fix the software that updates the Garmin, two other programs he needs and the antivirus caused mayham…

                So while I applaud Microsoft for maintaining some old APIs in their UI-Toolkit. It doesn’t do me any good in real life. So don’t teach me about backwards compatibility. It’s the same with their office suite and them deliberately making something in the word document file format incompatible every few years so everyone needs to upgrade. Including affecting me. I’m sure they can stop now because everything has become a subscription model anyways. Personally I don’t care. But if it’s in a professinal setting, I want the documents and slideshows to look as intended by the author. Please without them forcing me to buy Windows plus the most recent Office subscription. Plus a new CPU and a complete set of new printers and peripherals.

                I think I’m just getting old myself. And now I start to get what some people have been telling me. I sometimes can’t be bothered to figure out things. How to customize a product I don’t like in the first place. And I don’t want it customizable in theory. I want my shit to be the way I’m used to. I don’t want a different Start button. A new hideout for the button to shut down the thing. And then it doesn’t even shut down properly but does some magic that interferes with dual-boot. And a Ribbon-Interface for office that makes me learn how to do the modern version of File->Print. I don’t like that. Worst thing is, at some time LibreOffice will adapt. I think they already changed icons at some point. And my Linux is also starting to do silly stuff in the background. Look for updates and whatever is using up all the extra hundreds of megabytes of RAM. And change the traditional way of handling software packages and introduce 5 package managers. Do updates on startup or shutdown…

                I say sometimes… I’m also for technological progress.

                I kind of also stay with my Linux distro because of familiarity. But I promise I’m not close-minded. Once Linux starts displaying Ads in the start menu, tracks my every move to sell off my private data. And Windows becomes the ethical and free (as in user-freedom) alternative that is faster, has the better technology stack and the superior interface design… I’m going to put in the effort, learn everything that has changed since XP/2000 and switch.

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
      1•10 months ago

      You’ve hit all the critical ones.

      Headless may be the biggest one for me. I run multiple VMs in the cloud on tiny servers entirely without GUI bloat. I can, and do, automate anything that I do more than a couple of times, which I can do because there are decent command line interfaces for most things.

      With Linux, it’s possible to replace every component except the kernel - for example, Chimera Linux even replaces the GNU tools with FreeBSD ones. A wide variety of filesystems, init systems, window managers, display managers (well, two) - and nearly everything is free.

      Which is another thing that is impossible on Windows, that you can do on Linux: use this enormous library of software, legally and without piracy, for free.

  • @ReakDuck@lemmy.ml
    19•10 months ago

    Soon with Plasma 6 and Wayland, you can let your Desktop crash but still keep all your Windows after the new Desktop spawned. This also means you can replace your KDE desktop with Gnome, XFCE Hyprland and some others whithout needing to logout or close applications.

    Additionally you can save current states of the application with Wayland. Shit is getting so interesting right now.

    Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=sAlIcn5meSCDKq3K&v=jlDhpFjBWiw

    • @NateNate60@lemmy.ml
      19•10 months ago

      Getting a C/C++ compiler on Windows is a menace. To my knowledge, there are two ways to do it. Either install Visual Studio which will also install the MSVC compiler, or wrangle with MinGW to get GCC.

      In the first-year CS classes I attended, the instructions were usually to either get WSL and install the gcc package or to connect using SSH to the engineering server (CentOS 7) which has it pre-installed.

      • @DSX@lemm.ee
        9•10 months ago

        Lmao my university also uses centos 7 for their ancient-ass SSH server. Even the professors just told us to use a VM because they didn’t want to use an old version of clang anymore.

      • @DSX@lemm.ee
        2•10 months ago

        Yeah gcc and mingw took ages back when I learned cpp a few years ago. This was back in high school when I barely knew what Linux was, so it never occurred to me that I could do that. Eventually gave up on setting it up in VScode and used codeblocks and spent the semester dealing with that GUI.

          • Aatube
            1•10 months ago

            but I just want libstdc++… what you described in the second paragraph is thee definition of bloat. You don’t always get every library you want in MSVC either. How the heck do you get stand-alone MSVC with only STL and less than a GB?

  • treeshateorcs
    15•10 months ago
    1. adjust the drift speed of a thinkpad trackpoint
    2. stream audio from one computer to another one (or a phone) with ease (thanks pulseaudio)
    • treeshateorcs
      10•10 months ago

      btw 1 is literally impossible, there’s no gui driver setting, there’s no regedit switch, no nothing. on linux you just need to write to this file /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/drift_time

  • Domi
    14•10 months ago

    Docker! I have never experienced a more unpleasant software than Docker for Windows.

    • @bzxt@lemmy.ml
      8•10 months ago

      I think I read somewhere a while ago that Docker is only really “native” on Linux, because on Mac and Windows it spawns some internal virtual machine or something like that. Not sure if i remember it correctly but that would probably be a reason for worse performance i guess.

      • @nous@programming.devEnglish
        4•10 months ago

        There is a native windows docker as well, where you can run windows containers inside it. But no one uses it, everyone just wants to use the linux containers which require a linux kernel and thus virtualisation on windows. Performance should not be worst on it though, but the layer of a VM added to it adds a layer of jank to make it appear to work like the native linux version (ie mounting host folders need to be mounted on the VM first before they can appear in docker, and while that is mostly transparent it can cause a few issues with some things).

    • Saganastic
      8•10 months ago

      Do you not use it with WSL?? I’ve found the experience is almost identical to linux.

      • Domi
        6•10 months ago

        Funny that you ask, WSL was what made me switch to Linux. I previously used Hyper-V because that was what was available back then and it was a nightmare. Slow to start, slow to run and constantly needing a reset after a reboot because “something happened™”.

        I switched to WSL when it was new and it was much better than Hyper-V but it had major issues with volumes back then. Performance was abysmal when mounting a volume on a Windows drive and when using the WSL filesystem you had the reverse issue under Windows with your IDE and git.

        There were also two big issues with reproducibility on Windows (both with Hyper-V and WSL), namely:

        • Line endings changing to /r/n, breaking all shell scripts with it
        • File permissions changing to 777, breaking many applications with it

        Line endings changing happened a lot because git on Windows defaults to changing line endings on pull and/or if someone on your team commits a file opened by an IDE on Windows it will change the line endings a lot of times as well.

        In the end I spent so much time inside of WSL that I started wondering why I was running Windows in the first place and just switched over. Proton played a big part as well but Docker was the main point.

  • @dark_stang@beehaw.orgEnglish
    12•10 months ago

    I can use my computer without it installing software I don’t want (like when Windows installs candy crush) and without it advertising to me.

    • Treeniks
      0•10 months ago

      The only thing Windows installs without you wanting to is Edge. Ads like Candy Crush will only be installed after installing windows for the first time, not after any updates.

      • @Holzkohlen@feddit.de
        2•10 months ago

        Lol the excuses. “Windows only ever messes up all your settings twice a year with the big updates. The rest of the time it’s fine.”
        How about they don’t touch my shit at all?

  • @betwixthewires@lemmy.basedcount.com
    11•10 months ago

    Open a link in any browser i like. Say “no” to updates. Have a main menu that doesn’t look like a kiosk at the mall. Have my habits on my computer kept to myself. Install applications from outside an application store. Not need an antivirus software.

  • @BitingChaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10•10 months ago

    I found something I couldn’t easily do on Linux…

    I wanted to create a Shortcut to a GUI application directly on my Desktop on Linux (Ubuntu 22.04), and after fucking with Gnome extensions and googling multiple terms, I thought I was going insane. There is seriously no easy, standard, or simple way of doing that.

    On Windows or macOS you can just click & drag to make a shortcut to a file, and then put the shortcut on your Desktop. Done.

    On Gnome you have to manually create a .desktop file, fill it with the parameters to run the application (usually by opening a different .desktop file and copying & pasting the contents), ensure you also have Gnome configured to even allow desktop icons, and then copy the .desktop file to the Desktop.

    The Gnome experience was the most-rigid, least user-friendly or user-customizable interface.

    I guess the problem is that I shouldn’t be using Gnome. I liked how simple & clean it is by default, but I hate how inflexible it is.

    • LinusWorks4Mo
      12•10 months ago

      right, the real answer is that on Linux you can just use a different de if you don’t like one

    • Ulu-Mulu-no-dieEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      I never liked GNOME, too inflexible as you said. My favorite is XFCE and it couldn’t be easier, right click on the entry on the app menu and select add to desktop.

      And if you want a custom one, right-click on desktop, create launcher, give it a name and click browse to select the file you want to run, that’s it. Create link if you want to link to a folder.

      • Aatube
        0•10 months ago

        How do symlinks spectacularly break things? Drag and drop works just fine and creating .desktop’s are easy at least in mate

          • Aatube
            0•10 months ago

            Double clicking a symlink will execute the file as if it resides in that specific folder rather than altering the current working directory like a normal shortcut would.

            Well, I never made use of that case in Windows, I only used Windows shortcuts for graphical apps so it didn’t make a difference. That isn’t “failing spectacularly” either.

  • Limitless_screaming
    10•10 months ago

    Desktop customization; I am using KDE Plasma, and I have two panels: one on the right, which has a “task manager”, and the top panel which has an app-launcher, pager, clock, cpu load, and the system tray. I don’t know if you can even have two panels in Windows.

    Modularity: Switch whatever component with whatever you see fit. You can switch out the desktop environment you’re using, switch out the sound server, the init system, the bootloader, etc.

    You can update flatpaks using a bash script, you can even make a command to update system packages and flatpaks, by just adding alias update="sudo pacman -Syu && flatpak update" to your ~/.bashrc file.

    • Ganesh VenugopalOP
      1•10 months ago

      amen wo/man! I love Linux alright, but for the first few years, it’s a lot of effort. You do learn stuff alright, but yeah, the effort is high.

      • ffhein
        1•10 months ago

        I used Windows exclusively for 10+ years, and I still have to use it at work, but for me the experience is the opposite… Windows regularly causes issues, and it usually takes a lot of effort fixing them because it doesn’t give useful error messages and due to the OS’ proprietary nature. Almost every week some Teams meeting is delayed because some participant’s sound is suddenly not going to their headset. Another frequent problem I have at work is that networking for the virtual machines stops working either fully or partially, and IT’s solution is “just reboot your computer when that happens”. Or when I upgrade my computer, and Windows refuses to authenticate despite me having a valid serial number. At least Microsoft used to have good support that you could chat with, but it seems like they’ve replaced that with some interactive troubleshooter app (which btw. didn’t solve my issue, redirected me to a different online troubleshooter which eventually redirected me back to the first troubleshooter).

        That’s not saying that I never have issues on Linux, but at least for me those are generally much easier to fix.

        • Ganesh VenugopalOP
          1•10 months ago

          I used Windows exclusively for 10+ years, and I still have to use it at work, but for me the experience is the opposite… Windows regularly causes issues, and it usually takes a lot of effort fixing them because it doesn’t give useful error messages and due to the OS’ proprietary nature. Almost every week some Teams meeting is delayed because some participant’s sound is suddenly not going to their headset. Another frequent problem I have at work is that networking for the virtual machines stops working either fully or partially, and IT’s solution is “just reboot your computer when that happens”. Or when I upgrade my computer, and Windows refuses to authenticate despite me having a valid serial number. At least Microsoft used to have good support that you could chat with, but it seems like they’ve replaced that with some interactive troubleshooter app (which btw. didn’t solve my issue, redirected me to a different online troubleshooter which eventually redirected me back to the first troubleshooter).

          That’s not saying that I never have issues on Linux, but at least for me those are generally much easier to fix.

          that’s a very interesting point of view. I have faced the issues you are mentioning before, but I thought it was a hardware issue and it would go away with good hardware. Apparently not. Lack of actual error messages (with good details atleast) seems to be a very valid concern.

          thank you for your comment, seriously, this was an interesting take.