The lack of a good cad software (fusion 360), and no, freecad and openscad are not worthy equivalents.

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.

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.

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....

Uh, Shared GPU memory absolutely exists on Linux. Mind you this only exists (regardless of OS) when you have a shitty integrated GPU with no dedicated VRAM, but I am not sure why you think this only exists for Windows (or some other non-Linux OS, you did not specify).

HDR support and good VR support.

I suppose another way to say that while also outing myself as a real corporate shill is “better Nvidia support”

I moved to Linux over 25 years ago and I miss absolutely nothing.

The joy of not having to update your OS when Microsoft forces it, even whilst you're working, or the way Apple still cannot do window tiling despite decades of examples on how to achieve this, or installing applications and finding files splattered all over the file system with no way to remove them except manually, or the endless user agreements, licence fees, expiring licensees, or the notion that you cannot run a new OS on an old machine that's in perfect working order.

So, no, it was the best decision I've made.

I wish that I'd made the same good decision when it comes to my accounting software.

Not a darn thing.

• Better battery life.
• Cmd based hot keys for cut, copy, paste and close. They don't collide with others as much, particularly vim based keys.

I do honestly miss the level of artistic and aesthetic polish that a multi-billion dollar corporation can afford to field that no Linux distro really can.

Linux as a rule is and always has been generally quite "Guys Live In Apartments Like This". Often utilitarian to a fault. UX design by backend devs, because actual frontend devs cost money. No one wants to pay the "beauty tax" for software. DEs like KDE and Gnome are trying very hard and have made great strides, but it's very slow progress.

And I imagine this comment will be a magnet for power user types who will flock to my post and retort something along the lines of, "All that stuff is bloat/a usability nightmare/clutter/gets in my way/comes at the cost of features", blah, blah, blah, waaahhhh boo hiss... Yes, it's all true, and yes, I understand. But Linux and the free software it surrounds itself with tends to be crusty, clunky, and god-awful ugly, and I'd be lying if I said that didn't frustrate me a bit now and again. Does it bother me to the point that I don't want to use it? Fuck no. Windows isn't worth the bullshit. But they do at least know how to make an OS slick and beautiful, when it works, anyway.

I'm sure people will also cherry pick examples of FOSS software that are quite ergonomic and lovely to feel. Yeah, there are many examples that exist, but they tend to be diamonds in the rough rather than exemplars of the ecosystem. For every one dev in this community who actually has a fucking clue how to make smooth-feeling and aesthetically pleasing software, there's a score of devs who slapdash together their programmer-art-tier UIs and call it a day, and a thousand other dev-brained users who look at it and go, "this is fine". And yeah, it is fine. But sometimes I want more than fine.

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.

Photoshop and stable nvidia drivers.

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.

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

I don't necessarily miss it, but the primary reason I can't use Linux as a daily driver at work is because our VPN doesn't work on Linux. So I'd say that. Stupid as fuck that our IT department uses Linux for all of our servers but makes us run Windows.