What’s a Linux feature you can’t live without?

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pomcomic@reddit

Moving windows with super (+ shift) + arrow keys. I work with a mac at work and the lack of that feature alone drives me nuts on a daily basis

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Sellot4pe@reddit

fn+control+left/right arrow :) Better yet there's fn+control+shift+left/right arrow, and a key combination for tiling windows into quarters, if I'm not mistaken

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pomcomic@reddit

Oh snap, really? Welp, time to edit my post, I genuinely had no idea. My bad.

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Sellot4pe@reddit

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchl9674d0b0/mac

Check this out man. Made getting used to macos a LOT easier for me.

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MrSnowflake@reddit

Oh yeah such basic features are missing on Mac. But BetterTouchTool adds these and makes working with tiling so much better on Mac .

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johndoe60610@reddit

I've been using moom to manage windowing on a Mac, but there's dozens of options for this. Don't worry, there's still plenty of good reasons to scoff at MacOS ;)

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pomcomic@reddit

I'll have to look into that, thank you for bringing that to my attention

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DL72-Alpha@reddit

Long time Linux user and I recently learned about moving the GUi windows this way and it's absolutely transformed my workflow!

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cornfeedhobo@reddit

You can get that, and more, with Hammerspoon.

I hate Mac, but still worth pointing out.

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Enthusedchameleon@reddit

Why do you hate Mac? To be clear, it is out of curiosity and not to debate, I dislike Apple a lot and wrt Mac my main issue is for sure window management. So I'm just curious in your experience what are the other main grievances

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cornfeedhobo@reddit

1) The keyboard is unique in it's layout. I rely on keyboard shortcuts a lot. For me, that made it dangerous at work - you don't want to paste into a terminal when you don't mean to. Once I had the chance, I traded in the macbook for a linux option.

2) homebrew is a terrible package manager that has numerous conflicts and trashes /usr/local/bin. I loathe it. nix was a possible alternative, but it has downsides also that I didn't want to contend with.

3) Battery life was meh as a power user. I often have multiple instances of vscode running and more chrome tabs than I can count. Throw slack in there and battery was worth about 2 to 3 hours.

I eventually found a solution that's built into Mac OS that's annoyingly hidden:

defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true

If you’re running Sequoia you can use fn+shift+arrow keys to move windows, fn+shift+f for fullscreen and fn+shift+c to center a window on macos. There are more shortcuts but they don’t have bindings by default and Apple in their devine wisdom doesn’t allow users to add fn-key bindings.

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Jiggins_@reddit

I'm in the same boat as you but I eventually found a solution that's built into Mac OS that's annoyingly hidden:

defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true

Google 'Linux Auto update'

You can find the appropriate commands for your distro.

This is the power of open source: you can find documentation without buying a developers license.

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WSuperOS@reddit

my god THIS.
command line on linux is 1000x better than Windows'

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GarThor_TMK@reddit

If you're stuck on windows, you should give powershell a shot.

cmd is a 30 year old disasterous nightmare to navigate, and bat files are total garbage to read and write.

PowerShell is a great alternative. It's a sleek, well designed language, that's compatible with .net libraries. You can even separate functionality into libraries using powershell modules. And, it comes with auto-doc and man pages out of the box. :D

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IntingForMarks@reddit

Couldn't disagree more. Powershell is an abomination of verbosity for no reason. I had to use it for a while for work and hated every minute of it, even the most trivial task

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starlothesquare90231@reddit

I don't like Powershell nor cmd. Much prefer bash.

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GarThor_TMK@reddit

Have you tried using aliases? It has most of the most common linux commands already aliased to their linux alternatives by default.

For example...

Set-Location = CD (change-directory)
Get-ChildItem = LS (windows DIR)
Copy-Item = CP (windows copy)
Push/Pop-Location = pushd/popd
Rename-Item = mv (windows ren)
etc

[-]

tatotron@reddit

A good demonstration of another problem that keeps me away from PowerShell besides verbosity: who tf would guess copying files is called "Copy-Item" and changing directory is called "Set-Location"?

[-]

GarThor_TMK@reddit

I believe my point is that Set-Location exists for verbosity, the idea is that it reads well when you're writing a script that you have to maintain and run on multiple machines. However, in day-to-day use, you'd nearly always use the aliased alternative "CD".

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tatotron@reddit

I'm saying if I can't even guess that files and directories are called "items" and in another command directories are called "location", then what chance do I have to guess any command name generally? I'd have to literally google every single thing, because the command names make no sense to me. Verbosity can be tolerated to some degree if at least the commands and concepts are named well/intuitively, but I don't think that idea fits into their "enterprise" heads. Why is it called "Copy-Item" instead of "Copy-File" or even just "Copy" since "Item" doesn't add any information, and instead can make someone think the command has nothing at all to do with files?

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SomnambulicSojourner@reddit

It's called Copy-Item because you can also copy directories with it.

I work with PS daily and the verb-noun structure of commands makes guessing commands I'm not familiar with incredibly intuitive. If I can't guess the exact command, well then I know how to find out what it is. No google needed, Get-help and get-command are your friends.

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WickedIT2517@reddit

I probably shouldn’t even be bringing this argument here, but powershell is my first love. So in a sense, I am transverse to you in experience most likely as I have very minimal Bash experience.

My argument would be exactly the same as yours. If I wanted to do anything in a Linux terminal, I have many options of tools to use however there is 0 consistency in naming or usage. Every tool has a job and you are expected to research its capabilities before using it. Ie. awk, grep, touch. Bash does have standards and best practices for writing code and apps, just not for naming things making it really hard to use it intuitively.

The same generally applies to PowerShell, except it has that extra layer of consistency in naming conventions for commands and their parameters. I like the fact that the best name for a cmdlet in powershell is exactly what it does. A lot of the built in modules have extremely beginner friendly names. If you run “get-command *” will get all commands you can use. And reading through them, more often than not you can accurately determine what a commands does by its name.

Just my 2 cents

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GarThor_TMK@reddit

You would never use those, unless you were writing a script though...

Also... a location is a directory/path, while an item refers to a file itself. The confusion you are describing occurs because a folder/directory is also a file itself... and therefor an item.

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thank_burdell@reddit

You don’t enjoy having to use long camelcase tools and flags instead of nice terse commands piped one into another?

Me neither.

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SomnambulicSojourner@reddit

1) You don't have to use camelcase at all. "remove-item" works just as well as "Remove-Item"

2) You can make aliases for whatever cmdlet in PS you want. "rm" works just as well as "Remove-Item"

3) PS has a very robust pipeline. It's not the same as bash or zsh or w/e, but it does in fact work.

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ahferroin7@reddit

Credit must be given where it’s due, there are a handful of things that Powershell does do better than a POSIX shell environment.

Invoke-RESTMethod immediately comes to mind, it actually handles unmarshalling the JSON response from the request into a native object type, and it’s an inherent part of the language. To do the same thing in any POSIX shell you have to either trap out to a different language (like Python) or use two separate external tools.

As another example, Powershell’s variable scoping and the clear differentiation between environment variables and ‘regular’ shell variables is really helpful once your script gets past a few dozen lines.

Amazing-Exit-1473@reddit

yep, until i found that i was downloading files like 90’s modem connection.

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BallingAndDrinking@reddit

I've always said and I'll keep saying : PS may be good, but it's akin too python or common lisp. Should your command line be that complicated ?

And you know who agree with me ? Microfuckingsoft. tnc. Test-NewConnection is too much for what use it has. Hence an alias.

PS on ESXi ? I can get that, the data structures are complex enough to warrant OOP.

No, I haven't tried that... should I?

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mmv-ru@reddit

If You still need use Python and dream about autocomplete - try it.
I'm using ipython sometimes for quick introspection.

But I not ready to recommend ipython as replacement of PowerShell.
At least PowerShell has many useful Windows specific cmdlets.

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tatotron@reddit

cmd is a 30 year old disasterous nightmare to navigate, and bat files are total garbage to read and write.

But 30 years is not so much in comparison to the ~46 year old shell for which compatibility still remains in the most popular shells, of which the single most popular one itself is ~35 years old. And so it's a hot mess of weird syntax and behavior, and someone ought to throw out most of it. Like, nobody should be using parameter substitution without curly braces.

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xxPoLyGLoTxx@reddit

Yeah but that goes against the "Linux has the best terminal and nothing can replace it" message, and therefore cannot be processed.^/s

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dickhardpill@reddit

git bash and WSL have been pretty good to me.

I sed your grep and top you an awk. LOL.

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Stella_G_Binul@reddit

the thing is, it doesn't need to hog that memory. It doesn't need to use all that extra resources and power to accomplish absolutely nothing. Even with all that my pc would get a stroke for 5-10 seconds every time i open up file explorer or chrome so what's the point. And it would free that memory when it's needed by other apps? That's bullshit also, because there has been countless amount of times I saw memory pushing close to 100% when I had YouTube Discord and one other game running.

it uses less memory, but somehow its more responsive, and it can run more apps simultaneously. File caching is moving certain files to a quicker storage so the system may respond to user actions more quickly. How does this make any sense to you. If you're right, doesn't that make windows even more worse?

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Leliana403@reddit

stop sucking microsoft's dick

I saw this: https://github.com/eythaann/Seelen-UI

UNIX / X11 desktop features (also in wayland):
* Focus follows mouse
* * Without auto-raise
* Type and click in partially covered windows
* * Without auto-raise
* * Without need to raise
* Simple select and middle mouse paste
* 2nd copy and paste buffer via control-c or x / control-v
* Virtual desktops
* Xterm / vt-220 compliant terminal(s) and POSIX compliant shells (bash, zsh, ksh)

UNIX / Linux common features:
* OpenSSH
* tar
* sed / awk / grep
* vi family of editors
* emacs
* Simple chaining / piping
* Zsh, Bash - scripting, functions, alias'
* Containers
* Building from source when provided bins aren't build for arm64
* LUKS and/or filesystem encryption
* Simply the best programming environment

[-]

JachWang@reddit

Streaming DRM protected media such as F1TV

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raulgrangeiro@reddit

Terminal.

It's weird how much useful and time economic is updating system or getting some app status through it.

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Bruni_kde@reddit

-repositories

-dolphin

It's crazy to think, that linux DE's had virtual desktops for over 2 decades now, with their first implementation being more or less the way they are in KDE now. Windows does have it too, but it utterly sucks to use it is incredible how nobody even knows it exists.. after falling back a bit, I tried to use it and struggled too much.

There are so many things I dont want to miss, from the ease to set up development environments, too the plethora of cool package managers (using nix makes setting up projects a real breeze, in most cases at least) and the different flavors of desktop environments is just bonkers.. Getting to choose between macOSy and more regular windows setups, intertwined with i3/sway and other flavors of tiling.. Once I've done my thesis I want to give cosmic a whirl, maybe it is even out of alpha by then ;)

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DividedContinuity@reddit

Nobody knows it exists in Windows because it's so bad it's not actually very useful.

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GarThor_TMK@reddit

I just mentioned this... lol...

Is it bad? I've never really had an issue with it... I think it's just poorly advertised.

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ahferroin7@reddit

Poorly advertised, and also a bit of a pain to work with. You’re forced into a single linear layout and there’s no convenient way to quickly switch to a specific desktop without having to contort your hands horribly to hit the key combination that MS has decided should be used.

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GarThor_TMK@reddit

Unless you use the mouse...

Click the desktop switcher, then click the desktop you want to go to...

Or just use autohotkey to map an easier key combo...

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SaratogaCx@reddit

Win/Super + Tab ; Tab
Left and right let you select your desktop, enter to go to it, delete to remove it. last item enter creates a new desktop

Very clunky but it is usable without a mouse.

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GarThor_TMK@reddit

win+ctrl+left --> go one desktop left

win+ctrl+right --> go one desktop right

If all you have is two desktops, it's one macro-keypress... (personally I've mapped these to a pair of macro buttons on my keyboard using the keyboard's macro recording/editing software).

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SaratogaCx@reddit

OP said "specific desktop" so I assumed they didn't want to sim through multiple screens and wanted a more direct-to operation.

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RoundCardiologist944@reddit

Three finger swipe works as good on windows 10 as on hyprland for my laptop for switching desktops/workspaces. I dont know does window destkop switcing work with dual monitors or does it switch both?

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Nova-Exxi@reddit

I knew multiple desktops were a thing when using Win+Tab, but whenever I tried it, it was so slow to load the "Recommended apps, news, ads, recents, corporate paranphernalia" that I just never used it.

Then i found out you can create and switch between them with Ctrl+Win+D for creating one and Ctrl+Win+Left/Right to switch between them, I don't remember if it was shift or alt the key used to also move the current window to another desktop.

Anyways. Now I use gnome and I abuse the hell out of overview as god intended :D

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pak9rabid@reddit

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Aln76467@reddit

I hate middle click copy (except in minecraft where it's great).

I cannot live without middle click scroll.

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OffsetXV@reddit

Middle click scroll is the only thing I miss from Windows aside from voidtools' Everything. I've been on Linux full time for like 8 months and I still catch myself trying to do it in things that aren't Firefox (which thankfully has it built in)

[-]

DDjivan@reddit

voidtools' Everything

Just for the record: most things you mention came from Unix, they existed before Linux (or MacOS, BSD etc.).

To answer the question: the sum of these features (piping, grep, /tmp etc.) features is why we love Unix-like systems.

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Outside_Total_2955@reddit

Aur

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NoidoDev@reddit

Are you saying Windows doesn't even have virtual desktops? 😳

Marble_marble@reddit

Systemd😭😭

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cicutaverosa@reddit

is besides the point, we are talking about linux

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TenNinetythree@reddit

The editor joe. İ used to use turbo pascal under DOS and sll of my key bindings still work.

Also: command line music players, no playlists, no bloat, it plays the tracks you want and then shuts up

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pc_load_ltr@reddit

Good ole Turbo Pascal! Those were the days.

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bliepp@reddit

The Gnome DE/ecosystem. I really love it. Especially the community apps.
Devices work 99% of the time just flawlessly. My space mouse and my pen tablet are both neatly integrated into my system. The mix and match of drivers on Windows is something I really hate.
Pipewire virtual sinks and sources (and sound routing in general). It's so flexible.
The way services are handled by systemd. So nice. Getting a background service to run on Windows just sucks.

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Gamer7928@reddit

Package managers. Going back to hunting .exe files and manually updating apps feels like a nightmare.

I also feel as though I cannot live without package managers, especially after dealing with nightmarish sifting between various websites while hunting for and updating my favorite applications and games which I for the longest time kept downloaded .exe Setup applications for.

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arthursucks@reddit

Package managers, kernel level drivers. I love that almost everything can be scripted. I can run 1 command and update my entire system.

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so you tried using hyper-v without finding out if your laptop/CPU would support it, and it's a windows problem? Make it make sense.

P.S. I fucking loathe windows

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TheOneTrueTrench@reddit

Hardware virtualization has been standard in Intel and AMD chips for ... actually, let me check...

... twenty years.

Either you're still using a 32 bit CPU from 2005, some kind of Intel Atom monstrosity, or you're mistaken.

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MrSnowflake@reddit

VirtualBox, VMware something,qemu

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deja_geek@reddit

That's entirely different. I am not impressed with Hyper-V, but WSL is ok if you only need command line access to a linux VM. I'm forced to use Windows on my work provided machine, and our security tools can break WSL so anytime I need a local Linux environment I am forced to use Hyper-V.

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Krunch007@reddit

I have actually tried using windows virtual desktops. Holy shit. I sometimes use my girlfriend's laptop and she's a windows user, Windows will straight up ignore touchpad gestures to move to a different workspace, it lags when cycling workspaces, it's inconsistent when you try to do the gesture for the overview... It just feels so primitive and half baked compared to something like Gnome or KDE. Or even Hyprland.

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deja_geek@reddit

The virtual desktops on Windows 11 are so much worse than they were on 10. I stopped using virtual desktops on my Windows 11 machine

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LieberDiktator@reddit

Package managers. Going back to hunting .exe files and manually updating apps feels like a nightmare.

Have you tried winget recently? The exe hunting on websites got much better.

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maximelaroche@reddit

Chocolaty is a package manager on windows. MacOs has brew I think

Windows and MacOs has workspaces and can run windows and linux VMs

I have not looked into setroubleshoot-server yet, but on first glance reading the documentation, it is not really what I would call easy to use, but maybe it gets clearer when using it.

It has built in manuals. Even man us a step up from searching for obscure information, never mind the arch docs.

The whole VM/container architecture. Docker actually works. At times I feel I can just run anything on anything.

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Leburgerking@reddit

Getting docker to work on a windows machine was a nightmare when I was first doing it, my image builds would fail after the first image and I would need to reinstall docker engine for the image to build again, every time. Was close to pulling my hair out, hopefully it is better now. Linux has just worked, I haven’t had any issues with deploying/building dockers

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PaulEngineer-89@reddit

The Docker container interface is Linux. Im not just talking about using Alpine within the container but the actual Docker-to-host interface. As I understand it currently (no interest in bothering to try it) before Docker tried to run in Windows kernel emulating the couple hundred system calls that are required. This sort of thing is relatively easy to do for BSD since the POSIX interface is identical. But under Windows nothing is the same. You’d be trying to emulate the few hundred system calls when the kernel semantics are completely different while still somehow allowing the container to access the underlying kernel for some things. As I understand it Docker containers must be Windows specific. That’s obviously ridiculous when we can freely run Docker on BSD, MacOS, and Linux with zero changes. Maybe if it runs under WSL2 it will work better but WSL2 isn’t exactly just running Linux on say a KVM backend. You can’t just run a generic Linux ISO on WSL2. That should tell you how much trouble it is in the first place.

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GuruGuru-Transistor@reddit

Writing into, or even deleting a file even if it's opened by another program.

I have used one before and aren't "into" them, but I'm certainly not criticizing anyone for choosing what works best for them. My own wife doesn't set her machine up like I do. I got her to switch to Linux after we married because she thought Windows 10 sucked, but she uses a different distro and DE and even browser than me.

I've been using computers as part of my living for 30-plus years and pretty much use the traditional desktop plus any new features that are helpful to me. Not for everyone but that's what is most productive for me. And I'm equally glad I can make that choice for free.

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TheDarkerNights@reddit

Ctrl+R to do a substring search through command history.
tmux because the work "VPN" drops SSH connections regularly
On desktop, middle-click a window titlebar to send it to the back of the window stack

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baguette_smasher@reddit

opensource software...

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Competitive_Reason_2@reddit

Windows is starting to have it but back in the days SSH

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ZestyRS@reddit

True. I take for granted putty and git bash on my windows laptop now.

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el_extrano@reddit

It's pretty easy to trick out your windows with git, mysys2/mingw, putty/open ssh, and now WSL and get a passable Unix experience. Also, with the exception of WSL, those things have been around forever. I had binaries for the UNIX core utils lying around on DOS and Windows 95.

I have never really used Windows, will probably never consider.

On Mac OS, there is not a feature I'd be missing, but features I'd rather miss.

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vpupkin271@reddit

Throwing garbage files in /tmp knowing they will be cleaned up upon reboot

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Hytht@reddit

+Doing work in /tmp knowing it will use RAM and not decrease the lifespan of my SSD

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T8ert0t@reddit

Curious, what do you mean by that?

Like all your downloads and files you create are all there as a workflow and you nice what you want to keep?

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Yorvick@reddit

```
\~ % cd $(mktemp -d)
tmp.XsaffIGeFT % echo "hi can make a mess here" > temp.txt
tmp.XsaffIGeFT % cat temp.txt
hi can make a mess here
```

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Hytht@reddit

/tmp is usually tmpfs

tmpfs stores all files and folders in your RAM instead of on hard disk

That's why everything there is lost after reboot.

I use it as a playground for quick experiments that I don't need to persist on disk.

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__konrad@reddit

tmpfs stores all files and folders in your RAM

How a memory leak is handled? (e.g. a program creating GB of temp files and not cleaning it after exit/crash)

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The files are going to persist as long as the system's running, so application closing shouldn't be an issue. And given it's just a filesystem at the application level, nothing treats it differently or bugs out.

I also use it as the destination when sending files from my phone to my PC via Warpinator, or when testing out video transcoding scripts or doing anything temporary with masses of small files.

When the files are all transient, use a transient filesystem.

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UntestedMethod@reddit

That's a really good idea sending the browser downloads to a tempfs, most of it I don't want to keep long-term anyway

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a_brand_new_start@reddit

tmp is where I do gut clone in a pinch when I don’t feel like doing git stash

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tiling window managers, just started using niri now which is a scrolling one and its simply amaIng

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thebadslime@reddit

just got a new system an on windows for a lil while while i get shit downloaded and whatnot, package management is my SHIIIIT.

The things you mentioned are something existing both in Windows and Mac 😛

For me it is tiling window managers, and that I can replace which tools my global shortcuts use. (And what those global shortcuts are in the first place)

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usctzn069@reddit

Privacy

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gliitch0xFF@reddit

Wobbly Windows.

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ahferroin7@reddit

A sane command line is the top of the list for me, closely followed by not needing crap like Autohotkey to manage global hotkeys.

Package managers. Going back to hunting .exe files and manually updating apps feels like a nightmare.

On Windows, have you looked at Chocolatey? Or Winget? Or even the MS Store? On macOS I guess it’s Homebrew, macPorts, and the App Store.

Now, that said, I do prefer APK, or APT, or DNF, or Portage (though I will take Chocolatey or Winget over Pacman any day), but there are usable package managers on Windows/macOS.

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coreutils

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Pleasant-Shallot-707@reddit

Apt

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BeeInABlanket@reddit

The ability to have a taskbar on my secondary monitor but NOT the primary monitor (which almost always has something in fullscreen on it) or tertiary monitor (which is a drawing tablet with precious screen real estate and a risk of burnin from system UI elements).

I get that it's not a majority use case, but you'd think that it'd be common enough that somebody at MS would've gone "hey, y'know, on a multi-monitor setup it really makes zero fuckin' sense to put the taskbar on the primary monitor... maybe people might want to pick which monitors do and do not have it instead of it just being a binary choice between the bar being on EVERY display and the bar being ONLY on the display where it makes the least sense for it to be".

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OffsetXV@reddit

That's how I had Win10 set up. Vertical taskbar on the right side of my left monitor, right side monitor completely clean. On Linux I don't mind having it on the primary though, because the virtual desktops and overview hotkey make it more than easy enough to manage things without needing the panel easily accessible 24/7

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JasperNLxD@reddit

How did you solve that your drawing tablet range is only the part displayed on the drawing tablet? I'm really struggling with this: on Xorg pressure is not working well, on Wayland it maps my pen area to the full screen (including all other screens).

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BeeInABlanket@reddit

A while back I had to have OpenTabletDriver set to "artist mode" to keep pressure sensitivity in wayland, and had to jump through hoops to set it up as a 1080p screen area, and even then it'd map pen inputs to whichever display the cursor was on.

heliomedia@reddit

ZFS

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human_bot77@reddit

Pipe

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vim

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wortelbrood@reddit

GNU tools

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I never claimed any zram exclusivity anywhere -- other than explain my use cases w/ it.

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Snow_Hill_Penguin@reddit

Lack of the Anti-Malware-Executable.
Sometimes I feel nostalgic and want to install it under Wine or a VM and give it a bone to play with it :)

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whosdr@reddit

Oh right, I forgot how much that slows down..everything. Filesystem operations, software installations, web browsing..

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Never-Late-In-A-V8@reddit

For me, it’s workspaces/virtual desktops—the ability to switch between tasks seamlessly is something I never knew I needed.

UntestedMethod@reddit

Can I ask why screen instead of tmux?

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SeriousPlankton2000@reddit

It existed when I started and it's found everywhere. The only thing I changes is the hotkey to \^T because I use \^A frequently.

Anyway, I only use it once in a while for e.g. system updates. Instead I'm usually using konsole and it's got tabbing so I don't even need screen.

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UntestedMethod@reddit

Gotcha... I mean my terminal emulator has tabs too, but I'm still a complete fiend for tmux. I also rebound my default hotkey to t and bar on the top.. it fits beautifully since default (ex. on remote machines) is b and bar on the bottom. I'm a vim user too, so vim's w or gt aren't far off from my tmux t. I can get into some super efficient tab and tile workflows this way :)

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pikecat@reddit

Why is this so far down. Using the computer with just a keyboard is most important.

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MarzipanEven7336@reddit

FYI, there are many package managers for Windows too. You are just unaware of them.

GPL

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GarThor_TMK@reddit

Windows added virtual desktops in 8.1 I think? It's a feature I've only ever really used at work... I've got one desktop for work stuff and one for personal stuff... that way I can keep things separate and stay on track, but still check email every once in a while.

The package managers are just the windows store (or steam/epic for games)... also ninite will keep some things up to date for you...

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almonds2024@reddit

I am a brand new linux user, so I don't have enough experience to answer your question yet. But I am navigating the terminal and learning to implement certain commands. I have actually enjoying the process. First thing I learned was how to encrypt and decrypt files in the terminal, then how to change directories. Very cool

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bethemogator@reddit

Wobbly windows

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Keely369@reddit

Yeah bwoy!

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crypticcamelion@reddit

Virtual desktops, windows shade, a system that is actually responsive, i can scroll in one window and type in another without constantly clicking back and forth. Program menu that is alphabetically sorted and in general programs that are not overloaded with useless features and so much more. Unfortunately I'm forced to use windows professionally and feel constantly that I'm working around the system and not like Linux where the system is working with/for me.

Walzmyn@reddit

Meta+click-any-damn-where to move a window.

This is the thing that absolutely throws me every time I'm forced to use an inferior OS

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AdScared1966@reddit

Modular filesystem capabilities both in kernel and userspace.

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bmwiedemann@reddit

Yes. FUSE is fun. I once implemented curlwwwfs in a few hours that lets you mount a webserver directory and with fuseiso one could even look into large images without downloading the whole thing.

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Max-Normal-88@reddit

Packaging, grep, a functional shell

The dual boot with windows

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Physical_Opposite445@reddit

cd

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artificialidentity3@reddit

Middle click paste Tab complete Apt package manager

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AvonMustang@reddit

Im addicted to tab complete but it’s on Mac OS as well.

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artificialidentity3@reddit

You are absolutely right! It's not exclusive to Linux. I use it in MacOS, too. Your point made me curious, so I asked GPT to summarize MacOS vs. Linux tab complete:

"TabCompletion on macOS is implemented at the shell level (primarily via zsh or bash), not by the OS kernel, and is independent of Linux—macOS is based on Darwin, which derives from BSD Unix (FreeBSD userland + Mach microkernel), not the Linux kernel; both macOS and Linux support TabCompletion because they run POSIX-compliant shells (e.g., zsh, bash) that interpret Tab input through programmable completion functions (compdef in zsh, complete in bash) and context-aware scripts—so while the behavior is similar, it’s not a Linux feature but a capability of the shell environment layered on top of Unix-like systems."

In any case, it's one of my absolute favorite features of any OS that implements it. 😃

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pikecat@reddit

Add to that is cycle through anything in history that starts with what you type. Needs enabling on most distros in bashrc.

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MarioGamer30@reddit

Freedom and control of everything

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highlight and then middle click for pasting

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Open-Egg1732@reddit

One click update for everything in your pc...

Multiple desktops that you can switch through

Being able to customize your PC without paying $

Not having all the crap from windows.

All of them. 🙂

I love the command-line and do almost all of my work there, so that's one feature I could not do without.

Real multi-user support (I used to run multiple X servers on different consoles so my kids and I could stay logged in and just toggle between our sessions as needed.)

Tools like rsync, ssh, cron, etc. for remote access and system management.

Source availability. This might not be a big deal for a lot of users, but for me it is... I have tracked down and fixed bugs on occasion (and of course submitted patches to upstream.)

Full control of my system. No ads or restrictions on what I can do.

No forced upgrades, but the ability to upgrade at a time of my choosing.

D-S-S-R@reddit

Sloppy focus.

spec_3@reddit

The gpl, the free software movement and the standard CLI tools. A very basic knowledge of them are (at least in part) responsible for putting bread on my table.

I don't hate guis or anything, but i dislike hiding stuff in menus. It's just so cleaner to work with emacs or a terminal to get stuff done.

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cornfeedhobo@reddit

Credit where credit is due:

1) Windows and MacOS have virtual desktops now

2) There are package manager options:

Windows has chocolatey, which is meh
Mac has homebrew, which is actively rotting the brains of it's users

Features I can't live without in linux? * BASH and first class scripting. * Easy python. Easy source code development in general. * KDE and all it's customization possibilites while still offering a familiar interface. * Hating on GNOME users. * Not having to buy apps for every small thing I want to do (e.g. window tiling) * The biggest one of all, Consistency!

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FlailoftheLord@reddit

the ability to make my computer do what I want it to do instead of what the OS manufacturer wants

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Stick_Nout@reddit

Btrfs. The ability to save scum my system and just restore a snapshot when something goes wrong is such a blessing. Plus, when using Timeshift, you can choose whether or not you want to restore the @home subvolume. I use it whenever I want to test out a major change on my system.

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miqued@reddit

i like the config files and global shortcuts.

Neither of those is really a Linux feature. Other operating systems including Windows have those as well.

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Lagetta@reddit

Freedom to have any system you want. Being in community. Rolling release by choice. Having selfless debeopers who help everyday users to get the best system possible with little or no gain.

hunting .exe files and manually updating apps - good luck waiting for VST plugins in repos... also, good luck waiting for updated versions in LTS distros, unless you add 3-rd party repo

in advance, if someone calls customization, i'd prefer single but well-made theme rather than ability to choose|modify from hundreds amateur themes.

unfortunately, so far there's more windows features i'd like to be in linux

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cekoya@reddit

Everything being a file.

And tiling window manager

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GMoD42@reddit

Bash + Ctrl+R + a well defined alias list

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Tiny_Concert_7655@reddit

Everything that linux does is stuff that would seem bizarre to not have.i feel like apart from compatibility, other operating systems are really far behind. A package manager that you get all your software from is already something that elevates it to a hugger position than other operating systems for me.

ad-on-is@reddit

The snappiness, reboot, login, start using it
no annoying popups from proprietary apps for peripherals
easier to fix problems, compared to Windows, where it just shows random error codes, only God knows what they mean

Crackalacking_Z@reddit

Being able to bend the whole operation system to my will, instead of being forced into a corpo business model, where I'm the product, while paying to be the product.

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Rest-That@reddit

Not advocating for Windows, but they also have virtual desktops & package managers.

I used Scoop and Chocolatey for example.

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Ech0_Man@reddit

Freedom.

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archontwo@reddit

I always get caught out when using other OSs, when I habitually highlight some text and press the middle, or left and right mouse buttons to paste the highlight where the cursor is.

Ability to map Caps lock to switching keyboard layout, a normal shell with normal terminal, tiling window managers, and a system that doesn't sound it's smarter than you are and doesn't do anything on it's own in the background. Among 100s of other things I suppose

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dethb0y@reddit

I suppose there's nothing totally linux-exclusive, but i really like my workflow and setup, and would hate to have to try and replicate it on another platform.

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Rufus_Fish@reddit

Package management is great, though less unified at the moment if you are running a system with say snaps, debs and steam.

Installation is awesome, provided everything is supported which it usually is. When it works it works better. Recover your windows system and you are often stuck trying to to locate manufacturer drivers.

Linux as a recovery live system is great too. I'm an average basically non technical user but over 20 years I've achieved some pretty neat tasks thanks to great documentation. Recovering images off corrupted SD cards back when you used digital cameras, chrooting broken systems to either recover data or repair the system and actually fixing windows at the times I'm dual booting.

It's power when you need it and in my opinion really simple when you just want the basics. It's come a long way since the days of Mandrake. If it wasn't for the move towards smart phone as the daily device I think the Linux year of the desktop would have advanced further because the desktop is pretty neat.

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package managers

Its FOSS...

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