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.
The WHAT
I feel this. KDE has done an incredible job making Plasma gorgeous and usable.
Now I feel like with Plasma 6 there’s everything to gain and nothing to lose, aesthetically and usably.
On my old fun-and-games laptop I made everything look Aero-esque like my favorite aspects of XP and 7 haha. It’s not practical but I’m experimenting with different toolbar layouts and stuff.
But the biggest improvement coming from Windows? Not having a “fake fisher-price control panel” and an obfuscated “actual control panel” somewhere else. Plasma does a really good job of putting everything easily within reach.
But the biggest improvement coming from Windows?
The thing that got me to switch from Windows to Linux (the straw that broke the camel’s back) was Window’s “Eco Mode”. Eco Mode is a cute little thing that (at least at the time) cannot be disabled. It automatically slows down apps so your computer draws less power to help the environment. What did that mean for you? ChatGPT (which was just starting to boom at the time) would become barely functional because Eco Mode would slow down the browser. You could only temporarily disable it per-process, but it will enable itself right back again whenever it wants.
Wow that’s irritating!
That’s what bothers me too: It’s so opinionated. I guess so their “support” can suggest the same solution to every problem.
But geeze, things like fastboot, Cortana, Edge, Onedrive, or this eco-mode, or secureboot, or other features tied to deals they strike especially with laptop hardware vendors that simply assume THIS Windows is the only thing that will ever be run on this device.
That’s the worst.
At least I haven’t heard of them clobbering your bootloader with an update recently but I probably jinxed it now LOL.
I try not to just be a *nix-cultist. I grew up with Windows and had a lot of fond experiences with it. It just feels like it serves shareholders over users anymore.
I feel like it’s trying to make its users even dumber, while I feel like we learn things while using Linux.
I haven’t daily driven OSX for a few years now, but I still miss it every time I use a control panel on any other system. It’s so functional, intuitive, logical, consistent, and not a pile of dogshit to look at. If I want to change my IP address, I go to network, ethernet, IP address. If it’s greyed out, there is a lock icon right there. I click it, put in admin details, and then I can change the IP. All in the same window, in a consistent, logical flow.
It’s a usability nightmare for me. I sure love it when I open a PowerShell prompt, and some random window takes focus instead for no reason. Or when I create a new folder in Explorer, and the address bar inexplicably steals focus.
And that right-click menu can take a long walk off a short pier
That’s one thing I really enjoy about Plasma. I never even considered things like “focus stealing” or when to raise windows, but there’s options to tweak.
Heck you can even change what RMB does. (Yeah my brain doesn’t need THAT radical of a change lmao)
The defaults are perfectly sane, but I like that there’s buttons or toggles to see if something else works better.
And that right-click menu can take a long walk off a short pier
Seriously. Why?! Who does this serve? It confuses newbies and just ticks off everybody else.
Also this google-apple-esque trend of trying to glyphize (is that a word? Lol) everything just for its own sake is kinda maddening too. (We don’t want literacy to be a bar to clicking ads! /s)
/rant lol.
I don’t think I understand what you mean with the right click menu. Do you mean when right clicking, the menu that appears with things you can do there? Like right clicking a file, and being able to rename, or open with a different program, etc? Right click the desktop and get an option to change the desktop background? What’s the problem there?
I believe they’re talking about the W11 context menu, where most common options (like copy, paste, and delete) are replaced by icons that look almost identical to each other. They’re all soft rounded lines and have no defining features, which means you need to stop and parse the icon twice for every cut & paste. They also change position based on which options are available, so you can’t memorize the locations, and since delete is one of the options, I wouldn’t trust my memory.
Most of the interesting options like edit, run as administrator, open file location, readable copy paste options, or installed options like Edit with Notepad++ or 7zip > are hidden behind a Show more Options option, which just opens the window 10 context menu. Same styling and everything.
Basically, everything about the W11 context menu slows me down and nothing about it is more usable or helpful.
Oh, yeah, I understand now, thanks. That thing is UI/X design gone too far.
Also this google-apple-esque trend of trying to glyphize (is that a word? Lol) everything just for its own sake is kinda maddening too. (We don’t want literacy to be a bar to clicking ads! /s)
Keep in mind that 21% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate.
Keypirinha. Krunner is good but not that good.
Sharex. Spectacle is fine but not perfect.
A minor but useful GUI feature on MacOS in list view is showing the size of directories as well as individual files and being able to sort by those sizes. That extra step in Linux of having to contextually click on a listed directory and choose “Properties” all the way at the bottom of that menu is a minor annoyance
Dolphin has this as an option (Configure Dolphin > View > Content Display > Folder Size > Show size of contents[…])
Good OS-native cloud syncing. The Windows Cloud Sync Engine is so useful and is now adopted by virtually every cloud storage provider, and crucially lets you keep your entire cloud drive visible as unsynced files and pulls them on-demand (ie. what Dropbox call Smart Sync).
Thanks to being freelance and working for different companies I have different files I work on in Dropbox and Onedrive as well as my personal stuff being stored on Proton and my Synology NAS through Drive, and none of these have linux integrations that even come close to their Windows or macOS equivalents. Things like Syncthing and rclone will do selective sync, so you aren’t forced to sync your entire cloud drive on to your laptop’s tiny SSD, but that still means half your files are missing and have to be accessed through janky browser interfaces 🤢
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…
When I was using Windows, I used Adobe Lightroom with the Negative Lab Pro plugin to digitize my film negatives. I’ve played around with Darktable, and it does the job, but it’s a lot more fiddly, and it discourages me from processing film.
Shortcuts to move windows on xfce (there’s somekind of python script but i don’t want to bother) and discord and a few xorg wrapped apps are so fucking laggy on wayland
Shared memory is basically using your normal RAM as swapspace for your GPU.
From what I read online this only works for integrated cards?
isn’t the primary vram for integrated cards just the system ram?
Yeah but I assumed this is about providing the gpu with any user defined amount of ram
Some of my steam games dont run, and theres some files I cant run in Davinci Resolve. So probably just those
to edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT all night long
Got to tweak dos startup menu to maximise your conventional or ems memory.
That’s far too retro. No one else will get the joke.
I’m here. I’m old too.
Bluestacks for me :(
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.
Desktop shortcuts
Depending on your DE, you can have those no problem. You just symlink to the respective
.desktopfile for the program you want to run. So for example, if you wanna start Firefox from your desktop, you’d look for a file calledFirefox.desktopon your system (probably living under/usr) and symlink to that from~/Desktop.Its not the same.
what parts of it do you miss exactly?
On Windows it feels like a feature. On Gnome it feels like the desktop folder being shown on the Desktop.
hmm. I have to admit I don’t understand the difference. on windows it’s the desktop folder, plus a few separate icons to system utilities with some way to filter them. did you mean that?
I honestly don’t know.
The Cmd + Space combo on MacOS was a game changer. Finds EVERYTHING on the computer.
I miss my computer’s performance being held hostage by “Active Protection” feature of Virus scanner!
iTunes is probably the biggest, people with iDevices have a harder time with GNU/Linux
Tbf, that’s by iDesign. They want you to stay in their iEcosystem and spend more money on their products, if they allowed interoperability you might say go with Linux instead of Mac, or something. So take out a loan and buy another iProduct, good iConsumer!
Well you can use iTunes on Windows, so it’s not as if it was only on MacOs.
