I just don't get the love for notepad++

I started using it as my main back in 2006ish, I then switched to sublime text about 2011, then about 5-6 years ago to VSCode. All the time using vim for any in-terminal quick edits.

Notepad++ is easily my least favourite editor of the lot, by several miles, it just seems so rigid and clunky without even going into how it's windows only. Every editor I've used since has been a huge improvement over the one prior IMO

Many many years ago I switched from OS X back to Linux and had to find alternatives: https://jeena.net/why-i-switchedfrom-osx-to-linux

For the three software you point as a must have there are alternatives, even those you'd not think of:

• Visual Studio - Stop writing .NET web applications, there are so many other web frameworks around you don't really need .NET
• Notepad++ - It's a steep learning curve but Vim and Emacs give you all and more freedom than Notepad++
• Excel - You can use the 365 version in the browser, that is what I do at work
• OneDrive works through the browser again, but there are alternatives like Nextcloud, Syncthing, Seafile

I've also recently switched to Linux Mint as my daily driver. Linux + Open-Source is finally in a really good spot. I tell people that switching OSes always takes new learning, but a step-by-step approach is a sustainable one.

Whenever I go back to Windows and see news and ads popping up in my Start Menu, etc, I realize how much shit we were putting up with even pre-Copilot. That's not even including Microsoft Edge forcing itself back as a default program with each major update. It's like the word "consent" doesn't exist to those people.

This has been a dream of mine and one of my friend's as well. There's a small handful of blockers that I've slowly been transitioning but the upcoming windows pain points you mentioned are definitely recent motivators for me. I'm glad you made it and I hope the rest of us can too! I look forward to reading more about your experience.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it's not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you're willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you've already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It's fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

Excel is all hype. Unless you're a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It's not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It's just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you're paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you've got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

Notepad++ is a fabulous software program that had no complete alternatives on Linux. I used it for scripting, text manipulation, note taking, dumping and editing thoughts. Scintilla-based equivalents Geany, SciTE exist, but do not come close.

Really? No alternatives on Linux? Have you tried Emacs? I think Emacs with Org mode blows Notepad++ out of the water in all the uses you just mentioned.

If you absolutely need functionality of some Windows only applications on Linux, it's a bit clunky, but a solution exists to use a VM to integrate the Windows apps into your Linux environment. It's called winapps, and I use it to run the latest version of Excel, which I do need for some things. Here's their GitHub: https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

Also made the switch not too long ago, only using Manjaro. Steam's proton had gotten extremely good at playing Windows games, so there's a good chance that it could run your old strategy game.

You might already have this on your set-up, but having wine auto-launch for Windows executables has been fantastic. I regularly pull and run Windows executables without really giving it a second thought, and so far it's generally "just worked."

im kinda stuck with a windows workstation for work also, for the exact same reasons. ive used the discrepancy in environments to completely air-gap my home and work life. linux for all things personal, and windows for the BS at the office... never the twain shall meet

notepad++ really bothers me.. if theres one freakin app that linux should have a mastery of its text editing... and yet.

e. for the vim/emacs/nano peeps: no. just no. its not me who is wrong here because i dont want to learn 400 obscure keystrokes among other nonsense. we dont need to hear about your text editing stockholm-syndrome.

Heyy, I'm too in the process of moving from windows (10) to debian :) (though I'm very new to linux, but not new to open source software)

I was surprised that notepad++ didnt have native support for linux and while I tried many stuff, indeed I couldnt find a real replacement. I have kinda concluded that I will either use bottles with wine to run notepad++ (takes around half a minute to open) or use Geany and try to customize it as much as I can. (There are also Notepadqq which is kinda dead and NotepadNext which is still in very early stage.) I'll probably go with Geany and chech on NotepadNext if it evers becomes good enough.

I had a recent post about running windows stuff on linux and people gave me some good advice here: https://mander.xyz/post/18701186

Edit: I just found Textadept, might check it later (found it from a comment under this video).

Welcome to the resistance! 😄

I did pretty much similar as you, but about a decade ago. Was it really Windows 8 at the time? 7 perhaps? Even then the OS was becoming increasingly bloated, and crudely implementing channels for Microsoft to milk data from users.

For me it wasn't so much editors and development environment that kept me around, but the Adobe suite — specifically the lack of CMYK support in FLOSS alternatives. In the end I was quite happy to just find workarounds for the few print jobs I would have to do.

Quite often I think people are less resisting a new OS environment than the software available. "I couldn't use the same shortcuts in [FLOSS package] as in [proprietary software], so I went back to Windows"...

I'm not exactly a hardcore Excel user myself, but I'd be interested to hear how your transition to LibreOffice (I guess the most viable alternative?) will work out.

Not sure what you mean by Linking to Phone but KDE Connect is amazing!

For phone linking you can use KDE Connect (and GSConnect if you use GNOME)