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....

installing programs. there's been random programs I've needed to download for school and I've sometimes spent hours running into random errors, having to find out what library or dependency I'm missing, etc. I miss being able to just click on an .exe and that's it.

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.

Seamless adaption to higher DPI when I work remotely on my work Windows machine. The RDP clients will just expand the desktop and everything is very small when I WFH. mstsc will change the size of everything but legacy apps according to the DPI of the display.

Printing and scanning. I only print like one thing every couple months and scan things every 6 months, but a backlog is growing. My printer is over 10 years old but it worked well on Windows. Despite their site saying it supports Linux I just can't get it to print or acknowledge any data is being sent. I'm contemplating a newer printer since deals are going on right now.

Update: Woooo! After a few weeks of fiddling with the install scripts and CUPS config I got something to print via Linux! That being said I'm upgrading, not giving up, to a new EcoTank printer.

It's been so long since I used windows at home. I switched in 2009.

I use it at work, so I would say RDP is probably my favorite feature I would miss at home. But for the most part I use ssh anyways.

Fair number of FPS games refuses to work. Apex recently just did that. Other than that, none. Really happy my personal setup works so well.

I miss not having to worry about whether any app or game would be easy to install and work flawlessly.

edit. also printing in general, situation is so dire that I just send whatever I want to print to my phone and print it from there these days.

I'm about to switch from Windows back to Ubuntu, which I ran for a year or two but I missed Photoshop and Visual Studio. I've been using VSCode for dev work for a while and it's fine, and I can live with Gimp. I haven't used Office in years (Google docs & sheets are great). So I really don't expect to miss anything this time.

Windows' lightweight photo editing thing. Great for highlighting screenshots.

All image editing software on linux (that I've tried) is 10x more clunky.

Wallpaper Engine. Advantages Linux provides mostly are better than Windows, but man I miss clicking a few times and having an animated wallpaper working.

Really good image noise reduction software.

That's pretty much the only thing I miss, and I don't miss it enough to suffer through Windows

Support for auto cloud sync from vendors, or just auto cloud sync of setting between devices.

DE stability. I keep a Mac around for times when Gnome is kind of broken.

cmd shortcuts which don’t interfere with app shortcuts.

Powerful desktop Arm chips.

Gui to manage services.

Gui to manage firewall.

Easy fleet management tools.

A real terminal services and Remote Desktop solution.

Desktop icons.

Tighter userland security.

Tighter OS security. Mostly dm-verify and fs-verify.

Tiling support. (There are extensions, but I need to experiment.)

Not having to recompile out of tree kernel modules after a kernel upgrade.

Base and extras being cleanly separated.

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 🤢

I miss the human connection with those around me who use windows. After years of using Linux almost exclusively, I now miss being able to relate to them. Sometimes I feel lonely because of it.

Colleagues get to resonate with all the windows slowness and reliability issues, and I can only stay silent.

"Hey, how can I do this obscure thing?" "Oh yes that's easy... err... no, I don't know." So many methods that are easy on Linux are basically impractical on windows. E.g. many text file processing tasks are doable swiftly with simple shell scripts or even bash one-liners; what will a windows user do? Telling them to automate something means suggesting them to create a new Java project. Opening an SSH session means using Mobaxterm which limits the number of sessions you can create.

Being able to play League of Legends. We could until few months ago.

Shared memory is basically using your normal RAM as swapspace for your GPU.

Being able to operate without a keyboard. Perfect for home theatre pc

Some of my steam games dont run, and theres some files I cant run in Davinci Resolve. So probably just those

I do like that splash screen on Windows before login, where it shows me a different beautiful landscape each day.

I don't miss anything really. All of my software already worked.

Coherent theming, although you've hardly had that since Windows 98.

I've applied themes to make Xaw, Qt, and GTK software more Motif-like, but the GTK ones seem spotty and the Qt theme doesn't work for Qt6, and fonts are inconsistent.

to edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT all night long

I'd say a Control Panel, I miss the plethora of authoritive knowledge and settings for every program, device, driver, network, user, and a dozen more things besides, all findable by browsing and not remembering dozens of commands. Of course I'd miss that either way, because Control Panel has been gutted every new version of windows since XP, but it was once nice.

The Start menu context menu, or SUPER+X, is still nice, although mostly for avoiding poor UI choices and slow menus. The fact that many useful options are guaranteed to be there on every windows machine is nice though.

And I would also say Event Viewer, despite how incredibly clunky it is to use. Having one place to check all system logs and track crashes of all kinds was quite useful.

Basically, windows at one point went out of it's way to centralize settings and info, and that's just not possible in Linux without a lot of setup.

I miss RDP.
Preinstalled in every Windows, just allow access on the host with one click, open it, type in the IP of the remote host, and it's like you're on that pc. Sound, mic, camera, other devices, multiple screens, ... It generally just works.

On Linux with Wayland, I don't even know how or if it works, or how to set it up on the host machine.

Edit: OK, it isn't that difficult, actually:
https://std.rocks/gnulinux_rdp_remotedesktop.html#Windows

Being able to sync music or movies to my iPhone/iPad. More of an Apple issue than Linux, yet Mac/PC is compatible.

VLC does work, but since it’s not how Apple wants you to use your device it’s not as convincing nor flushed out.

Hardware info (hwinfo) or similar. Be able to check all voltages, speed and temps while testing new hardware. For example my ARC A770 has little to no info, and shows running at pcie x1.

Edit: mistakingly thought link width was x4, but looking at it again shows x1