Game pass

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

I'm honestly surprised that nobody has said anything about MS Office, but it's not like I expect anyone to miss the application itself, it's just that if your work requires you to interface with it, there really is no alternative to running Windows or MacOS. Microsoft's own Office Online versions of the apps do a worse job of maintaining DOC/PPT formatting consistency than the possible Russian spyware that is OnlyOffice, which also screws things up too often to be relied upon. LibreOffice is, let's be honest, a total mess (with the exception of Calc, which also isn't consistent with the current version of Excel, but can do some things that Excel no longer can do, so I appreciate it more as a complementary tool than as a replacement).

For me it’s the Mac Finder. It’s always running so (unless it crashes) there’s no delay in opening a file manager window and, more importantly, it has built in Quicklook and Miller columns. Haven’t managed to find a good-enough implementation of either of those in Linux, so I just work around it.

Desktop session restore. Shut down pc, turn back on, everything like when shut down. Or on crash, sometime even kernel panic, restart and right back to work.

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

I missed Odin 3 for a few years until I switched to Graphene and never looked back. In tried the FOSS package it didn't work for me and the documentation was beyond my skills at the time.

I miss the stupid people comradery, sometimes. People act funny when you're a normal stupid person and use Linux without the hoodie and a Matrix screen saver.

Bansi Buddy and NetZero of course!

But really it's winamp, which of course I would still use on Linux except I've become a disciple of the streaming gods.

Not something I use personally, but a super easy, #JustWorks kiosk mode.

It's the only thing I think Windows does better than Linux.

Don't get me wrong, you can turn Linux into a great kiosk device, but it takes a lot of technical labor.

In the IT space, I often need to set up a basic kiosk device for HR portals, safety training stations, etc. In Windows, this takes 5 minutes tops.

If I had the programming chops, it would be my #1 project to work on. Even if it only worked with a specific DE or distro, I would be alright with that, as long as it was as easy and quick to set up as Windows Kiosk mode.

Messages.app

I play and mod a lot of older games most of which aren't on Steam, so getting some of them running takes a bit more manual effort especially if they require a 3rd party patch to run on modern hardware.

Normally it's pretty simple like declaring some extra DLL files, But sometimes I'm jumping through hoops trying to get some old installer than hasn't been updated since 2009 to run...

I've had more success than failures though, Wine is pretty amazing imo.

GPU performance.

I miss my computer's performance being held hostage by "Active Protection" feature of Virus scanner!

@DieserTypMatthias

reboots after every update

USB support is bare bones. Always has been. Been feature requests in the core for decades.

Been on Linux since 2007, so for me it's kind of the opposite. You just get settled with your OS after a while, you're used to how it works.

For me the immediately missing features is customizability in window management. I'm not a tiling fan, but I still miss basic convenience features like middle click paste, press alt and drag windows around or press alt and right click to resize windows from whichever side is the closest to the cursor. The different way it arranges windows (Linux tries hard to make them fit in unused space whereas Windows just opens it in the middle of the screen). Another big one is if you have a window focused and try to scroll another window in the background with your mouse cursor over it, it'll still scroll the focused window even though the mouse cursor isn't on it. Focus steal prevention is non-existent so if you're typing and another window pops open, it steals your keyboard input. The search bar is like, utterly useless, so is the Microsoft Store. The start menu doesn't open instantly like it has to load it every time. When you uninstall something there's still leftover crap of it everywhere.

Thankfully when it comes to Linux apps, their open nature means the majority of them just have Windows builds anyway, and what doesn't would work in WSL. So really all I can miss is the inherent flexibility and openness Linux gives me.

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.

MusicBee for music management. Especially since I ditched Spotify and came back to local music. See, there are two things that I want from a music manager software: good playlists management and the ability to transfer such playlists to a phone or portable music player. Sadly, none of the Linux apps come close to MusicBee (and I think that I've tried almost all of them).

Some, like Strawberry, have decent playlist capabilities, but fail when I try to send my music to my phone: either it doesn't detect it (I'm talking about using the USB cable and MTP) or throws an error when transferring the files. And there are certain bugs that haven't been solved. Others, like Pragha or Gapless, cannot transfer music. Lollypop is the most acceptable one, but its playlist UX is awful, and is slow AF when syncing with my phone. So, for me, MusicBee is the only software that I truly miss from Windows.

And no, I don't want to just copy the music using the file explorer. As I've said, I rely heavily on playlists, and this method doesn't work fine for that. For the same reason I don't use Syncthing.

Foobar2000. Haven't found anything similar in terms of ui customization options, easy convert and ReplayGain operations built in.