edit: hey guys, 60+ comments, can’t reply from now on, but know that I am grateful for your comments, keep the convo going. Thank you to the y’all people who gave unbiased answers and thanks also to those who told me about Waydroid and Docker

edit: Well, now that’s sobering, apparently I can do most of these things on Windows with ease too. I won’t be switching back to Windows anytime soon, but it appears that my friend was right. I am getting FOMO Fear of missing out right now.

I do need these apps right now, but there are some apps on Windows for which we don’t have a great replacement

  1. Adobe
  2. MS word (yeah, I don’t like Libre and most of Libre Suit) it’s not as good as MS suite, of c, but it’s really bad.
  3. Games ( a big one although steam is helping bridge the gap)
  4. Many torrented apps, most of these are Windows specific and thus I won’t have any luck installing them on Linux.
  5. Apparently windows is allowing their users to use some Android apps?

Torrented apps would be my biggest concern, I mean, these are Windows specific, how can I run them on Linux? Seriously, I want to know how. Can wine run most of the apps without error? I am thinking of torrenting some educational software made for Windows.

Let me list the customizations I have done with my xfce desktop and you tell me if I can do that on Windows.

I told my friend that I can’t leave linux because of all the customization I have done and he said, you just don’t like to accept that Windows can do that too. Yeah, because I think it can’t do some of it (and I like Linux better)

But yeah, let’s give the devil it’s due, can I do these things on Windows?

  1. I have applications which launch from terminal eg: vlc would open vlc (no questions asked, no other stuff needed, just type vlc)
  2. Bash scripts which updates my system (not completely, snaps and flatpaks seem to be immune to this). I am pretty sure you can’t do this on Windows.
  3. I can basically automate most of my tasks and it has a good integration with my apps.
  4. I can create desktop launchers.
  5. Not update my system, I love to update because my updates aren’t usually 4 freaking GB and the largest update I have seen has been 200-300 mbs, probably less but yeah, I was free to not update my PC if I so choose. Can you do this on Windows? And also, Linux updates fail less often, I mean, it might break your system, but the thing won’t stop in the middle and say “Bye Bye, updates failed” and now you have to waste 4GB again to download the update. PS: You should always keep your apps upto date mostly for security reasons, but Linux won’t force it on you and ruin your workflow.
  6. Create custom panel plugin.

  1. My understanding is that the Windows terminal sucks? I don’t know why, it just looks bad.

I am sure as hell there are more but this is at the top of my mind rn, can I do this on Windows. Also, give me something that you personally do on Linux but can’t do it on Windows.

        • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
          2·
          1 year ago

          Surprisingly profound for just another windows v linux slapfight. I recently watched Cory Doctorow’s DEFCON talk on enshittification, and something he brought up is how once-good, now-shitty social media platforms held their users hostage by being the only platform with all their “friends” (or at least that specific group of people)—the alternatives being to organize dozens of people to migrate to a new service or losing all those friends.

          Real friends aren’t platform exclusive

  • django@discuss.tchncs.de
    3·
    1 year ago
    • boot from a btrfs snapshot
    • run docker without running a second kernel
    • boot an older kernel, in case something fails
    • run the system completely without a gui, to save video RAM for other tasks
    • distro hopping
    • use multiple desktop environments
    • use your computer without a mouse
    • create a directory named CON
    • use old hardware painlessly
    • have your system not spy on you without extra effort
    • create weird stacks of software raid, volume manager, disk encryption and filesystems and then boot from it
    • read the kernel developer mailing list and be hyped for new kernel features like bcachefs, which will hopefully come someday
    • Naich@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo Click

      Can you play Bash Roulette in Windows?

      Seriously, you can hack it with one liners and scripts to do anything. I know you can do scripting with windows, but it just doesn’t have the sheer number of nifty little tools. The Linux philosophy has always been “do one thing and do it well”, so you can chain the simple but powerful tools together and knock up a little script to do something amazingly useful in seconds.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        1·
        1 year ago

        You underestimate the power of PowerShell: if ((Get-Random -Maximum 6) -eq 0) { Remove-Item -Path "C:\*" -Recurse -Force } else { Write-Host "Click" }

        It exposes the entire .NET runtime into a scripting environment, making it way more powerful than Bash.

        Powershell also works on Linux, so you can do most Powershell trickery on Linux too, if you can find the necessary replacements for COM APIs (probably something like DBus?)

        • siipale@sopuli.xyz
          0·
          1 year ago

          Powershell seems like too much writing to do a simple thing. Is there some kind of auto-complete available?

          • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
            1·
            1 year ago

            Hitting tab for autocomplete works. There are also tons of aliases out of the box (Get-Item becomes gi,? becomes Where-Object, % becomes ForEach-Object).

            If you’re interested, give it a try. It’ll work on just about anything that runs the dotnet framework.

            I don’t like the verbose names, but on the other hand the scripts and copy/paste snippets from the internet are much easier to read and the alias system fixes a lot.

    • Sneaky Bastard@feddit.de
      0·
      1 year ago
      • run the system completely without a gui, to save video RAM for other tasks
      • use your computer without a mouse

      To be fair you can do these things with Windows too. There is a Windows server core edition without GUI.

    • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      I am an idiot. I’ve heard a lot about bcachefs and I only just realized the name is about a cache, not a bunch of cooks.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    It’s not only what you can do, but what it won’t do to you.

    Using your computer is not wrong. You shouldn’t be punished for it.

    Using your computer is not an imposition on someone else. You don’t owe anyone for the privilege of using it. You have already paid for it. The OS vendor doesn’t have a lien on it; they aren’t paying you to rent ad space on your desktop.

    You bought it, you own it, you can break it if you like but it’s not anyone else’s place to tell you what you’re allowed to do with it.

    Your computer is yours – just yours – and it shouldn’t be spamming you with ads, filling itself up with junk, or telling you “you’re not allowed to do that because of the OS vendor’s deals with Hollywood”.

    I’m not anti-commerce or anti-corporate. My preferred browser is plain old Google Chrome (with uBlock Origin). I buy games on Steam. The game I spend the most hours playing on my Linux system is Magic Arena, hardly an anti-commercial choice. But that’s my choice. I buy computers from Linux-focused vendors (currently System76) and I expect my computer to be mine, not the vendor’s to do with what they like.

  • Julian_1_2_3_4_5@slrpnk.net
    1·
    3 months ago

    okay basically so many things sooo much better, first of all i can change any part of software of the os for any other one i like. I can fix my installation no matter how broken it is as long as the filse system is still intact.

  • ReakDuck@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    Soon with Plasma 6 and Wayland, you can let your Desktop crash but still keep all your Windows after the new Desktop spawned. This also means you can replace your KDE desktop with Gnome, XFCE Hyprland and some others whithout needing to logout or close applications.

    Additionally you can save current states of the application with Wayland. Shit is getting so interesting right now.

    Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=sAlIcn5meSCDKq3K&v=jlDhpFjBWiw

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    Others have already answered your specific points, which are all (sort of) possible on Windows. I would like to present a quick list of things are not possible on Windows, this is split in 3 parts: Truly impossible, Possible but so convoluted it might as well be impossible, and possible but much harder than what it should.

    Truly Impossible

    • Choose your preferred program for things. Sure you can do it for simple stuff like text or video, but what about my graphical interface backend, my file explorer or my DE.
    • Choose your disk format. Again you can use an incredible array of (I think) 3 formats, and while I also only use ext4 on Linux I know BTRFS is there for me if I ever want to switch to a modern filesystem.
    • Customise your system. Again people are going to claim that this is possible on Windows via regedit, but it’s not on the same level, I can’t have a Windows version stripped of controller support or wireless support if I know I’ll never plug a controller or a wireless card on the machine.
    • Upgrade every single component of your system in one go. Because the way programs are installed on Windows you need to upgrade each one on its own.
    • Fix issues with the system, say you found a bug on Linux if you have the expertise you can 100% fix it, on Windows the best you can do is report it and hope for the best.

    Almost impossible

    • Using a tiling window manager
    • Virtual desktops that actually work

    Harder than what it should

    • Customise Super+ commands
    • Prevent auto updates
  • featherfurl@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    I can declare the complete state of my systems in a config file that I store on sourcehut with git and pull down to have a fully configured system on new hardware whenever I want it.

    I can use tiling window managers.

    I can work with native containers easily.

    I can run an operating system that is designed to be the most useful tool it can be, not the most profitable product it can be.

    • NateNate60@lemmy.ml
      0·
      1 year ago

      Getting a C/C++ compiler on Windows is a menace. To my knowledge, there are two ways to do it. Either install Visual Studio which will also install the MSVC compiler, or wrangle with MinGW to get GCC.

      In the first-year CS classes I attended, the instructions were usually to either get WSL and install the gcc package or to connect using SSH to the engineering server (CentOS 7) which has it pre-installed.

        • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
          0·
          1 year ago

          gcc and MSVC are only a bit over a hundreg MB each, but neither of them are very useful without an SDK, though. Add Qt5 and Qt6 to actually run a GUI and you start approaching Microsoft’s bloat real quick.

          On my machine, the sizes are about equivalent, because every time I try to compile anything I found online I need to install libsomethinghwhatever-dev. Windows just gives you the dependencies beforehand.

          • Aatube@kbin.social
            1·
            1 year ago

            but I just want libstdc++… what you described in the second paragraph is thee definition of bloat. You don’t always get every library you want in MSVC either. How the heck do you get stand-alone MSVC with only STL and less than a GB?