1y ago

What can you do on Linux that you can't do on Windows?

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

Adobe
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.
Games ( a big one although steam is helping bridge the gap)
Many torrented apps, most of these are Windows specific and thus I won't have any luck installing them on Linux.
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?

I have applications which launch from terminal eg: vlc would open vlc (no questions asked, no other stuff needed, just type vlc)
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.
I can basically automate most of my tasks and it has a good integration with my apps.
I can create desktop launchers.
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.
Create custom panel plugin.

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.

326 comments

I like Linux better
All the other reasons don't really matter.
- Yeah, I need new friends, I am gonna replace my best friend with you.
  
  Friends shouldn't be platform exclusive.

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
- [ $[ $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.
  
  [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
- 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.
  
  But can you call it Windows if there are no windows?
  
  So you have to completely reinstall Windows if you want to get rid of the GUI on an existing system?
  On Linux just edit a file & reboot…
  
  Interesting, I don't know much about current windows, so this did not cross my mind. But you have to install a separate OS for this and can't just decide to stop your display manager I guess? So playing games and running without GUI would require to different installations?
- 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.
  
  Knowing that it originates from bcache probably helps to prevent this confusion.

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.

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
- You've hit all the critical ones.
  Headless may be the biggest one for me. I run multiple VMs in the cloud on tiny servers entirely without GUI bloat. I can, and do, automate anything that I do more than a couple of times, which I can do because there are decent command line interfaces for most things.
  With Linux, it's possible to replace every component except the kernel - for example, Chimera Linux even replaces the GNU tools with FreeBSD ones. A wide variety of filesystems, init systems, window managers, display managers (well, two) - and nearly everything is free.
  Which is another thing that is impossible on Windows, that you can do on Linux: use this enormous library of software, legally and without piracy, for free.
  
  You can also replace the kernel though.
- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
  
  okay but all that “technically possible but nobody has written the software yet” is incredibly unhelpful
  it’s technically possible to run every windows app perfectly in WINE but nobody has implemented a bunch of the APIs without bugs yet
  
  Even if you can use an alternative file explorer you can't uninstall the native one, so that's not really replaceable. And even if you could there's the DE and the backend for graphics that I mentioned which you most definitely can't. The fact that people realise that being able to choose a web browser is a good thing but never consider the same of other parts of the system is truly amazing to me.
  That's cool, didn't knew that was possible,bI guess then that the file formation thing should be moved to the possible but so difficult might as well be impossible category.
  Even if the windows store did the same, it's a closed garden, so you can only update stuff Microsoft has approved, whereas anyone can spawn their own repo of packages for any of the many package managers out there. To give an example I would consider Android to NOT have this ability I described for Linux (at least not to the same extent), because system and apps updates are separated and because the play store is a walled garden that Google controls, and the moment you add F-droid or other alternatives you now have multiple steps to update everything. I agree that Flatpaks and the like are shifting this, but it's not hard to imagine a package manager that can natively handle those as well just like apt can handle both binary and source packages.
  You're missing the point of being able to fix the system, it's not about what you are likely to do, is about what you can or can't do. I agree with you that you're not likely to do it, and you seem a lot more knowledgeable than me on Windows so I believe that everything you said there is true, but the fact that you're stopped at the source code on Windows is exactly my point. I saw this a lot when playing around with game engines, Unity's bugs were annoying and all you could do was report them and wait, on Unreal and Godot you could hop in and find the issue in the code and get a better understanding and possibly fix it, just because the average game programmer won't do it doesn't mean it's not possible.
  I know tiling window managers exist for Windows, but in my experience they're all shit and miss things and are not as well integrated with other stuff such as virtual desktops which is essential. Which is why I put it on the possible but difficult category.
  But they're not flexible enough, afaik (and you seem to know more so please correct me if I'm wrong) you can't move virtual desktops from one monitor to another or choose whether each monitor should have their own set, or even choose whether you switch virtual desktops on only one or all monitors at a time. Which is why I specified as "that actually work" because the ones that exist work in only one way, so if you're okay with that great but if not it's the same as not having them.
  Last I used KDE that was the default behaviour, and I'm pretty sure that's easily configured on the shortcuts section of the system settings app. On the other hand to change these on windows you need to fiddle with regedit and some shortcuts are simply hardcoded so are impossible to change.
- You didn't mention the ability to mount different drives and partitions to different directories. For example, I always keep /home on a different partition so I can reinstall my OS without worrying about data loss. You also can use tools like LVM to combine volumes into a single storage volume. Have a lot of games and want to install them all to one place? You can set up multiple large drives to act as a single volume. I guess you can do this with RAID utilities or something in Windows, but it's really not the same.
  
  NTFS has supported mounting drives to folders for decades. The Windows LVM equivalent would be LDM (which powers the deprecated Dynamic Disks), or Storage Spaces.
- What's wrong with Virtual Desktops on windows? They work perfectly for me.
  No argument with your other points.
  
  I answered that in another comment:
  But they're not flexible enough, afaik (and you seem to know more so please correct me if I'm wrong) you can't move virtual desktops from one monitor to another or choose whether each monitor should have their own set, or even choose whether you switch virtual desktops on only one or all monitors at a time. Which is why I specified as "that actually work" because the ones that exist work in only one way, so if you're okay with that great but if not it's the same as not having them.

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

Personally I don't care so much about the things that Linux does better but rather the abusive things it doesn't do. No ads, surveillance, forced updates etc. And it's not that linux happens to not do that stuff. It's that the decentralized nature of free software acts as a preventative measure against those malicious practices. On the other side, your best interests always conflict with those of a multi-billion company, practically guaranteeing that the software doesn't behave as you. So windows are as unlikely to become better in this regard as linux is to become worse.
Also the ability to build things from the ground up. If you want to customize windows you're always trying to replace or override or remove stuff. Good luck figuring out if you have left something in the background adding overhead at best and conflicting with what you actually want to use at worst. This isn't just some hypothetical. For example I've had windows make an HDD-era PC completely unusable because a background telemetry process would 100% the C: drive. It was a nightmarish experience to debug and fix this because even opening the task manager wouldn't work most of the time.
Having gotten the important stuff out of the way, I will add that even for stuff that you technically can do on both platforms, it is worth considering if they are equally likely to foster thriving communities. Sure I can replace the windows shell, but am I really given options of the same quality and longevity as the most popular linux shells? When a proprietary windows component takes an ugly turn is it as likely that someone will develop an alternative if it means they have to build it from the ground up, compared to the linux world where you would start by forking an existing project, eg how people who didn't like gnome 3 forked gnome 2? The situation is nuanced and answers like "there exists a way to do X on Y" or "it is technically possible for someone to solve this" don't fully cover it.

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.
- about the full system config: how?
  
  I think they are using nixOS
- How do you do this and on what distro? I truly need to know.
  
  Probably referring to NixOS.
  Arch apparently can do this too. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall
  If you want to learn Ansible, you can get a similar experience with most distros.
  
  Haaaave you met Ted, er, Ansible?

Open a link in any browser i like. Say "no" to updates. Have a main menu that doesn't look like a kiosk at the mall. Have my habits on my computer kept to myself. Install applications from outside an application store. Not need an antivirus software.
- Install applications from outside an application store
  Ofc that’s possible in windows
- The fact that it's not even possible to disable the antivirus on windows 10/11 is infuriating. So much lost CPU for no reason.
  
  IMHO, anti-virus on windows is actually important. Yes, it takes up a lot of CPU, but there are so many viruses that target windows.
  
  Huh? You can absolutely disable defender. What are you talking about?
  
  You can, but you may need to edit some registers to avoid windows reseting them.

Not be spied on by microsoft
- I get the sneaking suspicion that this is the kind of response OP mean by "biased answers," but it's also just true. Some distros will harvest data, but it's much easier to avoid than with Windows

Use a system that's not a personalized ad billboard

Be the only user that can run code as root.
Microsoft and their "trusted partners" do not deserve closer access to my hardware than I have.

Docker! I have never experienced a more unpleasant software than Docker for Windows.
- I think I read somewhere a while ago that Docker is only really "native" on Linux, because on Mac and Windows it spawns some internal virtual machine or something like that. Not sure if i remember it correctly but that would probably be a reason for worse performance i guess.
  
  There is a native windows docker as well, where you can run windows containers inside it. But no one uses it, everyone just wants to use the linux containers which require a linux kernel and thus virtualisation on windows. Performance should not be worst on it though, but the layer of a VM added to it adds a layer of jank to make it appear to work like the native linux version (ie mounting host folders need to be mounted on the VM first before they can appear in docker, and while that is mostly transparent it can cause a few issues with some things).
- Do you not use it with WSL?? I've found the experience is almost identical to linux.
  
  Funny that you ask, WSL was what made me switch to Linux. I previously used Hyper-V because that was what was available back then and it was a nightmare. Slow to start, slow to run and constantly needing a reset after a reboot because "something happened™".
  I switched to WSL when it was new and it was much better than Hyper-V but it had major issues with volumes back then. Performance was abysmal when mounting a volume on a Windows drive and when using the WSL filesystem you had the reverse issue under Windows with your IDE and git.
  There were also two big issues with reproducibility on Windows (both with Hyper-V and WSL), namely:
  Line endings changing to /r/n, breaking all shell scripts with it
  File permissions changing to 777, breaking many applications with it
  Line endings changing happened a lot because git on Windows defaults to changing line endings on pull and/or if someone on your team commits a file opened by an IDE on Windows it will change the line endings a lot of times as well.
  In the end I spent so much time inside of WSL that I started wondering why I was running Windows in the first place and just switched over. Proton played a big part as well but Docker was the main point.
- Don't try Podman on a Mac... it's not pretty.
- So you haven't used Microsoft Teams then?
  
  When Teams doesn't work I restart it and try again. When Docker doesn't work I spend an hour debugging why my pipeline fails only to realize Docker for Windows messed up my permissions.
  Not to say Teams is good, Teams is pretty horrible as well.
- wait, you can run .exe files using docker? while being on linux?
  
  I don't think that's what the person you're replying to meant, but to answer your question, yes you can via Wine (or Proton, I guess)

Haha it's very easy now: I have an os with no adds.
I am the one telling the os when it updates or not and when it reboots or not.
I have a working terminal so I don't need dozens of shady softwares to do basic stuff like transferring a file on a local network.
And the biggest ones: I can disable my firewall and no defender will erase files from my computer without my consent.
Video games work surprisingly well today. Recent ones at least.
- Yay for all of that except the games. :)
  
  Which? I have like 3 that don't work (yet?)

Update the OS and all installed applications using a single command.
- Also, none of this "stop what you're doing, Microsoft is doing updates now" bullshit.
  
  Just the other day I woke up my windows laptop, but instead of the lock screen I get several minutes worth of confirmations and check boxes after a surprise update. All of these screens were asking me in various ways to send all of my data to Microsoft and tie up my entire machine in their data harvesting and ad platforms.
- Snap and flatpak would like to disagree.
  
  Add to bashrc “alias update=’sudo flatpak update && sudo apt full-upgrade’ “ linux best
  
  What you would install from flatpak and why
  
  sudo flatpak update -y && sudo dnf update -y
  
  Topgrade would like to disagree with Snap and Flatpak disagreeing.

Have an actual sane developer experience? There is a reason why almost every developer that uses Windows actually uses WSL.
- Yup, that's my coworkers as well. Constantly complaining about how shit windows is, already developing in docker on wsl anyway, but they never want to switch to anything that would solve all their complaints.

Connect a printer and have it just work.
- My printer doesn't work. Though tbf it doesn't work on windows either.
- Bought a Brother printer. Opened up "printers" on Windows 11, it picked up my printer wirelessly, I clicked "add" and it was done.
  No garbage software or anything.
  So printers definitely do just work on Windows.
  
  I think its a brother thing. Brother printers also work automatically on linux (fedora at least)
  
  I plugged my Linux Mint computer into my main home network for the first time and it immediately detected and installed my wifi Brother laser printer. I didn't even need to click anything.
  On my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed computer I just had to tell it to look for the printer and it did the whole setup flawlessly.
  I have several Windows PCs and I'm forever trying to persuade them to reconnect to the printer. They fail to find it, fail to print, give incorrect status reports, create duplicates of it, and so on. Linux has been amazingly unproblematic by comparison.
  
  Same with my printer.
  On Linux, I had to configure CUPS. This meant finding out which of the 30+ different drivers for my printer model actually worked. Then it meant determining which of the dozen or so different "devices" would actually work. And until I got it working correctly, it randomly crashed.
  There are plenty of things Linux is better at but it isn't that great at handling standard devices with any ease. I'm sure that I can do a lot more now with the Linux driver, but sometimes I just want to tell my computer that's my printer and I just want this printed.
  
  My shiny new printer will not work with windows. The drivers a pain in the ass. Even if it did, the drivers are bloatware.
  With linux there is no garbage drivers and scanning. Copying and printing just work. With native dialogs no less.
  
  It's funny, printers used to be a huge pain in the ass on Linux, and some probably still are. But I got a low end Brother about a year ago. Had been using MacOS because I was trying to move away from Android, and buy into the whole ecosystem. Now that that experiment is thankfully over, I installed Fedora on a new laptop. Wouldn't you know it, it automatically found my printer on the network without me even asking it to, and selected the correct drivers straight away.
  But printing can be a pain on every OS, it's very dependent on the printer.
- Wrong
  My printer "just works"
  On all computers and phones in my home
- Same but with scanners. Plugged in a canon protable scanner, which requires their software to work on windows while it just works on linux. The cherry on top was that when I then had to make a single pdf of the things i scanned, I just ran pdfunite file1.pdf file2.pdf ... output.pdf and guess what... it also just worked.

It's easier to run C/C++ compiler (GCC) on GNU/Linux
- 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.
  
  Lmao my university also uses centos 7 for their ancient-ass SSH server. Even the professors just told us to use a VM because they didn’t want to use an old version of clang anymore.
  
  First time i saw that i went mad, why the fuck i need to download 6gb to compile a cpp module, on linux gcc is only a few mb.
  
  Yeah gcc and mingw took ages back when I learned cpp a few years ago. This was back in high school when I barely knew what Linux was, so it never occurred to me that I could do that. Eventually gave up on setting it up in VScode and used codeblocks and spent the semester dealing with that GUI.
  
  Cygwin is great too! You can have a fully POSIX-compliant environment on Windows, no virtualization or anything needed. You can even distribute programs to other Windows users linked to their POSIX compatibility layer library.

Feel Free and secure with privacy
- this is a big one too. I love the feel of using FOSS software!

Most if not all of these seem very easily done on windows. You can create scripts as you like and set up environment variables like vlc. Control of updates I’m not so sure about, I haven’t messed with it I just let it auto update.
- If you own a Windows 10/11 Pro version, you can set a group policy for control of updates. If you own a Home edition, you need to change a Registry entry. It's not hard, but just as you I like Auto update more because I tend to forget to manually update
  
  And if you like, you can skip and even disable Windows Update completely, and use a PowerShell script to download updates manually and install them whenever you like. This is a good option if you don't trust Microsoft and decide to block all their IPs via a hosts file or a firewall or something, so you could download the updates from a trustworthy computer (like a Linux machine) and install the updates offline.
- The joy of creating powershell or cmd scripts. I'd rather do everything by hand. I get so irrationally angry whenever I have to even look at a script on windows.
  
  You may be more used to bash, but after having tinkered with both and converted some scripts from one to the other, I arrived to the conclusion that both are bad.
  
  I've been geeking about since the 80s. BASIC on an Atari, msdos, windows, vax, *bsd, Linux. Done a ton of scripting in a bunch of languages.
  Right now, I prefer powershell above anything else. But, honestly it's all personal preference.
- The procedure to create shortcuts, as an example, is rather convoluted. I originally looked this up because I was 90% sure that you could just use New-Item and it'd just work.
  The problem is that even if you install things with a package manager like Chocolatey and do not hunt for installer wizards on the Internet (the default Windows way to install software), applications don't commonly add themselves to the PATH and it's just a pain to get it working.
  
  scoop manages the whole PATH problem when installing apps. Winget on the other hand installs with the app's installer if I'm not mistaken, thus should also have no problems with that.
  
  Yeah, some of it may not be as easy on Linux, but I think the question was just if it’s possible or not

Modify the software.

adjust the drift speed of a thinkpad trackpoint
stream audio from one computer to another one (or a phone) with ease (thanks pulseaudio)
- btw 1 is literally impossible, there's no gui driver setting, there's no regedit switch, no nothing. on linux you just need to write to this file /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/drift_time
- I had this bug (feature) where when I was hosting, pulse would stream the music I was listening to to other players in Deep Rock Galactic. I had no idea it was happening until some one asked me what mod I was using. It apparently wasn't the best quality so I 'fixed' it.

Install software updates when you want, and not lose half the day while they install.

Have a really good keyboard-driven desktop environment.
Many good options for tiling desktop environments.
Extremely good logging, enabling you to diagnose most problems.
package manager-first approach: I don't want to manage package installations, routine updates, and dependency resolution myself. Package managers do the work for me
extreme customizability: I choose which kernel features are turned on or off, and compile them. For example, I can compile in PS4 controller drivers
first class support for the terminal and terminal-driven workflow
Enhanced security system: being able to sandbox apps easily, for example.
Enhanced transparency into the system: can easily get into the weeds of seeing why my Internet is not working.
- With logging, one thing I deal with at an MSP is BSODs. Maybe I'm just not experienced enough, but it feels like the event logs in Windows only help if it's something obvious like a poorly written or buggy application. If it's a driver issue they just are near useless. I usually end up downloading WinDbg (which has such an archaic UI on Windows 11) and read the minidumps, and it's like a 75% chance it's helpful.
  In the meantime on *nix, yeah there's literally logs for just about everything if you look in the right places.
  
  One time, I got one that meant three different things, so it was useless. I had to debug in depth only to find out that my HDD was the problem._.

I can actually use my computer on Linux!

Use only the amount of CPU power I need, and have my stuff be top priority, rather than picking up the dregs when Windows indexing and updates and other services have a little bit of CPU to spare.
- Too true. I have a relevant point to this that I noticed yesterday.
  I run a Windows 10 VM via libvirt/kvm. All this VM does is run the OS and Microsoft teams. I need the full desktop Teams client for work, unfortunately. Everything was pretty idle and my CPU usage across all cores was at around 16%. After I shut the VM down, I was idling at about 3%. So it's using up like.. half a core to have some electron app idle. That seems ridiculous to me.
  
  That's Teams. Slack used to be a CPU hog too, but Teams is a real piece of shit. And occasionally it used to just peg one core at 100% until I killed it.
  I'm so glad I quit that company.
  
  The only computer I can even get Teams to run somewhat stably on is a Linux machine. On Windows it crashes constantly.

unlink
Specifically the operation of removing a file from a path without requiring the file to be unused. Open references to the file can still exist by processes.
- NTFS file locking is pain
- Good think. AFAIK when all programs are closed file is deleted automatically.
  
  It's not that it's deleted automatically. If you define deleting as "not being referenced by the file system," then it's deleted as soon as it's unlinked.
  Fun story - create a big file, and hold it open in an application. Unlink the file. Then compare the output of du and df for the mount point the file was on. It will differ until the app closes and the inode of the file is finally freed.

Sanely use multiple workspaces.

FYI you can use LibreOffice with a ribbon-like toolbar or better yet experimental contextual groups.

I can use my computer without it installing software I don't want (like when Windows installs candy crush) and without it advertising to me.
- without it advertising to me
  Ubuntu users cough awkwardly
- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
- The only thing Windows installs without you wanting to is Edge. Ads like Candy Crush will only be installed after installing windows for the first time, not after any updates.
  
  Lol the excuses. "Windows only ever messes up all your settings twice a year with the big updates. The rest of the time it's fine."
  How about they don't touch my shit at all?
  
  The leopards only eat the bad zoo patrons. Well, that, and every new leopard gets to eat one child, but only when we first get the leopard.
  
  Even today there’s a lot of included unwanted stuff like my people, phone link, the new unified electron awful office app, onedrive, Skype/teams, Cortana, news, meet now, 3d viewer, mixed reality portal, solitaire, onenote, sticky notes, tips, xbox stuff…
  It’s not like updates uninstall stuff either and they still have giant ad live tiles today

sudo dd if=never_gonna_give_you_up.mp3 of=/dev/sda
Say "It's a UNIX system! I know this."
Make your capslock LED blink along with network activity using a built-in kernel driver
Fix bugs yourself

Not update if I don’t want to
- https://youtu.be/jdUXfsMTv7o?si=aPzpD_44whs0Tg_P I love this guy, nice meme give it a watch
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://youtu.be/jdUXfsMTv7o?si=aPzpD_44whs0Tg_P
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- Arch linux disagree with you

If by adobe you just mean photoshop, that works fine on linux, or you can get the version of GIMP with the photoshop menus. Wider adobe, that's a vm.
MS Word, I reckon Libre's fine but YMMV, there's office 365 anyway.
Games as noted are mostly there.
Many torrented apps : If you mean the *arrs etc, they go fine, better even (more contained, safer) in docker
Android apps: We've had Waydroid for a while now.
Hopefully that puts the FOMO to rest...
- Many torrented apps : If you mean the *arrs etc, they go fine, better even (more contained, safer) in docker
  yeah FOMO was there for a lil while only, do most apps run on docker/waydroid? just asking
  I don't really care about MS Word, it would have been a good addition, but now I use Google suite (sorry libre)
  Also, thank you for your reply! it's good
  
  do most apps run on docker/waydroid? just asking
  waydroid is pretty universal as I understand it, docker needs someone to set it up / maintain it but there's a lot on offer, have a poke around Docker Hub.
- MS Word, I reckon Libre's fine but YMMV, there's office 365 anyway.
  OnlyOffice has a much better compatibility with MSO formats compared to LO. But even then, it lacks VBA support, so a better option for folks who actually need Office for work, would be to run it in a VM. Maybe use something like WinApps for seamless Linux integration.
  
  Interesting, thank you!
- I could never get waydroid to work with a maimemo app

Find my hosts file without googling where it is.
- C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc
  Its as easy to remember as everything else once youve replaced it a couple of times
- ????
  dir hosts* /s

Pass-through hardware in Docker.

In a nutshell:
Have (real) user control.
- What a great way too summarize all the garbage I was thinking to spew. This is really it. Freedom and control. Or "whatever I want it to".
- Yup. I can completely destroy my system with a single command, and that is a good thing.

Make posts and comments about how much better it is to spend a ton of effort.
- amen wo/man! I love Linux alright, but for the first few years, it's a lot of effort. You do learn stuff alright, but yeah, the effort is high.
  
  I used Windows exclusively for 10+ years, and I still have to use it at work, but for me the experience is the opposite.. Windows regularly causes issues, and it usually takes a lot of effort fixing them because it doesn't give useful error messages and due to the OS' proprietary nature. Almost every week some Teams meeting is delayed because some participant's sound is suddenly not going to their headset. Another frequent problem I have at work is that networking for the virtual machines stops working either fully or partially, and IT's solution is "just reboot your computer when that happens". Or when I upgrade my computer, and Windows refuses to authenticate despite me having a valid serial number. At least Microsoft used to have good support that you could chat with, but it seems like they've replaced that with some interactive troubleshooter app (which btw. didn't solve my issue, redirected me to a different online troubleshooter which eventually redirected me back to the first troubleshooter).
  That's not saying that I never have issues on Linux, but at least for me those are generally much easier to fix.

Desktop customization; I am using KDE Plasma, and I have two panels: one on the right, which has a "task manager", and the top panel which has an app-launcher, pager, clock, cpu load, and the system tray. I don't know if you can even have two panels in Windows.
Modularity: Switch whatever component with whatever you see fit. You can switch out the desktop environment you're using, switch out the sound server, the init system, the bootloader, etc.
You can update flatpaks using a bash script, you can even make a command to update system packages and flatpaks, by just adding alias update="sudo pacman -Syu && flatpak update" to your /.bashrc file.

ssh (out of the box)
- Client or server?
  The client should be available out of the box. The server should be available as a feature that you can toggle on.
- Windows has had SSH built in for a while now

I found something I couldn't easily do on Linux...
I wanted to create a Shortcut to a GUI application directly on my Desktop on Linux (Ubuntu 22.04), and after fucking with Gnome extensions and googling multiple terms, I thought I was going insane. There is seriously no easy, standard, or simple way of doing that.
On Windows or macOS you can just click & drag to make a shortcut to a file, and then put the shortcut on your Desktop. Done.
On Gnome you have to manually create a .desktop file, fill it with the parameters to run the application (usually by opening a different .desktop file and copying & pasting the contents), ensure you also have Gnome configured to even allow desktop icons, and then copy the .desktop file to the Desktop.
The Gnome experience was the most-rigid, least user-friendly or user-customizable interface.
I guess the problem is that I shouldn't be using Gnome. I liked how simple & clean it is by default, but I hate how inflexible it is.
- right, the real answer is that on Linux you can just use a different de if you don't like one
- Sounds like you want to use KDE.
- Desktop icons should not exist. Now that is one thing gnome gets right.
  
  Why not? If a user wants to use their computer in that way, why should they not be allowed to?
- I never liked GNOME, too inflexible as you said. My favorite is XFCE and it couldn't be easier, right click on the entry on the app menu and select add to desktop.
  And if you want a custom one, right-click on desktop, create launcher, give it a name and click browse to select the file you want to run, that's it. Create link if you want to link to a folder.
- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
  
  How do symlinks spectacularly break things? Drag and drop works just fine and creating .desktop’s are easy at least in mate

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.
Have you tried onlyoffice? Its interface is closer to ms office and an online version can even be self hosted and integrated with nextcloud or seefile.
It has apps for Linux and Android
https://www.onlyoffice.com/
Edit:
Here is the link to the standalone desktop app (not the online version): https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop.aspx
And here is the link to the supported OSes for the desktop app (incl download links): https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx
Finally, here is the link to the github repo of the desktop app: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors

Program easily and efficiently. Not having to wait 5 minutes for a window to come. Fast boot/reboot times (less than 10 minutes). Native support for many things without having to install them. Installing is usually as easy as running an apt-get command. Not having to kill update processes because they take 100% of your disk bandwidth and starve all your other apps.
Windows feels like an ugly and sloggy system with a ton of duck tapes. Only reason I use it on my gaming laptop is for games.
Linux on the other hand just works. Nothing fancy, but it's just what someone who wants efficiency needs.
- Not trying to defend windows or anything, but
  Fast boot/reboot times (less than 10 minutes)
  What? In my experience, nowadays Linux is probably still a bit faster than windows in boot times, but that's comparing 20 seconds to like 30 seconds. Nowhere near 10 minutes.
  
  They must still have an HDD as a boot device or something.
  
  Yes. My windows takes literally 10 minutes to boot. I am counting here from the moment i press the button to the moment it is usable (when I can run applications and use them). I have a HDD and each time I boot windows services are always looking to update something which starves the other apps. It's really a clog. If I want to use it faster I need to bring up the task manager and kill each update thing one by one until I killed them all.
- How old is your hardware?
  Maybe a HDD based boot drive?
  
  My laptop is about 5 or 6 years old. It's all HDD I have no SSD at all

It's simple answer, my Linux (Arch Linux) is my OS with my choice what of app I have, faster, privacy (very important), just my, not from Windows or Apple, it's my choice what I will delete, install, use, how look my desktop... And my comp is ten years old and working like new.

Compiz Fusion wiggly windows/cube

Possibly dumb question, but... can Windows pipe things? Like, can I pipe a grep to a text file, or send stdout to a text? Or, like, tee a command onto the end of a config? I don't use this a lot in Linux, but I have never done in Windows and literally don't know if it can be.
- In powershell, kinda -- but it's unpleasant. Everything is an object which you pipe between commands, but it's not a text stream so the receiving end has to explicitly understand what it's receiving.
  
  The object nature in PowerShell is pretty powerful though. Piping JSON in PowerShell is, IMO, quite nicer than having to put ~~new ~~ jq commands as very other stage of the pipe in Linux.
  edit: just noticed autocorrect changed 'jq' to 'new' in my original post.
  
  Is it just me, or is powershell fucking horrible?
  
  [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
  
  Pure FUD. Worse, it's wilfully stupid.
  Are you in the habit of picking pipeline commands at random? Do you not usually have a purpose in mind? OBVIOUSLY the receiving end has to understand what it's receiving, or what the fuck are you even doing?
  Do you believe that your text processing commands don't have to understand what they receive?
  Let's get the ports of the node container.
  Bash:
  undefined
  
  docker ps | grep node | cut -n 6 -f ' '
  Pwsh:
  undefined
  
  docker-ps | where name -eq 'node' | select ports
  First the grep command shits the bed because at some point you started a new container running a nodejs image.
  Then the cut command fails because you had a container with a space in the name, so it outputs mounts instead of ports.
  That's a non-issue with sematic tools. Semantic tools are also legible. Yeah, I can figure out what that awk command does, but it's meaningless unless I also know the shape of the data is supposed to operate on.
  You don't write "USE 2nd DATABASE; SELECT 3rd COLUMN FROM 10th ROW", do you? Why would you want to do that in a shell?
- I use bash and fish natively on Windows and it obviously works in those. You can also use nushell natively and that has piping as well.
  I'm explicitly saying natively because most people assume that I'm talking about WSL when I say I use bash on Windows. I am not, msys2 allows you to use these things natively without a VM.
- No, and it makes inter process communication a removed. You're basically forced to use a tcp or udp socket on local host.

Manage multiple windows efficiently.
Alt + click to move and resize the windows exactly the way I want. Also, throwing windows into specific virtual desktops is smooth, efficient, fast and you can use keyboard shortcuts to jump straight to the point.
If someone knows a way to do this on my windows work computer, please please please tell me. Sluggish window management under Windows is driving me nuts.
- Try FancyZones
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzones
  
  Still not powerful enough. An autohotkey-based program called bug.n is the closest to what you can get with tiling managers on Linux. But it's neither easy nor stable...
- Wundows 11 (my work's pc), has adequate window management. It's still mostly accessed by mouse (drag to the top of the screen) instead of having the keyboard power of, say, i3wm, but it has more variation than the "left half, right half, maximize, minimize" of prior Windows'.
  
  Can’t wait for the company to upgrade. In the meanwhile I’m stuck with 10.

Set one mouse to left handed and another to right handed.

Install quickly and without license hoopjumping.

Use the command line to do everything instead of using mouse clicks for everything. It's so annoying how much mousing you have to do on Windows even for stuff only admins/programmers would touch.
- PowerShell makes that a lot better these days. It's still not perfect, but a lot better.
  
  My hands hurt just thinking about typing the long-ass commands in PS.

Enjoy my workflow.
It may sound glib, but I REALLY mean it.
- It may sound glib
  I prefer KDE, but to each their own.
  
  Has anyone made a Linux dad jokes community?

The paradigm of computing pushed by Linux is just plain better. Package managers, FOSS, variety of software, terminals, contribuiting, etc... these exist in Windows/Mac but idk its like they are side stuff, not the main focus.

I think an important thing to talk about here is that Linux is not Windows. Which I know is an obvious statement, but I'll elaborate.
Most deskop/laptop users use Windows. Most deskop/laptop software is for Windows. The way that most people know how to navigate an OS is Windows-centric. Windows does what most people expect a computer to do. A lot of what your focus seems to be on is if Linux can do what Windows can. And while the answer is often yes, I don't really think it's the right question.
Do you want to use Linux? If so, use it. One of things you'll have to accept with that is that you'll lose access to some of those Windows specific pieces of software. Sure, there's wine and steam/proton and you might be able to get any given thing running. But it's not a guarantee you will be able to, or that it will continue to run. If you're really beholden to Windows software, you should probably stick with Windows. If you're willing to explore FOSS alternatives to the software you're accustomed to, even if it may not work the way you expect it to, stick around. And you should, because Linux is awesome!

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Truly Impossible

Almost impossible

Harder than what it should