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.

  • Naich@kbin.social
    192·
    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
      161·
      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
        21·
        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
          4·
          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.