Linux Questions

The big one for me is grep/ripgrep. I'm a dev, so there are often times I need to search the contents of files to figure out where something obscure is mentioned. This is also possible on Windows, but as with most things on Windows, it's slow.

The second mention-worthy thing is, oftentimes in conjunction with grep, is piping! It's so enjoyable for me to find the files/content, pipe it to anything (sometimes through xargs and/or tee), so that I can replace the text en-masse with sed, remove all junk files that match a certain parameter with rm, and generally automatically act upon something that I don't have to manually look for.

Although I'm a dev mainly on Windows, I've installed WSL as a compromise, and quite often find myself using its bash to perform tasks like the ones mentioned above.

• Git
• (Less so now that it's preinstalled in Windows) OpenSSH
• Using the file manager (dual pane support in dolphin, most have tabs built-in, renaming files in dolphin with large directories doesn't jump the view position around)
• tabbing out of exclusive fullscreen applications
• installing and updating most applications
• installing the OS
• using AMD, Intel Graphics (somewhat less awful if drivers actually autoinstall in Windows)
• Not getting screen tearing in games

avoiding ads

Installing softwares is much safer and easier.

Windows:

• Search app on a search engine
• Maje sure it's the legit app and not a trojan
• Download the app
• Find and run the .exe
• Going through the warning if not a Microsoft app
• Going through the wizard

Linux:

Either do something like...

"sudo dnf install (name of app)" in the terminal

Or simply click on "Install" in the software manager.

The really big one for me is installing things. Installing packages requires 0 interaction, can be easily automated, wide availability of packages, etc. On Windows, Winget sucks. It's just running the regular installers. MacOS is better since it has Homebrew, but it has some problems. Homebrew struggles to update "casks" (aka GUI apps) so you still have to rely on app's in-app updaters. MacOS's gatekeeper also is annoying about third part software. And for anything not in Homebrew, you have to install it from the web.

Programming is also easiest in Linux. MacOS is a pain sometimes. The preinstalled toolchains are outdated. Installing new ones from homebrew also requires reading through a large block of text in order to find out what manual steps you need to do.

Dev stuff for my part, and I like the aesthetic of KDE plasma or LXQT that I am using, or the efficiency of tilling window manager like sway/i3. I also know how to troubleshoot Linux but not windows, and for gaming, Cyberpunk 2077 was better on Linux with proton than windows at launch and on Castlevania Lord of shadow, I had some graphic glitches on windows that made the game unplayable that never happened on linux

Detecting and setting up printers

The main thing I notice is piping audio around from one piece of software to another.

It's braindead simple in Linux (so long as you have JACK or Pipewire setup and the software is JACK aware), but as far as I could ever figure out, it's pretty much impossible in Windows.

Managing a install

A installed system can last indefinitely when done correctly.

I find that classic gaming experience is vastly better in Linux for its lack of exclusive fullscreen windowing.

Networking