[wolvesechoes]

If it comes down to FOSS/freeware stuff I am actually quite fond of Windows ecosystem.

Foobar2k, Paint.NET, Notepad++, IrfanView, WizTree, Ditto, TotalCommander, NAPS2 etc.

Linux has many options for any of those, but I always had a feeling that those options have less polish, or are less stable, or their UI is an afterthought etc. On Windows you have basically a single option for each application that most people go for, so documentation and online help is plentiful.

[kakacik]

> Foobar2k, Notepad++, IrfanView, TotalCommander

Without those, especially last one my productivity at my corporate work would be half at most. Editing a file in an archive within another archive directly, doing quick file comparisons of 2 files, syncing different dirs, fulltext recursive search... all with much better UI than Unix console counterparts (which I use too). And much more.

Simply the best tools on the whole market for me in given category, period.

[wolvesechoes]

I forgot about 7zip as well.

There is something magical about those specialized, no nonsense tools using WINAPI, not chasing cross-platform, and maintained for decades, some of them since 90s. Snappiness, intuitiveness, stability, discoverability etc.

[anthk]

MPD, Krita, Vim/Emacs/Scite,NSxiv with scripts, any diff tool since the 90's, any file manager since Midnight Commander and so on...

Less stable? MPD supported damn state supported popular science radio streaming channels in Spain like nothing...

Also vidir, entr and jimtcl/awk scripts p0wn your setup any time... I can just remote-mount FS's anywhere and use any local tools as if they where there. I can just spawn builds on directory changes and spawn an editor with a REPL in miliseconds. GUI? Everything it's composable. I can use a mega-complete GUI for MPD that makes Foobar2k blush. I can output audio to an streaming socket (or to plain Icecast) from MPD and plug any audio FX' and whatnot with MPD plugins.

I can push the whole graphical environment down and I could keep playing my music and control the whole music daemon from my phone. Add songs, add radio stream, play/skip, volume up and down... from my damn bathroom.

And OFC I can still code under VTY's and even read PDF's/CBZ's/EPUB's and even watch videos play any game or emulator which uses SDL (a ton of source ports, emulators like mednafen, Doom/Quake ports, Scummvm, DOSBox, PCSXR, PPSPPP)...

That without touching a mouse or switching between GUI's. No RSI, no headaches, no remote GUI tools to mount any crap requiring thousands of click and hurting your wrists and forearms. Everything it's under a directory and managed as it if were part of my hard disk filesystem.

I can edit directory listings with my text editor with the vidir tool, they will show up as a text file. You delete a range of lines, these files are gone. I can search and rename files at crazy speeds and, well, I can spawn any tool with find and iomenu and have a quick search for a file. File managers? Forget it, you keep typing and the fuzzy-finding tool with match the file in milseconds and open the registered tool for that extensions. And this is done with tools that could probably run in the 80's and early 90's. Go figure, I'm computing as if it was in 2040 but with 'prehistoric' tools.

Ah, don't forget that most CLI and TUI tools are scriptable... so you can just forget of even using a computer, 90% of the tasks can complete themselves via cron, the time scheduler under Unix.

[wolvesechoes]

I am not sure why you've put so much effort, but thank you for confirming my views on Linux people.

[anthk]

Is not about Linux, I don't use that Unix branch. I don't click neither on menues nor buttons. It's about usability and automation, something utterly lacking under Windows. Once you can use any remote or local filesystem seamlessly with your own scripts spawning at events, you are 90% done.

[mafuy]

I've switched all my machines to linux in the past couple years.

I say with confidence that you will never be able to do file operations as quickly in a terminal as you could in a good GUI, like the Explorer from Windows 2000.