I try very hard not to come off as a Linux zealot. I do recognize that it has a lot of flaws and functionality yet to be implemented. However, in my opinion its positive sides far outweighs its negatives, and that’s why I use it as my primary system.

But it’s not the only platform I use. While I don’t have any dedicated Windows boxes anymore, I still have at least one dual boot system for those applications or games that I want to use - just not every day. Right now I even have an iMac that I use every now and then (I do not own it, however).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewtopia/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Whenever I use those systems, there are some things that make me think “Why doesn’t Linux have this?”. Things like Time Machine, for example. But more times than not, I get extremely irritated over tiny things that Linux does, but the other platforms don’t.

Contained within this post is a short list of little Linux things that I miss whenever I’m not using Linux. I’m not going to include big things like being able to install software from repositories, or anything like that. Just the tiny things that I can’t stand not being able to use.

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Every now and then I get really, really tired of Linux. The last thing that almost drove me to the point of insanity was when every single browser was crashing every few minutes, but it’s also known for not recognizing usb hard drives, having buggy sound, not being able to connect to certain wireless networks, having software with completely unmeetable dependencies, and having file managers and desktop environments that won’t start and won’t give any error messages (if you’ve never experienced one or more of these issues, you are lying).

However, once you’ve spent a few days trying to install pretty much any version of Windows, you quickly realize how lucky you are that you’ve found Linux, because there’s nothing as frustrating and annoying as having to reinstall Windows if you don’t have the drivers that came with your computer.

This is the story of how my brother’s laptop stopped working, and how I eventually fixed it.

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