I see this contradiction all the time. Windows is a mess but there are lots of examples of rock solid, performant applications that have been developed and maintained over decades. Everything is one, also one that springs to mind which is much more performant compared to Linux alternatives is WinMerge.
If I install Ubuntu 25.10, I can't get camera effects (blurred background and so on) to work in Meet because hardware compositing (or something, I'm not entirely clear on the details[0][1]) doesn't work properly on the open Nvidia driver on Wayland. Wait I thought this was all supposed to be the future?
Ratpoison was always my favourite tiling window manager. There's also a fork called sdorfehs[0] which seems to still be maintained and has a bunch of minor improvements here and there.
Slightly off-topic, but a little while back someone shared an article with a screenshot of a lot of famous developers desktops including Kernighan, Ritchie, Pike, Rasmus Lerdorf and a load of others (they are just the ones that come to mind). One of things I remember was the use of Windows for some historical Unix person and also one of them liking non-monospaced fonts. Can anyone find this link? Thanks in advance!
Fails to mention my favourite text editor, Sublime Text which has an optional Vim mode built in (Vintage). I personally am using NeoVintageous[0] which allows you to run various ex commands and shell commands, as well as incorporating features from popular plugins such as vim-surround.
Sublime is excellent precisely because it has such excellent non-modal hotkeys out of the box.
I swear, I spent over a year training vim. I still wasn't as quick as I was after a week of sublime. It's pretty much the only proprietary software I shill for.
I also find Sublime Text to have the most well-designed non-Vim keybindings I’ve used. Having used Vim for a decade before trying Sublime, I initially underestimated how well it works even without a Vim plugin.
Two of my favorite tricks: (i) Search in file (Cmd-F), turn on regex mode if it’s not already on (Cmd-Opt-R), search for a pattern (with regex syntax highlighting!), and press Opt-Enter. This places one cursor / selection at every regexp match.(ii) Press Cmd-R to get a list of classes/functions in the file, and navigate with arrow keys (or type to search). Performs roughly the same function as I used code folding for in Vim or imenu for in Emacs. (Sublime also has code folding, but I don’t like the implementation much.)
I distinctly remember walking around the area where Notre Dame is in Paris and hearing a faint sound I recognised on the breeze. The closer I got the more it gave me chills. The sound of the organ presumably (I'd like to think) being played by Olivier Latry and of course I recognised the sound from his recordings of Messiaen[0]. Not Messiaen that day but those compositions being played by Latry on that organ... that sound.. it just takes me somewhere else.
