Unfortunately, that last 10% of games are AAA competitive multiplayer that account for a massive user base who are still dependent on windows to play them (battlefield 6, fortnite, any of the call of duty games from the last 8 years, league of legends, GTA online, apex legends, rainbow six siege...)
yeah, and mac too, can't run league or valorant. vanguard is their kernel-level anticheat, and windows is like 95% of their market and the difficulty of implementing it on another kernel i guess isn't worth the <5%.
League works on macOS just fine, I played yesterday. Vanguard is buggy (it occasionally quits the client after I finish a game), but the game generally works and has for at least several years.
Why would it be a "bold move"? Linux gaming population is damn near zero, they do not provide a higher profit margin like mac gamers would, and the documented evidence is that supporting Linux users is obnoxious because they are rude and entitled but not actually that much better at providing feedback.
Epic Games bought out rocket league and turned off a native linux build and faced no repercussions. Instead they made plenty of money.
Not sure that's fair, given most Linux gamers look like Windows gamers to the metrics.
That said, devices like the SteamDeck run games on Linux (and that's without considering that every Android game ever is technically running on Linux too).
Let's face it though, PC gaming is already small enough these vs the consoles, that further splitting the marked isn't going to make sense for a lot of companies.
>Not sure that's fair, given most Linux gamers look like Windows gamers to the metrics.
No. All the articles and testimony of game devs abandoning native Linux versions is from well before Proton was a thing, including Epic Games buying Rocket League and preventing you from playing the Native Linux build they had.
It also was not related to anti-cheat or underlying engine limitations or anything. Developers were clear that the problem was the massive lack of uptake mixed with a weirdly entitled community.
Personally I don't think gamers are entitled. Ultimately games are anywhere between 60 - 120 dollars and often barely work on their target platforms. With kernel level anticheat, you're literally being asked to pay them to rootkit your computer with software you cannot audit.
The last 10 years of AAA gaming have been an absolute shit show. The only people who seem to be even trying are Nintendo. Everyone else releases stuff that's buggy as hell and about as fun as a dental cleaning.
It's bold because it's breaking stuff that already works and will continue to work even if you do nothing.
It's one thing to choose not to develop a new game for Linux. It's another to take a game that already runs on Linux and intentionally break it. You're guaranteed to alienate SOME people who are already fans of the game.
I thought the same but let's not pretend Windows is a holy grail for compatibility anymore. Especially when it comes to older games, this facade / image breaks down fast.
I once tried to play Trackmania Nations (not Forever or United Forever, the ESWC one) because that was the first entry of this series I played. I still have all the files from back then so I thought it would be as simple as installing it and running it. Other games such as Trackmania Sunrise came with the nasty SecureROM DRM that will break your current installs, but ESWC was always free to play and without DRM.
Well, after install, I played a lot in my first sitting. A few days later, my Windows install was broken. I used a restore point before installing Trackmania, everything was back to stable. A few weeks later I tried again, same situation, a day or two after install, my Windows would break.
I thought it was a general system instability, maybe some weird configuration and the game only triggers that specific bug. So I did a full clean reinstall. And installed the game a few days later. Who would've thought, my Windows breaks yet again.
What I'm trying to say is: I've been running Fedora on my main PC for 2 years now and the game has been installed via Proton for 1 year. It never broke, it always just worked.
That's cool but I spent the last week trying to get midi music in dosbox under Mint. It's still not working. Midi.
And Wine works until it suddenly doesn't and searching for solution you get stonewalled with modern day equivalent of rtfms or plain old radio silence.
Thats always the worst part of linux for me. Everyone is always so hostile, I have to say though I have had a little success finding help on lemmy but not much.
To add to this Nathan Briggs does reverse engineering to make old games work on modern Windows. Windows 11 has corrected faults in it's APIs that probably should have been fixed but somehow worked with older versions of Windows that gamedevs built around. He often posts the solution and sends it GOG. Often this involves updating a community maintained wrapper around the DirectX APIs that GOG uses.
And much better keyboard control. It can also do interesting things such as run in 1:1 scaling mode (for example, 4K on a 1080p monitor) and then you can use your mouse to zoom in and out (wheel) and Ctrl+drag to pan around.
> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite
>
> writer, perhaps. calc, not even close
This really depends on your needs. I'm sure it's not enough for someone who does Excel wizardry for living. But I use it for tracking personal finances and other simple tasks and graphs, and it is completely sufficient.
This in my book easily earns it the "okay office suite" badge. To be honest all office suites in the last 20 years have been good enough for most small scale needs, including OpenOffice back in the early days.
In some places, yes, especially where certain online options are good enough.
Definitely not in financial services, and many offices I could mention. Even for me: Excel is the reason I haven't completely binned MS Office. For the subset of features I use⁰ it is better all round¹ than other things I've tried.
I'll miss it significantly when the last Windows machine that I operate away from DayJob is no more.
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[0] Probably less than that 10%
[1] There are many tasks for which there is something better, but the something is different in each case. Excel is a very good jack-of-all-trades.
If the general public knew how big decisions are done based on some ancient Excel sheet they'd faint.
It's in the sweet spot of "already installed" and "kinda-sorta database" and "kinda-sorta programming environment" where industrious people can build massive tooling over the years on top of an Excel sheet.
Yes, it could be an Actual Application, but then Legal gets involved (where is the data stored, what's the contract with the supplier), then you need to talk to Finance (Who's paying for this? Justify the cost!), IT (Managing the installations and licenses) and Security (Is the provider following good practices, is the application audited).
...then you decide "fuck that" and just use Excel, it's good enough.
Anecdote:
A programmer friend got promoted a few steps upward quickly and got into the "provide us with reports" level of employment. Their predecessor (a career manager) had spent multiple days each month manually doing the reports.
But a programmer's mind isn't built like that so they used the fact that Excel can pull stuff from HTTP APIs and now the report takes about 15 minutes to build automatically.
Frankly, calc is just as full featured as excel is, it's just different. About the only issue calc has is correctly parsing excel docs is notoriously difficult.
This is a familiarity problem, not a calc problem.
I'm going through a project at the moment where all the data is held in spreadsheets, and every time anyone opens them Excel fucks the numbers to be "scientific notation" despite there being space to display the full number and no way to disable this anti-feature. The amount of times I've had to restore the spreadsheet from a backed up CSV because of data loss is frustrating. I wish I could stop using Excel.
> This is just a formatting/display issue. Excel isn't rounding the number internally.
It isn't rounding or truncating while you are actively using the workbook or saving in its native formats, but it does when saving back out to CSV or certain other formats.
As much as I like Excel for many things, it is sometimes the bane of my existence wrt people using it to manipulate tabular data that isn't in its native formats and causing accidental corruption.
One of the many projects on my list of “things I'll never get around to” is a good⃰ CSV (or other text-based tabular data) editor.
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[*] There are actually quite a few that look good, but don't have some of the features behaviours I want, or in some cases are not available on an appropriate platform (there are a couple of Mac only options for instance), or are paid proprietary apps that are surprisingly expensive (I could justify it and get work to pay in DayJob, but not for my own use).
In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Yesterday, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that.
For scientific calculations with tables of data, I find LibreCalc better than Excel, so in my experience, Excel is the “good enough for simple tasks” tool, but LibreCalccis the tool when you actually do scientific big boy calculations.
The real issue is familiarity and importing, but if you start fresh, LibreCalc is better for me.
There are users (me included) that state the opposite, LibreCalc is better for my needs (complex formulas table driven) and that Excel is a toy for more “scientific” calculations.
Writer is awful too. It will randomly mess up formatting, especially in tables. Also in tables, it will insist to try and parse cell values like Calc would (breaking numbers and dates), even though Writer doesn't even provide a way to run calculations on those numbers anyway.
Word is awful too, it messes up formatting, especially when pasting images. Good luck writing anything longer than couple pages. Hasn't been solved in 20 years. Have stopped using word 2 years ago but I am gonna assume it's still an issue
> If you're a finance professional then there's no alternative to Excel
Not sure what you mean by this exactly, but I work in banking with a lot of "financial professionals", and the general opinion is that Excel is not good because it screws with numbers, whether its scientific notation (Why? Its just as long as the original number), rounding of numbers (had that with a large list of account numbers just last week where half the account numbers lost the last 3 digits) and there is no easy way of saying "just treat these as entered".
Even setting fields to text doesn't stop Excel from fucking around and overriding them to be date formatted if it feels like the balance could be.
The main issue is that Excel comes with Office and you aren't allowed to install other software so it forces you to use it and get used to it. It really wouldn't take much to be better than Excel.
The problem, as I see it, isn't a feature problem but rather just the fact that everyone in banking and finance is already using excel. You aren't going to see `ods` files passed around.
The only reason this is true is because everyone in finance uses Excel which means that differences in parsing excel docs is consequential. And, in finance, excel docs get shared a lot.
It's not the case that calc is lacking any features which excel has in a finance situation.
The Linux answer is often repeated but unfortunately, some users depend on various Windows software that only runs properly on Windows. E.g. CAD/CAM, Quicken finance, sewing embroidery, etc can't run in a Linux WINE emulator nor QEMU/KVM virtual machine. And avoiding the WINE/KVM incompatibilities by switching to "Linux-native" software such as Gimp often means having less features and/or not having ability to open old files because they use different formats.
Sure, there's the idea that "90% of users just use email and surf the web so they can just get by with a Chromebook" ... true, but there's still a lot of users who can't because they use other productivity software.
For me, there's always some unexpected situation that requires a working Windows computer. Last year, I had to do an unplanned firmware update on a digital audio interface via a USB cable. There was no Linux updater. They had a firmware updater for macOS but it didn't work. Based on the tech support forums, I had to download the firmware updater for Windows platform and that finally worked.
reply to: >What software do you have that doesn't work in a VM?
Example would be software that use hardware USB dongles for DRM. E.g. embroidery software for sewing machines. The passthrough USB emulation to the vm is not invisible enough to fool the software searching for hardware dongles. Another example was Trimble software for LIDAR that depended on DirectX which crashed in a vm.
reply to: >A good-enough compromise is a dual boot with a tiny Windows partition for the rare cases
That is a very techie solution that's not practical for "normies". Dual-boot creates the "2 os file systems" issue instead of having a single unified disk mount. Windows doesn't have a built-in way to read Linux ext4 file system. Linux doesn't have a bulletproof reliable way to read/Write NTFS partition (various tech forums mention data corruption). Unless one goes external with external NAS hardware and store all documents on an SMB mount -- but that also layers on more technical issues and doesn't work for laptops on-the-go being disconnected from the NAS.
Manufacturing and automation is another big one. Think about a water plant that is air-gapped but needs computer automation software to run. These things are everywhere, in every town that has indoor plumbing and sewer. The specialized software that automates these plants only runs on Windows. It relies on industrial hardware and touchscreens that are designed for use in harsh outdoor environments. All of these types of plants rely on high school educated operators that need to understand what's going on at a simple level. Having an OS that in any way relies on Internet access is a non starter. A Linux based system would be removed within a year of operation. You could get it approved maybe if you really worked at it but it would not be accepted in the long run, after the initial startup. There are physical constraints, technical constraints, and human/political constraints that are all working against Linux.
Most of that stuff is probably still running windows 98 or XP. If it's airgapped, and it works, and it controls a million dollar piece of equipment, then management will tell anybody suggesting it be updated to the newest windows version to stfu.
Also, the extent to which windows is needed to accommodate uneducated operators is overstated. A lot of industrial equipment runs other oddball operating systems configured by the manufacturer and machine operators don't need to know the difference because they just know which buttons to press to get the job done.
I work in a lab. Let me give you some ideea of what's happening:
- Some machines use embedded MCUs with no operating systems. I haven't seen one of these in the last 15 years. The last DNA extraction machine we got (a glorified sample shaker with 2 stepper motors) runs Win10! It has no keyboard, no network, and absolutely no ports of any kind (or at least not accessible without dissasembling the machine). A 8051 could do the job and still have memory left for Pong. [1]
- Very old machines run MSDOS and a proprietary software that directly talks to hardware ISA boards via I/O ports - no drivers. That software can't be ported to Windows2000+ because of the same reasons DOS games can't run in Win2000 - the kernel won't allow direct hardware access. Linux doens't allow it either.
- Newer machines run Windows 2000/XP/7/10, many of them offline. Some of them were updated to run Win10 from older versions, with the same app version (just Windows updated).
- Since Win10 can no longer be bought, newer machines run Win11 with permanent internet connection and they are minimally customized - the vendors left all ads, Copilot, Store and the kitchen sink installed. It's atrocious to work with those, but nobody cares. The management that make the decisions to buy the machines never ever touch them or even see them, and they don't take advice or feedback from us (or anyone else but accounting).
After rereading, it sounds like I meant for the two sentences to be related, but I didn't mean it that way. I was referring to the fact of Microsoft trying to force people to connect to the Internet before they can install Windows, or sign in with a Microsoft account in corporate infrastructure scenarios where that makes no sense, and so customers are forced to use Linux instead, but that's a complication being added to their overall system for external reasons.
A Linux-based system would be identical to a Windows-based system as far as operator experience goes. They interact with HMI software and only see the OS underneath when Windows pops up silly notifications and errors.
Windows owns the industrial space for historical reasons, mostly to do with OPC being Windows-only and software for doing maintenance on field devices originally running on DOS. It quickly became a chicken-and-egg situation - everyone wrote their software for Windows because everyone else wrote their software for Windows. SCO owned a decent chunk of the field before that, but we know how that worked out.
We're seeing some change now that OPC is being phased out. Ignition now has feature parity between Linux and Windows (barring OPC, of course). Windows won't go away any time soon (if ever), but you can now have a fully functioning SCADA system with no Windows at all.
For me it's ski race timing Software. Need a USB dongle and timing computer(a proprietary device that logs timestamps, prints and translates pulses offa wire into start and finish events to the PC Software) via USB. There's a lot of moving parts to manage, things like power to the USB, sleep etc. Bricking a ski race where thousands of volunteer, kid and coach hours have been spent in preparation for it is a nightmare. Last season our windows machines were in a Windows update death spiral on race day. The timing operators had no clue how to overcome it.
Yeah this is the way. I'm tented to go this route on my Mac but the licensing module won't work on ARM chips: Short answer: it’s not crazy to run Split Second in a VM—but only if you control the variables. The two biggest risk areas you called out (the USB license dongle and the timer I/O) are real. Here’s the straight path that works reliably, plus what to avoid.
Your go/no-go decision tree
1) If your MacBook Pro is Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3):
Running Split Second in Parallels with Windows 11 ARM is a no-go because the Sentinel/HASP hardware key that Split Second uses is not supported on Windows ARM. Thales (the dongle vendor) is explicit: “Sentinel HASP keys … are not supported” on Windows ARM; LDK works via emulation but not the HASP/HASP-HL USB keys you plug in.
I'm all for Linux, The difficulty of keeping it on the shelf for a year and then running it on race days when it's in full update mode on a crappy mountain Internet connection was a near disaster.
You can feed it the output from Kicad, and if you include the ipc netlist it’ll even generate models. Great for doing a check before manufacturing, especially if the viewer matches what you see in Kicad.
Unfortunately I’ve never gotten it to run in wine.
Agree on all points. Basically, Windows could suck to any degree whatsoever right now, it still has enjoyed an hegemony for decades and the vast majority of the population considers it the default, it's not impossible for this to change, but it's definitely going to take time.
Japanese Windows software mostly don't run, or does it badly, with Wine on Linux. Unfortunately. I've been a full-time Linux user since 1992 and this frustrates me. Some of the software won't even pass the install stage. I'm forced to run this on wife's Windows 10 PC, which has its own set of nightmarish problems.
Japanese software houses develop for one target: Windows. As a rule. They don't really know about anything else, except for the occasional support of Mac from some of them.
I've not really had a problem with Japanese software, but I mostly stick to old games and the like. You do need to make sure you install cjk fonts, and if your system locale isn't Japanese you need to make sure jp locale is enabled then set it before running with `LANG="ja_JP.UTF8"` (or possibly LC_ALL if that fails) but other than that I've not had any major problems.
I've used all the Japanese language and font settings (including your suggestions), and I have fonts installed, and for what barely runs this gets the fonts mostly working. It makes no difference for what doesn't even install. One example is 3D My Home Designer PRO (version 8 which is not the latest, but one I have a license for. From Megasoft, Japan). It's exclusively for Windows.
Another example (which is not licensed, and easier to test for) is Jw_cad https://www.jwcad.net/download.htm which actually installs and runs, it's just that it doesn't run well. Some stuff works, but it's not enough to make it usable.
I've run Japanese windows software under Wine, and with no configuration it was a sea of crashy mojibake. With the right locale configured, it worked fine.
Have you tried Bottles? I helped a friend a few weeks ago getting his game library to work after he migrated to Bazzite and there are a few games from Japanese studios / indie devs. It was mostly setting the locale for a separate bottle configuration and from there they installed and worked.
Installing a Windows VM is not really an option for me for various reasons, but in any case that's just.. running Windows. I don't have a Windows license either so I expect I wouldn't be able to anyway.
Yes, because as you said these applications only run on Windows. How else would you get around it, if not by running some form of Windows? At least this way, the core system (and 90% of general purpose applications) could remain on Linux.
> I don't have a Windows license either so I expect I wouldn't be able to anyway.
You can just use the install unlicensed, or, if your computer came with a Windows license (as most do), you can extract it from the motherboard and use it to activate the VM. Not sure if that's allowed in Microsoft's ToS though.
What's discussed in this subthread is running Windows applications under Wine. When it's running under Windows there's no discussion to begin with.
In any case, I'm not going to try to set up a Windows VM on my Linux computer, I don't have the room or if I had it would be better used for other things. And I just abhor using Windows, whenever I have to use the wife's PC it's hell. For her, too.. she can't find anything after she's saved something, for example.
And I don't have a Windows license, never had, my computers are all bare when new. In any case, it defies the whole purpose of not having to run Windows. Now, with Windows 11, it seems to be even worse. And I have zero idea on how to install Windows from scratch anyway - in my case I would probably even have to install a Japanese version, as is installed on my wife's PC. Well, not going to happen.
Okay, suit yourself, I don't exactly care. Most of the thread was about running Windows applications on Linux, wine is just one means to an end in that regard. I merely suggested another that may work for your specific use case, while still allowing you to retain Linux on root, as I do on my system.
Also, unless you're talking about desktop motherboards that you bought directly from the manufacturer, any laptops you have almost certainly have an embedded OEM Windows license key burned into them from the factory (and that's obviously without getting into any massgrave chicanery).
I suppose the difference in our views is pragmatic versus philosophical. I don't care whether something is running through a translation layer on Linux or technically "on Windows" in a stripped-down VM with telemetry removed, so long as my core system remains Linux and I can minimize my exposure to Windows without any application support hurdles.
Sorry, but could you list any program I'm never thought about japanese software and since I'm interested on japanese culture, I'd would like to know which kind of programs they are
they bring up a valid point: libreoffice is (in their opinion) harder to use and probably lower quality, so reports are harder to write and taking away time from more important things.
in my opinion libre office is absolutely good enough for this use case and thus not taking away significant time from other tasks. furthermore, the austrian armed forces are free to contribute to the project to improve the perceived paint points themselves.
on the other hand microsoft products are closed source and probably upload data to datacenters outside the customers (i.e. in this case, the militaries) sphere of influence. this may include the data (for storage and or AI training) and meta data (for advertising and telemetry).
microsoft may even silently introduce or reactivate (after they've been declined) those options after updates (don't quote me on this, but i think i remember this happening at least once).
microsoft apologists may argue that this is only the case for improperly configured corporate deployments, but as the software is closed source nobody can really be sure and if it's that hard to get right, it's a security problem in itself.
My point was rather that officers should have better things to do than feed the bureaucracy with reports no one will ever read, and so the harder you make it to write reports, the less likely they will do more of them!
Do you mean with the levels filter that Krita has, with the curves filter that Krita has, with the color balance filer that Krita has, with the slope, offset, power filter that Krita has, or with the hue/saturation/luma or red chroma/blue chroma/luma adjustment filter that Krita has?[1]
They are all available as non-destructive filter layers, by the way, and Krita users had access to this way before GIMP 3.0 was released with non-destructive filters.
> Do you mean with the levels filter that Krita has, with the curves filter that Krita has, with the color balance filer that Krita has, with the slope, offset, power filter that Krita has, or with the hue/saturation/luma or red chroma/blue chroma/luma adjustment filter that Krita has?
Honestly, I did not know that these existed in Krita (when I used Krita, I did not find them).
However, I still stubbornly maintain that I answered the question sufficiently, which used the qualifier "with a better UI".
Taking a leaf out of my wife's book "Even when I'm wrong, I'm right!* :-)
Why would anybody think it is a real alternative to upload your photos to website which is running proprietary garbage. Just use Adobe if you are going to do that.
I strongly prefer local software, but as someone coming from Photoshop who now only does the occasional edit (and therefore can't justify the price), I find Photopea to be a good alternative, especially since it closely mimics Photoshop's interface so I don't have to learn a new UI. Also, your images stay local on your computer and aren't uploaded to their servers.
It's developed by a single guy, which I think is very impressive given how much of Photoshop's functionality it has. I just really wish it were open source (and not a web app).
Yeah, right. I've the latest GIMP 3 on both Windows and Linux and an old CS4 Photoshop which I stopped updating years ago because of Adobe's ripoff prices and I continually find myself falling back to Photoshop because it's easier to use than GIMP (I'd prefer to switch to GIMP completely if it were easier to use).
Unfortunately, the authoritarian PIAs that develop GIMP have a rigid and inflexible mindset that stop GIMP becoming the default for millions of Photoshop users and or those who cannot afford Adobe's outrageous prices, and those who can no longer accept its draconian licensing terms.
In short, millions would switch to GIMP on Linux if it worked 'properly'.
I don't know why the Linux community doesn't put more pressure on GIMP's developers to comform. The percentage of Linux desktop users would increase considerably if they would.
Look at it this way: here's just one GIMP issue that turns away Photoshop users: why did GIMP's developers remove the perfectly functioning Fade feature in GIMP?
Yes, I know their stated reason and I also know the workaround but it's a damned nuisance to use.
By removing the Fade feature GIMP's 'high minded' developers have effectively done what mathematical types tried to do with the calculator when they introduced RPN/Reverse Polish Notation in place of the standard way of entering data.
Except for mathematicians, engineers, etc. RPN failed spectacularly—sure it is better but just too hard for mere mortals to grasp.
The bloodymindedness of GIMP's developers are deliberately holding back GIMP's adoption. They could have easily left Fade in place and just added their fancy sophisticated option for their propeller-head brethren to use.
Fixing some of GIMP's problems seems so obvious I sometimes think Adobe has placed a Trojan on GIMP's team to thwart competition.
Afterthought. Contemplating the above post a day later and thinking "yeah, right, that's typical me in hyperbolic mode when annoyed" but on refection would I change it?
No, I wouldn't; because I'm still annoyed and my frustration goes deeper than just GIMP and its developers, my issue is that the problems that plague GIMP also plague much open source software and we need to find solutions.
First, I'm a vehement supporter of FOSS and the need for more choice in the marketplace even if that means having more commercial software to choose from. As I see it, much of the key software (Windows, Android, MS Office, Photoshop, etc.) that monopolizes market now does so because of Big Tech's market domination—not necessarily because it's the best available.
It's the sheer domination of the software ecosystem by Big Tech that's the problem, thus good open source products such as Linux, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc. all struggle to get a mainstream airing irrespective of quality.
It's clear to me there are several important reasons why open source has not achieved a wider penetration amongst more general/less technical users. From that perspective FOSS software suffers from a fundamental and systemic problem which is it's principally developed by people who like developing code for its own sake who then open-source it for free.
Without the monetary incentive one doesn't have the right to demand of them the form software should take. Dictating how software should work and or what features it must have would serve little or no purpose, if they'd disagree they'd either ignore you or just pack up and leave the project.
The problem is obvious, FOSS developers are skilled and it's that skill that directs the way they'll tackle a project—thus the software ends up working their way and with features they reckon it should have—and more often than not this is in direct conflict with the way ordinary nontechnical users want it to work.
Despite my narky comments about GIMP's developers, I understand that in their technical judgment they had good reason why they omitted the Fade feature and I accept they are under no obligation to include a feature that from their perspective is out of place and does not logically dovetail with other features. Given also they're offering their time for free then there's really not much one can object to in the circumstances.
Nevertheless, that FOSS developers first and foremost develop software as they see fit and from their perspective and that that view often clashes with the requirements of nontechnical users poses a serious conundrum for open source software. The upshot clear: if ordinary users see no real advantage and or find it too difficult to convert to FOSS then it won't attract the number of users it deserves.
With commercial software user requirements are often determined by marketing based on user demand and programmers are obliged to program accordingly. When Microsoft says "we're about to start on yet another GUI for the next version of Windows" the choice is stark—knuckle down or leave. Without the monetary incentive, FOSS is at a significant disadvantage.
Let me offer my own perspective here. I am an IT professional and have been for decades. Moreover, I've headed an IT department where help-desk was a key service and from experience I know how difficult it is to get users to adopt new software packages, especially so when the replacement package offers essentially the same features, for example, replacing MSO with LibreOffice often meets with stubborn resistance.
Even I get annoyed when I have to change software and I find the UI and or features are noticeably different to what I'm used to. I'm an Arch user so I'm used to tweaking Linux et al but I deal with hundreds of different packages on Linux, Android, Windows and other setups and it's dead easy to forget the idiosyncrasies of a package that one hasn't worked with for several months. Having to relearn its features and quirks because its so different to what one was working on only moments before is not only time consuming but also a damn nuisance.
So from my perspective standardization is just about everything. Trouble is programmers all to often consider themselves 'artists' and unnecessarily keep reinventing the wheel. Look at the outrageous plethora of Windows GUIs. MS started out well by adopting IBM's well thought out CUA (Common User Access)† then essentially abandoned it for others that were often grossly inferior—think Metro for instance. And what about MSO's 'Ribbon'? The heretic(s) who devised that should have been condemned to time in the stocks. The unmitigated fucking hide of them to force millions of users to waste millions of manhours relearning functions that didn't need to be relearned. What is so outrageous was that after mandating the change to the 'Ribbon' those authoritarian shits at Microsoft could easily have left the old GUI there as a fallback option—but they didn't!
Who paid for those millions of wasted hours? Right, it certainly wasn't Microsoft.
This kind of outrageous and unacceptable behavior is why it's so important that FOSS be easy to convert to and be as compatible with the commercial product as is possible. With its Windows monopoly MS can afford to experiment with GUIs and weather the changes when they fail and still survive unscathed but I'd contend that in this regard FOSS is much more vulnerable.
In this regard we've witnessed a long lineage of failures in converting Windows users to Linux due to compatibility issues, despite the Linux brotherhood praising its simplicity the fact is that Linux is just too different to Windows for millions to make the leap. The problem is further compounded with the myriad of Linux distros available—and I'd venture that most Linux diehards have no idea the fear that that number of distros generates in newbies. FOSS developers should heed the message.
I am firmly convinced that the lack of consistency across FOSS development and its failure to adhere to uniform standards in the many instances where it's possible and logical to be consistent is a major impediment to its widespread adoption.
The other impediment slowing down FOSS adoption harks back to the fact that open source is free and without monetary incentives is that there are no guarantees that a FOSS project won't end up as abandonedware. I've long advocated a halfway revenue-neutral measure where certain FOSS projects only offer the source for free and charge a small nominal amount for binaries with licenses stipulating that one's only allowed to compile the source for one's own use—distribution thereof is prohibited. It seems to me most users would prefer to pay a small nominal amount of say $10 or $20 for the binaries. That way, developers could receive some recompense for their work, then they would have both the incentive to remain with the project and also likely to be more responsive to users' requirements.
I know I'm not alone in coming to these ideas, after I posted the above comment I came across this HN story that addresses very similar issues:
Anyone have a good suggestion for Linux dictation software? My friend wants to switch to Linux but he does all his writing with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
How about OpenAIs whisper[0]?
My social science friends tell me it‘s been great for them.
Not sure whether data privacy et all would be an issue of course, but I guess you can just run it locally :)
Okay the fact that Talon Linux use Dragon via Wine successfully is a big vote of confidence. I was reluctant to recommend that to my friend after seeing Wine's status page for Dragon but I'll give it a go!
Thank God all other non-Russian companies not only condemn various atrocities around the globe but even support the affected countries being liberated by developing the high-tech armies of the good guys, right?!
The fact that all of the above is being presented as an exclusively Russian strategy. When almost all companies mentioned on this website are proudly and directly tied to non-Russian war industries. The tendency to omit pointing out non-Russian examples almost always indicates endorsement of their actions.
And let me beat you to this that I condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin. Unlike those who believe it is ok to side with one and not the other even if they do the exact same.
If you interact with American businesses, use American technology or pay taxes to any Western government, you're indirectly funding genocide, slavery, wanton environmental destruction and countless other crimes by the US, its allies and corporations.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, none of our hands are clean. We all deal with our complicity in various ways, and draw our lines in the sand where we will, but at the end of the day survival in this world forces us all to be hypocrites.
This is quite a stretch of mental gymnastics from the initial point, drawing a blatantly false equivalency between the consumer and the producer as an at attempt to derail and minimize the latter's direct contribution to the forced unethical consumption. And it's an especially absurd argument since it's impossible to ethically consume or even survive with such owners of the means of production.
And this whole falsely applied narrative is unironically a very frequent laundering tactic of their proponents.
And btw I don't even think most are really willing to accept the accusations of the American companies, as they've been told for centuries that these are the good guys.
You've done the thing where you've basically restated my argument and implicitly agreed with it but for some reason also framed your comment as strident disagreement and accused me of motives I don't have. Like many people here, your emotions seem to have poisoned your intellect. I assume you just skimmed my comment and got triggered?
I'm not drawing an equivalency between consumer and producer, I'm pointing out a relationship which, while unequal, still exists and needs to be acknowledged. I'm not attempting to derail or minimize anything. You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
Yes, it's entirely possible to disagree with the misinterpretation of an otherwise as-objectively-as-possible true sentence.
It seems like you're holding onto your initial position, applying the factually true statement:
no ethical (as in a way of not contributing to others' exploitation) consumption is currently possible
in an twisted manner. Which is also evident from the very last sentence, where you're suggesting only a form of ascetic lifestyle is able to absolve somebody, however one would realize such thing is both impractical and still impossible to do so under the current economic-political landscape. Not to mention that all this suggests that you, maybe unwittingly but still, tie civilization advancement possibility to the existence of an exploitative societal structure.
Instead of talking about the way it's currently shaped to be ran by those who are profit-driven, violently steal resources and contribute to exhaustion of all peoples around the world, you're simplistically reducing it to a matter of entire groups of people, ignoring their standing in the social strata, having to either choose primitivism or accept they're just as bad as their rulers. Even if you've disclaimed that you're not concealing any motives and the responsibility is unequally distributed, your adherence on shifting away from those in charge of the means of production, which is how you've chosen to initiate this very exchange, enables an interpretation of you implicitly defending them, and I believe that's also what anyone with an ounce of critical thinking ability would make of. I would be less critical if you at least suggested organization against the existing way the global socioeconomical system as an alternative, but the appeal to the adherence to an archaic lifestyle suggests this is not something you'd probably approve of. A positive surprise would be taking this for granted and you just condemning those willing to comply all along I suppose?
And throughout the entire history, it has been shown that these are the exact same accusations that have insidiously been made by whoever is directly behind exploitative administrations. They put the blame on those who are always barred from having any say/questioning the way their labor is being used, divide them, deject their protests and prevent overthrowing.
> You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
This whole narrative here really boils down to the Oh you like music? name every song meme.
P.S. I'd advise refraining from appealing to imaginary emotional reactions on behalf of the other party. It usually demonstrates inability to defend a particular view and deflects from meaningful dialogue.
> Outdated ffmpeg, good for dated formats, not good for new stuff
Just how new does the new stuff have to be? I use VLC daily (because even though we have 4x streaming services, when I want to watch 3rd Rock from the Sun, it's not on any of them.
Some of the very new movies are also not on any of the streaming services, so I am left wondering, if I downloaded a movie that was only torrented a few days ago, just how new does the movie have to be to be unsupported by VLC?
Uninstalled vlc ~two years ago, but from what I remember it was missing tons of optimizations with h265 and newer codecs, almost lacking proper av1 and prores support, HDR is terrible. I think it's dated by like 3-4 years.
Haven’t tried mpv but VLC is my go to for weird formats and streaming from random rtsp cameras. Maybe it’s outdated but a couple of years ago when I switched over from libffmpeg to libvlc it was because some cameras on site had weird auth problems with libffmpeg but worked when streamed through VLC. I swapped over and now those cameras work.
VLC always had the ugliest UI of the open source media players. It also renders subtitles in a really ugly way (at least the last time I used it, which is years ago).
I really appreciate VLC for how it can play just about anything, but it's a "player of last resort" for me.
A more difficult but potentially great solution is to run Linux as a the host system and windows in single purpose containers for each game/program that work better in windows. All the anti-user behavior will only have minimal harm if all the container does is to start windows and then start the game, then close when finished. Ads will not have time to be shown, and telemetry only has game data to give. It can take a bit of trickery to get anti-cheat drm to work.
Level1Linux yt channel talks about this setup in details. I think they are using looking glass and kvm. I have considered to try it out since it would reduce my windows footprint and containerize non-work from work.
MPV is a better recommendation than VLC and Although I am a huge open source fan, saying gimp is a good image editor is questionable though.
I have always preferred pinta for normal usage editing and although this might be shunned but idrc, but sometimes photopea can be also good software.
Regarding desktop environmnents, Just try anything you find interesting, KDE,XFCE,Cinnamon etc., you would be shocked by how snappy/minimalist somethings like XFCE are.
I use Softmaker Office on Fedora/KDE but Excel is the one Microsoft application I would pay for a Linux version. Even the Office Web version doesn't come close (though it is still a vast improvement).
I think the main issue for most casual users is the office suite and browser.
LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org unfortunately do not cut it for quirky functionality/aesthetics etc. The most polished alternatives Corel and WPS Office only WPSOffice have a ready deb/rpm installer while also having a collaboration feature inbuilt. Corel seems to have decided to concentrate on a windows only Law vertical , whererthey are admittedly not doing too bad.
Browsers should do most of whats neeed for the rest of the saas apps even the video collab apps like Teams/Zoom have a browser mode.
Latest Office or Microsoft365 is being turned almost into a Saas wrapper for the online app , while having an always on siphon for your data to the MScloud and ADs, so many intrusive ads all overthe place.
If its an older version that works i guess can be usable in a VM , but again this is for your casul office worker/parents etc.The least amount of friction will usually be best for adoption (see how zoom came out on top in the videochat space)
The 90% of games running on Linux does not say how well and what games. Sure I can play the Batman: Arkham Knight perfectly on Linux. However the game is a decade old now. Try playing some titles that came out this year and it going to be very variable, multiplayer titles are often a no go at all due to anti-cheat. You can argue to you are blue in the face about kernel level anti-cheat but at the end of the day if all your mates are playing X, you are just going to suck it up and play X.
There is enough issues running games on Linux that there are specific distros created for running games because everything from the kernel version, X/Wayland, Compositor and the pipewire version can affect immensely how well the game runs.
The overwhelming majority of games that came out this year are from smaller studios and will work perfectly on Linux. It's only the big budget "AAA" games with corporate publishers pandering to shareholders/investment firms which insist on custom DRM and anticheat which are a problem.
The big budget games are often the ones that people are playing. Sure there have been a few big flops as of late, but a huge number of people are playing that require kernel level anti-cheat and DRM that does not work on Linux.
There are also other issues around how well those games work. Some games will work perfectly fine. I am not disputing that. It is a bit of a lottery though e.g. I had annoying sound issues with Hell Divers 2 that was only fixed with an update to pipewire. Performance issues were solved by upgrading to Kernel 6.16.
On Windows I had to do literally nothing for the game to work perfectly (also don't believe some of YouTubers that are complaining HD2, their PCs were actually broken!).
Generally on Windows I have to do very little to get a game to work, outside of extremely old games from the late 90s/early 2000s.
On Linux, the really old games just work, as do virtually all new games with the exception of those very few big budget new releases. If those are the games you really want to play then Windows is the answer, have fun ponying up your drivers license to Microsoft for the privilege of getting root kitted by those games. Literally everything else just works on Linux, one click install and play through steam, no bullshit fiddling around.
> On Linux, the really old games just work, as do virtually all new games with the exception of those very few big budget new releases.
It really seems like you aren't reading what I said. I accept that old games will often work fine, provided they are on a store like GoG or Steam. Big budget releases are often what people want to play.
> If those are the games you really want to play then Windows is the answer, have fun ponying up your drivers license to Microsoft for the privilege of getting root kitted by those games.
It isn't about what I want. It is about what is the reality for the vast majority of people. I would rather everyone play games that work on Linux. Unfortunately many of the people I play games like playing new titles, often they only work well on Windows. There is a social aspect of this that many people on here ignore.
> Literally everything else just works on Linux, one click install and play through steam, no bullshit fiddling around.
They don't though. There are always odd issues with games e.g. borderless window doesn't work in a lot of games, because the mouse will get lost. Having that happen mid-match sucks, having fullscreen window has it own draw backs. I won't get into performance and sound issues as I've already explained the issues there.
I get what you're saying, the plurality of gamers want to play the new release AAA stuff. And the majority of movie goers want to see the latest Minions Emoji movie. And the majority of cheese eaters want to eat American cheese or at best Wisconsin cheddar.
These things are mass market slop which are engineered to be bland and predictable to make the most reliable returns for institutional investors. Discerning consumers know better and don't go by what's popular.
I don't think there is anything wrong with liking popular things and tbh this attitude that somehow you are better because you like more niche things is very close to snobbery. I am not saying that is your intention, but it can come off that way.
There are plenty of popular franchises that I've liked in the past. There are plenty of "slop" movies that I enjoy, I really like Mission Impossible movies, Fast and Furious movies. I've also liked some of the Call of Duty games. There is room for both.
For the "huge number of games work on linux" I wonder how valuable that really is to drawing people to linux as PC gaming has a challenge with huge numbers of releases that aren't noteworthy and don't have many players, I'd guess most of them are not doing anything technically novel or quirky (i.e. using a popular engine with minimal changes) so can easily be compatible.
Is there much value there for users or the linux platform? Some definitely, but it's not going to move the dial much compared to if say valve, codeweavers, or someone else could work with EA to get an agreeable solution that lets Battlefield6 work on linux, as an example with a large audience that's locked into windows to play what they want.
What do you mean by "really old"? My experience with games available on Steam has been fine(barring those big-budget ones), but I've had problems in the past setting up games from CD-ROMs that have DRM on them. Proton and Wine still don't play so well with SafeDisc or SecuROM, and traditional Windows workarounds(when applicable) often don't work on Linux.
The publishers almost certainly prefer that you play these "AAA" titles on console, but if you insist, they'll settle for making your Windows as console-like as possible.
I live fine without a console, so I live fine without a Windows gaming PC too. I don't think the AAA chasers have more fun than me when it comes down to it, dealing with these companies seems to be an aggravating affair even if you do everything the way they want.
It isn't that much of an issue gaming on Windows. Yes, I had to do a one time workaround for a local account and run a de-crapifier. But it wasn't that difficult. If it becomes too difficult I will probably drop Windows entirely.
I run into more problems with Linux than I do typically with Windows. I've been using Linux on and off since 2002. I don't particularly mind it, but I also don't pretend it is for everyone.
I am sure it is fine. HellDivers 2 (the game I like to play) needed a lot of messing about with to work well on Linux. It really depends on what game you are playing as to how well it works. Having the odd game that doesn't work is a deal breaker for a lot of people.
Gimp is NOT a good image editor for someone who uses Photoshop professionally. This idiotic claim keeps coming up, year after year, along with suggestions for opensource replacements for InDesign, Illustrator, LightRoom - there really really arent any valid opensource alternatives to most creative software apart from Blender, and Krita for a linited subset of what Photoshop covers. I would have switched to Linux immediately if it wasnt for Adobe
Outlook on the desktop is pretty much in maintenance mode only and Microsoft is already breaking it[0]. As for web version runs on linux just fine so you are in luck.
In general, unless you need advanced Excel features, you can switch to linux.
We use Exchange on-premises, and the web client is really bad.
While email is asynchronous and I can live with not seeing it all the time (I check it occasionally anyway), the calendar feature is a must, and specifically the reminders. This is why I cannot live without Outlook launched, and it reminds me of meetings I would miss otherwise.
Didn't expect onprem since microsoft has super weird requirements on it since v2019 and haven't properly maintained it for years (except now you are also supposed to pay for it monthly), but if you would suffer with the old web version, you may want to look into Evolution+ews which should be able to handle onprem exchange on linux. Unsure if it supports niche features like public folders but the normal stuff should be covered.
And the crazy thing is that while outlook is my life it's also unbelievably bad. Why can't I have the calendar and email client open at the same time? Why don't newly received email addresses appear in the valid auto complete for sending out calendar invites? Why is search practically useless?
I just installed Thunderbird yesterday, and it finally supports my work email flawlessly, and even the calendar works essentially the same as with Outlook.
Can you briefly explain what it is that you like about Outlook? I've had to use it at corporate clients, and I really detest it. The interface seems to suffer from that same ribbon-nonsense that Word suffers from. Its search is poor and slow. It offers very few display customization options. The calendar in particular is horrendous, I can't even seem to select a time block by clicking/dragging the way I've been able to do in Thunderbird for (probably) 2 decades.
Or maybe you're talking about needing Exchange integration? I don't know what the state of that is on Linux these days.
If only. Accessibility on Linux isn't as good as it is on Windows. It's getting better, but there are so few people actually working on it that it will take quite a while to get there. Which results in anyone who uses Linux who needs accessibility to suffer very weird problems like not even being able to install it because the installer is inaccessible in some way, or it flat out breaking depending on hardware or because the distro isn't setting obscure env vars that are documented nowhere except for mailing lists that nobody reads anymore, or weird things like that. It's been improving, but really really slowly, and Wayland didn't help things when they for the longest time refused to even consider the possibility of allowing global keyboard access because "security".
Let's be realistic, accessibility — whether you like it or not — is an edge case. This is also why as you said, the amount of people working on it is low.
It is really not the limiting factor in Linux desktop adoption. The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.
Buy the wrong laptop, and you have to fight with X, wayland and Nvidia graphics like a terminally inclined caveman in danger
Not only is accessibility important in and of itself, but starting with a clean, accessible base implies standardization and interop, and makes things a lot easier to automate and extend.
Things that challenge accessibility plugins challenge any plugins. Steps away from accessibility are always steps towards lock-in.
> The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.
But you seem to desire this. Don't buy the wrong laptop if you like lock-in; Apple and MS aren't making their OS compatible with your every hardware whim. Or learn how to reverse-engineer and write drivers.
> Let's be realistic, accessibility — whether you like it or not — is an edge case.
Spoken like a true techbro. This attitude is so incredibly destructive. Technology is how we mediate our lives, cutting a very large number of citizens out of that is simply wrong, even if 'the numbers just aren't there' (and they are!).
Not putting the focus in accessibility is not the same as cutting those people off. I think I get your point, really, because someone who needs this kind of aid and doesn't get it does definitely feel cut off and usage of everyday devices becomes and everyday battle. We are not going to disagree there.
But surely there can be a point in which there are larger problems than that Linux reached 5% adoption this year in the US:
That's better than what it was. It's also not a whole lot. But you must understand, the more people use Linux, the better it becomes. Even if value accessibility over other matters, increasing the market share surely will increase the amount of people working on accessibility too.
That whole way of thinking isn't appropriate. 5% is an insane number of people, when you are that large these things are no longer optional. The fact that we have an effective tech duopoly is not important at all. If the market were split between 20 5% players they too would have to ensure that their devices are accessible to all comers. The fact that 95% is split between two parties does nothing to change the responsibilities of a 5% player.
>That whole way of thinking isn't appropriate. 5% is an insane number of people, when you are that large these things are no longer optional.
And hardware compatibility issues are? The fact that orders of magnitude more people don't use Linux at all, disabled or not, because of lacking features or usability is optional?
If 5% of people is an insane number of people, surely usability for them all is more important than for a fraction of that? And again, this is not a product sold by a corporation. Leave features behind and adoption goes down, then you get no accessibility features at all. If you want more accessibility features, you want more developers. For that you want more usage.
Hardware compatibility issues are just a distraction in this discussion. You can do both. If all of the hardware compatibility issues would be resolved there would be some other excuse.
The entirety of this discussion has been about what should be prioritised in order to increase Linux adoption. You cannot do everything together all at once, especially with the limited resources of open source.
Since you're such a noble white knight, why don't you code up those accessibility features you think are the most important missing part ? I'll wait.
Did I advocate for lack of accessibility features ? I just pointed out that in this context there are things far higher in the priority list. Especially given the fact that there are accessibility features, just not on par with windows.
Do you seriously believe that improving accessibility would have a higher impact in Linux adoption than improving robustness and hardware compatibility ?
> Do you seriously believe that improving accessibility would have a higher impact in Linux adoption than improving robustness and hardware compatibility ?
Yes, absolutely. Linux is plenty robust and has lots of hardware that you can use today. The reasons people end up not using it are:
- Microsoft
- Lack of favorite application 'x' (see: Microsoft)
- Difficult to use (unfamiliarity plays a role here)
So yes, accessibility is a key factor, and not just for the people that have challenging bodies.
Well then we simply disagree. I would suggest to look up negative criticism for linux online (e.g. "linux sucks site:reddit.com" etc).
It is flooded by complaints about HW incompatibilities, HW acceleration not working etc. Haven't been able to find complaints about accessibility.
Furthermore, what is the percentage of visually impaired people in the US and what is the percentage of linux desktop users ? The numbers speak for themselves.
Uh... Yes, yes we do. You do realize that adding accessibility features (and I mean actually high quality versions of said features) helps everybody, right? It isn't a low-priority item. To pretend like it is just shows your ignorance.
I think that is the main issue. 90% games is a lot, but is not nearly enough when the most popular multiplayer titles simply do not work due to usage of anti-cheat. For example you cannot play the new Battlefield 6.
As for GIMP, while I understand it can do many things as Photoshop, it is not close in terms of features and the UX is unfortunately terrible.
While I can understand that it's frustrating. Kernel level Anticheat is a abomination in itself and should in no way be supported. It is a security flaw in itself!
It's also unfortunately impossible to have a good competitive multi-player online experience without kernel-level anti-cheat. It's simply too easy to cheat at many of these games in the absence of strict control measures, and even a single cheater can ruin a game session for every other gamer.
No one reached directly for kernel-level anti-cheat. It was the result of an escalation of the sophistication of cheating solutions.
GIMPs UX is wonderful, and Photoshop UX is poison. The problem is that after torturing yourself to learn Photoshop, and sitting in it for 8 hours a day (for many people; I worked in prepress) makes you think that it has been designed rationally rather than simply cobbled together and stuffed with ads. Illustrator, being older, is even worse.
People who work with Photoshop have never worked with any other thing. The way they learned to edit bitmaps was through Photoshop. They can't separate the act and the product in their heads. Thank god for Affinity getting into the mix.
One just has to deal with GIMP as it is, and stop trying to project Photoshop paradigms onto it. People just need to stop thinking of FOSS as the generic, off-brand or ersatz versions that pass or fail due to their degree of imitation of some other product.
IMO, every step GIMP takes towards Photoshop UI is a regression. GIMP's problems have been technical, such as color management and non-destructive editing, and they're gradually falling away.
LibreOffice is ok for reading and making minor changes to existing files but I haven't used Writer or Calc for anything new in years. LaTeX and Gnumeric are my tools of choice.
90% of Windows games run on Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736925
LibreOffice is an okay office suite (good enough for my purposes): https://www.libreoffice.org/
GIMP is a good image editor: https://www.gimp.org/
VLC is a good media player: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/