There’s ridiculously little difference between Windows, OS X and GNOME nowadays. Once you realise that most of your Steam library works and you’ve hated Office for at least ten years anyway, that leaves browsers, which are exactly the same. Most users don’t want to fiddle with settings, installers and drivers, they’ll just accept what the machine comes out of the box with.
There is more to it though. The one feature i miss from windows is casting.
I dont mean chromecast, i got that working. I mean wireless casting to a tv or projector. The windows + k feature.
Ive yet to get that working in linux…
Besides that, im a happy linux person
Everyone’s got something they’d miss. For me it’s Affinity (though that’s on the way, it sounds like) and Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s insane, but MSFS is the 800-pound gorilla; it’s not just visuals, but almost all the new stuff (like Beyond ATC) is targeting MSFS.
That leaves audio production (with a bunch of Windows-only plugins), video production, photo editing, CAD…
Sure, you can re-learn your entire stack and get by, but that’s a far shot from “ridiculously little difference”. Dropping familiar complex piece of software like Ableton is a hard sell for folks (and it’s OK).
I think once you’re into concepts like a “stack”, you’re working with very niche specific software that most users will never touch. And absolutely, use what fulfills your needs.
The vast majority of people I know that ever use a computer, just use it as google chrome. Web browsers work great in Linux. Depending on your needs, a lot of creative software works great on Linux too.
Your situation is legit, and I honestly wish these things were better because I wish all things were better, but I do feel like these are specialized programs that “most people” never touch in their entire lives.
But yes, for people who have a technical or creative career based on a proprietary tech stack, the story is more complicated.
Most likely your software will work via bottles or wine. If you have a desktop PC from the last decade and it cost more than $1k, you can also run a VM (or Winboat) specifically for your software with nearly 1:1 performance to bare metal (if you get the passthrough right.)
Which isn’t a permanent solution, mind you, but if it’s just one piece of software holding you back and you don’t care to play with alternatives, then the solution isn’t to keep Windows despite its terrible performance in 99% of things, it’s to switch to windows and emulate or compatibility layer the 1% of software you might use that requires windows.
Most likely your software will work via bottles or wine
No, for the examples above it will not. Quite a lot of professional software will not run under wine (and a lot of hobbyists use professional software) - games work particularly well because they mostly do their own thing and depend less on Windows-specific APIs. And if you use a VM via Winboat then you’re just using Windows in the background, which is a workaround, but kinda defeats OP’s argument that there’s “no difference”.
To be clear: I’m daily driving Linux and I’ve not booted into Windows for more than a year. But it’s just wrong to say that they are on par with each other for a lot of usecases.
If you need an emulator (yeah, “Wine Is Not an Emulator” yadda yadda, it still makes your software think you run a different OS) to run much of your most important software, you chose the wrong operating system.
If it works completely fine with Wine - in many cases, better than under Windows - why do you care if there’s a translation layer? Seems like a weird hill to die on. Do you also feel like running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit architecture means you chose the wrong architecture?
All of that is true for most other operating systems, some of which are even more customizable than some of today’s Linux distributions. My question was “why Linux?”, not “why not Windows?”.
Question is a not relevant to the discussion, and might be an (possibly unintentional?) attempt at derailing the conversation. @bearboiblake@pawb.social answered the question more than adequately. Their point still holds: If needed, there are many ways to run Windows apps under other operating systems (including Linux). Choosing an OS between Linux - and it’s various flavors, FreeBSD etc is outside the scope of the original discussion.
Oh – in that case, because Linux is vastly more popular than any other alternative free operating system or system distribution, has infinitely more support options and software available than alternatives, and a much larger community/install base, meaning that if you have a problem or want some tool, it’s far more likely to be available for Linux than any other free alternative.
There are converters that do wonders for a lot of VST plugins but some critical ones (Kontakt for example) are unfortunately stubborn. If I made music that didn’t use sample libraries I’d uninstall Windows today. I have got it on a very minimal partition at least.
Really not how most of the software works. I install ton of apps locally like games, Libre office, ect. Running all in browser is a pipe dream. Also extremely memory and CPU inefficient
It really is. WebASM is miles beyond what you’re probably thinking of in terms of browser based performance, and most companies these days do not have local applications installed for their office workers. Office 365 is by far the most popular version of office, and it’s entirely browser based. Most in-house corporate IT work from the last decade is electron wrappers of internal company websites acting as simple interfaces for actual heavy lifting.
While there’s definitely some apps that are a bit too heavy for WebASM (or just javascript/.net for the above examples) this list is vanishingly short these days. I’d say blender and other 3d rendering would be inefficient just because WebASM has weird interactions with anything other than OpenGL and Vulkan, But even Unreal 5 can export to WebASM and do it fairly well (as well as OpenGL can perform, that poor outdated thing).
Heck just go to itch.io or any website that has ported over games to WebGL/WebASM. You can run Half-life directly on your browser these days. Half Life of all games. That’s more demanding than anything not 3d that you’d run in an office.
I know what web assembly is. It’s not a golden one-for-all solution you try to paint it to be. There’s a reason why you won’t see any modern AAA games in Wasm except ancient stuff like half life or Quake 3. It’s just not fast enough and not memory efficient enough.
While there’s definitely some apps that are a bit too heavy for WebASM (or just javascript/.net for the above examples) this list is vanishingly short these days.
Jesus no. It’s obvious you don’t play games. Unreal engine can export to Wasm but noone does this. Everyone develops games natively with DirectX 12 api in mind (and very rarely Vulkan like in case of Doom or Red dead redemption 2) You’re just blatantly wrong with this.
What’s web assembly is good for is what’s in the God damn name: Web apps. You can squeeze in office into it, because office is ultra lightweight use case, that back in the day ran on 486dx4 with 16Megs of ram. It now runs on 3ghz CPU and requires hundreds of megs of ram, this is insanely wasteful. We can afford these resources, but it’s still wasteful as hell.
Office 365 also refers to the desktop apps as well as the web versions, has done for many years now. Though I suppose it’s all copilot 365 now.
Source: Am office worker where we use office 365, and we all use the native system software, with the browser versions as for quick editing when elsewhere.
You’re all over this thread posting bad takes. Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser. There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from using any encryption algorithms within a browser whatsoever. I don’t even understand what you could possibly mean. There are so many ways to achieve it.
There are numerous ways to place decryption backdoors into a website’s JavaScript. How would you make sure that there is no MITM when trying to safely encrypt (e.g.) an e-mail in your browser?
Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser.
Talking about “bad takes”, aren’t we? There is no way to ensure that your end-to-end encryption is not decrypted on the fly when done by a website (= a potential attacker).
Who said anything about a website? You said browser. You can run fully-local resources in a browser, such as browser extensions, locally hosted tools, even just running in a .html file on your local disk somewhere. Javascript also isn’t the only option available to solve this problem.
Counter-point: Cubeless and platforms like it are close enough to a browser and handle that. Also by the very loose definition of secure encryption, https.
“Close enough to a browser” isn’t a browser. GnuPG in a browser just won’t work and most other encryption facilities aren’t quite as secure (and transparent).
and various Linux distros have gotten so good at this now. You can install something like Bazzite, PikaOS, hell even CachyOS with their recent update of switching from Octopi to Shelly and you can be up and running within a matter of minutes without having to worry about drivers or fiddling around with settings. PikaOS for example is probably one of the smoothest linux installs I’ve ever tried. easily within 15minutes I can have steam open and downloading games. within 30 I can be playing. and that’s without downloading drivers or playing around with settings.
There’s ridiculously little difference between Windows, OS X and GNOME nowadays. Once you realise that most of your Steam library works and you’ve hated Office for at least ten years anyway, that leaves browsers, which are exactly the same. Most users don’t want to fiddle with settings, installers and drivers, they’ll just accept what the machine comes out of the box with.
There is more to it though. The one feature i miss from windows is casting.
I dont mean chromecast, i got that working. I mean wireless casting to a tv or projector. The windows + k feature.
Ive yet to get that working in linux…
Besides that, im a happy linux person
Everyone’s got something they’d miss. For me it’s Affinity (though that’s on the way, it sounds like) and Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s insane, but MSFS is the 800-pound gorilla; it’s not just visuals, but almost all the new stuff (like Beyond ATC) is targeting MSFS.
Affinity works using WINE. I think there also exists a repo where they packaged it into .appimage
In theory yes. Not in practice though; unstable and slow.
I imagine if you play MSFS you have a beefy PC to handle Affinity through WINE
When my college classes went online because of the pandemic, I’d sit in my parents basement and cast my homework to their TV. Those were the days.
That leaves audio production (with a bunch of Windows-only plugins), video production, photo editing, CAD…
Sure, you can re-learn your entire stack and get by, but that’s a far shot from “ridiculously little difference”. Dropping familiar complex piece of software like Ableton is a hard sell for folks (and it’s OK).
I think once you’re into concepts like a “stack”, you’re working with very niche specific software that most users will never touch. And absolutely, use what fulfills your needs. The vast majority of people I know that ever use a computer, just use it as google chrome. Web browsers work great in Linux. Depending on your needs, a lot of creative software works great on Linux too.
Your situation is legit, and I honestly wish these things were better because I wish all things were better, but I do feel like these are specialized programs that “most people” never touch in their entire lives.
But yes, for people who have a technical or creative career based on a proprietary tech stack, the story is more complicated.
Most likely your software will work via bottles or wine. If you have a desktop PC from the last decade and it cost more than $1k, you can also run a VM (or Winboat) specifically for your software with nearly 1:1 performance to bare metal (if you get the passthrough right.)
Which isn’t a permanent solution, mind you, but if it’s just one piece of software holding you back and you don’t care to play with alternatives, then the solution isn’t to keep Windows despite its terrible performance in 99% of things, it’s to switch to windows and emulate or compatibility layer the 1% of software you might use that requires windows.
No, for the examples above it will not. Quite a lot of professional software will not run under wine (and a lot of hobbyists use professional software) - games work particularly well because they mostly do their own thing and depend less on Windows-specific APIs. And if you use a VM via Winboat then you’re just using Windows in the background, which is a workaround, but kinda defeats OP’s argument that there’s “no difference”.
To be clear: I’m daily driving Linux and I’ve not booted into Windows for more than a year. But it’s just wrong to say that they are on par with each other for a lot of usecases.
If you need an emulator (yeah, “Wine Is Not an Emulator” yadda yadda, it still makes your software think you run a different OS) to run much of your most important software, you chose the wrong operating system.
If it works completely fine with Wine - in many cases, better than under Windows - why do you care if there’s a translation layer? Seems like a weird hill to die on. Do you also feel like running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit architecture means you chose the wrong architecture?
If you use a Windows “translation layer” for your software anyway, why would you choose Linux as the host platform in the first place?
There are so many reasons. Here’s just a few off the top of my head:
All of that is true for most other operating systems, some of which are even more customizable than some of today’s Linux distributions. My question was “why Linux?”, not “why not Windows?”.
Question is a not relevant to the discussion, and might be an (possibly unintentional?) attempt at derailing the conversation. @bearboiblake@pawb.social answered the question more than adequately. Their point still holds: If needed, there are many ways to run Windows apps under other operating systems (including Linux). Choosing an OS between Linux - and it’s various flavors, FreeBSD etc is outside the scope of the original discussion.
Oh – in that case, because Linux is vastly more popular than any other alternative free operating system or system distribution, has infinitely more support options and software available than alternatives, and a much larger community/install base, meaning that if you have a problem or want some tool, it’s far more likely to be available for Linux than any other free alternative.
There are converters that do wonders for a lot of VST plugins but some critical ones (Kontakt for example) are unfortunately stubborn. If I made music that didn’t use sample libraries I’d uninstall Windows today. I have got it on a very minimal partition at least.
Life is more than browsers you know…
Most software can effectively run in a browser at this point, and the bit that can’t can be self hosted on a server and then cast to your browser.
Really not how most of the software works. I install ton of apps locally like games, Libre office, ect. Running all in browser is a pipe dream. Also extremely memory and CPU inefficient
It really is. WebASM is miles beyond what you’re probably thinking of in terms of browser based performance, and most companies these days do not have local applications installed for their office workers. Office 365 is by far the most popular version of office, and it’s entirely browser based. Most in-house corporate IT work from the last decade is electron wrappers of internal company websites acting as simple interfaces for actual heavy lifting.
While there’s definitely some apps that are a bit too heavy for WebASM (or just javascript/.net for the above examples) this list is vanishingly short these days. I’d say blender and other 3d rendering would be inefficient just because WebASM has weird interactions with anything other than OpenGL and Vulkan, But even Unreal 5 can export to WebASM and do it fairly well (as well as OpenGL can perform, that poor outdated thing).
Heck just go to itch.io or any website that has ported over games to WebGL/WebASM. You can run Half-life directly on your browser these days. Half Life of all games. That’s more demanding than anything not 3d that you’d run in an office.
I know what web assembly is. It’s not a golden one-for-all solution you try to paint it to be. There’s a reason why you won’t see any modern AAA games in Wasm except ancient stuff like half life or Quake 3. It’s just not fast enough and not memory efficient enough.
Jesus no. It’s obvious you don’t play games. Unreal engine can export to Wasm but noone does this. Everyone develops games natively with DirectX 12 api in mind (and very rarely Vulkan like in case of Doom or Red dead redemption 2) You’re just blatantly wrong with this.
What’s web assembly is good for is what’s in the God damn name: Web apps. You can squeeze in office into it, because office is ultra lightweight use case, that back in the day ran on 486dx4 with 16Megs of ram. It now runs on 3ghz CPU and requires hundreds of megs of ram, this is insanely wasteful. We can afford these resources, but it’s still wasteful as hell.
Office 365 also refers to the desktop apps as well as the web versions, has done for many years now. Though I suppose it’s all copilot 365 now.
Source: Am office worker where we use office 365, and we all use the native system software, with the browser versions as for quick editing when elsewhere.
Counter-example: secure encryption. You can’t do that in a browser.
You’re all over this thread posting bad takes. Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser. There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from using any encryption algorithms within a browser whatsoever. I don’t even understand what you could possibly mean. There are so many ways to achieve it.
There are numerous ways to place decryption backdoors into a website’s JavaScript. How would you make sure that there is no MITM when trying to safely encrypt (e.g.) an e-mail in your browser?
Talking about “bad takes”, aren’t we? There is no way to ensure that your end-to-end encryption is not decrypted on the fly when done by a website (= a potential attacker).
Who said anything about a website? You said browser. You can run fully-local resources in a browser, such as browser extensions, locally hosted tools, even just running in a .html file on your local disk somewhere. Javascript also isn’t the only option available to solve this problem.
Not sure if you’re just trolling at this point.
You said:
No, you can’t. I explained why.
…and I just explained to you how you can?
Counter-point: Cubeless and platforms like it are close enough to a browser and handle that. Also by the very loose definition of secure encryption, https.
That’s a very loose definition indeed.
“Close enough to a browser” isn’t a browser. GnuPG in a browser just won’t work and most other encryption facilities aren’t quite as secure (and transparent).
and various Linux distros have gotten so good at this now. You can install something like Bazzite, PikaOS, hell even CachyOS with their recent update of switching from Octopi to Shelly and you can be up and running within a matter of minutes without having to worry about drivers or fiddling around with settings. PikaOS for example is probably one of the smoothest linux installs I’ve ever tried. easily within 15minutes I can have steam open and downloading games. within 30 I can be playing. and that’s without downloading drivers or playing around with settings.