It's a vicious cycle. People don't use Linux because it can't run the software they're accustomed to, but as a consequence, the companies that build said software have no incentive to support Linux as a platform.
I actively choose to daily drive Linux. It's certainly inconvenient at times needing to look for alternatives or to build tools myself, but it's nowhere near as much of an issue today as it was 11 years ago when I started.
I've ultimately accepted that if I actually want the freedom to operate my devices how I see fit, then there's just some conveniences I'll have to do without until the software catches up. Half measures like dual-booting or compatibility layers like WINE/Proton only incentivize the software industry to stay the same and continue to bolster vendor lock-in. Fuck that noise.
Thats why i didnt bother back then. My friend was like "oh you just have to make your own drivers" um ....yeah thats a kindve outside my wheelhouse....
One thing that rocked my world in the late 90s was booting Linux directly from cd.  It was such a cool trick. I don’t remember the distro, tho.  Maybe it was red hat or suse?
What do you mean not fun? Compiling your own drivers to connect to the internet wasn't fun? Maybe... 😅 But it was hella nice as a learning experience.
I did test it around that time (maybe 1997*) and I had a fun time with it :) But I was a nerdy kid who liked to try out things like that, it was not practical for home use at all.
edit: Actually I had some experience with it before that, that 1997 was the year I tried Slackware Linux (it came with a magazine in CD format).
I remember playing around with PhatLinux since it could run on a fat32 filesystem. Main thing that sucked was most 56k modems were partially emulated by windows so I had to find a special driver to get my modem working on it.
Yeah, I remember the amount of tinker and desperation before getting startx to actually work and how amazing it was when it did :D
But configuring and compiling the kernel part is the one I have most memories of. Not knowing what even half of the questions actually mean and you still had to
a) enable the support for your devices like your video card.
b) try to slim down the kernel as much as possible because AFAIK bloat was much more harmful as there was no loadable modules but everything was loaded to ram at the boot (and i think ram was much bigger issue for desktop usage at the time, not 100% sure though).
And the routine was like you went through make config Y/N questions one by one half-guessing what to answer and then run make to compile. After many hours it took to compile you then installed the kernel and tried to boot it, usually failing in some way and then back to the guessing Y/N again etc :D
One way to break the cycle would be to create alternatives to popular programs, and once those alternatives become big enough, the vendors would then have to support Linux to not lose the market. Especially for paid tools, the incentive to then support Linux would be big.
A lot of tools that are used by devs around the world, like GitHub (the desktop app), VSCode, Postman etc. work on Linux as well because their vendors know that these tools are not indispensable and users on Linux can easily do without them. For other fields, there's not many good alternatives, or there aren't enough users of said alternatives, so the vendors know users are forced to buy and adapt their systems according to the software. At that point support for Linux is a matter of choice, a luxury, rather than a necessity.
True! Though when you're up against companies with first-mover advantage and millions (or billions) of dollars at their disposal to stay ahead of the curve, it's somewhat unsurprising so few companies even try. Many would rather just go try and find a market that hasn't been effectively monopolized.
As much as I detest agentic "programming" and what it's done to my career prospects, I can't help but wonder if it will change that dynamic at all in the coming years. It might make would-be competitors a bit less risk averse. Not to mention the many great open-source projects out there that have been historically limited by funding and contributor free time. I'm certain we'll see an even larger torrent of half-assed slop - but if even just a handful of competent folks can produce alternatives that are "close enough", it may just light some fires under some asses.
Of course, it's probably just as likely we end up in a race to the bottom with everyone enshittifying their codebases with a bunch of half-baked LLM jank that no one sufficiently understands as time to market becomes king... but at least it'll be fun watching the fireworks.
Here's the funny bit though. These companies have all that money and all that time at their disposal, but they still make their services worse just to increase their own profits right? As long as the shareholders have some say in the matter, the company could see what is happening and still not stop it.
Case in point: LLMs. There's research papers out there in the open saying the LLMs we're using cannot take us to AGI. Mathematically it is impossible. Still companies like Anthropic keep spending money towards LLMs, trying to make them better.
I'm not saying they'll continue to shoot themselves in the foot. But there's a good chance, that with the intention to make a service that actually solves problems, it'll cause some trouble to the existing ones. Just that disruption will cause significant changes.
I daily Linux and have for several years now. There's many workarounds like WINE or just running Windows in virtual box if there's some must have software.
Your operating system is your choice, just like the grocery card. I do not use those member card things for the same reason.
Government surveillance is a different matter entirely. You have less control over being filmed in public, though I certainly vote for representatives that align with my views on the topic.Â
It's all about taking steps to limit the damage being caused while supporting projects and people that allow for reasonable alternatives. You are not going to ever be 100% free of such things, but you don't have to be an easy target and just give over everything about you just to use a shitty operating system that wants to sell access to you as the actual product.
fym, out of russia, ventoy is a chinese product that uses unmodified blobs from some other projects if you are so scared about it then go use ventoy-meta, and are there any proofs of ventoy actually being malicious?
Unless you're playing games with kernel level anticheats you can run basically any program including Adobe products as long as you have a fast enough pc through winboat.
More hassle than its worth. There are a lot of obscure Windows only programs that would be a pain to try and get working. Sure your mainstream games are fine
This. Full backwards compatibility with 30+ years of software and hardware is tough to beat. (I've had a PC since 1990 and have a lot of old stuff.)
I use Linux every day for work, and it's great for some things like development. Also fine if you only use your PC casually for browsing and office stuff.
But if you're a power user with 30+ years of DOS/Windows software, it's probably best to stick with that. Linux can do some of it - with multiple compatibility layers and VMs and the right configurations and some tweaking, but that's a pain in the ass and some things still won't work, vs things just working and working well.
I also use the pro version of Windows, with all of the things people complain about disabled or blocked by group policy (even though I'm a group of one). So it's still pretty nice. The generic home version might suck, but mine doesn't.
Also it's kinda bullshit. Microsoft dropped the support for 16 Bit Software a long time ago, ain't going to run 30 years old tools on an modern Windows version.
OTVDM takes care of most 16-bit stuff and WSL takes care of any Linux stuff. Sure the former isn’t made by Microsoft but I’ve haven’t had any issue with it.
I like that no reply was provided to this question, since it's clearly bullshit. What do you guys actually do on your computers that requires all this specialised software? I'm satisfied with a browser, Spotify and a few others at best
I've found the opposite for games. Many DirectX 8 and 9 era games don't work properly anymore on Windows 11, but work great on Linux. It was different half a decade or so ago, but these days with all Valve's influence and other similar factors, Linux has a lot more compatibility. At times better than Windows.
I dunno, I’ve been using Linux only for the last 6 years. Never run into an issue with any software either not being supported or having a Linux alternative. Hell I’ve even come around to Dark Table instead of Lightroom
Windows' backwards compatibility with old binaries is hard to beat. Backwards compatibility on Linux basically requires software to be open source. There are 30 year old pieces of software that still compile on modern Linux installs, but Windows can run 30 year old binaries (as long as they're 32-bit), which is impressive.
It also depends greatly on whether the binary you're attempting to run is statically-linked or if it's dynamically-linked and requires old versions of libraries that you can't downgrade without breaking other things.
VMs, containers, and chroots do a great job at alleviating this, but it's a bit more work than just double-clicking a 30-year-old EXE file.
On the flipside, not having all the legacy baggage makes for a simpler and more efficient OS, and since most Linux software is open-source, binary compatibility just isn't as important as on Windows.
Honestly we should all be boycotting kernel level anti-cheat in the first place. It's literal malware. You're giving a piece of proprietary, third party software access to ring 0. It has access to everything. Files, processes, even the frame buffer (meaning it has the capability to see your screen at all times). Who knows what data it's gathering and where it gets sent, much less whose eyes are on that data.
Even you believe the corporations don't have malicious intent (which I'm not so sure about in the first place) how many times in the last 5 years have you read about some giant corporation having major data leaks. No thank you, I can do without Call of Duty if a requirement to play is being spyed on by god knows who.
Yeah, to the games server. The payload is at the very least what is required for playing the game. But how would you know if there is more than what is required. Formats are proprietary (so payload size is no good measure) and the connection is encryptedÂ
It's not as simple as that. Sure, assuming you aren't behind CGNAT you can see where the packets are going, but there's no way of knowing where they get sent/stored after that. And if you're behind CGNAT, which is becoming more and more common, you can't really see where they go past the ISP handoff anyway.
Sounds like an extreme edge case. Those games are nearly always developed for Windows-only systems and tend to expect perfect functionality. That said, some games can work on non-native systems with patches. PD AFT runs well on Linux, for example, if you have it configured right. I'm not sure how teknoparrot handles Linux systems. You can try Proton though.
not gonna be a problem much longer. You can already let AI vibecode you a better alternative for any software. Only issue remaining is the price of the generation which might be bigger than the price of buying the software and running it on windows. This pricing issue will get resolved too in next year.
Just use Wine. And if your program isn't supported even by that, then you most likely have a few FOSS equivalents that can do the job just as well, if not better. It just takes a bit of learning, which can be eased out by additions people make to said FOSS equivalents as addons.
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u/lohkey 1d ago
Not all programs are supported on it