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When WSL came out I was absolutely overjoyed - finally an actual linux shell on windows! I use windows for my gaming pc, and I wanted to have a unified gaming/dev box. It felt like the solution.
Over time though more and more small issues with it came up. Packages working not quite right, issues with the barriers between the two, etc. It always felt like there was a little bit more friction with the process.
With Valve really pushing Proton and the state of linux gaming, I've recently swapped over to Ubuntu and Nixos. The friction point moved to the gaming side, but things mostly just work.
Things on linux are rapidly getting better, and having things just work on the development side has been a breath of fresh air. I now feel that it's a better experience than windows w/ WSL, despite some AAA titles not working on linux.
By hypercube33 2025-05-201:384 reply WSL 1 was supposed to be like "Windows on NT" where it emulated the Linux kernal to the NT one. they skipped a ton of features then dumped the whole thing for a containerized virtual machine thing for version 2. Wish the NT one worked out but I get it being complicated.
If the WSL 1 ended up working, it would have been one of the best historical coincidences in MS's history. A long forgotten feature in the NT kernel, unique to pretty much any other OS out there, used to push it's dominance in the 90's, is revived almost 30 years later, to fight for relevance with Unix based OS, once again. To quote Gorge Lucas, It's like poetry, it rhymes.
I can tell that if POSIX subsystem in Windows NT was actually a good enough UNIX experience, I would never bothered with those Slackware 2.0 install disks.
And the subsystems concept was quite common in micro-computers and mainframes space, Microsoft did not come up with the idea for Windows.
The original POSIX subsystem was just there so MS could say that it exists (and pass DoD requirements).
It got actually somewhat usable with the 2k/XP version, slightly better in Vista (notably: the utilities installer had option to use bash a default shell) and IIRC with 7 MS even again mentioned existence of the thing in marketing (with some cool new name for the thing).
Indeed, and that is why if I wanted to do university work at home instead of fighting for a place at one DG/UX terminal at the campus, I had to find something else.
I am aware it got much better later on, but given the way it was introduced, the mess with third party integrations, as Microsoft always outsourced the development effort (MKS, Interix,..), it never got people to care about afterwards.
First impressions matter most.
Realistically anyone who cared would be using something like Cygwin (and the original UNIX server market segment evaporated due to Linux and had zero interest in migrating to NT in that form--some did migrate due to application layer benefits like .NET but not for the same workloads.)
There is an alternative universe where Windows NT POSIX is really as it should have been in first place, and Linux never takes off as there is no need for it.
As there is another alternative one where Microsoft doesn't sell Xenix and keeps pushing for it, as Bill Gates was actually a big fan of.
Obviously we'll never know, but I seriously doubt that parallel universe would've had a chance to materialize. Not the least due to "free as in beer" aspect of Linux whilst web/Apache was growing at the pace it did. All proprietary unices are basically dead. Sun was likely the sole company that had the best attitude to live alongside open source, but they also proved it wasn't a good enough business post bubble burst. NT and Darwin remain alive due to their desktop use, not server.
By skissane 2025-05-2110:45 IBM z/OS is officially a Unix-a very weird Unix which uses EBCDIC-but it passed the test suite (an old but still valid version, which makes it somewhat outdated) and IBM paid the fee to The Open Group, so officially it is a Unix. (Although somewhat outdated, they recently added a partial emulation of the Linux namespace syscalls-clone/unshare/etc-in order to port K8S to z/OS; but that’s not part of the Unix standard.)
If Microsoft had wanted, Windows could have officially been Unix too-they could have licensed the test suite, run it under their POSIX/SFU/SUA subsystem, fixed the failures, paid the fee-and then Windows would be a Unix. They never did-not (as far as I’m aware) for any technical reason, simply because as a matter of business strategy, they decided not to invest in this.
By pjmlp 2025-05-2113:11 With Microsoft having either Windows NT with proper UNIX support, or real UNIX with Xenix, there would be no need for Linux, regardless of it being free beer.
Whatever computer people would be getting at the local shopping mall computer store already had UNIX support.
Lets also not forget that UNIX and C won over the competing on timesharing OSes, exactly because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it in first place, there was no Linux on those days, and had AT&T not sued BSD, hardly anyone would have paid attention to Linux, yet another what-if.
NT underlies the majority of M365 and many of the major Azure services. Most F500s in the US will have at the very least an Active Directory deployment, if not other ancillary services.
IIS and SQL Server (Win) boxes are fairly typical, still.
By mmx1 2025-05-215:47 I am not suggesting NT is dead on servers at all. I am positing it would be dead had it not been for owning the majority of desktops. Those use cases are primarily driven as an ancillary service to Windows desktop[1], and where they have wider applicability, like .NET and SQL Server, have been progressively unleashed from Windows. The realm of standalone server products were bulldozed by Linux; NT wouldn't have stood a chance either.
[1]: In fact, Active Directory was specifically targeted by EU antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.
By throwaway2037 2025-05-216:401 reply For all large corps, users sit at 1990s-style desktop computers that run Win10/11 and use Microsoft Office, including Outlook that connects to an Exchange server running on Windows Server. I'm not here to defend Microsoft operating systems (I much prefer Linux), but they are so deeply embedded. It might be decades before that changes at large corps.
By kjellsbells 2025-05-2214:17 That was true once, but not true now. On-prem Exchange is rapidly being squashed by Microsoft in favor of 365. The direction of travel for the Outlook client is clearly towards web (I note anecdotally that the Mac client, always a poor relation to Windows, is so laughably clunky that the Mac users I know forgo it in favor of the web client.) If the service is in the 365 cloud and the client is a web browser, who needs Windows for this discussion? We might end up in a future of terminals again for the worker bees and 'real' computers only for the people who need Excel and Word and for whom the web versions dont cut it
By tjoff 2025-05-207:37 WSL 1 works fine. I much prefer it over 2 because I only run windows in a VM and nested virtualization support isn't all there.
Also feels a lot less intrusive for light terminal work.
That would not be unique, as is what BSD has done for Linux compatibility basically forever.
BSD and Linux are in the same bucket, so that doesn't count, not any more than MacOS compatibility with Linux. Windows is the odd one out.
I don't think it is fair to brush it off under "same bucket; doesn't count." The syscalls are still different and there's quite a bit of nuance. I mean the lines you're drawing are out of superficial convenience and quite arbitrary. In fact, I'd argue macOS/Darwin/XNU are really Mach at their core (virtual memory subsystem, process management and IPC) and BSD syscalls are simply an emulated service on Mach, which is quite different from traditional UNIX. The fact that as a user you think of macOS much more similar to Linux is not really reflective of what happens under the hood. Likewise NT has very little to do with Win32 API in its fundamentals but Win2k feels the same to the user as WinME, but under your framing, you'd same-bucket those.
By TeMPOraL 2025-05-2023:35 > Likewise NT has very little to do with Win32 API in its fundamentals but Win2k feels the same to the user as WinME, but under your framing, you'd same-bucket those.
I probably would, in this context. Well, maybe not WinME, because that was a dumpster fire. But any Windows coming down from NT line, which is what's relevant in the past 20 years, sure. Same bucket.
By pjmlp 2025-05-207:36 Solaris did as well.
The essential problem was that critical Windows APIs like CreateProcess and the NTFS file system were far too slow to be used in UNIX-like ways. If you tried to run git or build things in WSL1 - a key use case - it was way slower than doing so on native or VM Linux.
Performance was one problem, but imho the biggest was that MMAP semantics were inherited from the NT side and made a lot of applications crash (mmap's created could only be as large as the file's current size as in Windows, while Linux/BSD semantics allows for a mmap larger than the file that's usable without constant remapping as the file grows).
They didn't prioritize it until fixing at a late stage, barely before WSL 2 came out. Sometimes i do wonder if they made a premature decision to move to WSL2 since there was quite a lot of basic applications/runtimes that were crashing due to this fix lacking (Naturally a lot of other new Linux API's like io_uring probably would have made it an api chasing treadmill that they just wanted to circumvent).
> (mmap's created could only be as large as the file's current size as in Windows, while Linux/BSD semantics allows for a mmap larger than the file that's usable without constant remapping as the file grows).
I thought you could do it using ntdll functions, no?
https://www.jeremyong.com/winapi/io/2024/11/03/windows-memor...
By whizzter 2025-05-2021:32 Good to know, still the obscureness of this function or semantics led WSL1 to be incompatible for a long time (Also skimming this article touches upon some 0-sized mappings being an issue?).
Regardless this led WSL1 to have fatal incompatibilities for a long time, iirc basic stuff like the rpm system or something similarly fundamental for some distros/languages relied on it. And once WSL2 existed people just seems to have gone over.
Win32 APIs like CreateProcess suck because they have to spend so much time setting up the stuff that allows Win32's application model to mimic that of 16-bit Windows, which was coopreratively multitasked. The NT kernel is much faster at creating processes when it doesn't need to worry about that stuff.
As for NTFS: it's not NTFS specifically, it's the way the I/O system is designed in the NT kernel. Imagine any call from outside that layer transitioning through a stack of filter drivers before actually reaching the implementation. Very powerful stuff, but also very bad for performance.
Hm. I used Git on WSL1 for many years, with medium sized repos hosted on a Windows drive, and it worked great. When I moved to WSL2 Git became a whole lot slower - it now takes about 5-8 secs to execute 'git status' where before it was instant.
By dmatech 2025-05-2023:35 Windows actually created a new process type for this: Pico processes[1]. This allows WSL1 to perform quite a bit better than Cygwin on something like Windows XP.
1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/wsl/pico-pro...
I know -- I was super excited to see WSL1 and wished it worked. NT when started was the OS/2 personality and back at that time was excited to see NT as the OS to end all OSes (by running them all as a personality).
But WSL2 is freaking incredible, I'm super excited to see this and just wish the rest of windows would move to a Linux kernel and support bash natively everywhere. I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine
By seniorThrowaway 2025-05-2014:221 reply >But WSL2 is freaking incredible
It's good. But if/when you start using it as your main work platform nagging issues start cropping up. The native linux filesystem inside it cannot actually reclaim space. This isn't very noticeable if you aren't doing intensive things in it, or if you are using it as a throwaway test bed. But if you are really using it, you have to do things like zero out a bunch of space on the WSL disk and then compact it from outside in the Windows OS. Using space from your NTFS partition / drive isn't very usable, the performance is horrible and you can't do things like put your docker graph root in there as it is incompatible. It also doesn't respect capitalization or permissions and I've had to troubleshoot very subtle bugs because of that. Another issue is raw network and device access, it basically isn't possible. Some of these things are likely beyond the intended use of WSL2, in its defense. Just be aware before you start heavily investing your workflow in it. For these use cases a traditional dual boot will work far better and save you much frustration.
By dabockster 2025-05-2315:131 reply Hyper-V for a cheap solution.
But VMware still excels at running desktop Linux on Windows. Especially for distros that use 3D accelerated desktops (aka literally anything that uses a recent GNOME or KDE release).
One thing that I notice nobody mention about VMWare on Windows is what about the issues with "Virtualization Based Security"? If you have this enabled VMWare uses "Windows Hypervisor Platform" which I think is also tied in with Hyper-V for running VMs through VMware making them noticeably worse and more unstable especially when dealing with USB devices. During the installer, you'll be warned of this too if memory serves correct. Cons are you cannot use WSL2 and reduced security. How much in reality does it reduce security I'm not exactly sure but I wish it wasn't like this or there was a better workaround for VMware on Windows. VBS feature is enabled by default on all Windows 11 and I think most later releases of Windows 10.
By dabockster 2025-05-2914:56 The Windows Hypervisor does suck in terms of an actual virtualization features, but it does reduce security significantly by disabling it. It’s a big front line defense against memory attacks.
Why not just use Linux then?
The whole point of Windows right now is having a kernel that a) does not shove GPL down the device manufacturer's throat and b) care about driver API stability so that drivers actually work without manufacturer or maintaner intervention every kernel upgrade.
People like to talk like GPL is evil, but it's underpinning more of the world than many people see.
And thanks to no ABI/API stability guarantees, Linux can innovate and doesn't care about what others might say. Considering Linux is developed mostly by companies today, the standard upkeep of a driver is not a burden unless you want to shove planned obsolescence down the throats of the consumers (cough Win11 TPM requirements cough).
By dabockster 2025-05-2315:153 reply I wouldn’t call the GPL “evil”, but I do think it’s more unrealistic given current western economics and mooching practices. Some copyright here and there does help keep food and water on the table.
By bayindirh 2025-05-2610:19 > Some copyright here and there does help keep food and water on the table.
While I'm a strong Free Software proponent, I'm not a zealot and insist on a black or white approach.
Yes, some software can be closed source, I agree, but it shouldn't be the bedrock software, i.e. anything required to enable hardware (firmware, OS, and preferably the utilities).
For the record, I'm paying for a couple closed source software packages on Linux which provide very unique feature s. These are inSync and Pagico.
On top of that, you can always sell GPL software (remember, you shall ship the source with the product. opening it it to everyone is not a requirement). On top of it, you can sell support or special versions. curl has a special version for paying customers, and ccid driver developers sell ccid compliance testing.
So, there are always alternatives, and the reality has more shades of gray than two distinct colors.
By AStonesThrow 2025-05-265:02 Despite the FSF's word games with "copyleft", the GNU GPL, Creative Commons, and F/OSS licenses rely on legal copyright protections in order to work. It's the copyright holder who reserves the right to license the software by those terms.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#is-creative-commons-against...
Closed source is protected in other ways besides copyright. Trade secrets, confidentiality, NDA, proprietary ownership, obfuscation, and in the case of hardware, big globs of epoxy and other countermeasures to ensure nobody can get in and reverse-engineer it.
By codeguro 2025-05-264:57 Nothing prevents one from selling GPL'd software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
Sure, but consider that some people might not be able to just make that choice in any given context.
I was working as a freelancer wher a lot of my job meant interfacing with files other people made in Software that only runs reliably on Windows or Mac (and I tried regularly).
So WSL provided me with a way to run Linux stuff without having to run a fat VM or dual boot. In fact my experience with WSL is probably why I run Linux as my daily driver OS in academia now, since here the context differs and a switch to Linux was possible.
Whether a thing is useful is always dependent on the person and the context. WSL can absolutely be a gateway drug to Linux for those who haven't managed to get their feet wet just yet.
By bayindirh 2025-05-208:49 I completely agree with you. WSL2 can be useful for many scenarios at its current form.
We tend to forget that "Horses for Courses" and "Your Mileage May Vary" applies way broader than we think.
By FeloniousHam 2025-05-2011:312 reply The obvious answer: you can't. I work in constrained environment with an IT department that provides the hardware and (most of) the software I develop on. I agree with all the WSL cheering here, it integrates almost seamlessly.
But you're asking the wrong question. It should be "why not use MacOS?" if you need a stable UI with UNIX underneath :).
That's another sound option, but as a person who doesn't like Homebrew and stuffing /usr/local with tons of things, a lightweight Linux VM becomes mandatory after some point on macOS, too.
Other than that, macOS plus some tools (Fileduck, Forklift, Tower, Kaleidoscope to name a few), you can be 99% there.
By bayindirh 2025-05-2012:32 Oh. They changed it at last? This is good news. Thanks for letting me know.
By rcleveng 2025-05-2013:24 Yup absolutely.
I use macos as my daily driver, but any real work on it happens on a linux container or VM. Using one of {cursor, vscode, windsurf} with a devcontainer is a much better approach for me.
By skydhash 2025-05-2012:52 Current macos is going the windows direction with some architecture choice (default uninstallable software, settings panel mess, meaningless updates,…)
By MonaroVXR 2025-05-240:23 >Why not just use Linux then?
Why not both? Like me?
By justusthane 2025-05-2012:58 > I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine
It depends on what you're doing. PowerShell is incredible for Windows sysadmin, and the way it pipes objects between commands rather than text makes it really easy to compose pretty advanced operations.
However, if I'm doing text manipulation, wrangling logs, etc, then yes, absolutely I'm going to use a *nix scripting language.
By VBprogrammer 2025-05-2011:30 I sometimes say, tongue in cheek slightly, that the best Linux desktop is Windows.
By snailscale 2025-05-205:412 reply For anyone curious (as I was) the basic difference is that WSL1 implemented the Linux syscall table directly whereas WSL2 actually runs Linux on top of some virtual drivers (hypervisor).
WSL 2 runs a full Linux kernel under Hyper-V. There are some out-of-tree or staging drivers included in Microsoft's Linux kernel derivative and they publish their kernel sources at https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.
By dangerboysteve 2025-05-2014:42 i routinely upgrade my WSL2 kernel. Now on 6.6.87.1. Personally, I love WSL2.
By marshray 2025-05-2016:28 Note that in recent versions of Windows, typically the bulk of Windows now runs under a hypervisor (i.e., "in a VM") as well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
By ozgrakkurt 2025-05-1922:123 reply I had the same experience. Even installing linux is easier for me now. And with new spyware features of windows, there is really no incentive to use it
Could have written the exact same sentence when Vista came out. I still wonder when it's finally enough for the poor souls still stuck in windows
By BlarfMcFlarf 2025-05-2014:14 It’s finally enough for me at least. I’m skipping windows 11 and going to Linux instead.
When we die off I guess lol.
I've been using windows since I was 6 or 7. I currently work in a Mac environment and hate it. I worked in a linux one for 5 years. Nothing feels like the first language you learned I guess?
My home computer is windows and it'll be that way until windows stops existing.
Edit: when I say we I mean the people still on windows.
By herbst 2025-05-2016:57 Definitely not for me. Was in Windows between 95 and XP, never looked back. Same for my first programming languages, glad I am not stuck still doing PHP and Java.
Switched my main Linux and desktop environment multiple times as well.
By graynk 2025-05-2016:31 I have a video of me typing things into Microsoft Word at ~3-4 years old. I still hate Windows with a passion now (Mac too, tbh).
By dabockster 2025-05-2315:19 I’m actually going long on Windows now after learning about how the Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel, whereas Windows is a “hybrid” microkernel design. It explains so much about some program behavior in Linux (eg crashing Gnome would often cause kernel panics) that you don’t see at all on Windows.
Yeah, the spyware is annoying and stupid. But once you strip it out (it can be removed/blocked), Windows 11 is absolutely rock solid.
By jasonm23 2025-05-207:32 Honestly accurate for a dev work machine.
For a gamer... still not quite, but very close.
For the corps ... it's a legacy issue, but that may slip away as a side effect of Trump destroying global soft power and making it a hard sell to remain on a US led platform, purely op sec concerns, the spyware issue will add more weight to that.
I truly believe if AAA titles would not release for windows exclusively no-one would have a good reason to use windows really besides inertia.
Businesses would. The problem with that is you have decision makers in said businesses who don't know any better, so Microsoft-all-the-things gets pushed down the line. Offices are all trapped on Windows 10/11 and using Teams/Outlook with Exchange/Entra/Azure chugging along in all its misconfigured glory. Heck, half the MSPs I work side-by-side with seem to only offer support on Windows machines.
It gets worse. When we go to the manufacturing side of the building, there's a high chance they're still using Windows 7. Yeah, still! And IT or Controls has no idea what to do with it since, well, it's still working. Is it secure? They don't know because the team is comprised of kids who memorized the CompTIA exams and use Windows 11 at home.
Trying to get the business world to switch to Linux with all that in mind is an impossible task. It's the same as asking an American city to rip out all its old infrastructure at once and replace it with new instead of patching the old. The cost and knowledge required for such a task is unthinkable, to them. Believe me, I've tried.
Microsoft was quite brilliant in the way that they shoehorned their way into the fabric of the way we do business, not just in the US, but on a global scale.
I would be very happy with Windows 7 on manufacturing side - lots of CNCs that are still in use and supported by manufacturers are still on Windows 98.
By dabockster 2025-05-2315:24 I worked at a neighborhood IT shop during the height of COVID and we’d see XP laptops all the time that were used as offline/airgapped controllers for things like CNC mills.
By vrighter 2025-05-237:25 The higher up have such a hardon for Microsoft, I think it could actually be used as a bridge across the Atlantic ocean. We've already spent years migrating shit off of microsoft platforms onto the newest and latest microsoft platforms.
I left some room for myself with "a good reason" :)
When company is forcing you to use something out of inertia, then it's probably not for a good reason.
Actually regarding the "global scale" – I'm not really sure it's true, I think MS has influence mostly in US. Many EU and Asian companies I worked with were using OSX/Linux.
By clows 2025-05-2011:49 I'm in the EU and (nearly) every company runs windows (on desktop). Especially in larger organizations (there's plenty of windows servers still).
Yeah, I totally agree with what's being said here. It's a tough pill to swallow when you realize just how entrenched Microsoft is in the business world, and how difficult it would be to get everyone to make the switch to Linux.
I mean, think about it - most companies are still stuck on Windows 10 or 11, and they're using all those Microsoft services like Teams, Outlook, and Exchange. It's like they're trapped in this Microsoft ecosystem, and it's gonna take a lot more than just a few people saying "hey, let's switch to Linux" to get them out of it.
And don't even get me started on the IT departments in these places. A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing. They're using Windows 11 at home, but they have no idea how to deal with all the outdated Windows 7 machines that are still being used in manufacturing.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been really smart about this. They've managed to get their products and services woven into the fabric of how we do business on a global scale. It's gonna take a lot more than just a few open-source projects to change that.
They're "trapped" because there is no answer to the Exchange/Outlook combo for business purposes and it's very inexpensive for the value it provides. There are of course alternatives to Teams until you pair Teams with SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot/Exchange/3rd party market.
> A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing.
Well, this is true throughout IT, even those who went to college for a CS or IT-based degrees. People want to make money, and IT has been a safe haven so far to do so.
By thewebguyd 2025-05-2017:49 > They're "trapped" because there is no answer to the Exchange/Outlook combo for business purposes and it's very inexpensive for the value it provides. There are of course alternatives to Teams until you pair Teams with SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot/Exchange/3rd party market.
Yep, it's mostly this. Especially for businesses under 300 users, you get Exchange, EntraID, Defender EDR, InTune(MDM) + the Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot all integrated for $22/user/month. For a little extra you get a half way decent PBX for VoIP too.
If you tried to piece all that together yourself with different services, then integrate them to the same level, it's going to cost a hell of a lot more than that.
Microsoft is smart too, as none of that requires Windows either. Even of these companies switched to Linux or macOS en masse, they'd still be using Microsoft.
Plus, there's still no competitor to Excel for business types. We might be able to use Google Sheets to great effectiveness, but the finance department at the behemoths can't. The world runs on Excel, like it or not.
> A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing.
This is true for all fields not just tech/IT. Competent windows sysadmin work nowadays isn't all that different from macOS endpoints or Linux. Everything can be scripted/automated with PowerShell, or just using the Graph API for 365 stuff. You can effectively manage a windows environment and never touch a GUI if you don't want to.
Microsoft usually isn't the best at anything, but what they excel at is being "good enough" and checking boxes.
By seniorThrowaway 2025-05-2014:27 For larger orgs and enterprises, it is Active Directory/Entra. That is the true Microsoft killer app and lock-in driver. There is no comparable Linux solution that I am aware of.
By zoklet-enjoyer 2025-05-208:581 reply ChatGPT response
By tempaccount420 2025-05-209:161 reply Keep AI accusations to yourself, it's very rude when you get it wrong.
By zoklet-enjoyer 2025-05-2016:35 He re-wrote the comment he was replying to. It was either AI or just pointless.
I think you're underestimating how many businesses rely on Excel alone.
You're saying it like there is no alternative and you can't just open and edit same excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.
I'll say it too!
There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.
You can't just edit Excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets, or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.
> There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.
Which is 5% of its users probably.
Every advanced feature of MS Office is used by a different 5% of users. https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn... (The whole series is worth reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...)
--- start quote ---
The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")
--- end quote ---
The commands you mentioned seem irrelevant here. I never use any advanced features, i.e. those not available in LibreOffice or incompatible with MS Word, and I don't know anybody who does.
By troupo 2025-05-2020:12 "I", "I don't know"
vs.
--- start quote ---
How much data have we collected?
- About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.)
- Over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080324235838/http://blogs.msdn...
--- end quote ---
I wish there were more recent studies on this, but they would paint the same picture
By AceyMan 2025-05-213:57 and 90% of that 5% are the CFOs. As Scooby Doo would say, "Rotsa ruck!"
Can you give me an example of such advanced features? I really don't understand what outstanding feature did they pack in this "Excel" which has no alternative?
If the only problem is migrating from XLSX to some other format I'm sure this is trivial and some tooling must be available.
By cturner 2025-05-2013:19 There are complex reports that every European-regulated finance entity needs to submit to their regulator. They are always complicated, but they are only sometimes well-specified. The formats evolve over time.
There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.
The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.
If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.
There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.
Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.
The problem is not the "advanced features" within Excel but how they are used. If an excel sheet is basically just a front for a visual basic Programm it doesn't easily open anywhere.
As Google's JavaScript API also doesn't work in open office and whatever else they all have in extra layers.
However i am not sure when and why I encountered such a software last time, but my dad is a Visual Basic guy and has done a lot of these weird sheets for internal business stuff.
So the Visual Basic (lol) macros seem to be the only real thing retaining all the people on Excel, interesting...
VBA is the famous example, but Power Query deserves a shout out. I use it to make tables that pull their data from other tables with custom transformation logic.
Google Sheets didn't even support tables until fairly recently.
By Cordiali 2025-05-214:27 LibreOffice still doesn't have tables! Not to mention the new(ish) functions in Excel, like LET and LAMBDA.
Power Query the language is nice, I kinda like it. I've read the UI and engine works quite well in PowerBI, but I haven't used it.
The Excel engine is way too slow though. Apparently they're two entirely separate implementations, for some architectural reason, not exactly sure why.
Excel's Power Query editor on the other hand, is an affront to every god from every religion ever. Calling it an "advanced editor", while lacking even the most basic functionality, is just further proof of their heresy.
By joseda-hg 2025-05-2220:02 Power Pivot is one I encounter on the regular, you can't even use it on Excel for Mac, Windows or Bust
CFO was/is an excel wiz, so he would whip up crazy Rube Goldbergs with Power Pivot (And Power Query), that couldn't be modified by mac users (They can open the files, but they can't interact with it, not even changing filters
PowerQuery is another one, also not available outside of Excel for Windows, not Mac or Web
A lot of it is stuff that should be handled by SQL more properly, but the data people usually can't keep up with the Excel wiz
> Can you give me an example of such advanced features?
macros, vba, onedrive/sharepoint/office integration
I think you highly underestimate the Microsoft Office ecosystem and the tight integration in enterprises.
> I'm sure this is trivial [...].
nope.
You didn't really mention any real feature besides Visual Basic, which clearly has alternatives in other spreadsheet apps. You have to run your VBA through converter script, and the fix incompatibilities in your macros but again, for a Visual Basic guy it is trivial... The rest of the things you mentioned is a good old `rsync` repacked.
But you're right, they surely added a bunch of smaller stuff to keep everything connected, and I'm kind of underestimating it since I never used that ecosystem but heard rumors and complaints from other people who had to use it :)
I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself.
>There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.
this is just silly, it really means "There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on exclusive Visual Basic macros"
By zchrykng 2025-05-2015:40 > I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself.
Not true. Sharepoint and OneDrive are key enablers for real time collaboration. It lets multiple people work on the same file at the same time using native desktop applications. Dropbox has tried to bolt stuff like that on, but it is janky as heck. OpenOffice, etc can't integrate with Excel for real time collaboration (honestly, I'm not sure they support any level of real time collab with anything). Google Sheets won't integrate with Excel for real time. Google is great for collaboration, but sticking everything in Google's cloud system isn't dramatically better than being stuck on Microsoft's stuff. Also Google Sheets just doesn't work as well as Excel.
By p_ing 2025-05-211:35 SharePoint/OneDrive Lists can be directly edited in Excel. The Power platform can directly access/manipulate/transform Excel files in the cloud or on-prem via the Power BI Gateway.
You don't seem to have much of a familiarity with this ecosystem. If you're curious, I'd suggest hunting down these things on learn.microsoft.com, but to dismiss them is only showing your lack of understanding.
By rescbr 2025-05-2021:38 So you do all this work, retrain other users, spend a not-so-trivial amount of time and money and risk breaking stuff, all for not paying $22 monthly per user?
I get it, it would be a technically better solution, remove Microsoft lock-in etc, but the cost-benefit analysis isn’t that good in this case.
By p_ing 2025-05-2013:00 Not only is it about lack of features on the open source side, it's about workflow.
Sure Photoshop and Gimp both edit pictures, but the workflow is so different that professional users of Photoshop aren't going to switch just because it's FOSS.
The market is getting more diverse (mobile, steam deck alikes, laptops, consoles, etc), but i guess if you want to quickly earn the most money on your (huge) development investment, you better try and take the biggest piece of the pie first.
Personally i don't really believe in AAA (or UbiSoft's AAAA) titles that much anymore. Strange exclusivity for some console or device may bring some money early on, but i have plenty games in my Steam libary that could run perfectly under many platforms. And most AAA games heavily drop in price after a few months, Nintendo being the sole exception.
AAA and AAAA games became (expensive) gateways to microtransaction based money extraction application, in my opinion.
I enjoy older, smaller games nonproportionately more when compared to big titles which require much more resources and time. Yes they look nice, yes they use every documented and undocumented feature of my GPU, yes "it's so fluffy", but it is not enjoyable, esp. with shoved down microtransactions.
If we're talking FPS, give me any Half-Life (and Portal) title and I'm good. Gameplay first, unique art direction, good story, and a well built universe which is almost palpable with lore.
If we're talking RTS, C&C series, Dune Emperor, Supreme Commander and StarCraft is enough.
By gloosx 2025-05-2010:07 I have arm Mac and it's the most painful machine you can own as someone who likes games... Supreme Commander FAF I miss the most, unfortunately unplayable online due to floating-point calculation differences between ARM and x64 which are apparently untranslatable.
By b3lvedere 2025-05-2013:55 I hear you. I don't like that ecosystem as well.
I have more than 2000 games on Steam and i love my Steam Deck which i got for pretty cheap. It's a very fun game system and you can tinker a lot with it. Upgrading (bigger disk capacity) is very easy.
Just bought Black Mesa for two bucks. Works almost flawlessly. Ten year old game , but much fun to be had. Most games i buy on the very very cheap. Bought Skyrim couple of weeks ago for five bucks.
Sure, i click on the free thursday game on the Epic Games store, but i hate that interface with great passion.
By ErrorNoBrain 2025-05-2012:17 You underestimate how many companies use microsoft business central for various things...
But i also believe there's a lot of special software for laboratories etc, that run on windows only
By UltraSane 2025-05-215:04 So many companies use windows server because they don't have anyone who knows Linux.
By icemelt8 2025-05-2010:58 Adobe Photoshop? Microsoft Excel?
By gosub100 2025-05-2015:08 I was excited about it too, even just having a tmux and using it for grepping and file copying. Then after a year or two on windows, my computer started slowing down. Tale as old as time. I'm not surprised, and some of the issues aren't ms' fault, but nevertheless I see CPU spikes to 100 with several browser tabs open, or the drawing tablet driver goes to 100% cpu usage even though I never even use it. The UX shouldn't degrade like a mechanical system.
Curious, if you don't mind answering, do you mainly uses Ubuntu or Nixos, and which one do you liked more ATM?
Regarding Steam, do you install it with distro provided or through Flatpak?
What is the spec of your machine that you do Linux gaming on? I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.
By rcleveng 2025-05-207:05 I try to use debian, since it's a bit older (read: stable) than ubunutu and I've found that if something compiles and runs on debian it'll run on ubunutu and others but the inverse is not true.
By cirelli94 2025-05-208:39 It looks like nvidia suffer more of the difference between windows/proton, while AMD difference it's towards zero.
I quite like CachyOS currently. I see no performance penalty (but I also have only a 75 Hz monitor and I haven't tested VR games all that much yet). Currently I'm playing through Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 on ultra with no issues.
CachyOS provides packages for Steam, handles nvidia drivers for you and they even provide their own builds of proton and wine, allegedly compiled with flags for modern hardware + some patches (not sure how much they help though - before Cachy I used Pop OS and also had no problems with performance).
Cachy is based on Arch though, so unless you're ready for your system to potentially break with an update - maybe used something more stable (again - I quite liked Pop OS, it was extremely stable for me)
I've been using Arch for 1-3 years now, as far as I can remember the only time that my system "break" was caused by pacman lock got stuck somehow. Aside of that it's pretty stable in general.
By graynk 2025-05-2017:27 Good to know! It's my first Arch-based distro so I'm a bit wary for now
By RussianCow 2025-05-206:562 reply > I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.
I don't mean to dismiss your comment at all, but I'm surprised that such a low overhead would be the primary reason holding you back from switching. The difference between, say, 100 FPS and 91 FPS seems so negligible in my mind that it would be pretty near the bottom on the list of reasons not to switch to Linux.
By barrkel 2025-05-2010:15 If you don't have an adaptive sync +variable refresh rate) monitor and everything set up to use it, and don't like screen tearing (you enable vsync wait), overrunning the frame budget (e.g 16ms for 60hz) can mean dropping down to half the frame rate.
But I'm hunting for reasons here. A gaming setup should be using adaptive sync so those concerns mostly go away. But there may be problems with Linux support.
By garylkz 2025-05-2016:35 Don't get me wrong, what I meant is that I only uses windows on games that runs poorly for me, I use Linux as my daily driver.
Regarding fps, it's around 15fps diff, and it's bad in my case because I had a potato machine.
By meandmycode 2025-05-2012:211 reply I think actually Linux has come a long way and recently I actually dual booted fedora with windows and fedora was easily my main choice unless gaming.. unfortunately when updating from 41 to 42 there was clearly an issue with the GPU not having drivers for acceleration or cuda, updating the drivers bricked the OS immediately and while I could recover, I spent hours and hours on this and could never get the GPU drivers installed again without bricking it.. ultimately I realised how at mercy of drivers Linux is. I hope though that in the next few years things improve as windows is dismal to work on these days
By godzillabrennus 2025-05-2012:26 I just had a problem with Windows and Nvidia drivers/CUDA not working properly on a two year old Windows 11 install. I had to reinstall the operating system after days of troubleshooting and attempting different things to get it operational again. It can happen on there as well.
Unfortunately many of the more popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat tend to consider "made working on Linux" a bug rather than a feature. E.g. Easy Anti-Cheat and Unreal Engine both support Linux natively but Epic still doesn't want to allow it for their own game, Fortnite. https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781
By rossy 2025-05-207:15 There are even games like Infinity Nikki with anti-cheat that allows the Steam Deck but specifically detects and blocks desktop Linux. You have to wonder if that gets them any real security since the method they use to detect the Deck is probably spoofable.
There is more nuance to the anti-cheat systems supporting Linux argument than "it supports it but they won't use it". Turning on Linux support does weaken the security posture of the anti-cheat system, so it's not simply a decision of "it works with Linux, but they won't do it". It is moreso a question of whether the security posture changes for the game with this platform support enabled meet the business requirements. It's not a surprise that games with high MTX revenue do not turn this on, as I imagine this would be the biggest concern with this weaker security posture.
One of the boons of console hardware is also the strict execution environment that is presented on the system. While this of course doesn't prevent all cheating behavior in online games, a large selling point of it as a platform to publishers is not only the market segment available, but the security aspects of the runtime environment.
By zamadatix 2025-05-2117:32 Agreed, that's the angle Tim Sweeney argues in the linked comment as well.
By ozgrakkurt 2025-05-1922:141 reply Really hope valve’s server side anti-cheat will be a success and more competitive games will move over to that.
By zamadatix 2025-05-202:29 I'm not familiar with what new changes Valve has been working on in the anti-cheat space but historically most major anti-cheat systems, such as Easy Anti-Cheat, already have long included a server-side anti-cheat component. The catch rate (and overall accuracy) with both is just always going to be higher than only going with one approach.
By dncornholio 2025-05-207:541 reply Nowhere it says they don't want to.
By zamadatix 2025-05-2117:32 I think you're hitting on ideal vs. constrained wants (or, at least, that's how I've always referred to them). That is: what they want to be able to allow in itself vs. what they want to allow given the trade-offs with other wants.
E.g. "I'm going to go to the beach all day" and "I'm going to keep my job" are both likely the results of ideal type wants whereas "I'm going to go to my job today and then the beach tonight" would likely be the result of a constrained want.
For the curious, the protondb front page gives a pretty good overview of the state of Linux gaming:
Scrolling to Medals, 50% of all 25.000+ games tracked by the site are playable, either working perfectly or mostly (Platinum or Gold ratings). Another 20% can be alright under specific circumstances, and with compromises (Silver rating).
By frollogaston 2025-05-1920:272 reply AoE2:DE has a gold rating, but multiplayer doesn't work at all, and it's not even due to anticheat.
By alexjplant 2025-05-1923:121 reply Did this change recently? I haven't played in a month or so but it's been working great for around a year now for me.
By frollogaston 2025-05-1923:172 reply It's been waffling back and forth but always had a "gold" rating even when I verified it was broken. I haven't tried recently (haven't really played video games in years), but there's a comment from 5 days ago saying it's broken again.
At some point, Proton users reported success using some patch, then that stopped working, then there was a different patch... A lot of user reports say "thumbs up" then have a comment explaining how it goes out-of-sync unless you fiddle with it, so it's hard to trust.
Seems the root of the problem is this game's picky netcode, which is similar to the original 1998 game I played as a kid. If your game state diverges from the other players' at all, it goes oos and ends the game for everyone. And yes this happened often enough that people had an abbreviation for it.
I worked on this problem for a bit. What's going on is the game relies on the OS-provided C runtime libraries ("msvcrt"-style things) to do its math. Wine's implementation of these libraries does not match Windows's perfectly. If all players are using the same implementation, then they will agree, and there are no problems, so people think it is working. But if a player on Wine tries to play against a player on Windows, they will fall out of sync because the math errors eventually add up.
That was as far as I was able to take it. Another much more skilled dev at CW dug in a lot deeper and wrote a blog post about it[1], but as far as I know the problem remains unsolved.
[1] https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/rbernon/2022/9/12/ucrtcring...
By CorrectHorseBat 2025-05-2015:14 Oh interesting, I always wondered what the underlying issue was and why downloading some obscure looking dll solves it.
For a practical solution, just using the Windows dlls seems to work fine. Without AoE2:DE goes out of sync immediately, with I've played hour long games.
By frollogaston 2025-05-2015:001 reply Oh wow, thanks for sharing. I knew it was an oos but didn't think a math lib specifically was the issue.
I remember it being interesting to work on. It's been years, but if I remember right, there is some way to convince the game to dump a log of unit positions during a multiplayer match, possibly as part of its desync handling. I enabled that on both Win & Linux hosts, ran a match between the machines until they desynced, and diff'd the game's own logs, then confirmed from the Wine logs that the faulty values were coming from CRT-related math functions. It's always fun when you get to use a game's own debug utils to track down a problem.
Anyway it'd be great if the game devs included their own math libraries instead of relying on the OS's. That would fix the problem quite nicely.
By CorrectHorseBat 2025-05-2015:551 reply Do you know if the code from the blogpost you mentioned is publicly available? I don't think I could find it but I'd love to give it a try
By coldpie 2025-05-2016:18 I don't, he did that work after I left the job. You could email Rémi or hop into one of the Wine dev channels to start up a conversation.
By CorrectHorseBat 2025-05-205:201 reply It's been several months since I played but getting ucrtbase.dll always worked for me and it was the only thing I ever had to do for the game. You need to redownload it after every update because it gets wiped though.
Oos can till happen, but as you said it can also happen on Windows, hard to blame Wine for that.
Since gold means "works as good as Windows with workarounds" I think that's a correct rating.
By frollogaston 2025-05-2015:031 reply I can only testify to oos being common in the Mac version of the original game, and I've heard it happening in the og Windows game. In DE under Windows, I've never seen it happen, so I'd be concerned if you're still seeing it occasionally.
Also, "gold" should mean that it works by default, not that you have to patch in a DLL. The only place the site even says "playable with tweaks" is in a tooltip if you hover over the gold symbol, right above a separate list of details that doesn't mention tweaks. I didn't even know until now.
By CorrectHorseBat 2025-05-2015:27 I've got it from here: https://gitlab.winehq.org/winehq/appdb/-/wikis/Rating-Defini...
We can argue all day over what a rating means, but if it would work without a tweak I'd say it should be rated platinum. (The only other thing I know is missing is Xbox live login, but I don't really care about that)
By npteljes 2025-05-1920:46 Yeah there's a lot of random issues with the different games. In case user experience is the main goal, I always recommend going with the main supported ways, which in this case would be Windows 11. I personally try things first on my Linux, but I always keep a backup Windows just in case.
Overwatch is the big one - lots of random issues with it. But basically any game with Denuvo DRM is extremely high risk, resulting in either a ban or the game not running at all.
By zamalek 2025-05-1919:41 Denuvo counts each proton version as a unique activation, might help you avoid this issue going forward
By foresto 2025-05-1921:04 Can you remember any particular problems in Overwatch? I've been down that road, so there's a chance I might have some info that you would find useful.
One problem that was unsolved last time I checked: Saving highlight videos. It used to work if you told Overwatch to use webm format instead of mp4, but Blizzard broke that somewhere along the line, possibly in the transition to Overwatch 2. (I worked around this with OBS Studio and its replay buffer feature.)
By neogodless 2025-05-2016:10 When I ran a two month experiment, Hogwart's Legacy and Anno 1800.
The former ran slowly at low settings, with the occasional complete single digit slowdown. On the same laptop in Windows 10, it ran medium settings and easily twice the frame rate, no issues.
The latter wouldn't connect to multiplayer, and would occasionally just crash out.
(Comment written from memory, but I enshrined my experiment here: https://retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm )
For me, Red Dead Redemption 1 via Proton does not work on Pop_OS + NVIDIA.
By margorczynski 2025-05-208:061 reply In general you want to avoid Nvidia if you want to play games on Linux, but maybe things will get better.
By la_oveja 2025-05-207:24 i play rdr1 via proton on opensuse + amd and i get better frames than windows
By falcojr 2025-05-2015:17 https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Anything "denied" won't work ever unless they change their minds. Anything "broken" is...well...broken.
By 2OEH8eoCRo0 2025-05-1920:02 Escape from Tarkov and GTA V (online).
i think everyone tried that. gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point.
i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again.
then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again.
then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again.
now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file because we run a psql container in a different way under wsl... let's see how long we endure until saying never again.
By seventhtiger 2025-05-1920:301 reply It's the other way around. You can do very few productive things with Windows other than software development. Almost all other professional software assume Windows.
> You can do very few productive things with Windows other than software development.
I guess you meant Linux here
By seventhtiger 2025-05-2020:41 Ah you're right. I can't edit it.
By mulmen 2025-05-1919:24 > gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point.
I actually switched to Linux full-time when Starfield wouldn’t run on Windows but worked in Proton. We are now in a world where Valve provides a more sable Windows API than Microsoft. The only limitation now is anti-cheat but that’s a political problem, not a technical one.
By kmacdough 2025-05-1919:03 For consumers. A load of professional software still exists only for Windows, particularly as you do more niche.
By sertraline 2025-05-1919:325 reply It always infuriates me when people say Windows is all about games. Techies are so detached from reality they forget that people have creative hobbies and have to use industrial grade software. Doing creative hobbies on Linux is an act of sadomasochism. And on top of that, Linux and MacOS cannot run software from 3 years ago while Windows can run software from 35 years ago. And on top of that, Linux is completely unusable to Japanese/Chinese speakers due to how hard it is to input the moon runes, and on top of that Wayland breaks the least painful setup that you could have earlier. And on top of that, Wayland people shown a middle finger to all the people who need accessibility features.
No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.
A fair comment, but the argument I'd make against that is a lot of those creative tools are moving to the web. I personally work for Figma, and have seen that first hand. UI/UX design was entirely OSX/Windows centric for the last 40 years, and now it's platform agnostic. Even video editors are just at the nacent stage of looking at the web as an editor surface.
Totally hear you though for things like CNC milling software that's meant to stay static for the lifetime of the mill - that's not going anywhere.
Software moving to the web is not a win for Linux, it's a loss for everyone.
No, it's definitely a win for Linux. I get it. I've dabbled in software minimalism. I love native dev. I know the web "sucks." But the range of mainstream software available for Linux has exploded now that software is moving to the web (including Electron) and I can't see how that's a bad thing from the perspective of a Linux user. Of course I'd rather open a web browser to run an app than change my entire operating system to run an app.
Would you like to also own and have control of the data you store in these web-based platforms?
If I'm already compromising by using non-free software, does it matter that much? How do I know what a native app is sending back in its telemetry?
By TeMPOraL 2025-05-2023:33 By using non-free software, you're compromising on politics that don't really affect anything directly - not unless great many others suddenly embrace the ideas behind Free Software.
The compromise of using SaaS in the cloud in lieu of regular, native software, is affecting both you and society directly.
By pjc50 2025-05-208:33 It's the only truly portable platform, and there's no way we can force another into existence.
It doesn't have to be slow and bad, that's just a ""skill issue"" (poor prioritization by the companies making it).
And this is why wine/proton are so good: they’re implementing the only defacto stable API that exists.
By notrealyme123 2025-05-2011:25 The command and conquer collection worked quite good out of the box.
By mbarria 2025-05-2017:04 On Protondb: Split Fiction is platinum, Sims 4 is gold, Most F1 games work with the exception of 2014 and 24
By rounce 2025-05-2013:28 Personally not a big consumer of EA titles, but Star Wars Squadrons ran great for me.
By frollogaston 2025-05-1920:291 reply Yeah, I really like my Mac, but third-party software isn't its strong suit. It's hilarious how often Apple will wholesale break like half the software in existence.
By modo_mario 2025-05-207:46 >And on top of that, Linux is completely unusable to Japanese/Chinese speakers due to how hard it is to input the moon runes
How do Deepin and such solve this?
By mrguyorama 2025-05-2017:251 reply Linux on HN is always an example of https://xkcd.com/2501/
How many months can you use a Linux desktop to do daily externally mandated processes and not drop down to a bash shell at some point?
Average consumers and users do not want to use the unix utilities that Linux people love so much. Hell, developers barely want to use classic unix utilities to solve problems.
Users do not know what a "mount point" is. Users do not want a case sensitive file system. Users do not want an OOM killer that solves a poor design choice by randomly culling important applications at high utilization.
Users do not care for something that was designed in the 60s before we understood things like interface design and refuses to update or improve due to some weird insistence on unix purity.
Users do not care about ABI stability. They care about using the apps they need to use. That means your platform has to be very easy to support, Linux is not at all easy to support, and at least part of that is a weird entitlement Linux users feel and demonstrate in your support queue.
Hilariously, users DO WANT a centralized app repository for most day to day apps! Linux had this forever, though it had mediocre ergonomics and it was way too easy for an average computer user to manage to nuke their system as Linus Sebastian found out in a very unfortunate timing situation. Linux never managed to turn this potential victory into anything meaningful, because you often had to drop into a bash shell to fix, undo, modify, or whatever an install!
By joseda-hg 2025-05-2220:51 It depends, a lot (I use Bluefin, so I'll grab that one as an example)
Assumming everything is setup the way I usually do when someone asks me for a new Windows PC (Setup an account, install basic utilities, Office suite, automatic updates, etc)
More or less everything
- ThunderBird + OnlyOffice is close enough for regular usage (Coming from Outlook + Office)
- Flatpaks and system updates are on the background by default and only take when you restart, so they're more or less invisible (And for someone else, I'll usually do the oldest channel available, maybe even the CentOS based LTS when that's out of beta)
- Discord, Teams, Stuff like that is electron based anyway
- Steam for games is reasonably good (Depending on your library, Everything in mine works, but not everything in my wishlist)
- Windows only utilities are on a case by case basis (Depending on the program, they'll usually call me to procure it, because god knows, no sane person wants to deal with the likes of adobe)
For the sake of transparency, I would use the CLI to setup quite a lot, but I wouldn't expect them to use it for anything
By 7bit 2025-05-1919:18 For me it's Adobe Phuckushop. But yeah, always that one thing holding one back from swapping
By prmoustache 2025-05-2015:46 Why would anyone run malwares on purpose on the same machine they use to do development/work?
By throwaway148773 2025-05-1922:142 reply Except if you're on Nvidia...
By spartanatreyu 2025-05-201:131 reply No.
Their GTX series cards all used proprietary blobs that required unmanageable device specific interfaces.
Starting from the RTX series cards, they still have proprietary blobs but instead of having device specific interfaces, they all use a shared public interface which makes compatibility and performance much better.
It's not across the board, but there are instances of gaming benchmarks showing more performance under linux than windows.
I'd trade half my GPU performance for the NVIDIA drivers not freezing my system on wake-up. The new half-open ones arguably made it worse, it consistently freezes now.
If you're using DisplayPort, try switching to HDMI. (Really.) For me it made the freezes much shorter. It's a bug in their driver related to the connected monitor(s).
By debugnik 2025-05-2016:57 That didn't occur to me! I'll give it a try, although I suspect that will break VRR for my setup.
Then why are you using NVIDIA? The AMD open-source driver stack is very mature by now
I had switched back to Windows after years of issues with Linux drivers, I needed a new PC, and I needed CUDA for college and tinkering.
Now, it's been barely a couple of months since I reinstalled Ubuntu, and a couple of weeks since I found out the latest release runs even worse, so this is new to me. I don't plan to use Windows at home ever again, so I could sell my GPU and buy AMD, but so far I'm simply disappointed.
By pxc 2025-05-2020:01 Ugh, that sucks. It makes sense. I'm somewhat optimistic that as the open-sourcing effort continues, more and more of NVIDIA's driver stack will be open-source and it will see significant improvements, too.
Am currently on nvidia and have no issues with their proprietary drivers. While they aren't following the linux ethos, the software runs just fine.
By SchemaLoad 2025-05-200:283 reply Have they fixed the drivers on wayland yet?
By callc 2025-05-200:36 I’ve been running on Wayland with nvidia drivers for around a year. No issues for development work. Haven’t tried gaming.
By graynk 2025-05-2016:25 I'm using 4070 Ti with open kernel module on Wayland.
It's MOSTLY painless. Some GNOME extensions seem to randomly hang everything on startup (I'm currently investigating which ones, I believe Dash to Dock and/or Unite are to blame) and there's a weird issue with VR when streaming via ALVR: SteamVR launches, but games crash unless I disable the second monitor (no such issues with WiVRn, so not entirely sure if it's a driver problem or not)
Besides that in my daily driving I saw no other issues.
Been using Nvidia+Wayland for years now, even on an optimus laptop.
I'm convinced that many these people saying Nvidia has serious issues on Linux must be (by no fault of their own) going by habit and downloading the driver installer .bin from the Nvidia website and trying to install drivers that way. So yes, if you do that you're going to have issues.
Learn to do things the way your distro does them (use a package manager) and most problems go away.
Ubuntu-packaged NVIDIA drivers freeze my entire system on wake-up. The switch to Wayland and the new half-open drivers made it worse.
By bsdz 2025-05-207:17 I feel I'm in the same boat. For several months I've been thinking my GPU was on its way out (it's a pretty old 2080 now). My desktop freezes randomly. I can log into it remotely but all the usb devices stop working and the screen goes blank. l took a good look at the logs and noticed a bunch of pageflip timeouts followed by usb disconnections. I later discovered the Nvidia forums seem to have many recent complaints (with similar logs) especially around their latest drivers and Plasma + Wayland compatibility.
I'll take Linux seriously when I can play Starcraft 2 and Fortnite on it
By neogodless 2025-05-2016:15 StarCraft 2 definitely works on Linux, with a relatively simple act of adding it to Steam as a non-Steam title, and then letting the Proton layer do its thing.
And this is coming from a very Linux-hesitant newbie who mostly uses Windows.
I have not tried Fortnite.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcr...
By graynk 2025-05-2016:20 Starcraft 2 worked well for years.
Fortnite doesn't work because Sim Tweeney doesn't want it work: both BattleEye and EAC can work on Linux, Epic just chooses not to enable that functionality.
By steve-chavez 2025-05-2113:30 I played starcraft2 13 years ago on Linux, the wizard installer worked just fine.
By liendolucas 2025-05-1917:3618 reply I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux. If you are in Windows and have the urge to use Linux, do the proper switch once and for all. You will never look back. I haven't in almost 15 years.
Given what Windows has become and already discussed here on HN I would even hesitate to run it in a virtual machine.
Edit: more than 15 years.
By MrPowerGamerBR 2025-05-1918:259 reply Except that if you require anything that is GPU-related (like gaming, Adobe suite apps, etc) you'll need to have a secondary GPU to passthrough it to the VM, which is not something that everyone has.
So, if you don't have a secondary GPU, you'll need to live without graphics acceleration in the VM... so for a lot of people the "oh you just need to use a VM!" solution is not feasible, because most of the software that people want to use that does not run under WINE do require graphics acceleration.
I tried running Photoshop under a VM, but the performance of the QEMU QXL driver is bad, and VirGL does not support Windows guests yet.
VMWare and VirtualBox do have better graphics drivers that do support Windows. I tried using VMWare and the performance was "ok", but still not near the performance of Photoshop on "bare metal".
By frollogaston 2025-05-1920:341 reply People throw around the ideas of VMs or WINE like it's trivial. It's really not.
By sureglymop 2025-05-1921:582 reply On linux it's quite trivial. KVM is part of the kernel. Installing libvirt and virt-manager makes it really easy to create vms.
I'd say even passing through a GPU is not that hard these days though maybe that depends on hardware configuration more.
“On Linux it’s quite trivial…” giving big
“ or a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”[1] vibes.
Convenience features in software are huge and even if a system is well designed a system that abstracts it all away and does it for you is easier, and most new users want that, so it often wins. Worse is better etc
The comment you linked is one of the most misunderstood comments on this site, which makes sense because it's one of the most cited comments on this site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
This probably isn't even the best dang comment about the situation, it's just the one I could find quickly.
Perhaps I should have put a larger explanation around it but I am mocking neither sureglymop nor BrandonM but we can still learn lessons from hindsight.
Sure, it’s trivial to set the switch in BIOS for virtualisation, and download a couple of libraries but people like computers doing things for us, we like abstractions even if they sacrifice flexibility because they facilitate whatever the real world application we are attempting.
I think power users of any technology will generally overvalue things that 80% to 95% of the user base simply don’t care about.
I admit that having touched Windows twice in the last 5 years I wouldn’t know but I would be willing to wager that WSL has very few drawbacks or shortcomings in the minds of most of its users.
By frollogaston 2025-05-210:52 Also sometimes the harder approach is also not as capable as some people make it out to be, and there are some unsolved caveats.
By frollogaston 2025-05-2014:591 reply I don't see what's misunderstood about it, but also it's not right to make fun of the user for it.
Because it's only silly sounding because of hindsight. With today's context of file sync applications being a huge industry, that comment seems silly. But that was the prevailing opinion at the time. Check out this blog post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...
>Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.
That's just what a lot of competent people thought back then. It seems hilariously out of touch now.
By frollogaston 2025-05-2015:341 reply But it wasn't my opinion at the time, and I didn't hear from those people. I was in middle school, kids were commonly frustrated syncing their homework to/from a flash drive, family members wanted to sync photos, and everyone wanted something like this.
Before Dropbox, the closest thing we had was "the dropbox," a default network-shared write-only folder on Mac. Of course you could port-forward to a computer at home that never sleeps, but I knew that wasn't a common solution. I started using Dropbox the same month it came out.
By skyyler 2025-05-2016:06 I'm happy for you :)
The future is rarely made by people who are comfortable with the status quo. That’s the only thing we can get from this.
By s3p 2025-05-2222:01 His comment appears to me to say "please don't bother my friend". Him saying that file sync "wasn't common knowledge at the time"...ok? It is much easier than the solution the commenter proposed. In this thread, it's the same, people are proposing a complex solution as if it's trivial just because it is trivial to them.
By frollogaston 2025-05-200:171 reply Even the described FTP-based Dropbox replacement is easier than getting a VM to work properly with DRM'd software and/or GPU acceleration.
Really? With GNOME Boxes it's pretty straightforward. I hear KDE is getting an equivalent soon, too.
By frollogaston 2025-05-2016:172 reply You can do GPU passthrough in a Gnome box, as in, your VM can see the host's GPU (let's say Nvidia) and it works exactly the same as on the host? Or another metric is if you can run Photoshop in a VM with full hardware acceleration. I haven't tried Gnome box in particular, but this isn't what I'm seeing when I search.
By skyyler 2025-05-2018:47 Ah, yeah, seems like I was mistaken and maybe Red Hat's virt-manager was what I was thinking of.
virt-manager is a bit more involved than GNOME's Boxes, I'm not sure I could recommend it to someone that doesn't know what they're doing.
Yeah, reading your original comment I was about to go off until I saw GPU pass through with DRM software. Highly cursed.
By frollogaston 2025-05-2022:12 Yep, regular VMs where you basically only care about the CPU and RAM are easy, provided nothing in the VM is trying to not run in a VM. USB and network emulation used to be jagged edges, but that was fixed. VirtualBox was my go-to. It never had great GPU support, but the rest was easy.
I'm pretty sure there are solutions to assign an entire GPU to a VM, which ofc is only useful if you have multiple. But those are specialized.
By dabockster 2025-05-2315:30 Yeah! Even as a dev who can navigate vim, I absolutely don't want to do that on a daily basis. Give me pretty GUIs and some automation!
By sureglymop 2025-05-2022:44 Not even close. I mentioned a software package that literally offers a full gui for all your virtualization needs.. how is that comparable to the things mentioned in that comment?
That really depends on what you want to run. Dipping into a Linux laptop lately (Mint) there are things, old things (think 1996-1999) that somehow "just work" out of box on Windows 10, but configuring them to work under WINE is a huge PITA coming with loads of caveats, workarounds and silent crashes.
By frollogaston 2025-05-2019:48 The silent crashes get me. Also running one exe spawns a lot of wine/wineserver/wine-preloaded processes.
Tried doing 3d modeling in a Windows VM - couldn't get acceleration to pass through.
By voidUpdate 2025-05-2010:014 reply What 3D modelling were you doing that couldn't be done on linux?
By rhdjebejdbd 2025-05-2016:171 reply Fusion360 doesn't work on Linux. Or at least I tried multiple times and couldn't get it to work
By pona-a 2025-05-2110:09 Really? I recall installing it 3 years ago, and aside from some oddities with popups, it worked just fine. I think it was this script [0]. I don't know if they broke it, I switched to OpenSCAD, which meets my needs.
[0] https://github.com/cryinkfly/Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux
By zchrykng 2025-05-2015:59 Mostly having software better than FreeCAD, AKA everything that exists on Windows and macOS.
By vvpan 2025-05-210:09 I needed to use Rhino 3D specifically because it had an environmental simulation plugin.
By dabockster 2025-05-2315:31 None of your business.
By robotnikman 2025-05-1922:33 I'm hoping that IOMMU capability will be included in consumer graphics cards soon, which would help with this iirc there are rumors of upcoming Intel and AMD cards including it
By teaearlgraycold 2025-05-1918:591 reply Quite a lot of people have both integrated Intel graphics and a discrete AMD/NVidia card.
By MrPowerGamerBR 2025-05-1920:541 reply Sadly I'm not one of those people because I have a desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which does not have an integrated graphics card.
However now that AMD is including integrated GPUs on every AM5 consumer CPU (if I'm not mistaken?), maybe VMs with passthrough will be more common, without requiring people to spend a lot of money buying a secondary GPU.
By mrguyorama 2025-05-2017:41 Yes, my Ryzen 7600 has an integrated GPU enabled. AMD's iGPUs are really impressive and powerful, but I do not have any idea what to do with it and despite that I moved to an Nvidia GPU (after 20 years of fanboyism) specifically because I was tired of AMD drivers being terrible on Windows, I STILL have to deal with AMD drivers because of that damn iGPU.
I could disable it I guess. It could provide 0.05% faster rendering if I ever get back into blender.
By ThatMedicIsASpy 2025-05-209:271 reply AMD has SRIOV on the roadmap for consumer gpus which hopefully makes things easier in the future for gpu accelerated VMs
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GIM-Open-Source
Windows can run GPU accelerated Windows VMs with paravirtualization. But I have no use case for two Windows machines sharing a GPU.
By fifteen1506 2025-05-2011:35 There is also native context for VirtIO, but for now Windows support is still not planned.
Also note some brave soul implemented 3D support on KVM for Windows. Still in the works and WinUI apps crash for some reason.
By MrPowerGamerBR 2025-05-1922:18 True, but I don't have the need to run applications that require GPU under WSL, while I do need to run applications that require the GPU under my current host OS. (and those applications do not run under Linux)
By hermitShell 2025-05-1919:233 reply I don’t know why there aren’t full fledged computers in a GPU sized package. Just run windows on your GPU, Linux on your main cpu. There’s some challenges to overcome but I think it would be nice to be able to extend your arm PC with an x86 expansion, or extend your x86 PC with an ARM extension. Ditto for graphics, or other hardware accelerators
By Dylan16807 2025-05-1920:131 reply There are computers that size, but I guess you mean with a male PCIe plug on them?
If the card is running its own OS, what's the benefit of combining them that way? A high speed networking link will get you similar results and is flexible and cheap.
If the card isn't running its own OS, it's much easier to put all the CPU cores in the same socket. And the demand for both x86 and Arm cores at the same time is not very high.
By hermitShell 2025-05-1922:14 Yes, with pci-e fingers on the ‘motherboard’ of the daughter computer. Like a pci-e carrier for the RPI compute.
Good point about high speed networking. I guess that’s a lot more straightforward.
By tyushk 2025-05-205:01 You may be interested in SmartNICs/DPUs. They're essentially NICs with an on-board full computer. NVIDIA makes an ARM DPU line, and you can pick up the older gen BlueField 2's on eBay for about $400.
By pjc50 2025-05-208:35 > full fledged computers in a GPU sized package
.. isn't this just a laptop or a NUC? Isn't there a massive disadvantage in having to share a case or god forbid a PCIe bus with another computer?
By zozbot234 2025-05-1921:09 There is ongoing work on supporting paravirtualized GPUs with Windows drivers. This is not hardware-based GPU virtualization, and it supports Vulkan in the host and guest not just OpenGL; the host-based side is already supported within QEMU.
By Andrex 2025-05-2013:36 I completely gave up on WINEing Adobe software but I didn't know about the second GPU thing, I thought it was totally impossible. Thank you!
I will do anything to avoid Windows but I miss Premiere.
> I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux.
Every Windows thread on HN is a reminder of the stark divide between people who need to use Windows for productivity apps and those who don’t.
The apps I need a Windows machine for are not the kind that virtualize nicely. Anything GPU related means Windows has to become the base OS for me.
If you’re running an occasional light tool you can get away with Windows in a VM, but it’s a no-go for things like CAD or games.
By sureglymop 2025-05-1922:031 reply Windows in a vm with a passed through GPU is really nice. Although still pretty niche these days it's easier than it used to be. It also works with a single GPU, e.g. on a laptop.
I personally have a desktop PC with an AMD GPU and then another Nvidia GPU that I pass through to windows hosts. I have a hook that changes the display output and switches the inputs using evdev.
By madeofpalk 2025-05-1923:052 reply It's really nice if you have two seperate GPUs in your computer?
Most computers do. All laptops and most desktops have an integrated GPU on the CPU.
By ZoomZoomZoom 2025-05-209:541 reply That's the first. Do you have sources most have more?
By christophilus 2025-05-2010:51 He’s right. Laptops have integrated graphics, but all mid-tier and higher laptops also have a dedicated GPU. Desktops are similar, though my guess is a lot of business desktops have only the integrated graphics.
By sureglymop 2025-05-2022:42 As I mentioned, can be done with a single GPU as well, just makes it a bit more complicated to set up.
By zargon 2025-05-1920:40 I prefer to just have two (or three) GPUs than have Windows as the base OS.
By luyu_wu 2025-05-1920:47 If you can GPU passthrough (it's quite simple to set up), this is not a large issue. You're right that Linux is sorely lacking in native creative software though!
> who need to use Windows for productivity apps and those who don’t.
LibreOffice has gotten quite good over the years, including decent(ish) MSO file format interoperability, and Thunderbird seems to support Exchange Server.
So, I suppose things like MS Project or MS Visio many not have decent counterparts (maybe, I don't really know), but otherwise, it seems like you don't need-need to use Windows for productivity apps.
By stackskipton 2025-05-1921:25 Last I looked, Thunderbird used Exchange Web Services to connect to Office365 which Microsoft is getting rid of: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/retirement... (I point out Office365 since vast majority of "Exchange" users are on 365)
It also only support email and not calendaring/contacts.
That being said, Office365 Web Client is pretty good at this point and someone who doesn't live in Office all day can probably get along fine with it.
Counterpoint: things like the Valve Index for VR simply don't behave well in this environment no matter how much I've worked on getting it there.
I'm not a novice either, $dayjob has me working on the lowest levels of Linux on a daily basis. I did linux from scratch on a Pentium 2 when I was 12. All that to say yes I happen to agree but edge cases are out there. The blanket statement doesn't apply for all use cases
By rounce 2025-05-2013:41 IMO this is the real blindspot: it's VR support, not Photoshop, or MS Office, or CAD tools (all of which I've got running fine via Wine). I'm guessing the intersection between VR users and Wine users must be really small and I suspect it's because of this that support is so lacking.
By SunlitCat 2025-05-2015:37 And even more worse with the Vive Pro 2 by HTC which needs a special Windows tool to use all it capabilities...
I would have switched over to Linux if it wouldn't be because of that one.
I used Linux as my daily driver for years, before finally switching back to Windows, and then to the Mac. I got tired of things like wine breaking on apps, I got tired of the half-assed replacements for software available on Windows, like GIMP compared to Photoshop. I got tired of the ugly desktop that inevitably occurs once you start needing to mix QT and GTK based apps. Linux is not a panacea.
By herbst 2025-05-2012:02 I love how subjective these things are.
I hate the half assed commercialised approached for software on both Mac and Windows where you download 50mb+ of electron bullshit for a bash 2 liner with default tools on Linux.
Mostly for windows but when I installed 5+ tools from untrustworthy websites (which they all look like if you aren't used to that) it feels like my computer is likely forever busted with some scamware. But there is no dd, no proper editor, no removing adware and "news" without these tools.
On windows if you want to configure something it's like going into a computer museum where you start in the metro area and end up in UIs straight out of win 95. That's better on Mac, but the UI is depressing (in my opinion) and I always had the feeling my Mac wouldn't need to run that hot if it wouldn't draw shadows, mirroring and weird effects I haven't asked for.
That said. Linux is not a panacea
By kobalsky 2025-05-1918:04 Running Windows from a ZFS partition with its own dedicated GPU, viewed through looking-glass on the Linux host at 1440p@120Hz, has been super useful.
I set it up originally for gaming, but nowaways I install a lot of disposable software there.
I use Linux guests VMs too (a la Qubes), but sadly there's no guest support for looking-glass on Linux. Native rendering speeds on VMs are something hard to let go.
By ActorNightly 2025-05-1918:001 reply The big difference is hardware access.
I used to do VFIO with hardware passthrough so I could have linux but still run windows software like CAD that takes advantage of the gfx card. That was a pain to set up and use.
The other way, its very simple. WSL2 can run ML tasks with just a tiny bit of overhead in moving the data to the card.
By ActorNightly 2025-05-223:06 Yes but the point is to not do dev on windows, because window "terminal" sucks
By password4321 2025-05-1918:18 Related: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-... (edit: not https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...)
> We currently package our virtual machines for four different virtualization software options: Hyper-V (Gen2), Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMware. These virtual machines contain an evaluation version of Windows that expires on the date posted. If the evaluation period expires, the desktop background will turn black, you will see a persistent desktop notification indicating that the system is not genuine, and the PC will shut down every hour.
Edit: Oops, dead link -- the dev tools evaluation VM hasn't been released for 6+ months. But they do offer Windows evaluations ISO's after registration.
By RKFADU_UOFCCLEL 2025-05-1918:14 That's how I do it. I don't see the draw for Windows as the main OS, especially with Windows 10+ being dumbed down beyond belief and having seconds of lag to do anything at all. Seems even from this thread that people just want the convenience of a gaming rig in the same box as their work (which is a security issue because games are full of remote code execution vulnerabilities).
By montymintypie 2025-05-1922:58 It's funny, more than any productivity app (though I do have a few of those), the Directory Opus [1] Explorer replacement is one of the things that I've yet to find a viable replacement for on both Linux and macOS. Unparalleled customisability, scriptable actions, outstanding performance (thumbnailing 10,000 images in a folder never causes slowdown), incredible search and "huh, why doesn't anyone else do this" features everywhere. I use my file explorer a lot so the friction is felt daily.
I'm using Forklift [2] on my mac at work, but it's a pale imitation of what a file explorer can truly be. I did some searching for Linux but it's all pretty pedestrian.
[1]: https://www.gpsoft.com.au/ [2]: https://binarynights.com/
I've considered it, but there are two Windows features I need that sound like they'd require some time investment to set up correctly on linux.
1. I use UWF on windows (Education Edition). All disk writes to C:/ are ephemeral. On every single reboot, all changes are discarded and my pc is back to the exact same state as when I first set it up. I do keep a separate partition for documents that need persistence.
2. Miracast for screen mirroring.
By prettymuchnoone 2025-05-205:31 as for 1. if you ever have some free time on your hands, and want to take declarative configs to the next level, you can check out Impermanence for NixOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218289
and 2...hm I know i've done Miracast before with GNOME Network Displays https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.NetworkDisplays
By kasabali 2025-05-207:31 (1) can be done with little to no configuration on default live images of like, every single distribution.
I feel like every conversation about this is the bell curve/midwit meme[1], with the middle being the argument over “Windows VM on Linux” and “Linux VM on windows”, and the edges being “own multiple computers”.
By ho_schi 2025-05-208:33 Right! Use Linux, because it is your preference [1]. It doesn't cause harm (side-effects: incompatibility and vendor lock-in, due to mass-effect) to others.
We need to remember why Microsoft uses WSL. Microsoft wants to prevent users (i.e. developers) to migrate on Linux. It is the old approach Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish [2].
Monopolies are made by users and politics, because we don't consider vendor lock-in and mass-effect. I wish strong regulation for all information-technology. We saw the wonderful effects of regulation with AT&T {UNIX, C, Open-Source, Open-Documentation} and then a mistake was done. The company was split up, looking back a complete failure.
[1] Means: It is a better operating-system and adapt to users needs. Either novice user or programmer. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguishBy Animats 2025-05-1917:48 That's sort of what Wine does. That's how I run the occasional Windows program on Linux.
By NelsonMinar 2025-05-1918:00 That works pretty well except for gaming. A lot of games detect if they are running in a VM and refuse to let you play, as an anti-cheat measure.
I always have Windows on Parallels on a Mac, too – unfortunately VirtualBox for arm64 Mac isn't quite there yet.
By mdaniel 2025-05-204:46 I think the biggest problem with VirtualBox on arm64 is that it is only for arm64 guests, unlike the qemu-system-x86_64 which colima et al use and allow booting up "normal" guest OSes
Also, VBoxManage was created by someone who firmly subscribes to the "git UX is awesome" school of thought :-(
By stephenr 2025-05-1918:26 It is slowly improving (albeit with some egregious bugs, like losing EFI data on export) but TBH even their x86 product pales in comparison to Parallels or VMWare Fusion, in terms of machine performance.
By int_19h 2025-05-1918:01 If you're in a corporate environment, you often don't have a choice wrt Windows as your primary desktop OS.
By icemelt8 2025-05-2011:02 You haven't used Photoshop for 15 years?
By rfoo 2025-05-1919:11 Okay. Then you had a Mac. Then you need to run Linux in a VM anyway because similar to Windows, macOS is also a dumpster fire. Then why bother? You are going to have a Linux VM anyway. I usually just sync my VM disk between all my laptops & desktops, no matter what host OS it runs.
WSL 2 is one of the biggest reasons I'm able to be productive as a blind software developer. With it I'm able to enjoy the best desktop screen reader accessibility (Windows and NVDA) as well as the best developer tools (Linux). I hate Microsoft's AI and ads force-feeding as much as anyone else but trust me, you'd do the same if you were in my shoes. Screen reader accessibility on Mac Os is stagnating even faster than the os itself and even though Linux / Gnome accessibility is being worked on, it's still ready only for enthusiasts who don't mind their systems being in a constant state of somewhat broken, as illustrated by this series of blog posts from just a few weeks ago: https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...
By protocolture 2025-05-215:27 >Screen reader accessibility on Mac Os is stagnating
Apocryphally, a lot of this was apparently developed at the direct insistence of Steve Jobs who had some run ins with very angry visually impaired people who struggled to use the early iphone/ipad.
That said, my source for this is one of the men who claims to have spoken to Mr Jobs personally, a visually impaired man who had lied to me on several fronts, and was extremely abusive. However I couldn't find anyone inside apple management or legal who would deny his claim. And he seemed to have been set the expectation that he could call the apple CEO at any time.
By hodgesrm 2025-05-2015:42 Thanks for pointing this out. I'm not visually impaired but even so the graphics and presentation features on Windows seem noticeably better than the competition.
By craigaloewen 2025-05-2013:37 This is so awesome to hear!!
