WINE and the very popular/well maintained Linux distros have gotten so good in recent years that the scenario is nearly identical to Windows + WSL2, except with the DE reversed.
And WINE is never going to run entirely as smooth/easy as regular Windows, though it's pretty damn close.
I prefer Linux DE, both for aesthetic and resource (but mostly resource) purposes.
I think Win11 looks great despite internet's opinion, but wow-ee I cannot justify/cope with the amount of resources (modern) Windows takes just to idle and run explorer.exe
Now -- OLD Windows? Windows 98, Windows 2000? That was (is) some good stuff.
ReactOS recently released an x64 compatible build and I've booted into QEMU with it and toyed with the idea of trying to use it as a daily driver/work, even for a week as an experiment.
FWIW, I recently tried WINE/Codeweavers again after hearing everyone rave that it ran practically everything, and it was an absolute disaster. Literally 5/6 of the applications I tried didn’t run (and the sixth was Telegram, which actually already has a Linux client IIRC).
I doubt it’s really an option for 99% of people who need Windows for serious work.
Damn that sounds like bad luck to be honest. Or maybe the opposite -- I got very lucky and the apps I used were almost all compatible.
Off the top of my head, I've gotten:
- Ableton Live 10
- FL Studio 20
- A lot of popular Windows games
To work without any bugs (Borderlands 3 had a bug loading an asset once)
The one program I couldn't get working with WINE was Studio One 5.
Ableton and FL Studio are multi-GB programs with dozens of .dll's, really complex -- and all I had to do was:
wine <installer-name>.exe
Then click through them
So yeah it could just be a crapshoot as far as what works. Maybe it winds up that a lot of the apps you personally use/need don't run at all, which would really suck =/
But WINE sees constant improvement, including contribution from Valve who have a vested interest in Proton for running games. Not to be cliche, but it's always improving.
(I've never used the paid Codeweavers product which is supposedly better, so can't comment on that one. Maybe someone else can chime in with recent experience if they have?)
In spirit, I love FOSS, though I won't cripple myself by sticking to if something that works better for me comes along/use it to my own detriment.
In fact, I would be willing to pay a good amount of money for Windows 98/Windows 2000 with a modern kernel, x64 support, and icing on the cake would be a Linux shell.
If there was "Ubuntu: Windows 2000 UI Edition" they could take my money.
ReactOS runs on old PCs that couldn't run Windows 2000 and up. It only requires 48M of RAM to install. They are getting closer to a beta build. I use the alpha builds in Virtual Box, along with HaikuOS, AROS, and Linux.
Have you ever tried to do work in it or use it as a general purpose desktop?
It wasn't really feasible (IMO) until they put out that initial x64 build in August, but in my ignorant understanding with x64 compatibility there's nothing stopping someone from running VS Code or whatnot on there right?
What're your opinions on ReactOS?
The 30 minutes I played around with it on QEMU were amazing.
We've truly regressed so much in functional UI design. I genuinely felt able to focus better because there was less "going on" on the screen. Felt like my brain wasn't overstimulated with visual information.
Many people only use Windows because the software they have don't have a Linux build. Maybe people should start pressuring vendors to make Linux builds and that could end Windows.
Switched from 10 years of Debian-based linux (mostly Ubuntu, recently Pop_OS) to Windows because of some MIDI driver thing I could not get to install in WINE.
I have had a significantly less pleasant time on both Win10 and Win11, and it's slow as hell. Ubuntu/Ubuntu-derivatives with Regolith as a DE + Tiling WM is the best computing experience I've ever had
(Disclaimer: Have never used a Mac. Have been told OSx is better than Linux by people who have used both for long time.)
The ironic thing is that, I later had a passing convo with a developer of a DAW, who told me that MIDI driver stuff is usually for running specific software from the vendor and that MIDI is universal over USB.
So I never even needed to switch in the first place! I was just too hardware-stupid to know this!
Oh man it hurts my soul.
I could switch back but it takes a whole weekend to properly backup + wipe and setup a machine. I think I am going to go back to Pop_OS or Ubuntu though.
> (Disclaimer: Have never used a Mac. Have been told OSx is better than Linux by people who have used both for long time.)
As someone who used both for a long time, I would agree 2-3 years ago, now though I'd say I prefer Linux. I do really love the new m1 macs in term of temperature control and performance though.
The advantage of Linux is that when it doesn't work it's much easier to diagnose and fix by yourself, that didn't use to be a problem on macs because Apple's QA was much better and they were pretty stable (if you skipped the first 3-4 months of a new OS release) but nowadays, it's a lot less stable, my mac cannot even go to deep sleep properly (which ironically used to be a major pain on linux) and it's just a black box that's hard to diagnose but doesn't work well enough to justify it being a black box. And for the mac, I used to use things like SIMBL to modify the system exactly how I liked it but all of that has been slowly removed by Apple. Now I just want the flexibility of Linux.
> "I would agree 2-3 years ago, now though I'd say I prefer Linux"
This is an interesting anecdote. Do you have anything in particular that makes you think this, or is it an overall shift in feel? Also curious to hear which distro you use
Call me a heretic, but I am jealous of the M1 performance-for-price being outside the Apple ecosystem and have thought to buy an M1 laptop and wipe it + put Asahi Linux on it hahaha
I mostly use Arch Linux. Used to use Gentoo for years before that. Mostly it's the continuous QA problem I've been getting (my mba not going to deep sleep is a big one), the dumbing down of the OS X interface and the fact that I can no longer easily use tools like SIMBL to extend applications.
It's a bit the straw that broke the camel back. As time went on, little things became more and more aggravating.
I have a core i5 mini computer which I spin up every couple of months and it always amazes me that for the first 20 minutes or so the CPU runs at 100% while windows checks for updates (obviously this wouldn't happen if I ran it daily, but still Linux never does this)
There are several reasons for Windows popularity today:
Active Directory - The centralised control it gives corporates.
Games and DirectX - Although this seems to be getting to be less of a reason.
Backwards compatibility - Windows 16 bit apps are now dead, but you can take the VB6 code I wrote pre-Y2K and run it today.
Linux fragmentation - It's difficult to support all the Linux variations with a single binary (or at least it feels that way to me) I suspect it has a very high support cost. Related to this is the GPL and it's potential to force release of source code.
Not long ago I upgraded an Ubuntu system to 21.04. It took me more than half an hour of looking around to realise that the "Ubuntu Software" screen everyone was referring to was a separate application that wasn't installed by default. Then I could look up the CLI command to install it via apt.
That sort of thing would be a small (though very irritating) waste of time for many of us on HN but it could have been a showstopper for other potential Ubuntu users who aren't technically inclined and just want a system that works.
Unfortunately in my experience that still sums up desktop Linux in a nutshell. You probably can fix just about anything if you know what you're doing. If you do, you get the benefits that come with running Linux, including avoiding the kind of controlling behaviours we see from Microsoft and Apple in their desktop platforms these days. But the reality is that most normal people won't know what they're doing to that degree and so can't fix the problems.
So continues the cycle where "normal people" don't use Linux and so there is no big market for commercial applications and so most commercial applications don't run on Linux and so "normal people" don't use Linux.
The "Ubuntu Software" screen should be installed by default.
> Ubuntu Software Center is a one-stop shop for installing and removing software on your computer.
> It is included in Ubuntu 9.10 and later.
> - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuSoftwareCenter
The "Ubuntu Software" screen should be installed by default.
"Should" being the operative word unfortunately. It clearly wasn't installed by default for this machine that had been upgraded through earlier versions (starting around 16 I think so well after 9.10), nor was there any obvious indication to the user that it was missing and available to be added.
There were some other oddities after that upgrade, for example Firefox no longer appearing for one-click launching from the default UI layout when it had before, so the lack of Ubuntu Software (and, apparently, its underlying apt package) wasn't the only anomaly. It just wasn't a polished experience that a non-technical user should have to deal with.
Synaptic still works fine but it also needs explicitly installing and it is aimed at more technical "power users" and so solves a slightly different problem.
I’m also struggling to understand why it would be difficult to create a mouse driven GUI for any CLI based app.
In fact, there are apps that can do that automatically. Admittedly these apps tend to create not very good UIs, but the point is that it’s not hard at all.
Ironically I have been using Linux via VMWare for about 10 years now, because I got fed up with Year of Linux Desktop, which to this day still doesn't provide a proper experience to anyone that cares about graphics programming and usable UI/UX tooling.
When my Asus Netbook dies (1215B with XUbuntu), the next UNIX travel laptop will be an Air.
So you can spare the talk about how much GNU/Linux has progressed, since I see it every time I take that netbook into use.
Have you ever considered that there's a huge amount of users that don't care about "graphics programming and usable UI/UX tooling"? Maybe Linux on the desktop doesn't suit your individual needs, but you seem awfully combative about it on the basis of your specific niche.
> "Maybe Linux on the desktop doesn't suit your individual needs, but you seem awfully combative about it on the basis of your specific niche."
I see your point. Devils advocate: we're each the center of our own universe, so whatever it is we find important is the marker for usability for us.
Ideally an OS should have tools for everything. Though I'm not certain if "Graphics Programming" means like GUI in C++ (pjmlp often talks about C++ Builder and C++/CX, so I believe he means that kind) or programming GPU's via CUDA. I don't think it's the second one -- Linux is much easier for GPU stuff (IE most ML projects/tutorials are only set up for Ubuntu) than Win.
I imagine the argument stems from a lack of Visual Studio equivalent on Linux. It looks like the only version that runs properly on Linux is VS 2005 -- LOL!
VS on Linux would indeed be great. I had to make a Win10 VM the other day to compile a C# WinForms project that I could run fine in Wine but couldn't modify. Similar deal with reverse engineering, Cheat Engine runs surprisingly well in Wine but none of the Mono stuff works.
I do think it's a little reductive to discuss Linux struggling with things like Visual Studio that are only relevant because Windows is relevant, but that is our unfortunate reality.
> Have you ever considered that there's a huge amount of users that don't care about "graphics programming and usable UI/UX tooling"?
Have you ever considered that this "huge amount of users" might not care about graphics programming or usable UI/UX tooling, but that >99% of them sure care about either graphics (games, photos, video, digital painting, ...) or usable UIs and UX?
I'm using Linux all the time, and it's quite amazing how terrible anything Desktop related is. Who is going to fix that if the state of graphics and UI/UX tooling is so poor that it either drives away or stymies all the people with relevant skills to drive some improvements?
I'm not saying those things aren't important, but they don't warrant the outright dismissal that I was replying to.
Linux has an obvious lack of contribution from designers, designers are employed for products, noone is making money selling desktop Linux as a product. Also, most designers aren't tinkering with open source software alternatives in their free time like developers do.
I also feel like I'm missing something because my experience on desktop Linux is way better than anything I've ever had on Windows or Mac, meanwhile everyone's saying it's unusable. Can't be easy for the handful of people working on desktop environments and the like.
Honestly, I think the entire situation where we have multiple DEs/toolkits/video drivers/window managers/input methods is unmaintanable. It would be likely unmaintanable even for a well-funded corporation.
If there was a well-funded corporation, they would naturally focus on their stack of choice. I think that's what Red Hat does, focusing most of their desktop stuff on GNOME.
Some Linux Desktop are loudly combative about how great Linux Desktop is and seem to consider it some kind of failing if someone else doesn't agree. It's always "you chose the wrong distro!"[0] or "you have to be more picky with hardware!"[1], or even "it works for me, so you must be lying!". I imagine decades of experience with that person on internet forums is what has shaped parent's combativeness.
I know what you mean, but in this instance the complaint is poor UI/graphics while the distro in question is using a very cut-down desktop environment (running in a VM).
> "which to this day still doesn't provide a proper experience to anyone that cares about graphics programming and usable UI/UX tooling."
Genuinely curious what doesn't work in IE Ubuntu 21.04 for you?
Not one of those raving Linux zealots (don't really care that much about privacy), I've just had positive experiences on Linux -- not using it masochistically for ethical reasons, but because it worked very well for me.
So I would be interested in hearing the other side of the coin, since you've been around the block a time or two.
I'm not the person you were replying to, but here's the straw that broke this multilingual camel's back: unless Gnome is running under Wayland, switching the keyboard layout steals the input focus away from the foreground window briefly, causing focus-loss event handlers to fire. This might seem an easily fixable minor issue but it's actually a decade-old hairball which significantly harms the experience and can't be fixed cleanly under X.
I didn't notice Wayland becoming the default, tbh. Thanks for mentioning this.
As for the specific bug, it was introduced by the implementation of a non-essential feature (the languague switch HUD) which was then left in place, likely because the Wayland transition was juuust around the corner. While Wayland does address many architectural issues, I don't think X users should deal with regressions caused by Wayland-optimized features just yet (and definitely not 8 or so years ago).
> a proper experience to anyone that cares about graphics programming and usable UI/UX tooling.
I suppose the only answers here are qt or game engines like godot/heaps.io etc - and they probably aren't as good as windows. But it's a little tricky to know exactly what you mean.
> When my Asus Netbook dies (1215B with XUbuntu), the next UNIX travel laptop will be an Air.
> So you can spare the talk about how much GNU/Linux has progressed, since I see it every time I take that netbook into use.
If you're looking for a "windows desktop replacement", you should probably compare it to one of the "big" desktop projects - ie: Ubuntu standard desktop (not a spin, like xubuntu), Red Hat or SuSe.
It's also not clear which version of xubuntu you're running - 20.04 lts?
Personally I think 20.04 with Wayland and pipewire has made great strides as a "just works" Desktop - and I'm looking forward to the next lts (pipewire baked in, hopefully).
That said, I doubt much will beat an m1 Mac in the near future, if you're happy with apple/macos.
VMWare vs Native Linux running last Gnome is a very, very different experience in my laptop.
VMWare is crippled performance wise, doesn't detect autorotate, and using it in full-screen requires me to resize the VMWare window every time I reboot the VM.
VMWare also doesn't detect all the buttons in my mouse.
The thing is, vendors will only invest resources required to make Linux builds if there's a market that justifies the investment. The only pressure companies can feel is the pressure that comes from the promise of making more money.
It obviously won't end Windows. Not will actually make any sizeable dent in Windows marketshare. That's a pipe dream.
Vast majority of people use Windows because it comes preinstalled. And it comes preinstalled for business reasons that are very hard to counter or reverse.
The only way to weaken Windows is through legislative measures and that ain't likely to happen.
