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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

I admit it's a few years at this point I don't use a Linux box as my desktop. Is it at a point where, to do all the obvious things like, use Skype, configure a printer, have a decent presentation or video editing software, update my system without hacking with the drivers, I can just have it? My fear is that I'll not be able to do everything I do with my Mac now. A solution could be to install Windows 10 in dual boot maybe, to use commercial software (for video editing, just to make an example, but others may want to do gaming). Trivia: I used only Linux for more than a decade, but I quit and went to macbook because it was a bit like fighting with the system to do basic stuff.

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Skype on linux works well, last I checked.

Configuring a printer is pretty good, actually: for the most part, you plug it in, and it Just Works™. Networked printers are another matter, but by no meand impossible.

Presentation on Linux can be handled by LibreOffice, Google Slides, or Reveal.js (which has become increasingly popular with developers of late)

I've never had trouble with updating my system, and I'm on ArchLinux. The one thing you may have trouble with is wifi, but if your wifi chip's supported, the rest is most likely good. However, it does depend on your setup.

Really, the only thing you might have trouble with is video editing, and even that's not so bad anymore: OpenShot is as good as WMM ever was, and Lightworks, the NLE of choice for many professionals, has a Linux version.

As for gaming, I've been gaming on linux since 2011, when Steam on Linux was but a madman's dream. It was possible to play many exellent games (some through wine, some native), and with the dawn of Steam on Linux, that's never been more true.

Skype on Linux is currently abandonware and can't do multi party video calls, but MS is writing a new client which is alpha now. Still, the current client keeps working for multi party audio calls and one to one video calls and screen sharing, doesn't have ads. More important, it can be configured not to have all that white space around the messages. I can see two or three times as much messages than the Windows version. Sadly the new version seems to be like the windows and macos ones.

Ah. I haven't used Skype in a while, and was unaware of the new situation.

Thanks, looks like things are better than 7/8 years ago.

They really don't though. Right now I have these apps open on my Mac. I don't want to settle for sub-par alternatives. I want these specific apps:

Spotify, Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator, iMessage, Apple Numbers (I'd settle for Excel), Keynote (far superior to Powerpoint), Hearthstone, Apple Calendar, Apple Mail, Apple Maps, Apple Photos

For nearly every one of those apps I'd have to settle for an inferior user experience on Linux. It would be significantly more bearable on Windows, but still would be a UX compromise compared to my experience on the Mac today.

In your case the problem I see is that you are using a lot products from Apple. In my case is just Keynote, otherwise I'm using just the OS itself, and I even have an Android phone, so the switch could be simpler. Unfortunately I think you'll require to do researches for each single software in order to potentially migrate to something else. The good thing is that for almost everything there is some indie solution that is great, but the bad thing is that it's not as simple as just sitting and letting Apple provide good integrated solutions. For iMessage however I would go towards Whatsapp, it's going to happen anyway world-wide IMHO, it's just North America that is using Apple messaging mostly. I totally agree it is significantly simpler to switch to Windows + VM or Windows in dual boot than bare Linux.

Photoshop, Illustrator, Spotify, Excel, and Hearthstone (more or less) work well through Wine. I've never heard of Sketch, so I wouldn't know about that.

iMessage and Apple Maps are accessible from your phone (as is Hearthstone, for that matter), and probably more convenient there, although iMessage might be useful on the desktop as well. Google Maps, however, is a thing, and probably better.

I've heard good things about Shotwell for photos. Have you tried it, or did you dismiss it out of hand?

Mail and Calendar can be replaced by Thunderbird, or any number of other email clients if Thunderbird concerns you. None of them, AFAICT, are worse than Apple's mail and calendar apps, which are pretty "meh" IMHO.

So of the apps you listed, only iMessage, Keynote, and Sketch don't work on Linux, and don't have viable alternatives.

> Skype on linux works well, last I checked.

Nope. They (Skype/Microsoft) have not updated skype in years. It's still version 4.3, and recently on Linux Groupcall is problematic as all the other Skype clients got upgrades.

Though digging around for a known workaround to that last problem it appears there is a new alpha-grade update for Skype-on-Linux: https://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Skype-for-Linux-Alpha-a...

Alpha do not work very well. You still can install old 4.3 version, work better than new version under Win 10.

Skype need to be some kind of amazing mismanagement where with such simple product they keep losing quality. To compare Curse/Discord for games work and look way better.

...Or even Mumble.

As for video editing software: this may sound strange, but I've seen several people, some of them VFX professionals, recommend Blender as a very good tool. (Perhaps it's not so surprising when you consider it's been used for editing several feature-length movies.)

For presentation software: personally I've completely switched to HTML5 based presentations (with reveal.js generated from markdown with pandoc), because even in 2016 I still see professionals at big conferences fail at playing back videos, or just plain hanging their Windows computers, when using PowerPoint. But when was the last time a video failed to play in your browser?

My current setup is Windows 10 on a Thinkpad Helix 2, with full-screen cygwin X11 for ssh-ing into other systems from an environment where I can use fvwm2 to manage my xterms, and a FreeBSD VM running under Hyper-V for when I need a real unix locally.

I have no idea at all if that would be remotely close to suitable for you, but, y'know, have a random data point in case it turns out to be helpful.

For me Windows is fine as long as I don't have to deal with viruses, anti viruses, malwares that reconfigure your default search, and stuff like that. It's not that I'm particularly in love with MacOS UI, even if I think it's pretty good/consistent, I could adapt to anything else which is stable and works. Thanks.

The only thing that's hit me (so far as I know) in years was an Acrobat Reader 0day that my installed antivirus missed (AVG? I think? years ago) but once I figured out how to sigkill the payload while it was still starting up, Hitman Pro ate it alive in short order. Windows Defender is apparently pretty good but it's never found anything to complain about on my systems except copies of EICAR in a local CPAN mirror.

So, for me, as far as I can tell, "don't use IE" plus "don't install random crap you downloaded from the internet" plus "my mail client is mutt under screen on a server" between them are basically sufficient defense these days. How far that generalises I can't really say.

Skype for Linux has a release that’s up-to-date with the Mac and Windows ones now. Can’t help you with presentation or video editing software, though.

Blender has a surprisingly good general-purpose video editor built in.

Thanks, I think that, while I still have a Macbook that will last a couple of years, I'll install a Linux installation in dual boot so that I can start to understand where I'm headed...

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