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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Who picks their operating system first? IMHO, the OS is only there to support the applications I need to use. If those applications are available only on Windows, then your advice isn't very useful.

So I would say your advice isn't helpful. Microsoft has a financial relationship with their users (especially their business users) and despite what many people think, they do listen to their customers. So I would say the best way to fix Windows 10 is to continue to let Microsoft know that you aren't happy with specific changes they've made.

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And here come the "b-but you can use wine" comments, which of course everyone who would be a proponent of such would understand that it is not perfect, does not run everything and is far from user-friendly.

Yeah, Wine is amazing for what is is, but is never quite good enough for current, big desktop applications.

> does not run anything

Have you actually tried it in recent years? Wine runs a lot of stuff just fine.

    grep --files-with-matches wine ~/opt/win32/*/launch.sh | wc -l
    71

The most obvious incompatibility right now is probably DX11-only software. Aside from that kind of known compatibility problem, wine has worked well for several years now.

> far from user-friendly.

While I agree that wine can get nasty if you need to debug anything or if you have unusual requirements, but the standard "just run this win32 binary" case has also been trivial for years. I believe some distros even enable the kernel feature that launches wine automagically when running a .exe file.

> it is not perfect

Of course it isn't. It is, however, worth trying.

Sorry, that was supposed to be everything, not anything.

I've always been afraid that DRM-encumbered games aren't going to work on wine. Is that an unfounded fear?

No. Games that utilise the Denuvo DRM (which is gaining popularity, unfortunately) will not run on Wine.

I pick the OS first, but most of the tools that I use are cross platform. If I did need applications that were only available on one, I would likely use a VM. Of course, if the main applications that I needed (maybe ones that I use 80% of the time) were only available on one, that would be different.

I think his advice is perfectly reasonable, it just doesn't apply to everyone. I bet that it applies to a lot of people in a technical audience, though.

Aren't you people EVER gaming though, programmers or not? I am doing it a lot less compared to only 5 years ago but I want the opportunity to be there the second I figure I want to game a bit, and no, dual-booting is not a way of addressing this at all.

Elaboration: when I have 3 Chrome windows, 2 work VMs fired, a separate Chrome window for the work services, several consoles outside of the VMs, and a live Twitch stream running on the TV hoooked to my PC then no, I am not willing to reboot only to play a game.

From a web search the best-selling PC game in history was Diablo III with 5.15 million copies sold. That's barely a blip given 2.5 billion people online. Gaming is a niche activity.

> Gaming is a niche activity.

Define "gaming". There is a sense in which the best selling PC game is almost certainly solitaire.

According to Wikipedia [1] the top selling PC game is Minecraft, with 24 millions sold, followed by World of Warcraft that got to around 14 million subscribers, while Diablo III is in third place with 12 million copies sold...

Sure, that's still not much compared to 2.5 billion, but that's also 5 times what you said.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games

According to World Bank, the earth's population exceeds 7 billion people and 65% of those people are between the ages of 15 and 65. So let's say there's 4.5 billion people of driving age on the planet.

The Toyota Corolla is the best selling car of all time and has only sold 37.5 million units.

By your measure, driving is clearly a niche activity as well.

League of Legends has over a 100 million monthly players. Overwatch 20 million. CSGO and Dota 2 around ~15 million / month, each.

So... adds up ;)

League of Legends has over 100 million active players a month. Dota 2 has around 39 million. Steam has over 125 million active, with 9 million concurrent users during peak hours. The free to play games market is enormous.

> Aren't you people EVER gaming though, programmers or not?

Frankly? Not much. What gaming I do do is either on the PS4 or is indie gaming, which largely works on Linux or Wine.

Last several months I probably have like 4 hours a week at maximum. My point is, I want all the games in my Windows 10 machine to be there and ready the moment I figure I want to get into them.

Convenience > all, including for some of us the programmers. =)

After many years away from gaming, I built a linux-based gaming machine recently. A surprisingly large number of games, from GOG and Steam, work natively on Linux today; many others (most dx9 games) works near flawlessly under wine.

I had actually planned to setup GPU bypass on the box and run Windows in a VM, but I have more games now to last a long time, and I haven't actually bothered.

> Aren't you people EVER gaming though, programmers or not?

Yes, maybe on my phone once in a blue moon? Otherwise, that went out the door(at least for me) sometime in my 20's.

36 here, and a well-paid programmer too; still gaming occasionally although it's times less compared to in the past. I suspect you're not in the majority, having in mind the statistics about adoption of user-level OSes. :P

WoW runs fine under Wine. Most games worth bothering with do, and/or have a native port available.

AFAIK, macOS runs more software than any other operating system simply because you generally can't run macOS in a VM (I believe you can iff you are running on Apple hardware). So that's probably the safest choice.

I'm not sure about Sierra, but El Capitan works fine under VirtualBox/VMWare (you do need to be running an Intel CPU).

This is why I have a strong preference for free software that is available for the dominant three operating systems. Only if free software doesn't satisfy my needs I look for nonfree software and then I first look for commercial software which supports free operating systems. If all that fails, it's time for a Windows 7-VM to run that program.

I'm only one customer but I'm letting Microsoft know that I'm not happy with the way they go with Windows by not using Windows 10.

I have a strong preference for using the best software available to me. IMHO, all of the major operating systems are good enough although none are perfect.

These days, hardware and software is very inexpensive compared to time. I love the idea behind free software, but sometimes it's just too expensive to choose.

The "best" depends on the context. I don't want to argue what's best for you.

In the university context I've found that there is a lot of free software that works good enough or sometimes even better than commercial products. If you factor in that you still can use that particular program after you leave, it becomes a big plus.

> The "best" depends on the context.

That's very true. For example, if I need to use an image editor, Photoshop is the only thing I would consider. It's inexpensive ($35 for a month subscription), but more importantly it's easy to hire people that know it well. It's also well supported and documented.

Exactly, financially support Linux devs and your tools will follow.

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