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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Getting off platforms is usually quite hard with most trying to be as sticky as possible. The common reason why people tend to stick to Windows is games, even if the situation has gotten better.

Personally I have come to the conclusion that the best solution is virtual machines with a linux base system. Put every game that is sticky to windows into its own little container and just have hardware passed through. That way every form of sticky platform only exist in a small pocket of virtual space. The tricky part is getting all this working as smoothly as if it was just one system that just happen to have really good sandboxing for untrustworthy platforms.

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> The common reason why people tend to stick to Windows is games

For home users perhaps. Enterprise users are often locked into ERP clients, for instance, that are Windows only.

But the real killer reason enterprises use Windows is Active Directory. Simple GUI SSO and policy based management. For instance I could have a white-list that didn't have this adware on it and could apply it by group-policy...

Active Directory is just a fancy name for LDAP, Kerberos, and DNS (often in combination with CIFS). There's no reason why you cannot use an equiv in a partly or pure Linux/UNIX environment. And indeed, there are many partly Linux/UNIX environments where the servers are running on Linux/UNIX yet the clients are running on Windows. The killer feature of Windows is that people are used to running it as desktop, meaning a less steep learning curve. Another one to add to the list of features is Exchange, but even that has *NIX alternatives.

> Active Directory is just a fancy name for LDAP, Kerberos, and DNS (often in combination with CIFS).

I don't quite agree, Active Directory is an easy to learn and deploy implementation of LDAP, Kerberos, and DNS (often in combination with CIFS) with a friendly GUI interface. It also adds Group Policy, which is less simple to replicate on Linux. Then it adds a huge pool of admins which have been through the vendor supplied training process. I can show people how to create a user and add them to my company defaults in minutes, and not just because they are familiar with Windows, but because they are familiar with the desktop metaphor

I am a keen Linux user, I am typing this on Linux in fact. We have lots of processes running on Linux in fact. But I cannot replace the ease of AD in Linux. And more than that, our ERP client only runs on Windows...

I've found that FreeIPA tends to be a fantastic replacement: https://www.freeipa.org/

If you're using Red Hat/Fedora GNOME desktops, you can pair that with Fleet Commander to set up desktop policy: https://fleet-commander.org/

At some point soon, I expect it to work for SUSE and Mageia systems, too.

I currently run this on a Fedora Server setup to pair with some Fedora Workstations I manage.

Except AD lets you do an awful lot more than this with Group Policy - you can configure and enforce endless amounts of settings on client machines from the simple - wallpaper for example - to software installs to executable restrictions...

This is a big plus for locking down mostly untrusted users (eg average employees in a larger enterprise).

Edited to fix stupid autocorrect.

Group Policy (which is really a mostly-unrelated thing propagated through AD) is probably the hardest-to-replace part of the equation.

> Personally I have come to the conclusion that the best solution is virtual machines with a linux base system. Put every game that is sticky to windows into its own little container and just have hardware passed through.

Is there a Windows license available to consumers that allows simultaneous installation on multiple VMs under a non-Windows-based hypervisor?

Not really no. I recall that linus tech tips had same question when they made a similar setup.

The question about "how many installations does one license allow" does not seem to be much explored by the courts, so I am not that worried for personal setup like this. One could argue that multiple VM is just technical details for what is in practical terms a single user and a single machine.

The opposite is true for my purposes... I run linux and then use virtualbox to run windows 10 for the only app i'm using windows for, which is QuickBooks. I gave up on closed source software decades ago. With Windows, every six months you have to reinstall your machine because of malware and of course the hour(s) of lost productivity per day compared to linux. Good luck with that.

> With Windows, every six months you have to reinstall your machine because of malware and of course the hour(s) of lost productivity per day compared to linux. Good luck with that.

This stopped being true from like Windows 7. Please stop spreading FUD.

At work, I have been using my laptop for ~3.5 years now, running Windows 7, without reinstalling once. If you take some care, don't just install any random piece of software you run across, only download software from trustworthy sources, etc., it is possible to keep a system free of malware.

Just to be clear, at home, I run GNU/Linux, too. But it's not like catching a virus is inevitable fate on Windows.

> With Windows, every six months you have to reinstall your machine because of malware

This is only true if you're careless or technically inept.

> of course the hour(s) of lost productivity per day compared to linux

I don't lose any productivity by using Windows. Not sure where you're getting this from.

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