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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

I remember discussions back the day between Linux and Windows proponents. I was clearly in the Windows camp, seeing Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. That changed, now that Linux is probably the last OS I can run without a cloud account easily. Heck, I'd even pay for it!

Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows all the way for obvious reasons. Privately I am on Ubuntu now, along with LibreOffice. Won't go back, Windows turned into a major PIA when I tried to run different Teams and Office accounts not linked to the Windows 10 license due to home schooling and two kids. Gone were the days that a license key was all you needed. There is still a Windows boot partition, company hardware is Windows anyway.

The only thing I have a hard time getting rid of is Excel. I am so used to that...

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> Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers.

To be fair, some of us were smug as hell.

I once picked an argument with a guy simply because he was wearing a Microsoft t-shirt.

Ah, in those days I remember friends referred to Microsoft as The Evil Empire.

I think there was also a little bit of "friendly" debate over the superior OS at the time. (I ran OS/2 Warp for a number of years myself.)

Oh the days of being on Slashdot and getting downmodded to -1 Troll because you dare to suggest that Windows is a usable operating system and not type Micro$uck or some other variant.

I was actually quite fond of WinNT4. Lean and stable.

Microsoft being the Evil Empire and facing antitrust for bundling Internet Explorer was, of course, cheered on... meanwhile very similar groups of geeks these days see no problem with Apple only allowing Safari to be the web browser engine on iOS...

Oh my gosh... that Bill Gates Borg avatar....

Unfortunately this trend continues in the Linux Desktop community. It seems it never outgrew its teenager mindset.

I think most of the teenager mindset moved towards the Apple camp. Apple has been far more restrictive and anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was at its worst. Mention something like how Safari being the only allowed web engine on iOS and get downvoted, don't agree that Google is the ultimate evil and point out they're open sourcing Android, Chromium and etc... get downvoted.

The embrace of Apple on tech sites is something I'll never understand considering the attitudes that were prevalent when it came to Microsoft just a decade or two before.

Also compare the immense output of Microsoft Research versus the almost non-existent research output of Apple.

Almost everyone has been through that "mine is better than yours" distro war phase, adopting Linux (distros) as a religion is just stupid ;-)

Some of the gold I've accumulated over the years when converting Windows users and/or giving talks

  - All Linux distributions are the same: the Linux kernel, glibc and a bunch of GNU utils.
  - "Adopting Linux like a religion is stupid." - Thomas Cameron
  - "We've all been through my distro is better than yours" thing.
  - "The best Linux distro is the one that does what you need at the best cost."
  - Linux is NOT about the distribution but the kernel, it's about what the kernel can do.
  - Distribution is a way to wrap up what the kernel can do into a more manageable way.

>Heck, I'd even pay for it!

I usually donate to FOSS projects I use since you can't pay for them in the traditional sense but I still want to support the developers. KDE is my favorite thus far.

I've always wondered why no Linux app store has risen to prominence? Can one make a living selling their Linux applications to end users?

> Can one make a living selling their Linux applications to end users?

There are companies that do this- DaVinci Resolve, IntelliJ IDEA, Ardour come to mind.

While I wouldn't quite call it prominence, nor can I imagine you could make a living with it exclusively, elementary OS has something of a Linux app store with their AppCenter. Flipping through the website it seems to offer developers the standard 70/30 split.

It's quite simple, the market for paid end user applications on Linux is tiny. Canonical was saying years ago that they were going to add paid applications to the Snap Store but seemingly never got around to it. Elementary's App Center has integrated payments but they are optional and ~99% of users do not pay anything.

You can certainly make a living selling a cross platform application that supports Linux, but it's probably quite difficult to make much of a living selling Linux-only applications.

I think an app store would be a great location to not have optional payments for open source software if developers do not want it. Users can choose to go get and compile the source, download a third-party binary and keep it updated themselves, or pay for it and know it's directly from the authors and automatically updated and getting a path to support and the interested customers know the only people submitting reviews are people who paid for it and not drive by opinionated users like is common in open source software.

I'd say the existing app stores plugged on distribution repos (apt) provide a very large amount of free software, thus reducing the incentive to look for paid software.

For the seller, being able to sell is one thing, having to run software in a tiny and extremely fragmented market (a large bunch of slightly different distros) is another one. Then osx happened, and the linux desktop never happened.

I'll put it on the list once my Office 365 about expired. Because that Eco system, open source alternatives to MS, Google and so on, are more needed then ever. Or I just started to recognize how important they are.

I remember this :)

I was using Coherent at the time, and Linux people was posting in comp.os.coherent how good Linux was. When MWC folded people from MWC suggested moving to a BSD because at least the BSD people did not troll the group.

I ended up with Slackware because the PC I had at the time was too lite for a BSD.

I never got used to Excel, most of the spreadsheet things Excel is used for can be achieved by awk

I do not know why you got down voted for this.

But same here, I never used Excel (and do not now) because the tools in UNIX type OSs are fine.

So I guess I will be joining you in the basement :)

Gaming is still a major sticking point when it comes to Windows alternatives. But for Linux specifically, another one is web streaming: some popular services will outright refuse to stream on Linux, presumably due to DRM concerns.

Which platforms have you had issues with? All the ones I use (HBO Max, Crunchyroll, Netflix, Disney+, Amazon and Hulu) work fine, surprisingly. You do sometimes need to use a closed browser (Chrome, particularly) or enable DRM (Firefox), though.

They work fine only for SD contents. There are hacks that enable FullHD streams but they work only for Netflix.

I have no problem with either one of those. I watch Netflix, YouTube, DailyMotion and Vimeo without issue, and game performance is quite good under modern Proton. If those were your two big sticking points, it's probably time to try Linux again.

Hulu was outright refusing to play anything a couple of months ago, for example.

MS really needs to release a Linux Excel.

Not sure if that's ever gonna happen. I could imagine, now that Steam tool care of a huge junk of gaming, Office is the main thing keeping a sizable number of people on Windows. Imagine if MS was reduced to MS Excel...

Microsoft is mostly reduced to the Office and Cloud teams. It's likely why the Windows UI is an inconsistent disaster.

Seems reasonable. And to be honest, Teams is good for professional collaboration. And the MS Office suite isn't too bad. I used to be soslo founder until recently, and for that Office 365 was just perfect. No VPN, no really worries about it security. And even pricing was, I'd say, reasonable. Customer service is shit show, so.

It was always like that since the Windows days, Office drove the next UI improvements which would later appear as Windows common controls.

The current UI chaos is because the Windows team has become mostly the Cloud team, while the UI frameworks seem to keep rotating new people every couple of years.

They had to literally restaff WinForms and WPF teams from scratch, and then merged them with WinUI/UWP!

Once they have ported it to Electron ...

They're basically trying to with Office 365. The OS is a commodity, so move everything into the browser. Then you can sell to the shops that are running Chromebooks, and support Mac without a separate team.

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