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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice.

What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more. If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it.

The only area I wish had a better story was the enterprise desktop space (like Windows domains or jamf on macOS) but currently I can’t justify allowing my team to run Linux because having its hard enough for small companies to manage a mixture of macOS and Windows fleets without adding a 3rd platform into the mix.

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> What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more.

That's a funny conclusion to make. In the business world that still exists and even my kids are forced into the Microsoft eco-system by their school because the software they insist you run (for which perfectly good web alternatives exist) only runs on windows.

True, but increasingly marginal. Many schools have adopted Chromebooks (Linux in disguise) and even the MS Office suite has largely moved online.

MS is on a mission to go after schools that have adopted Chromebooks. If your school is using Chromebooks you can expect all kinds of stick-and-carrot tricks to try to get you to switch (back).

They invented the hilarious Surface SE, so bad it can't even run all Metro/Store apps. Worse than a Chromebook in every way.

Everything you want to install has to be approved by Microsoft

I agree. Google Classroom exploded during the pandemic in my local school systems.

Enterprises are moving to Workspace from 365. I hope they drive each other's prices to the bottom. :)

"Enterprises are moving to Workspace from 365" not in any meaningful numbers.

> not in any meaningful numbers.

While I agree, it has to start somewhere. As a customer of both, I appreciate the competition from 1-2% per year[0] growth.

[0]https://blogs.gartner.com/craig-roth/2022/08/02/market-share...

Nah... We've had Workspace for a long time and there are still users that adamantly refuse to use Google Apps over MS. They actually have good reasons as well. Since Google just has web apps only there's always extra steps uploading all the office docs they get from other businesses.

We tried blowing Office 2013 away on everyone's machines after being told most users didn't think they needed it. Now, a few months later 90% of our users have asked for a 365 license.

What typically happens from what I can tell is that most businesses just end up having a mix of both 365 and Workspace.

Great feedback!

Excel specifically seems to have the most attachment among our users.

Excel has programming capabilities (VBA) that are used a lot, and I don't think they're available in the online version (are they?)

A lot of people are stuck on Windows or MacOS because of one killer app - Photoshop, a CAD/CAM package, a video or audio editor, or some proprietary bit of business software. Many of these applications have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of dev time invested in them and it just isn't realistic to expect an open source alternative to compete.

I'm in that boat, but I don't especially mind. I run Windows because it allows me to run Fusion 360, but Windows Subsystem for Linux gives me a full Linux dev environment. A younger me would have got angry about it, but present me accepts that platform lock-in effects are very strong; fortunately for Linux, it dominates every new category of platform. I sincerely doubt that anyone will ever develop a new proprietary OS from scratch, because the business case for putting a pretty UI on Linux is overwhelming.

Sure but we were talking about students at schools here, where this is usually not a problem.

I hope that Photopea (browser-based Photoshop) can gain traction to break that dependency.

I know the evidence is that plenty of people are totally happy with applications running in a browser -- Office Online, Google Sheets, etc. are compelling evidence -- but I strongly prefer dedicated and native applications for something I'll be spending a lot of time using.

I'm not even necessarily blaming this on the performance difference, although that is a pertinent topic, but just the mental structure of something I'm using living in a browser tab rather than actually running on the computer.

Installable web apps would give you a workaround for that wouldn’t it?

They are still bound by the constraints of the Web.

For example WebGL 2.0 (2009 hardware), WebGPU (2015 hardware), any GPU capabilities after 2015? You ain't going to get them.

If the parents are talking about choice, then forced Chromebooks are not choice. The students must use them, and schools like them because they are very locked down and centrally observable.

But the student has no choice

> Chromebooks (Linux in disguise)

I don't think a win for Chromebooks counts as a win for Linux, except in maybe the most narrowly technical sense.

Go on the Chromeos subreddit and you'll see a lot of first time Linux users breaking open the dev tools to run Linux apps to get more functionality.

Its honestly quite interesting seeing new users from that perspective.

Yes, but many schools lock down their Chromebooks so that you can't run Linux on them. I somehow managed to unenroll mine last year, but I have no idea how I did, and to make it worse I had to switch out my Chromebook after it stopped working.

So in practice, no, it's not very useful. Most students are still forced to use a web browser and nothing more, else they run the risk of getting in trouble for hacking their Chromebook.

Tangent: That being said, it's hilarious how much worse the schools are at locking down Windows computers. As far as I can tell, they just bought a few commercial solutions, set them up on the Chromebooks, and paid no attention to the Windows computers. The BIOS isn't even locked. They're only restricted at the network level.

My middle school's computers (desktop pcs with windows at the time) fidn't have passwords on the bios We would bring linux "live users to boot on and play minecraft

A loss for the school, but definitely a win for our education

People aren't forced, they choose it. They are clueless about technology and don't trust anything that may look like a dark horse. They want reassurance. It's not just the "enterprise" or corporate world. Home users have that mentality. Mac computers cost an arm and a leg and people still pay for it because the advertising machine has hammered it into the heads that "it just works." Most people only trust big brands. The bigger the better.

> People aren't forced, they choose it.

I'm forced to use it at work. :(

I share that sentiment.

One important reality, though, is that "forced" is a sticky word here. Anyone sufficiently anti-FAANG and tech-savvy enough will find a workaround, so the constraints are far less than most dominant forces across the lens of history.

If a school requires Windows, students are forced to use it. Not changing schools isn't "choosing" Windows.

But yes, I'm always surprised how many people buy things introduced to them in ads.

> People aren't forced, they choose it.

No they don't. There aren't any schools nearby that do not force Windows on the students and I can have my whole house on Linux it doesn't matter: if you want to participate in highschool around here then Windows it is. My personal views of MS, their crimes past and present are worth absolutely nothing. I would not be surprised if you dig deep enough that you'll find some level of corruption but even that doesn't help me, it would just lead to a long and drawn out court case the outcome of which will likely be resolved long after my kids are out of school.

So, I have no choice other than to take my kids out of school and that too - rightly so - isn't an option.

It's more than a little bit ridiculous too because there isn't anything in the highschool curriculum that per-se would require access to a windows computer. But they make it so that it just simply doesn't work otherwise, starting from windows native applications for the agenda and messaging system and ending with sending documents in proprietary formats.

Well clearly the choice is to move to an area where your kids are able to run Linux.

I hope that was sarcastic. FWIW I think that government institutions, educational institutions, banks, insurance companies, health care service providers etc should use only open standards. No proprietary stuff at all. So no banking apps, no voting apps, calendar apps, no healthcare claim apps and definitely no client side software (Mac or Windows). Just the web and properly managed infrastructure.

> What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more. If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it.

The danger that the history will repeat for browsers instead of OSs is real. The less market share for browsers other than Google Chrome or Chrome-based ones, the more likely it is, that we will be forced to use those because of incompatible web applications.

E.g. at work, using a Linux Computer, I switched to Chrome for Teams and Outlook, because of compatibility issues.

Did you try setting your User Agent to Chrome? I have to use Teams for work. Under Firefox it has problems and missing features, setting my user agent to Chrome solves all of it. Highly uncompetitive if you ask me.

Thank you. That tip might lessen my need to use Brave for sites only working in Chrome.

Also, pro tip: copying the most popular user-agent string gives you a bit of extra protection against fingerprinting. As of the time of writing, the most populated user-agent string is this: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Source: https://techblog.willshouse.com/2012/01/03/most-common-user-...

To me that sounds more like bad software dev/test procedures at MS than anything intentionally uncompetitive. For example, maybe they don’t keep their Firefox support up to date because not enough Teams users use Firefox to warrant the effort, but maybe Firefox is increasingly Chrome-compatible. Firefox is not popular enough for MS to intentionally cripple.

> If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it.

I'd take every day a native app running locally over a web app. And I am a web developer.

I have a native app (VS) and a web app (VSC) running side by side on my computer, its like an adult vs 7y old.

> I have a native app (VS) and a web app (VSC) running side by side on my computer, its like an adult vs 7y old.

Honestly, VSC is pretty decent due to all of the engineering MS put into it. Brackets and Atom both were way slower and had noticeable input lag, at least for me.

Other people have also looked into things like that: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

Personally, something like Notepad++ or Lazarus always felt the fastest to me.

Software like JetBrains IDEs, their Fleet editor, Visual Studio and even Visual Studio code all had noticeable hiccups but always seemed "fast enough". Even when the typing itself was okay, there'd be stuff like autocomplete delays/stuttering and refactoring slowdown, but nothing too annoying.

In contrast, Brackets, Atom, working through SSH, remote sessions through RDP/VNC or any device that lagged due to being underpowered always was annoying slow and disruptive.

Not anymore. Last gen phones have enough performance to run webapps without a single loss in performance, look and feel compared to native apps. Native apps will remain, but you see more and more SPAs wrapped in a hybrid app still maintaining a 'native'look. Costs of developing webapps is dramatically lower. Although native knowledge is still required for Auth, billing, advertising and other required native stuff.

It's not just loss in performance, it's also loss of your data and control over that data.

This is not inherent to web apps though, is it? Free software web apps without vendor lock-in exist.

They do, but they are the exception, not the rule. The bulk of the free software that I use I use locally, in fact I don't think I use even a single package that is a free software web app that is operated by some third party and if it were then I probably would try to find an alternative.

I still have to see a single webapp that is as performant and feels the same as a native one. We might get there, and lots of companies are happy to release a half-backed webapp today, but that is definitely not the experience today.

Render speed of browser engines is really good these days on mobile phones. Getting fluid animations is maybe even easier and faster with css than with the Android sdk or ios. Plenty of frameworks out there to create nice SPAs. Some parts still have to be native like Auth, billing etc. But majority of the app can be web.

I could post a mini saas that I made in php and mysql, using jQuery on the front end, that outperforms just about any webapp and most modern local apps, but I don't want to attract too much attention because I'm sure technically it's easily breakable to pros and malicious people.

Also, it runs on a $4 a month namecheap server.

Why is so fast? Because I came from the land of slow crms, and performance was my #1 goal. Instead of making it faster to develope, I made it faster for the end user.

Is that a worthwhile business goal? I don't know. But I know it's fast.

But how do you know if an app is "native"? What does native even mean? Can I use html/js for layout in my native app?

I propose that all the apps you use that you find good you assume are native, but possibly some of those are not.

Feeling similar due to phone just being faster is not the same as a loss of performance.

You are still paying performance for using web apps, and even though your fingers don’t feel it as badly, your battery sure does.

> Last gen phones have enough performance to run webapps without a single loss in performance [...]

This makes no sense. If webapps run without a loss in performance, then you don't need increased hardware performance in order to see the difference.

> [...] compared to native apps.

This simply isn't true. Run a well-designed webapp and a well-designed native app on the same platform. You'll see a difference in performance.

> you see more and more SPAs wrapped in a hybrid app still maintaining a 'native'look.

I'm still waiting to see even one example of this.

> Costs of developing webapps is dramatically lower.

True. But it comes at a cost to quality.

Why would the browser render engine slower than the Java Android UI render engine? I am almost certain that the browser css engine is better optimized than the Android native render. IOS is a different story since their render engine is heavily optimized against their own hardware. But still I know that webapps can have the same performance as native apps. And the end of mobile native UI kits will finally arrive. Webapps/spas will take over.

Same here, have done a mix of native and Web for 30+ years, and when it comes to chose, if there is a native app available, I'll take that.

> That doesn’t really exist any more.

But the lack of driver support still does. Linux on a modern laptop is just full of headaches. I mean, https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-7840u this is typical: GNOME doesn't work, graphical glitches... In my own experience, operating MFC devices over several years is a nightmare, Bluetooth is problematic as well, some proprietary VPNs do not have Linux clients which might not be Linux's fault but if I can't log in I can't work.

Life is too short for this, sorry. Windows + WSL is the way. The right tool for the right job, Windows for drivers, WSL for, well, everything else.

> I mean, https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-7840u

So, they took a cutting edge Windows PC, slapped Linux on it, and it didn't work well.

How well did OSX do when they tried it? Clearly, OSX isn't ready for the desktop! No wonder nobody runs it!

Modern computers are complex enough that they can work well with Windows, OSX, or Linux, but they don't work well with more than one of them (unless the designers work really hard). See, for example, how to reboot: https://mjg59.livejournal.com/137313.html

If you want to run Linux on a computer, buy it preinstalled, with support. Anything else is an exercise in chasing down small glitches, as you describe. (This happens for Windows too! The difference is that the laptop vendor has a team of people (the system integration team) to fix the issues, either by modifying drivers, modifying the firmware, or having the ODM change the hardware. If you slap Linux on some random bit of Windows kit, you get to be the system integration team, but with only one of three avenues open to you to fix the glitches. And that only halfway, since you cant get the OEM or ODM to give you the time of day. And that's assuming you're a proficient kernel hacker.)

Slapping Linux on a Windows box is a mug's game. The only way to win is not to play.

So true. If you get a System76 laptop you can get some really amazing hardware and make sure to never pay the Windows license fee.

It's not about the fee (generally it's small for you (though for the OEM it's critical, and one of the ways MSFT gets OEMs to do their bidding (a small example is how they all "recommend Windows" on their sites; it's a discount on the fees they pay MSFT)). The fee also is why you get so much crapware on new Windows boxes.

It's about the hardware's support of the OS (see the firmware discussion above).

It's also about your support experience as a customer (do you have to reinstall Windows before the OEM will give you the time of day, let alone fix the hardware glitch you're hitting)

)

System76 won't make MFC drivers for every MFC there is or make Linux clients for wacky corporate VPNs and Wifi appear.

Sure, because they (or whoever) don't make it.

Many printers, especially the MFC ones, support Linux. For instance, Brother has drivers: https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/52188/~...

WRT corporations, they can do what they like with their own hardware and software. And yes, a lot are short-sighted. Most won't be using Mac any time soon, because they've locked themselves in quite effectively.

i dunno. i work on completely cross platform things and use a system76 laptop and the experience is still pretty garbage. the real problem is the linux userspace. its a huge arbitrary mess that is made worse by the insane number of packages that have to work together for a remotely usable desktop experience.

it's possible of course, but invariably breaks, especially if you need to install any single third party thing.

i hate flatpak etc but it really makes u think about why people are putting effort into fat packages for desktop stuff

Sounds like the problems you describe would be fixed by Guix or Nix. You should give one of those a try, or even use them on your existing distro!

> What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more.

What? This is very real and a key driver not to use Linux or Mac for millions of users. As soon as even a little performance is required webapps just can't compare. Look at anything graphics related especially 3d, CAD or video. You might be able to build shitty infographics for Instagram on Canva but real work still requires access to compute at the edge and most software providers in those spaces target Microsoft only.

I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS I tell them to use. It's called "my choice".

>No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice

That was the case in 1999 too. The Linux on the Desktop dream wasn't about removing choice, but about MORE people making the choice to run Linux.

Also, market share translates to support, resources available, people and companies working there, drivers, and so on. Personal choice to use X doesn't magically offer those.

What a joke. Web standards move under our feet -- and browsers break -- all the time. I personally work for a company that forces me to work online and only pretends to support Linux. They say I have to use the latest version of Chrome (so I can't choose a browser that won't spy on me), I use it and it still breaks occasionally. I know they count on everybody using Windows and don't want to bother with Linux. So much for cross-platform. That pipe dream was proven false years ago.

> I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice.

That's a strange point to make. The whole point of this users changing their minds, and deciding that they prefer Linux.

> I can’t justify allowing my team to run Linux

So it's not about choice then?

> No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice.

But I can't use the OS I like. I can't go in a store, pick a laptop I like, and get it with an OS I like. I can get it with an OS I don't like; and gamble that I can install on it an OS that I do like. It would have been very different if Linux market share on the desktop were in double digits.

This is a wholly valid point when it comes to Linux desktop penetration. However as an aside, it seems to me that the computers for sale in actual stores are usually of terrible quality. They’re the last the computers I would choose, and this isn’t really a Windows or ChromeOS thing. (I’d just wipe them and install Linux in any case) This doesn’t detract from your point at all, but it just seems like the most-available computers are the ones companies _want_ to sell rather than the computers that savvy consumers _want_ to buy.

I agree, and am sad to observe that it is very different with Apple, where laptops available on display in a physical Apple store are often the ones a savvy customer would want to buy.

I'm sure as hell locked in. Linux Desktop doesn't even remotely come close to offer the things I ask out of a PC (high quality music production and image editing). On the other hand, both Windows and macOS do.

And let's not even get started about work.

Both these things are very well possible on Linux. Maybe you are more concerned about specific applications which have not been ported by their developers?

I have run high quality music production software on Linux. It was Windows software, that runs thanks to Wine. It works and it's even better than native applications because native applications expire when a distro version is discontinued and the application is not packaged for the current version. Windows applications installed in Wine never expire. Wine is Linux, Linux does the job.

And high quality image editing is possible, though it's probably done differently from whatever you're used to. There are plenty of graphic artists making their work on Linux and bragging about it.

So "doesn't even remotely come close" is either a lie or a display of your ignorance.

Can you use iLok on Linux/wine?

I know quite a few graphic artists and musical engineers who use Linux professionally. I think the difference, really, is which tools you're used to using. There aren't really any Linux tools for these sorts of things that work the same as the tools for Windows, so if you're expert with one, you still have a rather large learning curve if you want to use the other. That can be prohibitive.

Adobe (and others) wants a word with you.

Oh, the lock in still exists. In many fields. You need a certain software to be competitive, so you have to use whatever os supports it. I know people who have switched from Mac os to windows because office is slightly janky on Mac os. Lock ins happen all the time.

There's also a thing where software supports Mac and Windows, but really needs a lot of memory and storage, so the absurd markups Apple went back to charging in the Apple silicon era make it unviable for all but the most profitable workloads. I looked into Apple when laptop shopping recently, but couldn't justify or afford the markup to get the storage and memory I can put in the laptop I went with for a fraction of the cost.

Only if said OS exists. It does require a critical mass of users otherwise drivers wouldn't exist for desktop hardware and distros wouldn't exist. We're just lucky that the critical mass is actually quite low.

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