Comment by okanat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by okanat | Hacker News Reader

Here is the thing. MS Windows has no alternative. There is no other OS that: - is primarily user friendly (no terminal use, good accessibility support, well known patterns, well made paid human translation) - has drivers working out of the box with every single hardware - has long term software support - has long term hardware support - has a healthy closed-source specialized software ecosystem - has good developer support - has not perfect but reasonably future proof API - good interoperability with majority of the other software

Once you step out of programming or hobbyist use it is 90% Windows for the use cases one uses a full fledged computer. Yes you can replace many things with a tablet or a smartphone.

You can't replace a PC with a tablet for accounting, customer management, CAD, printing, publishing, manufacturing, simulation, advanced reporting, large document processing, centrally controlled IT and many other things.

The professional grade software you do those built on Windows, Office and Active Directory. They trust the backwards compatibility and wide range of API and integration Windows ecosystem provides.

People don't use computers because they like them. They use them because they do work for their goals.

Even for nonprofessional use case Windows still has the best hardware support. For example you cannot use old low DPI monitors with Macs anymore; the text is unreadable. Certain audio workstations doesn't work with ARM chips.

I disagree. For vast, vast majority of cases, linux would likely do the trick these days. People would complain initially and, predictably, would complain again if new functionality was taken away from them. But that is just human nature.

Lets talk reality. More and more applications users access live in a browser.. you technically could run the entire company on dumb terminals if you were so inclined ( and jobs were sufficiently.. in dire of automation, but for one reason or another human is doing those ). Windows is not needed for that.

You could argue banking/finance with excel ( and there are some neat things Office introduced with 365 ), which is presumably why that sector is going to be locked in for a while, but then.. my last class at university, all kids were running google docs and they will be making decisions one day. I am not sure that bodes well for MS/Office/Windows.

As for "accounting, customer management, CAD, printing, publishing, manufacturing, simulation, advanced reporting, large document processing, centrally controlled IT", you might be right, but somehow I doubt it. There is nothing magical about Windows. It is currently held by inertia and contracts, but even inertia ends eventually.

> my last class at university, all kids were running google docs

Corporate use looks nothing like that. I was actually working in an accounting firm that tried to move people over to google sheets and docs. Took about a week for people to realise the sheets plan is utterly idiotic.

Docs lasted about a month before even the “thought leaders” in charge of pushing the initiative went quiet.

For casual use sure, but it’s no more replacing office than ms paint is replacing photoshop.

It depends on the company. Every startup I’ve either got uses Google Docs.

were the business/marketing/etc people using docs too? At my last job, those people had office

Startups do a lot of things different from big orgs

The problem is that there's no Linux. The Average Joe cannot download Linux from Linux.com.

He will waste hours, maybe days learning about different distributions, window managers, packaging, etc. This is true even for experienced professionals. It's demotivating IMHO.

There's a book named "The Paradox of Choice", it gives a good psychological overview of this topic. No distribution is ready to compete against Windows

And...

Here comes the perfect business opportunity for purveyors of Linux laptops.

I know, they exist. But, If Microsoft really pulls off that shitshow (and even the mainstream press is not very kind about it) there could be a significantly large market for such offerings.

Every major CAD software that I'm aware of has its roots in Unix. I personally used AutoCAD on SGI and Sun hardware with Unix OSes.

Give some market demand, they could switch back and support Linux

AutoCad is already available on Mac, so is Rhino. Revit is not but ArchiCad is.

Lot of these are .Net based and .Net is now more or less cross-platform.

AutoCAD for Mac lacks feature parity and has been known to break functionality in dwgs in my clients' workflows. Tool pallets get jacked up. IIRC, also problems with dynamic blocks.

Your os is still a gatekeeper. I get the appeal of Apple products and the desire to work on a Mac and the rage of going back to Windows (Your file system uses backlashes? Your mount points use drive letters that can be hard codes into files, making resources unreliable users and devices that aren't mapped perfectly? Your files include a newline and a carriage return just in case you reach for the teletype machine? You did what to your start menu? My laptop battery just dies by default when I close the lid unplugged? The list goes on).

Famously, life is suffering and you suffer differently (maybe less?) by going where your tools are (for CAD in AEC it's still very much Windows).

> You can't replace a PC with a tablet for accounting, customer management, CAD, printing, publishing, manufacturing, simulation, advanced reporting, large document processing, centrally controlled IT and many other things

For each one of those examples there's already a superior Linux based choice.

Are those choices things that my tech-illiterate parents can use without me maintaining it for them?

No.

You kind of have to pick an argument though. Are your parents tech-illiterate, or are they routinely doing CAD, simulation, and manufacturing work?

Being tech-illiterate is where Linux shines. Point them to a browser, set up unattended-upgrades, and you're good for a few years - at which point they'd have needed help installing a Windows update (98 -> XP -> 7 -> 8) had Microsoft not decided that thou shalt update, whether the user wants to or not.

Doing any of the above turns it into a hobby. All hobbies require tools, and many software based hobbies require one to learn software. It doesn't seem unreasonable to learn to use publishing software because you want to self-publish a book. Same with learning CAD because you want to learn to 3D print doo-dads and helpful thingamajigs.

And if we're discussing office workers? Well, the IT department is paid handsomely for a reason. One of those reasons is to make the OS as close to invisible as possible. Which again, seems reasonable enough to me.

If you want to say Linux isn't there, then fine. But please don't derail parent's thread by changing the hypothetical user and moving the goalposts.

> Being tech-illiterate is where Linux shines.

I have a tech-illiterate grandfather using Linux who is a gearhead. During the pandemic he wanted to get into sim racing to stay in contact with his friends and enjoy his hobby. I ended up having to write drivers for all of his equipment for Linux because almost none of it was supported, whereas it would have been a simple plug-n-play task on Windows.

Just because somebody only needs a browser for now doesn't mean their OS choice won't restrict them in the future from enjoying their life.

No. There is not. Without changing how "Linux" is built from the very C library to binary loader and graphics APIs, there cannot be either.

Try finding alternatives to Excel with its entire feature set (no cheating all SQL db integration and VBA equivalent scripting, plugin APIs should be there), PowerPoint with all the integration with other Office, Solidworks with its entire feature set, Altium with its entire feature set, Siemens NX, Catia, SAP, Ansys, Active Directory, Adobe Creative Suite or Affinity or CorelDRAW, Cubase, Sibelius just a start. And the software you mention has to have succesful companies behind them and has to be used widely.

> Try finding alternatives to Excel with its entire feature set (no cheating all SQL db integration and VBA equivalent scripting)

If you need those many features you should not be using Excel.

> PowerPoint with all the integration with other Office, Solidworks with its entire feature set, Altium with its entire feature set, Siemens NX, Catia, SAP, Ansys, Active Directory, Adobe Creative Suite or Affinity or CorelDRAW, Cubase, Sibelius just a start

The most critical business software in the world never left the mainframe. The one that did now runs on Linux somehow or their competitors do. If it doesn't run then it can run on a compatibility layer like Wine or on a VM.

> Active Directory

The most overhyped software ever. Some phishing e-mail can bring an entire organization using Active Directory to its knees.

These are the reasons I struggle to leave Windows too. Also the open API ecosystem is great. You can do pretty much everything with win32 libraries.

GPL is also part of the problem. Linux will simply never support HDMI 2.1 properly because the license precludes it. It will never support OSS like ZFS properly because the license precludes it.

It is a restrictive/closed copyleft ecosystem by design, and that’s actually completely unsuitable for a world where you must have some kinds of software (including open/libre software) and some parties simply will not license that way.

(And I know people will object to the term but it undeniably is more restrictive and closed than BSD/MIT/CDDL-style licenses - intentionally, openly, and by design. The point is that you are supposed to license your software GPL too - and when that is not possible, your freedom is denied. Intentionally, by design. But it is a closed ecosystem - you are either in it, or not, and there are large swaths of code (even open/libre code) that is excluded by design. That is a closed model, just as much as, say, CUDA. You play by their rules or you play in a different sandbox. And open CUDA code exists too, etc - that doesn’t mean anything to the overall ecosystem if licensing precludes people from using it.)

The minimum standard for even reaching usability would be to guarantee a BSD-style stable ABI such that kernel upstreaming is not required in the way that it currently is, and that’s a nonstarter with the current kernel leadership team. Actually they have in many cases gone out of their way to explicitly break compatibility to push others to relicense, even when they know that it’s not going to happen and their users will suffer.

When you get to the point of rejecting interop with other libre code due to license, and actively take steps to break other libre code to prevent interop - you certainly are not fully libre in the typical sense anymore. There’s a degree of fairly open hostility to other libre code at this point, in fact.

Again, it’s not 1992 anymore, Linux could absolutely maintain a stable ABI through major releases. Not only do they not want to do that, they are actively, willfully, maliciously breaking other libre code (GKH has done this repeatedly). Which gives sort of a different color to the former: kernel upstreaming is one of the most potent weapons at this point, for pushing more stuff into their closed ecosystem. It’s not exactly embrace-extend-extinguish, but certainly of a similar tone and kind - join or die.

Almost everyone uses a "tainted" kernel with proprietary blobs these days.

NVIDIA drivers being one example of that.

If this is a problem to you don't use Windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com