Hacker News Reader

Comment by brushfoot | Hacker News Reader

My main reasons for using Windows right now are:

- Davinci Resolve

- Adobe suite

- AutoHotkey scripts, lots of them

- Microsoft Office, mainly PowerPoint, Excel and Word for creating and interacting with other companies' docs. Libre/OpenOffice mangled them/were missing features I depend on

- Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card (screen tearing etc.) last time I tried to switch, and rabbit holes that I don't have time for anymore (solopreneur)

That said, I would love to switch back. I loved rofi [0] last time, for example.

Can anyone speak to the above? What's the status of running Windows apps like Adobe, Resolve, Office, for instance? Or AutoHotkey or equivalent?

0: https://github.com/davatorium/rofi

View on HN

About AutoHotKey, you can do similar stuff as long as you are using X11 as there are various utilities for it, such as xdotool[0]. There is even an AutoHotKey-for-Linux project[1] (it also needs X11 - the author did try to port it to Wayland but gave up). For Wayland there are some alternatives like ydotool[2] (actually AFAIK since ydotool uses some daemon to inject events it works with anything, not just Wayland, but on the other hand it only provides a basic tiny subset of xdotool's commands) but the core protocol isn't particularly friendly to such automation.

[0] https://github.com/jordansissel/xdotool

[1] https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11

[2] https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

I suspect the problem they were indicating with “AutoHotKey scripts, lots of them” is that they just have a lot of scripts they’d need to convert. I get it—even switching to a new WM or distro can be a real pain.

Well, they did mention "AHK or equivalent" so it sounds like converting them isn't out of the question.

Things that used to be prohibitive are made much easier with AI these days. Especially tasks like this that do something fairly small and isolated and are easy to test.

ydotool helps bridge the gap in wayland. xdotool replacements ate even more essential since wayland strips away most of the hooks into windows.

There is nothing like AHK. All mentioned tools are toys in comprison.

Agreed. AHK and Windows’ amenability to such things is an important reason why Windows is still my preferred GUI by far.

I wish there was something like Keyboard Maestro for Windows or Linux. It seems like there isn’t. I’d love to be corrected, though!

From what I can tell, AHK can’t do (m)any of the cool things that KM does, like “Click at Found Image”, “Set the Find Pasteboard”, “Prompt for Screen Rectangle”, “Stream Deck Show OK”, “Increase Song Rating by Half a Star”, “OCR Image/Screen”, “Paste from Named Clipboard”, or many other useful actions. Is there any Windows or Linux application that can?

AHK can do all that, but you need to program a script, there is no out of the box solution.

For example: https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=134045

Thank you, good to know AHK is able to do part of what Keyboard Maestro can, it just requires more work and troubleshooting for every script/macro.

That example script also doesn’t let you simply drag a marquee selection to choose the image to find, you have to provide a file path to an image that already exists. That’s not

There must be a market for something more user friendly, at least on Windows.

> That’s not… an option for the workflow it’s currently being used in. I’ll hunt for more user-generated scripts to modify on that forum. Thanks for your response.

Davinci Resolve has official support for Linux

...and unofficial support for FreeBSD

https://github.com/NapoleonWils0n/davinci-resolve-freebsd-ja...

Oh wow, thanks for this. I had filed it under "Windows and Mac only" in my head for some reason. Now I see that it was originally Linux only!?

Amazing that this free-to-download application supports Linux when Adobe doesn't. Or maybe not so amazing given their different approaches.

- Davinci Resolve

Has nativ support.

- Adobe suite

- Microsoft Office

https://www.winboat.app But beta.

- AutoHotkey scripts, lots of them

I'm afraid there is no easy way. https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

- Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card

Get AMD.

> I don't have time for anymore (solopreneur)

Fair. Second PC to play around from time to time is probably the best in this case. But I fully understand, unless as a hobby, that infesting a lot of time makes little sense.

Linux for me is all about customization and control, particularly of hardware, which you'd usually do for optimization (performance, workflow, latency, stability), which is fun if you care about optimization and efficiency, but for "good enough/I'm used to it/I'm a satisfied paying customer" I suppose there's no reason to investigate or risk. The market has poured loads of capital into satisfying PC multimedia use-case.

I'd suspect there's probably versions of all those that have been made to function basically through WINE.

If your curious, it's very easy to use it as a hypervisor, and pull out what you can, though IOMMU/SR-IOV might be tricky.

Alternatively, checking if Blender/GIMP service your use cases wouldn't even require switching...

AutoHotKey has been solved a lot of different ways, for sure.

But yeah, granular detailed control over your hardware is still the primary use-case for Linux, so if you view bad defaults, annoying install procedures, occasional show stopping bugs a hindrance rather than an opportunity, maybe it's not a strong candidate.

I hear that. I enjoy that kind of tinkering; I just have too much on my plate with my business to go as deep into it as I used to. But I'm still interested in Linux, if only because it's a much-needed third option. I've been on and off it as a daily driver over the years.

I'm guessing others here who are primarily on Windows can relate to this. We've been disappointed with what Apple and Microsoft are doing, and we want, not necessarily more customization of our OS, just less interference.

I don't use it as much nowadays but https://github.com/ublue-os/aurora (kde desktop + automatic updates + baked in nvidia drivers) got me an as painless as possible nvidia experience (on a laptop I got my nvidia gpu to power down while idle which had been a huge time sink trying to figure out how to do on my own). Didn't notice any screen tearing personally, but that's probably something that depends on what applications / workflows one has.

In terms of office compatibility OnlyOffice iirc has the best compatibility. Easy to install via flatpak (I really enjoy this move in desktop linux because now I can easily remove network access from apps / set the permissions I want).

The only thing that seems unsurmountable is probably Adobe, not sure how much of a dealbreaker that is.

> Issues with my laptop's Nvidia card (screen tearing etc.)

I'm running Ubuntu on a laptop with a 3070m. I don't have any issues like this. I did have issues related to using an external monitor but they all seemed to resolve when I switched from Gnome Wayland to Gnome X11.

1. office.com

2. Google drive/docs/*

3. Hacky office on Linux work around - several found on github

Davinci Resolve seems to run faster on Linux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com