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Comment by elektrontamer | Hacker News Reader

The thing is linux desktop is pretty damn good for a lot of people for their day to day needs. It's just the office tools and gaming. Cloud tools like google docs can handle the office side and valve can sovle gaming. But there still remains the issue of convincing people.

My mom works as a translator and all she needs is email, something to edit documents in and a browser, thats it. She was able adapt to ubuntu pretty fast even though she's not the kind of person who likes learning new tech.

There must be millions of users just like her. But people are very resistant to change and few have an annoying linux evangelist like myself in the house to push them.

We need to get them young somehow. I'm thinking around highschool.

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Libreoffice can handle most office documents these days. Steam can run many games via proton/wine. In fact, for normal “day to day” stuff, I find Ubuntu is a solid replacement. The problems arise the moment some non-mainstream/non-prepackaged install is needed on any distro. The newest drivers, some alternative program, a non-standard networking configuration, etc. The moment any of that is needed the Linux distros immediately fall back to terminal commands which are not end-user friendly. I would guess that 99% of “normal” (but non-standard) things can be done with Mac and Windows via GUI only. Installing another driver, a program, etc. Linux is far from there and only seems to achieve that for the absolute most common operations overall (basics). I like Ubuntu, and I am coming to hate this new Windows approach, but the ecosystem of flexibility and “just use a terminal command” mentality will never really let it go fully mainstream (at least until that is resolved).

Unfortunately LO can not handle most people's document requirements. Not at any fault of LO, it's Microsoft who make comparability hard or impossible. So when working with most people who will be using Office, LO will fail to correctly format a document.

I'm reminded of this great article on the subject

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...

Unfortunately MS make everything a moving target.

To be a little fair to Microsoft, they have made it much harder to enable macros over the years. So when stuck with a bank's spreadsheet that requires a win32 macro to convert for upload, I blame the bank.

Luckily grey market keys for both windows and office are so cheap I can just relegate these to a VM for those times it's needed.

The above is probably enough to keep the typical user on Windows forever though.

I replaced Windows with Fedora (KDE) on my moms computer, and she's never even commented on it. The browser icon looks the same, and it's in roughly the same place.

Lol! Brilliant!

Is there a way to chain launch a "qemu VM --> windows 10 client --> autodesk product" in a transparent way? If we could do that reliably and with a stripped down win10 image, I think the serious office users could just pretend they are running autodesk or whatever software in linux. The big downside I presume is this will not work with software that need tight interaction with custom hardware (mocap suits etc).

'Winapps' and 'winboat' on Linux allow a windows image to run in a Linux docker container and permit just the app to be streamed to the Linux desktop (after initial setup). I haven't played with it yet..but you could theoretically set up a windows host on a different remote server via tailscale or netbird and have them RDP into the windows docker container remotely.

Unfortunately my parents run macos and these tools are not meant for Macos. But like you said there are apps like UTM that provide a nice shell for QEMU on macos. Not as nice as streaming just the app, but a good start. These work great on new macmini with apple silicon.

Yes, doing that by hand would be three lines of bash to launch it.

  virsh start ms-malware11 # or any other method to launch your vm
  sleep 20
  remmina -c /home/me/ms-malware11.remmina

Make a shortcut to above script and the only thing the user needs to do is click it .

It requires a bit of setup on Linux. First install a win11 vm, you can do it graphically via `virtual machine manager` from libvirt. Then install remmina and configure a profile `ms-malware11.remmina`, also graphically. In that profile, under Advanced, have Startup Program "AutoDesk.exe" or whatever that is called.

Then Autodesk runs like any linux application, the user doesn't see it runs in a vm. This feature depends on RemoteApp feature in Windows.

This is something your mom probably wouldn't setup by hand, but anybody here should be able to.

libvirtd really is such a quality piece of software making local VMs so trivial to spin up and manage.

Hyper-V and Virtualization Framework wish they were so user friendly.

Ooh remmina looks really cool.

>ms-malware11

lol

I built that setup over a decade ago, when I virtualized my parents' WinXP installation and gave them Debian on the host.

  - transparent ethernet switch on the host (i.e. br0)
  - old disk copied into an LVM volume (to ease with later migrations and partition growth)
  - qemu instance managed by virt-manager (for autostart and managed shutdown)
  - tty5 linked to spice-client in its own X server (i.e. startx -- spice-client-gtk in inittab)

I considered my solution kinda hacky back then, it effectively ran the entire spice client as root. But it did what it needed to do, and I'm sure it would have been trivial to add a su call somewhere in the startup chain.

I'm sure that between systemd and virtd the same solution should be easier to build today, if it weren't for Wayland and logind complicating the hell out of single-app (think kiosk mode) display sessions.

There is winboat which I think can help in this

https://www.winboat.app/ (Their motto is "Run windows application with seamless integration " so I think it might work for your use case as well)

> Cloud tools like google docs can handl

This.. but whenever this is mentioned people will start the other point. Google is not for privacy.

I have become a silent spectator.

Neither is windows. Google at least works and is easily protable.

My dad's always searching for some usb drive he lost with hours of work on it. He'd be much better off using google.

It's weird, users will happily accept Google Docs and Sheets as replacements for Word and Excel despite the considerable differences but are more reluctant to give the LibreOffice suite a try despite arguably being more capable. But at this point I'm not going to judge as long as they're happy.

With all respect libre office startup times are awful in Linux. UI still needs work over. Lots of resources. Libre office works poorly if one has 4 or 8 GB RAM.

If there was a minimal footprint libre office (like online with collaboration line or next cloud it will be great but it is very unreliable)

And often people have gotten used to

- simple just open with browser - needs few resources - love or hate Android is most popular. So people are able access documents in phone

There are also companies slowing realizing the strong use of Google docs so that definitely design it more compatible with Google docs rather than libre office. And many companies have already bought into Google ecosystem.

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