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Harsh word. I don't think gimp and Inkscape are all that terrible for casual use. On that note, I honestly can't think of anything other than Adobe products an

Harsh word. I don't think gimp and Inkscape are all that terrible for casual use. On that note, I honestly can't think of anything other than Adobe products and Microsoft Office that is preventing a mass migration to Linux (or rather Ubuntu, let's be honest) at this point. It has all other killer apps. Dropbox, Spotify, VSCode, Atom, Steam, Chrome, VLC, etc... I know that Excel is the only thing keeping my dad on macOS these days. He is definitely not the Apple fanboy he once used to be. What an amazing day that would be... when, at least Adobe, would release builds for Linux. Does anyone know if there's a serious obstacle for them other than market share?

microcolonel 10y ago
One thing that I've run into when running Adobe stuff on OS X is that it fails catastrophically on a case-sensitive filesystem. That would be the first thing to sort out; short of that I think it would be a matter of platform integration for color management, and windowing system integration (iBus, libnotify). I'm sure there's plenty more in the way of technical difficulties in porting Creative Cloud. One reason they might do it is to capture the film industry, which seems to do grading and compositing on Linux (which is why Autodesk's products in those categories support it).
- autoreleasepool 10y ago
  I actually reard in an HN comment that OS X's case-insensitivity by default was a choice that revolved solely around compatibility with Microsoft Office, so I think you're on to something.
  - wolfgang42 10y ago
    That sounds unlikely. I believe case preservation but insensitivity has been in Mac OS since the original Macintosh File System; certainly it was in the Hierarchical File System and was inherited by HFS+. When they switched to OS X, they still had to maintain filesystem compatibility for the Classic system, and maintaining it for the entire OS probably made porting other Mac applications simpler as well.
    - pfranz 10y ago
      I think here's the comment he was referring to[1]. You're right, case-insensitivity was introduced in HFS or earlier. Back then filenames could use any byte except ":". With HFS+ it accepted all Unicode, where case-sensitivity gets quite a bit trickier. With the later switch to OSX it would have been a great time to change the default to case-sensitive if they wanted to, but as they said, you're then betting on a few killer apps like Office and Adobe products supporting it. Office has always been notoriously slow to update and Adobe has been notoriously slow at adopting new technologies like Carbon and Cocoa. I'm sure Apple at the time was in close communication with those teams. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877431
  - tossaway1 10y ago
    > reard Is that a combination of heard and read? I like it!
    - fb03 10y ago
      I rear you!
- ommunist 10y ago
  Speaking of Autodesk, they do have SketchBook Pro, not sure they have Linux version of it.
jwagenet 10y ago
While likely not as widely used as Adobe, until mechanical CAD software like Solidworks, Inventor, or PTC Creo support Linux I won't be making a full switch any time soon. There are a few offerings lacking in features and I guess you can do some FEA with Nastran, but there is no comparison to these Windows only suites. And while Steam is supported, the Linux library is a shadow of the Windows library even if you exclude older, underplayed games.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  > And while Steam is supported, the Linux library is a shadow of the Windows library even if you exclude older, underplayed games. True, but you can't expect things to change from one day to the next. There are many more games on Linux now than there were like 3 years ago. Like 2000 more. And it's still growing, and in 2016 we have got more AAA titles than ever mostly thanks to Feral Interactive's porting efforts. It's better and better for Linux gamers. And even AMD is slowly fixing its broken Linux drivers.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    A lot of this seems like problems with the graphics sub-systems. It's getting better, but nvidia still doesn't have open-source drivers, and graphics switching still doesn't work (nor does power management). By "doesn't work" I mean that as someone with >10 years *nix sysadmin experience, I couldn't get everything to work right on Ubuntu 16.10 on a Dell XPS 9550 in a week of downtime effort (probably around 10 hours total). If NVidia, Intel, and AMD got serious about Linux graphics support for enthusiasts and professionals, I'm sure we'd see a huge improvement and make switching viable for many traditional hold-outs. Chicken and egg, unfortunately.
    - KaiserPro 10y ago
      Nvidia are serious about graphics for professionals. The linux driver is fast and continuously updated. I have deployed thousands of workstations with various ranges of graphics cards. Nvidia is the simplest, a trailing second is AMD (they do make rolling RPMs easy though) They are just as buggy as the windows drivers. Intel make brilliant drivers now, its just a shame the graphics cards are tiny compared to AMD/Nvidia. Nvidia just don't do opensource drivers. For me, I frankly couldn't give a fig if they are open source or not, just so long as it works.

microcolonel 10y ago

One thing that I've run into when running Adobe stuff on OS X is that it fails catastrophically on a case-sensitive filesystem. That would be the first thing to sort out; short of that I think it would be a matter of platform integration for color management, and windowing system integration (iBus, libnotify). I'm sure there's plenty more in the way of technical difficulties in porting Creative Cloud. One reason they might do it is to capture the film industry, which seems to do grading and compositing on Linux (which is why Autodesk's products in those categories support it).

autoreleasepool 10y ago
I actually reard in an HN comment that OS X's case-insensitivity by default was a choice that revolved solely around compatibility with Microsoft Office, so I think you're on to something.
- wolfgang42 10y ago
  That sounds unlikely. I believe case preservation but insensitivity has been in Mac OS since the original Macintosh File System; certainly it was in the Hierarchical File System and was inherited by HFS+. When they switched to OS X, they still had to maintain filesystem compatibility for the Classic system, and maintaining it for the entire OS probably made porting other Mac applications simpler as well.
  - pfranz 10y ago
    I think here's the comment he was referring to[1]. You're right, case-insensitivity was introduced in HFS or earlier. Back then filenames could use any byte except ":". With HFS+ it accepted all Unicode, where case-sensitivity gets quite a bit trickier. With the later switch to OSX it would have been a great time to change the default to case-sensitive if they wanted to, but as they said, you're then betting on a few killer apps like Office and Adobe products supporting it. Office has always been notoriously slow to update and Adobe has been notoriously slow at adopting new technologies like Carbon and Cocoa. I'm sure Apple at the time was in close communication with those teams. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877431
- tossaway1 10y ago
  > reard Is that a combination of heard and read? I like it!
  - fb03 10y ago
    I rear you!
ommunist 10y ago
Speaking of Autodesk, they do have SketchBook Pro, not sure they have Linux version of it.

jwagenet 10y ago

While likely not as widely used as Adobe, until mechanical CAD software like Solidworks, Inventor, or PTC Creo support Linux I won't be making a full switch any time soon. There are a few offerings lacking in features and I guess you can do some FEA with Nastran, but there is no comparison to these Windows only suites. And while Steam is supported, the Linux library is a shadow of the Windows library even if you exclude older, underplayed games.

ekianjo 10y ago
> And while Steam is supported, the Linux library is a shadow of the Windows library even if you exclude older, underplayed games. True, but you can't expect things to change from one day to the next. There are many more games on Linux now than there were like 3 years ago. Like 2000 more. And it's still growing, and in 2016 we have got more AAA titles than ever mostly thanks to Feral Interactive's porting efforts. It's better and better for Linux gamers. And even AMD is slowly fixing its broken Linux drivers.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  A lot of this seems like problems with the graphics sub-systems. It's getting better, but nvidia still doesn't have open-source drivers, and graphics switching still doesn't work (nor does power management). By "doesn't work" I mean that as someone with >10 years *nix sysadmin experience, I couldn't get everything to work right on Ubuntu 16.10 on a Dell XPS 9550 in a week of downtime effort (probably around 10 hours total). If NVidia, Intel, and AMD got serious about Linux graphics support for enthusiasts and professionals, I'm sure we'd see a huge improvement and make switching viable for many traditional hold-outs. Chicken and egg, unfortunately.
  - KaiserPro 10y ago
    Nvidia are serious about graphics for professionals. The linux driver is fast and continuously updated. I have deployed thousands of workstations with various ranges of graphics cards. Nvidia is the simplest, a trailing second is AMD (they do make rolling RPMs easy though) They are just as buggy as the windows drivers. Intel make brilliant drivers now, its just a shame the graphics cards are tiny compared to AMD/Nvidia. Nvidia just don't do opensource drivers. For me, I frankly couldn't give a fig if they are open source or not, just so long as it works.