3 ms·

While I agree in terms of stability and general usability, I'd say that missing support from popular applications are a deal breaker for many. For most people i

While I agree in terms of stability and general usability, I'd say that missing support from popular applications are a deal breaker for many. For most people it's probably MS Office, for others Adobe CS products. If those had (officially supported) Linux versions, I can even imagine many companies considering a switchover. Alternative software available on Linux is often not fully compatible, so people are effectively locked into Windows/MacOS as long as they want to keep their existing data or work with others (who often use those lock-in products). In addtion, UX of FOSS like GIMP is at the least very different from big commertial counterparts like Photoshop and takes a lot of time to learn, which many people simply don't want to invest.

pixelmonkey 9y ago
I run Windows 10 in a VMWare Workstation instance for this. Luckily with modern multi-core high-memory machines and Intel VT-x, this runs really, really well. So I really don't need the vendors to expend any effort on a port. That said, one sad thing is that VMWare recently laid off and/or outsourced their VMWare Workstation team[1], and it is now in "maintenance mode", so I will be really sad if this product gets sunset somehow. It's still infinitely better a VM option than Virtualbox for running Windows. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmware-fusion-workstation-team-culled-in-company-restructure/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmwar...
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  I experimented with this extensively and found that while VBox and VMWare had different performance profiles, overall it'd come out to a wash in terms of a real performance "winner". As of June, I'm running Win10 "natively" on an ArchLinux hypervisor with GPU and USB passthrough via vfio-pci. It was a marathon to get this configured, but overall it's quite nice. Previously, I had switched to Win10 native and ran Linux out of VBox for "real work", after finally getting sick of waiting 2 min+ for something to churn in DxO via VMWare and/or VBox on the Linux host. Combined with virtio drivers, the passthrough VM gives me practically-native performance (Geekbench shows ~15-20% loss in single-core performance, and about equivalent multicore performance) and the flexibility of a virtualized environment (qcow2 images, etc). It also allows my workstation to operate independently from the other services in my house (Plex, work VM, etc.). One of the biggest annoyances of a Win10 host and a Linux guest VM was that Win10 would sometimes force the box offline for updates. Still annoying, and doesn't really happen since I switched to the "business release channel", but at least it doesn't take everything down. The coolest part of this setup: my son has a Win10 VM with GPU passthrough to the secondary GPU in the hypervisor that he uses via Steam Link to connect to "his computer" from several "thin terminals" in the house. Would love to develop this out as a product some day. All this said, since it is an experimental setup that depends on some cutting-edge features, there have been some kernel-related struggles and I've been on the kvm mailing list a couple times in the last few weeks. 4.11.x is mostly-stable (one system lock on it), 4.12.x crashes after a few hours, 4.13rc1-7 crash after tens of hours, but 4.13rc7 with the mmu-notifier patchset from Jerome Glisse is stable so far. I'm anticipating a clean 4.14, which will be LTS, and then I'll probably stick to that branch until the next LTS comes along.
_e 9y ago
Microsoft Excel, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign work very well for me under WINE. There are cases where those programs don't work 100% but they work 99% for everything that I need which is fine for me. It feels much faster than running the same programs under Windows 8.1.
ghaff 9y ago
Increasingly though mainstream users don't need to run local applications. Some do; I have a combination of Linux, Mac, and Windows systems I use for various things. But a lot of the time when I travel I just take a very portable Chromebook with me. The vast bulk of what I need to do on a day to day basis I do online.
- nyolfen 9y ago
  since you mentioned chromebooks i feel obligated to mention the truly stellar galliumOS, an xubuntu derivative for chromebooks. i've been using it for about a year on a toshiba chromebook 2 and it's been a joy -- everything works perfectly, and after swapping in a 128gb ssd i have zero complaints.

pixelmonkey 9y ago

I run Windows 10 in a VMWare Workstation instance for this. Luckily with modern multi-core high-memory machines and Intel VT-x, this runs really, really well. So I really don't need the vendors to expend any effort on a port. That said, one sad thing is that VMWare recently laid off and/or outsourced their VMWare Workstation team[1], and it is now in "maintenance mode", so I will be really sad if this product gets sunset somehow. It's still infinitely better a VM option than Virtualbox for running Windows. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmware-fusion-workstation-team-culled-in-company-restructure/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/vmwar...

cookiecaper 9y ago
I experimented with this extensively and found that while VBox and VMWare had different performance profiles, overall it'd come out to a wash in terms of a real performance "winner". As of June, I'm running Win10 "natively" on an ArchLinux hypervisor with GPU and USB passthrough via vfio-pci. It was a marathon to get this configured, but overall it's quite nice. Previously, I had switched to Win10 native and ran Linux out of VBox for "real work", after finally getting sick of waiting 2 min+ for something to churn in DxO via VMWare and/or VBox on the Linux host. Combined with virtio drivers, the passthrough VM gives me practically-native performance (Geekbench shows ~15-20% loss in single-core performance, and about equivalent multicore performance) and the flexibility of a virtualized environment (qcow2 images, etc). It also allows my workstation to operate independently from the other services in my house (Plex, work VM, etc.). One of the biggest annoyances of a Win10 host and a Linux guest VM was that Win10 would sometimes force the box offline for updates. Still annoying, and doesn't really happen since I switched to the "business release channel", but at least it doesn't take everything down. The coolest part of this setup: my son has a Win10 VM with GPU passthrough to the secondary GPU in the hypervisor that he uses via Steam Link to connect to "his computer" from several "thin terminals" in the house. Would love to develop this out as a product some day. All this said, since it is an experimental setup that depends on some cutting-edge features, there have been some kernel-related struggles and I've been on the kvm mailing list a couple times in the last few weeks. 4.11.x is mostly-stable (one system lock on it), 4.12.x crashes after a few hours, 4.13rc1-7 crash after tens of hours, but 4.13rc7 with the mmu-notifier patchset from Jerome Glisse is stable so far. I'm anticipating a clean 4.14, which will be LTS, and then I'll probably stick to that branch until the next LTS comes along.

_e 9y ago

Microsoft Excel, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign work very well for me under WINE. There are cases where those programs don't work 100% but they work 99% for everything that I need which is fine for me. It feels much faster than running the same programs under Windows 8.1.

ghaff 9y ago

Increasingly though mainstream users don't need to run local applications. Some do; I have a combination of Linux, Mac, and Windows systems I use for various things. But a lot of the time when I travel I just take a very portable Chromebook with me. The vast bulk of what I need to do on a day to day basis I do online.

nyolfen 9y ago
since you mentioned chromebooks i feel obligated to mention the truly stellar galliumOS, an xubuntu derivative for chromebooks. i've been using it for about a year on a toshiba chromebook 2 and it's been a joy -- everything works perfectly, and after swapping in a 128gb ssd i have zero complaints.