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As someone new to Linux from 20 years on a Mac -- what's the deal with everything being free? Seriously, where are the "take my money" opportunities. I don't w

As someone new to Linux from 20 years on a Mac -- what's the deal with everything being free? Seriously, where are the "take my money" opportunities. I don't want free OpenOffice. I want to pay $100 for something better, whatever the heck that is, maybe a little less clunky. I don't want free open source Notes app, I want to pay for something that's polished. The Linux community is incredibly giving and passionate and it seems like it's all "free" but sucks up my time. I couldn't even figure out how to slow the scroll of my trackpad on Ubuntu after lots of digging. Please, coming as a Mac user, take my money.

ksec 5y ago
Generally speaking the Linux community thinks that money is somewhat evil. There are little "take my money" moment. Most value only comes from services and support, not a common or sustainable stream of revenue on consumer computing. Which is fundamentally different to the Apple and Mac platform. It is the polish app and "take my money" market. And for most part it is doing exceptionally well. ( On macOS, not MacBook )
- istingray 5y ago
  That's helpful context. If there's good pro-Linux developers and apps worth buying from, let me know. i.e. on Mac Panic, Pixelmator, BBEdit. Would love a Mail alternative. Thunderbird is...not for me. I'll take the opportunity to recommend Standard Notes. They have great Linux support, it's basically an Apple Notes replacement with E2EE for $50/year. Take my money!
  - notwhereyouare 5y ago
    I’m using mailspring for my email client
  - tpmoney 5y ago
    Closest to BBEdit, and worth paying for is SublimeText https://www.sublimetext.com https://www.sublimetext.com
- okamiueru 5y ago
  That's could be part of it, at least for some. However, to me, much more important is the open source nature of things, and not so much that it is free. In fact, it consider free and proprietary to be worse than something I'd pay for, since I assume I'd be the product. Open source means supporting a collective achievement that is shared by humanity. I use FreeCAD, not because it is better than Fusion 360, and not because one is less expensive, but because the latter is owned by a corporation that exploits knowledge investment (i.e. Free for students, free for everyone to "jk we just wanted you to invest in learning it") The same goes with most Linux software. The only exception is the operating system itself and gnome, which I find to be miles better than the commercial alternatives. It's so much better, it isn't even a contest. Of course, the caveat is software availability, which to some extent also includes drivers. But that is hardly Linux's fault, although that detail makes little difference to the end user. Open source also means, to a much larger extent, the absence of dark patterns. Drivers aren't accompanied by telemetry software with a company logo.
  - istingray 5y ago
    Seems like a nice 2x2 matrix here: Financial cost (free/paid) X Openness (proprietary/open) Observations: - Bottom left of the quadrant is Facebook, "you are the product". (free / proprietary) - Bottom right is Linux, pay with sweat (free / open) - Top left is traditional software (paid / proprietary) - Top right is ideal (paid / open)
    - okamiueru 5y ago
      I'd also consider the need for a possible third dimensions, which would be the quality/usability. I do not subscribe to the "pay with sweat". If that would be the case, one could arguably say that you pay for the proprietary alternatives with anti-patterns, forced reboots and update interruptions, and a lot of effort to try and make the operating system not work against you or spy on you. Of course subjective, but I'd for example place Linux in free, open, and high quality. Similar with blender. Windows would be paid/proprietary but not that good. Etc
- mgbmtl 5y ago
  A lot of developers pay for their IDE (PHPStorm, for example). And a lot of software accept donations. I don't think people think money is evil, but to accept it, you need to be able to receive it, and that might be too much overhead for a lot of people. Also, Mac is a much bigger market than Linux on the desktop, and tends to be used by people with money (for the expensive hardware). More of a profession, less of a hobby.
eric__cartman 5y ago
There is paid commercial software for Linux, like MATLAB or Wolfram Mathematica. But the sad truth is that many companies like Microsoft aren't interested in offering MS Office for Linux. A lot of FOSS projects do make money by offering things like 24/7 support and security updates guaranteed for x amount of time (see Ubuntu Extended Security Maintenance). Also a lot of software is used by big companies that do have an interest in sponsoring the development on something they depend on. Where it be by contributing development time themselves or donating money to the developer fund. Maybe as Wine advances we'll be able to use more and more commercial Windows software, kind of like what is happening with games. But I'm not holding my breath yet.
- istingray 5y ago
  Is there a way to pay for WINE to encourage this? For example Parallels costs $80 on a Mac to run Windows, seems reasonable enough.
  - est31 5y ago
    There is! CrossOver from CodeWeavers bases on Wine and the company employs many of the Wine maintainers. So buying from them directly sponsors Wine development and gives you access to an improved product over Wine.
    - istingray 5y ago
      This looks great. Thank you for the recommendation!
- tech234a 5y ago
  Microsoft does offer Teams, Edge, and VS Code on Linux these days.
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    Is that because all of the above are Electron apps?
est31 5y ago
There is definitely a proprietary desktop software market for Linux. For your office example, try WPS office. Never used it myself but I heard good things. There are paid text editors like sublime or the stuff that jetbrains is building. There is also lots of Linux desktop software in the SFX industry.
- istingray 5y ago
  Oh Sublime looks great, like BBEdit on Mac. $30 not bad. Thanks for the rec! Checking WPS out now: https://www.wps.com/premium https://www.wps.com/premium $30/year, not too bad. The fact that their free version runs on ads is a turnoff from a brand standpoint.
- yoyohello13 5y ago
  My main problem is I don't want proprietary software. I want to pay for FOSS software. I have a rolling monthly fund where I donate to projects I like. A lot of Linux users scoff at paying for software, but I think the Linux community would really benefit from fostering more of a donation centric culture.
  - est31 5y ago
    I see contributions which are not paid for as donations. Even if some work is paid for, it's often not market rate for that quality of work. From this perspective, donations are extremely prevalent, they are just not in terms of money. Of course this doesn't bring food to the table of contributors however. I agree that there should be more monetary donations in FLOSS.
hindsightbias 5y ago
> it's all "free" but sucks up my time. Linux is for users who don’t value their time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dpbriggs 5y ago
  That's a terrible take. I enjoy having control over my computer and software. There's not some PM somewhere pushing a crappy change to forward their career.
- freedomben 5y ago
  I've been using Linux exclusively for 10 years now and I value my time more than anything. I save a ton of time by being on an environment where I can finely tune my setup for my desired workflow and automate absolutely everything.
- neop1x 5y ago
  This is definitely not true generally! I value my time high as well and I have been using Linux for many years. System updates are no worse than any other system, I would even say easier as I don't need to reboot every time. I have been using VSCode, Libreoffice, GIMP, VLC, Firefox, KiCAD, MPV, VLC and many other apps (mostly CLI) - mostly backend development, docker, databases, webapps - and I had wonderful experience doing so. I can imagine it may be more difficult for graphic designers and a like but I can imagine that even in that category some people are using only basic features doable in SW like GIMP and yet are still paying a lot for subscription-based proprietary software unnecessarily.
JeremyNT 5y ago
If you want, you can run a lot of proprietary Windows software in wine, so this is already an option for you. However, a lot of open source software projects will also accept donations in addition to code (if you do not have time to contribute the latter) so if you find something lacking there may be an easy way for you to help. I like to pick a few OSS projects every year to make some donations to. I have always figured it would be better to help improve the open source solutions than it is to look for proprietary ones.
- istingray 5y ago
  Appreciate you sharing your experience how it works. Glad to hear Windows software is an option.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Take a look at Proton, as well. You can use it outside of Steam to run Windows apps.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
There are more and more paying/professional-quality software that is available on Linux, mainly due to the popularity of Electron and subscriptions: - Companies choose Electron to reduce the cost of supporting Windows and Mac, which has the side effect of making Linux supported easily even if the market isn't there. People sure like to complain about Electron but it has been very beneficial for Linux desktops. - Selling Linux software has always been hard, mainly due to piracy and a widespread aversion to closed-source software within Linux users. With subscription business models being more popular/acceptable nowadays, which comes along a requirement to be always-online, such services are more easily available on Linux too. For example Linux has VSCode, Spotify, 1password, Bitwarden, Obsidian, Slack, Discord, Skype, Typora, Simplenote, Inkdrop, Wordpress, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Signal, Atom, Ghost… It has improved drastically from even just 10 years ago, when almost no popular software/service was available. And that's not mentioning the general shift to using webapps instead of desktop apps (Google Workspace, Office 365, most email services, Jira, Github, Asana…), which obviously makes Linux much more viable.
- slumpt_ 5y ago
  Write once run everywhere has really become a reality with Electron in a practical sense that wasn’t ever quite as real before. A lot of mudslinging about performance but for a devoted team it’s very possible to build a solid web app. Love what it’s done for software
  - silisili 5y ago
    Would you not consider Java as write once run anywhere? I mean, that was basically its whole selling point. I feel its popularity is more to do with one stack everywhere, than say, some groundbreaking tech idea. All that aside, I must agree. Electron, however you view it, has greatly boosted linux compat among popular applications.
    - reasonabl_human 5y ago
      One stack everywhere is not a ground breaking concept since Java did it from an architecture stand point, but Electron is doing it in a new and unique way: one stack across across desktop, web, mobile - device classes instead of just architecture / OS. Same concept applied differently as I see it.
awinter-py 5y ago
feels like some important apps are starting to distribute on linux -- tbh steam may be the most important of these because it contains such a diversity of other software and has a microtransaction system
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
It's a chicken and egg problem. Nobody pays for free software, so noone who makes software does the boring things. It sucks up your time because the boring things they don't want to do is that 10% that would make it easier. Ofcourse there are exceptions, and I am surprised there aren't more companies that go with the ardour model. They give away the source but charge for binaries. I would even like it if they charge for everything but have it be open source, so you can't download an "official copy" unless you pay.
lostgame 5y ago
Coming from a Mac, and the commercial software world; such as using software like Photoshop or Logic Pro instead of GIMP or Ardour - the polish, standardization and reliability are way, well; worth the damn money. There is an age-old axiom that 'free isn't free', and Linux quite literally embodies everything about that for me. When I can get native, commercial software for Linux; without interpreter layers such as WINE, I, along with the majority of the rest of computer users, will consider it. Until then, there are far too many compromises for me to consider it. I would so much rather pay for a piece of software I rely on - especially every day - and get the support that comes with it to boot - than have it for free. And so do millions of others.
- sagarm 5y ago
  > There is an age-old axiom that 'free isn't free', and Linux quite literally embodies everything about that for me. The entire world runs on Linux and other F/OSS software like Python, Ruby, GCC, Clang, MySQL, Spark, VSCode, etc etc. The programs you're talking about aren't the only kind of value out there. > When I can get native, commercial software for Linux; without interpreter layers such as WINE Valve has integrated their version of Wine (Proton) into Steam with great success. Wine isn't a bad option for the kind of GUI tools that tend not to be popular on Linux.
acomjean 5y ago
There are a few paid apps. Bitwig for music and DaVinci Resolve Studio 17 (there is a free version of DaVinci too), Jetbrains dev tools (intellij,phpstorm, pycharm). Coming to it, it is a little weird at first. Note that on Mac at least there's the garage band/imovie/ iphoto apps available for free with the OS too. Your right though, the everything is free and unsupported (usually the take my money moment is for support) . For example I needed to do some minor video editing, what do I use..? There are some major apps that tend to stand out: LibreOffice/Krita/Gimp among others. I'm using POPos so I tend to find a list of applications and see what's available pre-packaged for my version of linux. Even Unreal Engine can build on linux with work. Its a bit of a pain, but maybe I'm used to it now..
- kbelder 5y ago
  I was trying to think of a distribution platform to sell programs on Linux. Steam, kind of? Seems to be an unfilled niche. Is an opensource app store that sells closed-source software possible or reasonable?
  - pantalaimon 5y ago
    That's what Ubuntu has been trying for years with it's store.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  Pianoteq is also available for Linux.
  - scns 5y ago
    That you very much for this. Applied mathematics FTW! and it sounds absolutely gorgeous: https://www.youtube.com/embed/waTykg6Wruw?badge=0&autoplay=0&html5=1 https://www.youtube.com/embed/waTykg6Wruw?badge=0&autoplay=0... (edit) Brian Eno is a huge fan. (edit) copy'n'paste from their site: Pianoteq is an award-winning virtual instrument which you can install on your computer (PC/Mac). It is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and will even run on some ARM-based boards such as the Raspberry Pi. It can be used both in standalone mode and as an instrument plug-in in VST, AAX, and AudioUnits hosts. What makes Pianoteq superior to other virtual instruments is that the instruments are physically modelled and thus can simulate the playability and complex behaviour of real acoustic instruments. Because there are no samples, the file size is just a tiny fraction of that required by other virtual instruments, making Pianoteq perfect for any modern laptop. The secret of Pianoteq The Pianoteq history is strongly connected to the outstanding career of Philippe Guillaume, who, so to speak, had three lives in one. In a first life he was a high level expert in piano tuning and piano restoration. He worked with prestigious artists like Maria João Pires and Alicia de la Rocha. Then at age 30, he started a second life with basic studies in mathematics and succeeded brilliantly in the prestigious French Agrégation competition. He earned in a very short time the title of Doctor in Applied Mathematics degree, then became a full professor, and the Director of the Department of Mathematics of INSA-Toulouse, France. The adventure of Pianoteq started when Philippe Guillaume tuned his first piano and when he wrote his first mathematical model. The third life of Philippe Guillaume is devoted to developing and promoting Pianoteq. With the help of his colleagues and a carefully chosen team of experienced musicians, the complex instrument step by step turned into a vivid and convincing piano simulation which makes it the very first piano of its kind.
seph-reed 5y ago
Try Elementary OS. They have a sweet pay-what-you-want model, and the UI is really nice. I'm always surprised how many people overlook it, given that it's IMO the only OS I know of with a nice UI that can play games. https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/
ElijahLynn 5y ago
I hear you, that would be nice to have more premium apps that are paid. I personally would gladly pay for premium apps, even more so if I pay and they are open source. Until then, here three quality paid apps for Linux: * Lightworks - professional video editing with GPU support * Bigwig Studio (like Ableton live, creating EDM style music, midi arrangements etc) * Maya - 3D animation software (Pixar uses this too) * IntelliJ/PhpStorm/Pycharm/Rubymine/etc IDEs for coding
- scns 5y ago
  Excuse my correction but it is Bitwig and it is awesome. Funny typo though, the actual leader in that niche (DAW optimized for live playing) would be Ableton Live, and Bitwig was written by former Ableton employees.
danShumway 5y ago
A lot of Open Source software products operate on the opposite notion. They won't take your money, you have to give it to them. I use almost entirely Open Source tools as a game dev for various reasons (some ideological and some practical). All of them get money from me on a monthly basis. It's a security thing; I give them money because I want them to stick around and because there are features that they're working on that I'll need for future projects. Paying them money is much more cost efficient and much safer than trying to build all of my own tools, and much safer and more future-proof than buying into commercial engines. What I get out of that arrangement is closer relationships with the developers, slightly more input into how software gets built, but mostly just confidence that the products will get better and an increased likelyhood that devs will fix things that are incredibly annoying to me. And some software products (Blender in particular) have shown that this model can work really well if there's enough buy-in from the community. Blender/Krita will even let you sponsor development on specific features if you're willing to pay enough money. Unfortunately, like with anything else, products suffer if there's not enough funding, and a lot of Open Source products are underfunded. There's an open question in the OS world about how you get people to donate voluntarily rather than forcing them to give money. People don't have the perspective I describe above, it's not an intuitive way to the think about software. But if you're not in that boat, if you're actually willing to pay money purely to get better software, that's a solveable problem today. Many Open Source products support donations, and at the scale you're talking about (equivalent to Mac, one or two devs make something really good as their job), getting donations to the point where people can work on a project full time would be enough to get the kind of quality boosts you want. Most Open Source projects accepting donations are not at that level yet, but again, if you genuinely want to pay money to increase software quality, you can do that. But it does require a shift in thinking, you have to break away from the philosophy that the Mac ecosystem has aggressively drilled into you that says you pay for access to things. In Mac, the way you support developers is you pay for access, and as a side effect they build better apps. In Linux, (most of the time) you pay for development, not access. Everyone understands in theory that we pay for software because we want the software to improve. But theory is different than practice, emotionally we buy software because we have to. In Linux with Open Source, if you want software to get better you are forced to internalize the underlying theory -- you have to get your brain to actually believe that you are paying for continued development instead of access to something that already exists. And then at that point, you realize that kicking someone $5-10 a month so that they'll add new scripting APIs to Tiled is actually a really good deal. Mac's system has the advantage that it forces everyone to participate, so it's easier for Mac developers to get enough money to focus on building really polished products. Mac doesn't require its users to believe that they're paying for development. The weakness of Linux's system is it doesn't force everyone to participate in supporting the ecosystem, so there's way less funding. But while that's a legitimate criticism of Open Source, it's also a purely social/psychological phenomenon. There's no law of nature that means we couldn't collectively pay developers of Open Source apps enough so that they could devote the same amount of time to development as Mac devs do. And if we did that, then quality would skyrocket, Mac is proof of that. The Mac app ecosystem proves that you don't need giant companies to have great software, all you need are a few developers per-app that can afford to put all of their attention into their apps instead of just their free time.
nightfly 5y ago
I'm a long time Linux user who got an M1 Macbook Air from work having about the inverse problem. Every little thing costs like $10-50 and it adds up. And the level of polish I've seen isn't really _that_ great. I've paid for things like BetterTouchTool, BetterSnapTool, and Alfred for basic easy features. I still can't get BetterTouchTool to reliably start on boot :/ At this point I've stopped trying to refine my work environment anymore, just because I'm tired of being nickeled and dimed for every little thing
- theshrike79 5y ago
  I gladly pay for stuff. That means that the developer has motivation to keep the software up to date. Open source relies on the kindness of strangers, sometimes a project has critical mass (or a corporate sponsor) to keep it alive, others just fizzle out. Then I need to spend time finding a replacement. For example: this is why I chose Newsblur as my Google Reader replacement, they took my money. And I haven't regretted my choice even once. Oh and Alfred really doesn't have a replacement anywhere. I bought Soulver just because of the Alfred integration.
  - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
    > That means that the developer has motivation to keep the software up to date. If you use OSS, anyone can keep the software up to date.
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      Yes, but very few actually will. It requires someone who is already invested in the software, preferably using it themselves and also has the skills to keep the development going.
      - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
        Unless the software is fairly niche it’s not uncommon. For example a better maintained fork of youtube-dl made front page just yesterday.
Aperocky 5y ago
> I don't want free OpenOffice. I want to pay $100 for something better For me the better thing is also free, it's called markdown. Agree on trackpad though, someone has probably hacked something together but hardware driver is kind of hard to make as third party.
- duckmysick 5y ago
  Markdown is not a replacement for office apps. It's a markup language. I can't use markdown to open a .docx file for a revision my client sent me.
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    I hope eventually markdown would replace docx. Afterall I think certain official documents are still typed out in plain text.
gjs278 5y ago
wait until you find about about ascii
jordigh 5y ago
Who do you want to take your money? Someone wrote bash. There's no company behind it. It's mostly just Chet. How do you want to pay Chet? I'm not sure he even accepts donations. Looking through my bash history to see what I use most often, I think of the OpenSSH devs wrote ssh. Then I think that lots of volunteers wrote Emacs. Oh, oauthtool, I use that often. I should figure out who wrote that. I suppose there's all of the Linux hackers who wrote each part of my kernel. Mercurial as my git. Hey, I wrote parts of that, so at least my debt there feels paid. Ah, there's the Mate developers who forked from Gnome 2 long ago and are now mostly doing basic maintenance on that codebase. Some GNU hackers wrote each of the coreutils but that was long ago and someone else is maintaining them now. Oh, Firefox, of course, the OS-within-an-OS. That also has its own few hundred hackers over the decades that should be paid. How am I supposed to be paying all of the thousands of people who each wrote a little part of my OS? Apple didn't pay all of the people who wrote the free parts of their OS either. Did you? There simply is no societal structure in place to pay the people who wrote this stone soup of an OS.
eitland 5y ago
Feel free to use IntelliJ and Jetbrains tools generally like I do and Sublime Text (like I did) and fell free to support a number of the open source packages you like best :-) I prefer to keep it mostly free as that was how I could afford it back in the days but there's nothing wrong with using pid products you like. I also try to give back a bit extra now that I can afford it.
freedomben 5y ago
I love you! You are the exact kind of users we need in the community and I'm ecstatic to see that you're here :-) I think stuff for you is coming, you're just a little early and a lot of things are in development. That said, Elementary OS was trying to offer the type of thing you're looking for. It might be time for me to jump back into the desktop app market. I used to make (IMHO) really nice polished Qt apps primarily for Linux but also available for Windows and Mac. I quit doing it because the market collapsed around 2014, but maybe it's time to get back in !!
- istingray 5y ago
  What a warm welcome! Thank you!

ksec 5y ago

Generally speaking the Linux community thinks that money is somewhat evil. There are little "take my money" moment. Most value only comes from services and support, not a common or sustainable stream of revenue on consumer computing. Which is fundamentally different to the Apple and Mac platform. It is the polish app and "take my money" market. And for most part it is doing exceptionally well. ( On macOS, not MacBook )

istingray 5y ago
That's helpful context. If there's good pro-Linux developers and apps worth buying from, let me know. i.e. on Mac Panic, Pixelmator, BBEdit. Would love a Mail alternative. Thunderbird is...not for me. I'll take the opportunity to recommend Standard Notes. They have great Linux support, it's basically an Apple Notes replacement with E2EE for $50/year. Take my money!
- notwhereyouare 5y ago
  I’m using mailspring for my email client
- tpmoney 5y ago
  Closest to BBEdit, and worth paying for is SublimeText https://www.sublimetext.com https://www.sublimetext.com
okamiueru 5y ago
That's could be part of it, at least for some. However, to me, much more important is the open source nature of things, and not so much that it is free. In fact, it consider free and proprietary to be worse than something I'd pay for, since I assume I'd be the product. Open source means supporting a collective achievement that is shared by humanity. I use FreeCAD, not because it is better than Fusion 360, and not because one is less expensive, but because the latter is owned by a corporation that exploits knowledge investment (i.e. Free for students, free for everyone to "jk we just wanted you to invest in learning it") The same goes with most Linux software. The only exception is the operating system itself and gnome, which I find to be miles better than the commercial alternatives. It's so much better, it isn't even a contest. Of course, the caveat is software availability, which to some extent also includes drivers. But that is hardly Linux's fault, although that detail makes little difference to the end user. Open source also means, to a much larger extent, the absence of dark patterns. Drivers aren't accompanied by telemetry software with a company logo.
- istingray 5y ago
  Seems like a nice 2x2 matrix here: Financial cost (free/paid) X Openness (proprietary/open) Observations: - Bottom left of the quadrant is Facebook, "you are the product". (free / proprietary) - Bottom right is Linux, pay with sweat (free / open) - Top left is traditional software (paid / proprietary) - Top right is ideal (paid / open)
  - okamiueru 5y ago
    I'd also consider the need for a possible third dimensions, which would be the quality/usability. I do not subscribe to the "pay with sweat". If that would be the case, one could arguably say that you pay for the proprietary alternatives with anti-patterns, forced reboots and update interruptions, and a lot of effort to try and make the operating system not work against you or spy on you. Of course subjective, but I'd for example place Linux in free, open, and high quality. Similar with blender. Windows would be paid/proprietary but not that good. Etc
mgbmtl 5y ago
A lot of developers pay for their IDE (PHPStorm, for example). And a lot of software accept donations. I don't think people think money is evil, but to accept it, you need to be able to receive it, and that might be too much overhead for a lot of people. Also, Mac is a much bigger market than Linux on the desktop, and tends to be used by people with money (for the expensive hardware). More of a profession, less of a hobby.

eric__cartman 5y ago

There is paid commercial software for Linux, like MATLAB or Wolfram Mathematica. But the sad truth is that many companies like Microsoft aren't interested in offering MS Office for Linux. A lot of FOSS projects do make money by offering things like 24/7 support and security updates guaranteed for x amount of time (see Ubuntu Extended Security Maintenance). Also a lot of software is used by big companies that do have an interest in sponsoring the development on something they depend on. Where it be by contributing development time themselves or donating money to the developer fund. Maybe as Wine advances we'll be able to use more and more commercial Windows software, kind of like what is happening with games. But I'm not holding my breath yet.

istingray 5y ago
Is there a way to pay for WINE to encourage this? For example Parallels costs $80 on a Mac to run Windows, seems reasonable enough.
- est31 5y ago
  There is! CrossOver from CodeWeavers bases on Wine and the company employs many of the Wine maintainers. So buying from them directly sponsors Wine development and gives you access to an improved product over Wine.
  - istingray 5y ago
    This looks great. Thank you for the recommendation!
tech234a 5y ago
Microsoft does offer Teams, Edge, and VS Code on Linux these days.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  Is that because all of the above are Electron apps?

est31 5y ago

There is definitely a proprietary desktop software market for Linux. For your office example, try WPS office. Never used it myself but I heard good things. There are paid text editors like sublime or the stuff that jetbrains is building. There is also lots of Linux desktop software in the SFX industry.

istingray 5y ago
Oh Sublime looks great, like BBEdit on Mac. $30 not bad. Thanks for the rec! Checking WPS out now: https://www.wps.com/premium https://www.wps.com/premium $30/year, not too bad. The fact that their free version runs on ads is a turnoff from a brand standpoint.
yoyohello13 5y ago
My main problem is I don't want proprietary software. I want to pay for FOSS software. I have a rolling monthly fund where I donate to projects I like. A lot of Linux users scoff at paying for software, but I think the Linux community would really benefit from fostering more of a donation centric culture.
- est31 5y ago
  I see contributions which are not paid for as donations. Even if some work is paid for, it's often not market rate for that quality of work. From this perspective, donations are extremely prevalent, they are just not in terms of money. Of course this doesn't bring food to the table of contributors however. I agree that there should be more monetary donations in FLOSS.

hindsightbias 5y ago

> it's all "free" but sucks up my time. Linux is for users who don’t value their time.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dpbriggs 5y ago
That's a terrible take. I enjoy having control over my computer and software. There's not some PM somewhere pushing a crappy change to forward their career.
freedomben 5y ago
I've been using Linux exclusively for 10 years now and I value my time more than anything. I save a ton of time by being on an environment where I can finely tune my setup for my desired workflow and automate absolutely everything.
neop1x 5y ago
This is definitely not true generally! I value my time high as well and I have been using Linux for many years. System updates are no worse than any other system, I would even say easier as I don't need to reboot every time. I have been using VSCode, Libreoffice, GIMP, VLC, Firefox, KiCAD, MPV, VLC and many other apps (mostly CLI) - mostly backend development, docker, databases, webapps - and I had wonderful experience doing so. I can imagine it may be more difficult for graphic designers and a like but I can imagine that even in that category some people are using only basic features doable in SW like GIMP and yet are still paying a lot for subscription-based proprietary software unnecessarily.

JeremyNT 5y ago

If you want, you can run a lot of proprietary Windows software in wine, so this is already an option for you. However, a lot of open source software projects will also accept donations in addition to code (if you do not have time to contribute the latter) so if you find something lacking there may be an easy way for you to help. I like to pick a few OSS projects every year to make some donations to. I have always figured it would be better to help improve the open source solutions than it is to look for proprietary ones.

istingray 5y ago
Appreciate you sharing your experience how it works. Glad to hear Windows software is an option.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Take a look at Proton, as well. You can use it outside of Steam to run Windows apps.

benhurmarcel 5y ago

There are more and more paying/professional-quality software that is available on Linux, mainly due to the popularity of Electron and subscriptions: - Companies choose Electron to reduce the cost of supporting Windows and Mac, which has the side effect of making Linux supported easily even if the market isn't there. People sure like to complain about Electron but it has been very beneficial for Linux desktops. - Selling Linux software has always been hard, mainly due to piracy and a widespread aversion to closed-source software within Linux users. With subscription business models being more popular/acceptable nowadays, which comes along a requirement to be always-online, such services are more easily available on Linux too. For example Linux has VSCode, Spotify, 1password, Bitwarden, Obsidian, Slack, Discord, Skype, Typora, Simplenote, Inkdrop, Wordpress, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Signal, Atom, Ghost… It has improved drastically from even just 10 years ago, when almost no popular software/service was available. And that's not mentioning the general shift to using webapps instead of desktop apps (Google Workspace, Office 365, most email services, Jira, Github, Asana…), which obviously makes Linux much more viable.

slumpt_ 5y ago
Write once run everywhere has really become a reality with Electron in a practical sense that wasn’t ever quite as real before. A lot of mudslinging about performance but for a devoted team it’s very possible to build a solid web app. Love what it’s done for software
- silisili 5y ago
  Would you not consider Java as write once run anywhere? I mean, that was basically its whole selling point. I feel its popularity is more to do with one stack everywhere, than say, some groundbreaking tech idea. All that aside, I must agree. Electron, however you view it, has greatly boosted linux compat among popular applications.
  - reasonabl_human 5y ago
    One stack everywhere is not a ground breaking concept since Java did it from an architecture stand point, but Electron is doing it in a new and unique way: one stack across across desktop, web, mobile - device classes instead of just architecture / OS. Same concept applied differently as I see it.

awinter-py 5y ago

feels like some important apps are starting to distribute on linux -- tbh steam may be the most important of these because it contains such a diversity of other software and has a microtransaction system

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

It's a chicken and egg problem. Nobody pays for free software, so noone who makes software does the boring things. It sucks up your time because the boring things they don't want to do is that 10% that would make it easier. Ofcourse there are exceptions, and I am surprised there aren't more companies that go with the ardour model. They give away the source but charge for binaries. I would even like it if they charge for everything but have it be open source, so you can't download an "official copy" unless you pay.

lostgame 5y ago

Coming from a Mac, and the commercial software world; such as using software like Photoshop or Logic Pro instead of GIMP or Ardour - the polish, standardization and reliability are way, well; worth the damn money. There is an age-old axiom that 'free isn't free', and Linux quite literally embodies everything about that for me. When I can get native, commercial software for Linux; without interpreter layers such as WINE, I, along with the majority of the rest of computer users, will consider it. Until then, there are far too many compromises for me to consider it. I would so much rather pay for a piece of software I rely on - especially every day - and get the support that comes with it to boot - than have it for free. And so do millions of others.

sagarm 5y ago
> There is an age-old axiom that 'free isn't free', and Linux quite literally embodies everything about that for me. The entire world runs on Linux and other F/OSS software like Python, Ruby, GCC, Clang, MySQL, Spark, VSCode, etc etc. The programs you're talking about aren't the only kind of value out there. > When I can get native, commercial software for Linux; without interpreter layers such as WINE Valve has integrated their version of Wine (Proton) into Steam with great success. Wine isn't a bad option for the kind of GUI tools that tend not to be popular on Linux.

acomjean 5y ago

There are a few paid apps. Bitwig for music and DaVinci Resolve Studio 17 (there is a free version of DaVinci too), Jetbrains dev tools (intellij,phpstorm, pycharm). Coming to it, it is a little weird at first. Note that on Mac at least there's the garage band/imovie/ iphoto apps available for free with the OS too. Your right though, the everything is free and unsupported (usually the take my money moment is for support) . For example I needed to do some minor video editing, what do I use..? There are some major apps that tend to stand out: LibreOffice/Krita/Gimp among others. I'm using POPos so I tend to find a list of applications and see what's available pre-packaged for my version of linux. Even Unreal Engine can build on linux with work. Its a bit of a pain, but maybe I'm used to it now..

kbelder 5y ago
I was trying to think of a distribution platform to sell programs on Linux. Steam, kind of? Seems to be an unfilled niche. Is an opensource app store that sells closed-source software possible or reasonable?
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  That's what Ubuntu has been trying for years with it's store.
TimTheTinker 5y ago
Pianoteq is also available for Linux.
- scns 5y ago
  That you very much for this. Applied mathematics FTW! and it sounds absolutely gorgeous: https://www.youtube.com/embed/waTykg6Wruw?badge=0&autoplay=0&html5=1 https://www.youtube.com/embed/waTykg6Wruw?badge=0&autoplay=0... (edit) Brian Eno is a huge fan. (edit) copy'n'paste from their site: Pianoteq is an award-winning virtual instrument which you can install on your computer (PC/Mac). It is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and will even run on some ARM-based boards such as the Raspberry Pi. It can be used both in standalone mode and as an instrument plug-in in VST, AAX, and AudioUnits hosts. What makes Pianoteq superior to other virtual instruments is that the instruments are physically modelled and thus can simulate the playability and complex behaviour of real acoustic instruments. Because there are no samples, the file size is just a tiny fraction of that required by other virtual instruments, making Pianoteq perfect for any modern laptop. The secret of Pianoteq The Pianoteq history is strongly connected to the outstanding career of Philippe Guillaume, who, so to speak, had three lives in one. In a first life he was a high level expert in piano tuning and piano restoration. He worked with prestigious artists like Maria João Pires and Alicia de la Rocha. Then at age 30, he started a second life with basic studies in mathematics and succeeded brilliantly in the prestigious French Agrégation competition. He earned in a very short time the title of Doctor in Applied Mathematics degree, then became a full professor, and the Director of the Department of Mathematics of INSA-Toulouse, France. The adventure of Pianoteq started when Philippe Guillaume tuned his first piano and when he wrote his first mathematical model. The third life of Philippe Guillaume is devoted to developing and promoting Pianoteq. With the help of his colleagues and a carefully chosen team of experienced musicians, the complex instrument step by step turned into a vivid and convincing piano simulation which makes it the very first piano of its kind.

seph-reed 5y ago

Try Elementary OS. They have a sweet pay-what-you-want model, and the UI is really nice. I'm always surprised how many people overlook it, given that it's IMO the only OS I know of with a nice UI that can play games. https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/

ElijahLynn 5y ago

I hear you, that would be nice to have more premium apps that are paid. I personally would gladly pay for premium apps, even more so if I pay and they are open source. Until then, here three quality paid apps for Linux: * Lightworks - professional video editing with GPU support * Bigwig Studio (like Ableton live, creating EDM style music, midi arrangements etc) * Maya - 3D animation software (Pixar uses this too) * IntelliJ/PhpStorm/Pycharm/Rubymine/etc IDEs for coding

scns 5y ago
Excuse my correction but it is Bitwig and it is awesome. Funny typo though, the actual leader in that niche (DAW optimized for live playing) would be Ableton Live, and Bitwig was written by former Ableton employees.

danShumway 5y ago

A lot of Open Source software products operate on the opposite notion. They won't take your money, you have to give it to them. I use almost entirely Open Source tools as a game dev for various reasons (some ideological and some practical). All of them get money from me on a monthly basis. It's a security thing; I give them money because I want them to stick around and because there are features that they're working on that I'll need for future projects. Paying them money is much more cost efficient and much safer than trying to build all of my own tools, and much safer and more future-proof than buying into commercial engines. What I get out of that arrangement is closer relationships with the developers, slightly more input into how software gets built, but mostly just confidence that the products will get better and an increased likelyhood that devs will fix things that are incredibly annoying to me. And some software products (Blender in particular) have shown that this model can work really well if there's enough buy-in from the community. Blender/Krita will even let you sponsor development on specific features if you're willing to pay enough money. Unfortunately, like with anything else, products suffer if there's not enough funding, and a lot of Open Source products are underfunded. There's an open question in the OS world about how you get people to donate voluntarily rather than forcing them to give money. People don't have the perspective I describe above, it's not an intuitive way to the think about software. But if you're not in that boat, if you're actually willing to pay money purely to get better software, that's a solveable problem today. Many Open Source products support donations, and at the scale you're talking about (equivalent to Mac, one or two devs make something really good as their job), getting donations to the point where people can work on a project full time would be enough to get the kind of quality boosts you want. Most Open Source projects accepting donations are not at that level yet, but again, if you genuinely want to pay money to increase software quality, you can do that. But it does require a shift in thinking, you have to break away from the philosophy that the Mac ecosystem has aggressively drilled into you that says you pay for access to things. In Mac, the way you support developers is you pay for access, and as a side effect they build better apps. In Linux, (most of the time) you pay for development, not access. Everyone understands in theory that we pay for software because we want the software to improve. But theory is different than practice, emotionally we buy software because we have to. In Linux with Open Source, if you want software to get better you are forced to internalize the underlying theory -- you have to get your brain to actually believe that you are paying for continued development instead of access to something that already exists. And then at that point, you realize that kicking someone $5-10 a month so that they'll add new scripting APIs to Tiled is actually a really good deal. Mac's system has the advantage that it forces everyone to participate, so it's easier for Mac developers to get enough money to focus on building really polished products. Mac doesn't require its users to believe that they're paying for development. The weakness of Linux's system is it doesn't force everyone to participate in supporting the ecosystem, so there's way less funding. But while that's a legitimate criticism of Open Source, it's also a purely social/psychological phenomenon. There's no law of nature that means we couldn't collectively pay developers of Open Source apps enough so that they could devote the same amount of time to development as Mac devs do. And if we did that, then quality would skyrocket, Mac is proof of that. The Mac app ecosystem proves that you don't need giant companies to have great software, all you need are a few developers per-app that can afford to put all of their attention into their apps instead of just their free time.

nightfly 5y ago

I'm a long time Linux user who got an M1 Macbook Air from work having about the inverse problem. Every little thing costs like $10-50 and it adds up. And the level of polish I've seen isn't really _that_ great. I've paid for things like BetterTouchTool, BetterSnapTool, and Alfred for basic easy features. I still can't get BetterTouchTool to reliably start on boot :/ At this point I've stopped trying to refine my work environment anymore, just because I'm tired of being nickeled and dimed for every little thing

theshrike79 5y ago
I gladly pay for stuff. That means that the developer has motivation to keep the software up to date. Open source relies on the kindness of strangers, sometimes a project has critical mass (or a corporate sponsor) to keep it alive, others just fizzle out. Then I need to spend time finding a replacement. For example: this is why I chose Newsblur as my Google Reader replacement, they took my money. And I haven't regretted my choice even once. Oh and Alfred really doesn't have a replacement anywhere. I bought Soulver just because of the Alfred integration.
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago
  > That means that the developer has motivation to keep the software up to date. If you use OSS, anyone can keep the software up to date.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    Yes, but very few actually will. It requires someone who is already invested in the software, preferably using it themselves and also has the skills to keep the development going.
    - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
      Unless the software is fairly niche it’s not uncommon. For example a better maintained fork of youtube-dl made front page just yesterday.

Aperocky 5y ago

> I don't want free OpenOffice. I want to pay $100 for something better For me the better thing is also free, it's called markdown. Agree on trackpad though, someone has probably hacked something together but hardware driver is kind of hard to make as third party.

duckmysick 5y ago
Markdown is not a replacement for office apps. It's a markup language. I can't use markdown to open a .docx file for a revision my client sent me.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  I hope eventually markdown would replace docx. Afterall I think certain official documents are still typed out in plain text.

gjs278 5y ago

wait until you find about about ascii

jordigh 5y ago

Who do you want to take your money? Someone wrote bash. There's no company behind it. It's mostly just Chet. How do you want to pay Chet? I'm not sure he even accepts donations. Looking through my bash history to see what I use most often, I think of the OpenSSH devs wrote ssh. Then I think that lots of volunteers wrote Emacs. Oh, oauthtool, I use that often. I should figure out who wrote that. I suppose there's all of the Linux hackers who wrote each part of my kernel. Mercurial as my git. Hey, I wrote parts of that, so at least my debt there feels paid. Ah, there's the Mate developers who forked from Gnome 2 long ago and are now mostly doing basic maintenance on that codebase. Some GNU hackers wrote each of the coreutils but that was long ago and someone else is maintaining them now. Oh, Firefox, of course, the OS-within-an-OS. That also has its own few hundred hackers over the decades that should be paid. How am I supposed to be paying all of the thousands of people who each wrote a little part of my OS? Apple didn't pay all of the people who wrote the free parts of their OS either. Did you? There simply is no societal structure in place to pay the people who wrote this stone soup of an OS.

eitland 5y ago

Feel free to use IntelliJ and Jetbrains tools generally like I do and Sublime Text (like I did) and fell free to support a number of the open source packages you like best :-) I prefer to keep it mostly free as that was how I could afford it back in the days but there's nothing wrong with using pid products you like. I also try to give back a bit extra now that I can afford it.

freedomben 5y ago

I love you! You are the exact kind of users we need in the community and I'm ecstatic to see that you're here :-) I think stuff for you is coming, you're just a little early and a lot of things are in development. That said, Elementary OS was trying to offer the type of thing you're looking for. It might be time for me to jump back into the desktop app market. I used to make (IMHO) really nice polished Qt apps primarily for Linux but also available for Windows and Mac. I quit doing it because the market collapsed around 2014, but maybe it's time to get back in !!

istingray 5y ago
What a warm welcome! Thank you!