4 ms·

- About 90% of the (GUI) software ever developed? I'm happy to hear that there are quality Linux alternatives nowadays, but there's just many order of magnitude

- About 90% of the (GUI) software ever developed? I'm happy to hear that there are quality Linux alternatives nowadays, but there's just many order of magnitudes more choice on Windows (and far less, but still more on Mac). For a lot of categories, this might change in the next decade (Electron and other cross-platform frameworks, tech like Proton) but for things like media editing or even image viewers, or until there is some tech to seamlessly emulate, this won't be a fight. - Trivial app portability - I absolutely love the concept of portable Windows software. Have a single folder with configuration and binaries, that can run for sure anywhere (give or take a .Net/VisualC install) - and you can achieve this for 90%+ of all available apps. With a some sync tool it's simple to have the same (as in reproducible/copiable) work environment on many machines (in the context of ad-hoc gui user applications). I know this concept isn't really transferable to Linux (separated locations per app, "just build from source") and there are attempts (Snap) but due to the fractured scene and #1 it's not that practical for end-users. - Hardware compatibility - cool that you didn't have device issues, but this could be because you just don't use non-mainstream hardware. Even when I did, a lot of special functionality was bound to (Mac/Win) drivers. Sure, not Ubuntu's fault, but still. I think Ubuntu/Linux success stories are infinitely subjective - what you need as an end-user, how much time or patience you have, or how much you value privacy/lack of telemetry/security.

silisili 5y ago
Re 2: It's actually gotten a lot better. There exists Flatpak, AppImage, Snapd, and of course Docker on the 'container' front. A growing number of apps, probably due to Go, are just as you described - a binary you can run anywhere. I will say, I've been solely a Linux user for almost 20 years now, and still prefer the Windows structure as you described. I like the idea of applications in their own folder, with the binaries and configs and everything just there. In Linux, of course they are divided - confs go here, binaries go here, libraries here. The problem is that -here- isn't well defined. Directions for one distro don't necessarily translate directly to another wrt to locations.
mdp2021 5y ago
> Trivial app portability The "registry" is not an issue anymore?
- poisonborz 5y ago
  A negligible percentage of apps use the registry to store configuration, and even if, when missing, it's not an issue. If absolutely needed, conf can be easily exported/imported on a per app basis. What's far more common is to store stuff in AppData, but that can be synced as well (with a whitelist).
  - nikau 5y ago
    I'm not sure how this is easier than just synching up your dotfiles on Linux
    - joombaga 5y ago
      You can do the same thing in Windows if the software supports dotfiles. There's plenty of Linux software that requires additional configuration beyond dotfiles.
      - cycomanic 5y ago
        Like?
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Apparently an idea that GNOME thought it was worthwhile to copy.
  - TingPing 5y ago
    DConf is great and not a 1:1. Also with flatpak apps store plain text configs privately and dconf is more of a system store now.
nonameiguess 5y ago
Some of this feels out of date. I've used a fair amount of what seems like obscure peripherals and they've all worked fine for at least a few years. That definitely was not the case in 2008 and desktop Linux was legitimately hell at times back then. As far as relocatable installs, this is entirely a choice on the part of distro maintainers and a consequence of how the packages are built. They can be built in a way that allows you to put them elsewhere, but it would defeat the purpose of having a package manager. Which makes me wonder, does winget support relocatable installs? I'm sure you can at least understand why Linux distros have chosen to do packaging this way. The killer app for Linux is server installs. It might be perfectly fine to allow users to move around software they've installed after first installing it on a single-user home PC, but it destroys the possibility of automation. A package manager can't know where the software is if it's constantly moving, meaning it can't upgrade or remove it without significant user interaction, which can't possibly scale to data centers full of servers. Different needs for different markets, unfortunately, but to me, even at home, this is an advantage of Linux, because I have many devices. I guess not being choose between hundreds of media viewers might matter if you're actually a professional media editor or creator, but very people are that. Granted, any professional use of a computer other than making software is going to benefit from Windows. Professional software just targets Windows. That's on the creators of those packages, not the system itself. Whether it's CAD, media editors, the Adobe suite, software teams that charge for use don't like Linux. But they don't like it because people aren't using it. It's a chicken and egg problem. I'm not sure I actually agree with the ease of adding and moving Windows software, though. One of the big problems is it's often impossible to completely uninstall something. Applications quite frequently drop files all over the place that Windows Installer doesn't know about if it wasn't registered upon installation, and it's even worse if your "installation" doesn't use Windows installer at all and it just you copying an executable file somewhere. Did it leave data in %PROFILE%/LocalLow/AppData, %PROFILE%/Local/AppData, or %PROFILE%/Roaming/AppData, and what the heck is even the difference between those? Where is it putting logs? Where is it expecting config? Without any sort of filesystem hierarchy standard like Linux has, there is no way to know, and systems just gather cruft over the years to the point that common advice is periodically wipe your entire root filesystem and start from scratch.
cycomanic 5y ago
Except for the last sentence, most of this is wrong in some way or the other. >- About 90% of the (GUI) software ever developed? I'm happy to hear that there are quality Linux alternatives nowadays, but there's just many order of magnitudes more choice on Windows (and far less, but still more on Mac). For a lot of categories, this might change in the next decade (Electron and other cross-platform frameworks, tech like Proton) but for things like media editing or even image viewers, or until there is some tech to seamlessly emulate, this won't be a fight. I think this is highly subjective, sure if you need some specific piece of software (e.g. photoshop), but for everything else you are pretty much covered. In particular free software for common tasks like image viewing is much better on linux, on windows everyone uses some piece of software they received with some camera or similar, which is often unmaintained and riddled with bugs. > - Trivial app portability - I absolutely love the concept of portable Windows software. Have a single folder with configuration and binaries, that can run for sure anywhere (give or take a .Net/VisualC install) - and you can achieve this for 90%+ of all available apps. App binaries and configuration in the same folder? On my windows install there are lots of files in some subfolder o f C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\ and C:\Program Files\Common Files\ And finding the correct subfolder is not always trivial if you try to nuke your configuration. Mind you that is not necessarily easier in Linux either however things got better and more and more software adheres to the XDG standard locations. >With a some sync tool it's simple to have the same (as in reproducible/copiable) work environment on many machines (in the context of ad-hoc gui user applications). I know this concept isn't really transferable to Linux (separated locations per app, "just build from source") and there are attempts (Snap) but due to the fractured scene and #1 it's not that practical for end-users. Syncing your work environment over to a different computer is trivial in Linux compared to Windows (not that this is a very typical end-user work case either). Sure if you put a different distro on every computer it's not so easy, but why would you do that? >- Hardware compatibility - cool that you didn't have device issues, but this could be because you just don't use non-mainstream hardware. Even when I did, a lot of special functionality was bound to (Mac/Win) drivers. Sure, not Ubuntu's fault, but still. Yes you still run into the odd bit of hardware that doesn't work, but that's quite rare even on very recent laptops. This is also not a solved problem on windows either, if you don't use the pre-installed OS on your windows PC then installing a new version can result in quite a bit of chasing drivers. There are issues with Linux still, but the ones you listed are not among them IMO (and Windows isn't really better on this either). One of the things that I find annoying at times is that developers don't seem to consider upgrades to the configuration files when releasing new versions. After some upgrade the previously saved configuration doesn't work anymore, because the file format changed or parameter names changed or similar. While I suspect this happens in windows as well, it's more of a problem in Linux because one upgrades more frequently.
qwerty456127 5y ago
> About 90% of the (GUI) software ever developed? I'm happy to hear that there are quality Linux alternatives nowadays, but there's just many order of magnitudes more choice on Windows Most of the people don't need this though. I've migrated many individuals and middle offices from Windows to Ubuntu (for myself I prefer Manjaro though) starting from 2007. They only use Firefox/Chrome, Skype/Telegram, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, PDF&picture viewers and VLC (so it's not even about alternatives - all the essential apps already are cross-platform and even easier to install/update on Linux) and never asked any questions - everything feels intuitive and works great. WiFi used to be hard to set-up in 2007-2009 but not anymore. Printing and scanning works slightly unstable with some printers (mostly because they go to sleep and disappear or stop working in Ubuntu). The only Windows app I really miss on Linux is Paint.Net - to me it seems the ultimate perfect non-professional graphics editor while its Linux clone (Pinta) is slightly crappy, although does the job generally and I still am very grateful it exists. If only Linux also had full Visual Studio and Adobe Illustrator+Photoshop it would be hard for me to name a reason to use Windows at all. Most of the new apps I encountered during the recent years (e.g. Obsidian, Typora, MS Teams, etc.) just use Electron and work seamlessly on Linux as well as Windows and Mac this way (I know MS Teams is deprecating Electron and worry about this). The situation with games has also changed (to good) significantly during the recent years AFAIK and probably is even better than on the Mac OS now.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  VSCode is fine if you are doing .net core. Paint.NET is great though, its genuinely the only thing I miss at my debian machine.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    > VSCode is fine if you are doing .net core. I know. But it lacks ReSharper and I also just feel better and happen to be significantly more productive in the full Visual Studio because of its look-and-feel (this is a mild OCD-related phenomenon). VSCode also notably lacks visual WinForms designer (a thing I would actually pay to get on Linux) and many other features many programmers use. > Paint.NET is great though, its genuinely the only thing I miss at my debian machine Try Pinta really, if you still didn't. It's worse but does approximately the same job in the most of the use cases. I would feel really sad and do any hacking to return it if it would be discontinued.
qwerty456127 5y ago
> Trivial app portability - I absolutely love the concept of portable Windows software. Have a single folder with configuration and binaries, that can run for sure anywhere The Linux way of installing the apps is merely a convenient tradition. You can still put the app files anywhere and run. It will put its configuration files wherever the developer wanted them (conventionally the app dir is meant to be immutable and the files are meant to be stored under the user's home dir though). In fact many apps (incl. Chrome and PyCharm actually are installed the Windows way under /opt which is an equivalent to C:\Program Files\). > there are attempts (Snap) I actually hate this concept because it encourages duplication (same program files installed under different users) and adds performance overhead (often significant). So, when no traditional package is available I rather get an AppImage and just drop it in \opt (the downside is it won't automatically appear in the menus though so I have to create .desktop files and update the app itself manually). This also seems very bad for the office setting. I have dozens of employees set-up on dozens Ubuntu computers in the office and want a single-install/update to apply to everyone seamlessly. Now I see Firefox moved to Snap in Ubuntu 21.10 and this scares the shit out of me, but it's supposed to be possible to force it the traditional way in 21.10. They say they will move it to snap only in 22.04 though so I will probably abandon Ubuntu and switch to some distro which is not corrupted by this bullshit. This is sad as Ubuntu still is the most polished and muggle-friendly out of the box, their GNOME mod in particular.
- datenarsch 5y ago
  > The Linux way of installing the apps is merely a convenient tradition. You can still put the app files anywhere and run. It will put its configuration files wherever the developer wanted them (conventionally the app dir is meant to be immutable and the files are meant to be stored under the user's home dir though). In fact many apps (incl. Chrome and PyCharm actually are installed the Windows way under /opt which is an equivalent to C:\Program Files\). I don't think he was disputing the technical possibility of it. It doesn't help him from a user perspective though to know that this is merely a convention and not a technical limitation.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago

silisili 5y ago

Re 2: It's actually gotten a lot better. There exists Flatpak, AppImage, Snapd, and of course Docker on the 'container' front. A growing number of apps, probably due to Go, are just as you described - a binary you can run anywhere. I will say, I've been solely a Linux user for almost 20 years now, and still prefer the Windows structure as you described. I like the idea of applications in their own folder, with the binaries and configs and everything just there. In Linux, of course they are divided - confs go here, binaries go here, libraries here. The problem is that -here- isn't well defined. Directions for one distro don't necessarily translate directly to another wrt to locations.

mdp2021 5y ago

> Trivial app portability The "registry" is not an issue anymore?

poisonborz 5y ago
A negligible percentage of apps use the registry to store configuration, and even if, when missing, it's not an issue. If absolutely needed, conf can be easily exported/imported on a per app basis. What's far more common is to store stuff in AppData, but that can be synced as well (with a whitelist).
- nikau 5y ago
  I'm not sure how this is easier than just synching up your dotfiles on Linux
  - joombaga 5y ago
    You can do the same thing in Windows if the software supports dotfiles. There's plenty of Linux software that requires additional configuration beyond dotfiles.
    - cycomanic 5y ago
      Like?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
pjmlp 5y ago
Apparently an idea that GNOME thought it was worthwhile to copy.
- TingPing 5y ago
  DConf is great and not a 1:1. Also with flatpak apps store plain text configs privately and dconf is more of a system store now.

nonameiguess 5y ago

Some of this feels out of date. I've used a fair amount of what seems like obscure peripherals and they've all worked fine for at least a few years. That definitely was not the case in 2008 and desktop Linux was legitimately hell at times back then. As far as relocatable installs, this is entirely a choice on the part of distro maintainers and a consequence of how the packages are built. They can be built in a way that allows you to put them elsewhere, but it would defeat the purpose of having a package manager. Which makes me wonder, does winget support relocatable installs? I'm sure you can at least understand why Linux distros have chosen to do packaging this way. The killer app for Linux is server installs. It might be perfectly fine to allow users to move around software they've installed after first installing it on a single-user home PC, but it destroys the possibility of automation. A package manager can't know where the software is if it's constantly moving, meaning it can't upgrade or remove it without significant user interaction, which can't possibly scale to data centers full of servers. Different needs for different markets, unfortunately, but to me, even at home, this is an advantage of Linux, because I have many devices. I guess not being choose between hundreds of media viewers might matter if you're actually a professional media editor or creator, but very people are that. Granted, any professional use of a computer other than making software is going to benefit from Windows. Professional software just targets Windows. That's on the creators of those packages, not the system itself. Whether it's CAD, media editors, the Adobe suite, software teams that charge for use don't like Linux. But they don't like it because people aren't using it. It's a chicken and egg problem. I'm not sure I actually agree with the ease of adding and moving Windows software, though. One of the big problems is it's often impossible to completely uninstall something. Applications quite frequently drop files all over the place that Windows Installer doesn't know about if it wasn't registered upon installation, and it's even worse if your "installation" doesn't use Windows installer at all and it just you copying an executable file somewhere. Did it leave data in %PROFILE%/LocalLow/AppData, %PROFILE%/Local/AppData, or %PROFILE%/Roaming/AppData, and what the heck is even the difference between those? Where is it putting logs? Where is it expecting config? Without any sort of filesystem hierarchy standard like Linux has, there is no way to know, and systems just gather cruft over the years to the point that common advice is periodically wipe your entire root filesystem and start from scratch.

cycomanic 5y ago

Except for the last sentence, most of this is wrong in some way or the other. >- About 90% of the (GUI) software ever developed? I'm happy to hear that there are quality Linux alternatives nowadays, but there's just many order of magnitudes more choice on Windows (and far less, but still more on Mac). For a lot of categories, this might change in the next decade (Electron and other cross-platform frameworks, tech like Proton) but for things like media editing or even image viewers, or until there is some tech to seamlessly emulate, this won't be a fight. I think this is highly subjective, sure if you need some specific piece of software (e.g. photoshop), but for everything else you are pretty much covered. In particular free software for common tasks like image viewing is much better on linux, on windows everyone uses some piece of software they received with some camera or similar, which is often unmaintained and riddled with bugs. > - Trivial app portability - I absolutely love the concept of portable Windows software. Have a single folder with configuration and binaries, that can run for sure anywhere (give or take a .Net/VisualC install) - and you can achieve this for 90%+ of all available apps. App binaries and configuration in the same folder? On my windows install there are lots of files in some subfolder o f C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\ and C:\Program Files\Common Files\ And finding the correct subfolder is not always trivial if you try to nuke your configuration. Mind you that is not necessarily easier in Linux either however things got better and more and more software adheres to the XDG standard locations. >With a some sync tool it's simple to have the same (as in reproducible/copiable) work environment on many machines (in the context of ad-hoc gui user applications). I know this concept isn't really transferable to Linux (separated locations per app, "just build from source") and there are attempts (Snap) but due to the fractured scene and #1 it's not that practical for end-users. Syncing your work environment over to a different computer is trivial in Linux compared to Windows (not that this is a very typical end-user work case either). Sure if you put a different distro on every computer it's not so easy, but why would you do that? >- Hardware compatibility - cool that you didn't have device issues, but this could be because you just don't use non-mainstream hardware. Even when I did, a lot of special functionality was bound to (Mac/Win) drivers. Sure, not Ubuntu's fault, but still. Yes you still run into the odd bit of hardware that doesn't work, but that's quite rare even on very recent laptops. This is also not a solved problem on windows either, if you don't use the pre-installed OS on your windows PC then installing a new version can result in quite a bit of chasing drivers. There are issues with Linux still, but the ones you listed are not among them IMO (and Windows isn't really better on this either). One of the things that I find annoying at times is that developers don't seem to consider upgrades to the configuration files when releasing new versions. After some upgrade the previously saved configuration doesn't work anymore, because the file format changed or parameter names changed or similar. While I suspect this happens in windows as well, it's more of a problem in Linux because one upgrades more frequently.

qwerty456127 5y ago

> About 90% of the (GUI) software ever developed? I'm happy to hear that there are quality Linux alternatives nowadays, but there's just many order of magnitudes more choice on Windows Most of the people don't need this though. I've migrated many individuals and middle offices from Windows to Ubuntu (for myself I prefer Manjaro though) starting from 2007. They only use Firefox/Chrome, Skype/Telegram, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, PDF&picture viewers and VLC (so it's not even about alternatives - all the essential apps already are cross-platform and even easier to install/update on Linux) and never asked any questions - everything feels intuitive and works great. WiFi used to be hard to set-up in 2007-2009 but not anymore. Printing and scanning works slightly unstable with some printers (mostly because they go to sleep and disappear or stop working in Ubuntu). The only Windows app I really miss on Linux is Paint.Net - to me it seems the ultimate perfect non-professional graphics editor while its Linux clone (Pinta) is slightly crappy, although does the job generally and I still am very grateful it exists. If only Linux also had full Visual Studio and Adobe Illustrator+Photoshop it would be hard for me to name a reason to use Windows at all. Most of the new apps I encountered during the recent years (e.g. Obsidian, Typora, MS Teams, etc.) just use Electron and work seamlessly on Linux as well as Windows and Mac this way (I know MS Teams is deprecating Electron and worry about this). The situation with games has also changed (to good) significantly during the recent years AFAIK and probably is even better than on the Mac OS now.

smackeyacky 5y ago
VSCode is fine if you are doing .net core. Paint.NET is great though, its genuinely the only thing I miss at my debian machine.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > VSCode is fine if you are doing .net core. I know. But it lacks ReSharper and I also just feel better and happen to be significantly more productive in the full Visual Studio because of its look-and-feel (this is a mild OCD-related phenomenon). VSCode also notably lacks visual WinForms designer (a thing I would actually pay to get on Linux) and many other features many programmers use. > Paint.NET is great though, its genuinely the only thing I miss at my debian machine Try Pinta really, if you still didn't. It's worse but does approximately the same job in the most of the use cases. I would feel really sad and do any hacking to return it if it would be discontinued.

qwerty456127 5y ago

> Trivial app portability - I absolutely love the concept of portable Windows software. Have a single folder with configuration and binaries, that can run for sure anywhere The Linux way of installing the apps is merely a convenient tradition. You can still put the app files anywhere and run. It will put its configuration files wherever the developer wanted them (conventionally the app dir is meant to be immutable and the files are meant to be stored under the user's home dir though). In fact many apps (incl. Chrome and PyCharm actually are installed the Windows way under /opt which is an equivalent to C:\Program Files\). > there are attempts (Snap) I actually hate this concept because it encourages duplication (same program files installed under different users) and adds performance overhead (often significant). So, when no traditional package is available I rather get an AppImage and just drop it in \opt (the downside is it won't automatically appear in the menus though so I have to create .desktop files and update the app itself manually). This also seems very bad for the office setting. I have dozens of employees set-up on dozens Ubuntu computers in the office and want a single-install/update to apply to everyone seamlessly. Now I see Firefox moved to Snap in Ubuntu 21.10 and this scares the shit out of me, but it's supposed to be possible to force it the traditional way in 21.10. They say they will move it to snap only in 22.04 though so I will probably abandon Ubuntu and switch to some distro which is not corrupted by this bullshit. This is sad as Ubuntu still is the most polished and muggle-friendly out of the box, their GNOME mod in particular.

datenarsch 5y ago
> The Linux way of installing the apps is merely a convenient tradition. You can still put the app files anywhere and run. It will put its configuration files wherever the developer wanted them (conventionally the app dir is meant to be immutable and the files are meant to be stored under the user's home dir though). In fact many apps (incl. Chrome and PyCharm actually are installed the Windows way under /opt which is an equivalent to C:\Program Files\). I don't think he was disputing the technical possibility of it. It doesn't help him from a user perspective though to know that this is merely a convention and not a technical limitation.
- qwerty456127 5y ago