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As an article this starts well but descends into the usual denial of commercial reality you see from Linux enthusiasts. The reason why you can get your 70 year

As an article this starts well but descends into the usual denial of commercial reality you see from Linux enthusiasts. The reason why you can get your 70 year old mother, or my 75 year old father in law to use Linux is because for their use case it is good enough and the best operating system is the one that a) meets your needs and b) you are used to. For me that is Windows. It could be macOS (except for games), but it isn't, because I'm not used to it so find it frustrating. It can't be Linux because I do a lot of intensive image manipulation, digital sculpting and CAD and frankly gimp et. al are terrible compared to photoshop, Zbrush is a none starter (yes Blender is good, I develop addons for it, no it's not a replacement for zbrush), fusion360, catia etc. not a chance to get them working properly and the open source alternatives are like going back to the 90s. The idea that major games companies should spend 10s or 100s of millions to develop games just for Linux isn't commercially viable. I mean why would They do this? They don't have any kind of emotional investment in Foss which is the only real motivator. They would go broke AND they would get attacked by every other Linux user because the game wasn't free (as in beer and as in speech).

throwawayboise 5y ago
Relatively few people do intensive image manipulation requiring photoshop. If an iPad or Chromebook is good enough (and for many people, it is) then a Linux distro with a sensible desktop certainly is.
mariusor 5y ago
You seem to be blaming linux users for vendors' lack of interest in launching the software you want for the linux platform. It's not their fault. Nobody really expects Adobe or Epic to launch their products just on linux, but in today's age when a game gets shipped to multiple platforms and Photoshop has OSX and Windows versions, what's one more platform to add to the build matrix? Granted linux is not exactly a single uniform platform, the market is small, and the users are the most vocal about submitting issues. However Valve proved it can be done, and other vendors are just hiding their laziness with "market share" excuses. And to your last point, to my knowledge nobody is really up in arms against Valve because "closed source" because if you want to support a open source OS you inadvertently contribute to the ecosystem one way or another, and their work with Proton and flatpak and Steam OS is more than worth it. Edit: I guess I should have read TFA before replying to you, but as a linux user of almost 20 years I disagree with some of the fringe opinions in it, as you can tell from what I wrote. :D

throwawayboise 5y ago

Relatively few people do intensive image manipulation requiring photoshop. If an iPad or Chromebook is good enough (and for many people, it is) then a Linux distro with a sensible desktop certainly is.

mariusor 5y ago

You seem to be blaming linux users for vendors' lack of interest in launching the software you want for the linux platform. It's not their fault. Nobody really expects Adobe or Epic to launch their products just on linux, but in today's age when a game gets shipped to multiple platforms and Photoshop has OSX and Windows versions, what's one more platform to add to the build matrix? Granted linux is not exactly a single uniform platform, the market is small, and the users are the most vocal about submitting issues. However Valve proved it can be done, and other vendors are just hiding their laziness with "market share" excuses. And to your last point, to my knowledge nobody is really up in arms against Valve because "closed source" because if you want to support a open source OS you inadvertently contribute to the ecosystem one way or another, and their work with Proton and flatpak and Steam OS is more than worth it. Edit: I guess I should have read TFA before replying to you, but as a linux user of almost 20 years I disagree with some of the fringe opinions in it, as you can tell from what I wrote. :D