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Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by mastazi on Saturday September 28, 2019 @09:42PM (#21104436)
The reason why I feel like I’m stuck is based on my personal use case. Basically I need two things:

A. Being able to use some proprietary software not available on Linux

B. Being able to self build so I can select the HW that works for me

With Linux I lose A and with Mac I would lose B. I’m thinking that a combo Mac Mini + Tower PC with Linux could work, but using two OSes at the same time, even with shared NAS, KVM switch etc., would not be the best in terms of UX

(Edit I had mixed up “A” and “B” in my sentence)

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by viraptor on Saturday September 28, 2019 @11:26PM (#21104847)
What about C: use Linux for the main desktop, use Wine for things that require Windows, use a VM with windows exclusively to launch that one annoying app which won't work under wine?
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by mastazi on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:48AM (#21105140)
Oh yes of course that’s the cheapest option and probably good for most use cases, in my specific case I was thinking about a Mac Mini because some of the proprietary SW that I use (Adobe Suite, Ableton Live) probably wouldn’t run very well in a VM (but I may be wrong and I will of course test before spending money)

Edit: besides the VM, I hear Wine supports many apps nowadays so it’s worth trying as well

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by input_sh on Sunday September 29, 2019 @02:51AM (#21105534)
Look up Bitwig studio as a replacement for Ableton Live. I know it's an expensive tool to replace, but its workflow is very similar to Ableton Live and it supports Linux.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by mastazi on Sunday September 29, 2019 @07:11AM (#21106391)
Oh of course, I like Bitwig very much! The modular engine ("Grid") is great! But I have a lot of material from the past in Live so, even if I switch to Bitwig, I may still need to use Live from time to time. But I guess a Win VM would suffice for that type of usage.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by fnenrjfkdke on Sunday September 29, 2019 @07:51AM (#21106506)
Can confirm, was able to run Live 9 on W7 in VirtualBox on ~decade-old hardware earlier this year. It was easy and worked like a charm. Was running Arch Linux at the time, and used the VM images from here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by rtisdale on Sunday September 29, 2019 @08:15AM (#21106599)
How was the latency?

I'd like to achieve sub 10ms latency and I feel running in a VM would make that very difficult?

Did USB passthrough for MIDI devices work well?

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by rtisdale on Sunday September 29, 2019 @08:14AM (#21106595)
Producer here as well. I currently dual boot.

I've considered bitwig for Linux production but a big issue is you end up losing a lot of VSTs that aren't native to Linux (Serum and Massive, both wavetable synths, are a good example).

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by aldanor on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:54AM (#21106155)
+1, that's what I'm doing.

iMac for everything, including development and music production; Windows and Linux virtualised and resumable in a few seconds if needed.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by tanr54ok on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:05AM (#21104996)
There isn’t just one app, there are plenty. Excel and adobe cs are the obvious ones. If you’re not in programming (exclusively) you’re stuck on Windows or Mac.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by viraptor on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:19AM (#21105056)
Latest excel has gold level support: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...

I know there are plenty of things that don't work with wine, but realistically, how many of them does each person need to work, and how many are "defaults"? For example if you spend 90% of your time in illustrator, do you need excel specifically, or "an app with text in cells"? And if you're crunching market data in excel all day, do you need Adobe, or just something to draw an arrow on a screenshot?

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by dkersten on Sunday September 29, 2019 @04:11AM (#21105813)
I had a similar discussion with my mother recently. She was buying a new laptop and went to check it out in the shop a few days before she actually went to buy it. The lady in the shop on the first visit tried to upsell her some office package for some crazy money. I instead got her to think about what she actually needs and wants and got her to realize that for the odd document or letter she writes and prints (and doesn't share files with others where pixel perfect formatting is important), so a copy of Libre Office actually does everything she needs and then some, and saved her, I don't remember how much, $200 or something.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by yyyk on Sunday September 29, 2019 @08:02AM (#21106552)
If I had a penny for every time a 'Gold level' supported program simply failed to work properly or required some nearly undocumented workaround* , I'd be rich.

* No, I don't consider having to search bugzilla 'documentation'.

Edit: Note that I'm talking about Wine here. When wine is wrapped by people who know what they're doing it works well - Crossweavers/Proton etc. - for the specific subset of programs they're tuned for. Otherwise you have all the wine-typical issues outside that subset.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Sunday September 29, 2019 @10:15AM (#21107148)
Right? Don't get me wrong, that Wine works at all is pretty damned incredible, but anyone who thinks of it as a drop in Windows replacement is going to be severely disappointed.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by jodrellblank on Sunday September 29, 2019 @07:05AM (#21106365)
> Latest excel has gold level support

"The test results for this version are very old"

"What works: "Basic editing of the slides (inserting and formatting texts, images)""

"What was not tested: "Advanced functionality""

----

Nobody has tested it recently, nobody knows if "advanced" features work, and they think it's PowerPoint. What does 'Gold' mean?

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by viraptor on Sunday September 29, 2019 @07:50AM (#21106498)
> Nobody has tested it recently

Whatever worked is highly unlikely to stop working. You can expect better support than in past test.

> What does 'Gold' mean?

https://wiki.winehq.org/AppDB_Rating_Definitions

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by mikestew on Sunday September 29, 2019 @09:57AM (#21107052)
Whatever worked is highly unlikely to stop working.

New to software development, are we? That is such a laughably bad assumption that I’ll assume what I think you meant to say is not really what you meant to say.

But I’m glad to know that editing slides works just fine in Excel. From the link, “Gold” means: “Works as well as (or better than) on Windows with workarounds.” The test results say online login crashes. That tells me their certification program doesn’t mean shit.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by viraptor on Sunday September 29, 2019 @03:53PM (#21109274)
It's not a certification program. It's just reporting system.

And yes, it is what I meant. For software like wine, if something works in version X, you can expect it will work in X+1. Sure, there will always be some regression from time to time, but wine's whole existence is based on the idea that they support Window's APIs. These are not random features they'll decide to remove from time to time.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by braindeath on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:42PM (#21109792)
> For software like wine, if something works in version X, you can expect it will work in X+1.

Anyone that expects this is setting themselves up for disappointment.

My actual experience with this has not matched yours. Wine is extremely fragile. There is a reason why things like winetricks and using dedicated wine prefixes exists, for one.

This is not a knock on wine really, but the complexity of the problem at hand.

> These are not random features they'll decide to remove from time to time.

Emulating windows APIs is extremely complicated. Even with the best intentions of not breaking something it happens, quite a bit.

You are extremely naive.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by tanr54ok on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:58PM (#21108151)
The crowd on HN is biased towards software development, something overwhelmingly well supported on Linux (it’s my daily driver as much as possible for that). But I assume there is a long tail of other professionals here... using their systems for actual industry work that isn’t programming. An area that is terrible on Linux sadly.

Photoshop and Illustrator and Premiere are not “defaults” on any system I know of. If you need to draw an arrow on a screenshot, there are ironically more free beer and open source programs available on Windows to do this (even gimp). If someone wants to pirate adobe that isn’t an aspiring designer (which is sort of a rite of passage), and has it just to collect that’s cool, but irrelevant... but I assume if someone has the CS on their machine it’s to do actual work with industry standard tools - that certainly is the case for me.

There are plenty of things to do in Excel that are best served by excel and not crunching market data. I have tried libreoffice calc multiple times in the past. Google sheets is also cool for certain things, but no excel killer.

And here’s the kicker: If you need to just put arrows on screenshots or an app with text in cells (and you’re not a dev), then you don’t need a desktop running Linux or windows... you can do with an iPad.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by amaccuish on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:58PM (#21108150)
That's not the latest excel, which would be Excel 2019.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by rk06 on Sunday September 29, 2019 @02:23AM (#21105460)
You got those examples and mixed up
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by bgorman on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:29AM (#21105088)
Wine works remarkably well these days. You can even run the latest Microsoft Office version.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by braindeath on Sunday September 29, 2019 @03:33PM (#21109173)
No, you cannot. You cannot run Excel 2019 flawlessly or even close to it with Wine.

And https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

A garbage rating for the latest installer also means that even if you could run things, the workflow is not seamless.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by dkersten on Sunday September 29, 2019 @04:05AM (#21105795)
A lot of businesses I know seem to be using Office365 for Word and Excel and such nowadays and they work fine in Linux. If you happen to work somewhere that uses Office365, there's no need for actually running Windows or Mac.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by ageofwant on Sunday September 29, 2019 @04:45AM (#21105921)
Office365 takes care of Excell and Outlook and most everything MS.

You can get very far with Gimp and or Inkscape. I'm going to suggest that the majority of Adobe users will get by just fine with Gimp.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by braindeath on Sunday September 29, 2019 @03:44PM (#21109240)
> You can get very far with Gimp and or Inkscape.

> I'm going to suggest that the majority of Adobe users will get by just fine with Gimp.

Well, frankly, your suggestion is useless. Not even the maintainers of gimp have the temerity to suggest that Gimp is a suitable replacement for Adobe photoshop. I don't care about the "users" of Adobe that pirate it. The tools are expensive and people pay for it. The majority of people that pay for Adobe Photoshop have very good reasons for doing so.

You are clueless if you think Gimp can replace Photoshop. You can do a little research to see why, it's well documented. Morons have been suggesting Gimp as a PS replacement since the late 90s and there is now nearly 20 years of responses for why that is untenable.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by darklajid on Sunday September 29, 2019 @02:26AM (#21105470)
I'm thinking of going down that route, but for various reasons I NEED Outlook and Office a lot, although my main work is development and could work on another platform.

If you do this (as I did in the past) you're now juggling N Windows VMs to avoid ONE Windows host system..

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by viraptor on Sunday September 29, 2019 @02:54AM (#21105545)
Why N VMs? You had one before, you can have one VM with multiple apps (if you can even count office parts as multiple apps)
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by darklajid on Sunday September 29, 2019 @04:44AM (#21105917)
Sorry, kinda mixed the "Need office" requirement I wrote about and my previous "Different VMs for different needs" (Office was one, a Windows product I build extensions for was in another, then the corporate environment tends to keep VMware images around to simulate a customer environment / to prepare a demo system for sales etc etc).

You're right. One VM could work for office and other utilities. Unfortunately for me it grew into a mess of VMs, fast.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by snagglegaggle on Sunday September 29, 2019 @03:06PM (#21108998)
If you can set up stuff in Windows VM, you can enable RemoteApp and freerdp can just show a seamless window. Kind of like parallels.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by fnenrjfkdke on Sunday September 29, 2019 @07:53AM (#21106515)
I think Qubes OS targets your use case. It has support for Windows 7 although I never got around to trying it out.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by CRConrad on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:40AM (#21106096)
How about the Office / Outlook Web interfaces, shouldn't they be usable from any OS?
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by mastazi on Sunday September 29, 2019 @09:36AM (#21106944)
They don’t handle well some edge cases, for example I had Word documents with complex layouts that would be broken and partially unreadable when using the web version of Word.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by mappu on Saturday September 28, 2019 @10:17PM (#21104584)
If your proprietary product is in any way niche (i.e. not the usual adobe/autocad example) I would suggest petitioning the company to support Linux (or web) clients. Software developers are often pro-Linux and a few customer suggestions might be enough to force the issue.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by mastazi on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:51AM (#21105153)
Oh yes that is always a good thing to do, even though Linux is not currently my main OS, I always tell devs they should support it.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by ViViDboarder on Saturday September 28, 2019 @10:19PM (#21104589)
You could go the hackintosh route. Though I haven’t tried it in a decade or more, I’ve seen some people with pretty cool setups. Certainly more work to maintain than just Linux or an official Mac.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by lasagnaphil on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:11AM (#21105025)
Recently hackintoshed a XPS 15 9550, and holy shit it became the best laptop I’ve used so far. Everything (including bluetooth and wifi) works, no butterfly keyboard shenanigans, still decent performance, lots of ports (including hdmi and usb 3), the touchpad works perfectly (with all multitouch gestures).
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by arbol on Sunday September 29, 2019 @06:17AM (#21106218)
I don't suppose you have a link to a write up or guide you followed?
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by lasagnaphil on Monday September 30, 2019 @02:43AM (#21112329)
Here: https://github.com/wmchris/DellXPS15-9550-OSX

By the way, it doesn’t support discrete GPU, but Nvidia GPU performace in the XPS 15 is horrible due to heavy throttling anyway.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by vetinari on Sunday September 29, 2019 @01:02PM (#21108181)
Try r/hackintosh vanilla guide. You may find, that other guides are refering to old/obsolete tools, and thus will not work with current macOS.

Also expect learning new things and spending several evenings trying. Compared to hackintosh, installing Linux on random hardware is a walk in the park.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by Wowfunhappy on Sunday September 29, 2019 @02:53PM (#21108922)
> Also expect learning new things and spending several evenings trying. Compared to hackintosh, installing Linux on random hardware is a walk in the park.

I've been a Hackintosh user for the past decade.

I've not done it yet, but the next time I need to do a brand new Hackintosh setup, I'm planning on using ESXI. It seems perfect—you're getting very little performance loss in exchange for a setup which is (kind of) officially supported by Apple.

Maybe when I actually do it, I'll discover some terrible downside, but it seems incredibly appealing.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by vetinari on Sunday September 29, 2019 @03:11PM (#21109033)
I did my first hackintosh few days ago just for the learning experience, I have normal Macs otherwise. It does have a problem with flickering screen; I suspect it is due to 10-bits per pixel that I cannot switch from and the cheap HDMI2 cable used.

Wrt ESXI - are you aware, that with ESXI you will lose local console (and all the GPU-goodness)? After ESXI boots, it has only text-mode notice, how to connect remotely and that's it. You will be stuck with remote access. For things like build machine or test-runner, that's fine, but if you want to run something interactive... well, let us know about the experience ;)

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by Wowfunhappy on Sunday September 29, 2019 @03:28PM (#21109147)
I'm pretty sure I can do GPU passthrough? https://blogs.vmware.com/apps/2018/09/using-gpus-with-virtua...
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by vetinari on Sunday September 29, 2019 @03:32PM (#21109165)
Yeah, that's an option, too.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by op00to on Sunday September 29, 2019 @07:10AM (#21106385)
Hey, how do you know those hacked kexts you have to install to get macOS on a non apple machine don’t contain a keylogger?
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by thelittleone on Sunday September 29, 2019 @07:00PM (#21110179)
Any problems along the way with updates, performance issues or anything?

I’m interested in a new XPS 15 but prefer Mac OS.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by mastazi on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:56AM (#21105173)
Thank you, yes I’ve actually tried that route in the past and I’ve enjoyed it but, as you said, it was a bit of a chore to maintain it
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by op00to on Sunday September 29, 2019 @07:07AM (#21106374)
You could also install untrusted, untested, potentially hostile code running at the highest privileges levels if you go the hackintosh route.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by snagglegaggle on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:43AM (#21105126)
Maybe is not appropriate to "convert" you here, but I recommend self building so you get good Linux support, and then running Windows in a VM. Usually you can run program in WINE, but VM should always work.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by mastazi on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:53AM (#21105164)
Thank you. I’m hearing from many other comments in this thread that Wine works very well nowadays, I’ll give it a shot (alongside a Win VM) before investing in a Mac Mini
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by spc476 on Sunday September 29, 2019 @07:03PM (#21110196)
I use the combo Mac Mini and PC tower at home. The crucial piece of software that makes this work for me is Synergy. It allows you to share a keyboard and mouse across Linux, Mac and Windows (and support cut-n-paste of text across all three). It works like a charm.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by craftyguy on Saturday September 28, 2019 @10:16PM (#21104580)
> A. Being able to use some proprietary software not available on Linux

What software is this? Perhaps it runs under Wine?

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by mastazi on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:54AM (#21105165)
Adobe Suite, Ableton Live with various VST plugins. I’m going to investigate the Wine route, as I’m hearing that it supports many applications nowadays
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by Nux on Sunday September 29, 2019 @04:07AM (#21105805)
None of the Adobe stuff works under Wine, alas.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by paulcarroty on Sunday September 29, 2019 @09:57AM (#21107049)
Fake news!

Use latest PS and Lr.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by tanr54ok on Sunday September 29, 2019 @08:44PM (#21110775)
I’m not saying you’re wrong. But winedb gives garbage status to the latest, the installer on playonlinux is unverified and posted by a banned account. I have found no testimonial that the latest works now other than yours.

So here’s the thing. Even if you’re right (and not confusing some older version as the latest.. that often happens in these discussions... what do you think is the latest version of adobe CC?), this is a terrible support story and not something that most pros that rely on adobe tools want to mess around with.

One of the winedb reviews says this:

“adjusting parameters in some effects such as lens blur makes program unusable (must kill app)”

Wonderful.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by paulcarroty on Monday September 30, 2019 @07:10AM (#21113840)
> playonlinux is unverified

playonlinux is dead last two years, authors decided to rewrite it.

> what do you think is the latest version of adobe CC?

2019.

About 1star reviews - guest mostly people are confused about installer, it doesn't works for years.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by tanr54ok on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @08:00PM (#21142125)
As I already mentioned even if it is just the installer that alone sets the tone for a poor support story.

Additionally what of the various bugs that are filed and comments about missing or broken functionality.

This is not something that most professionals want to dick with.

Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by rocho on Sunday September 29, 2019 @01:10AM (#21105229)
If you have enough RAM you can run VirtualBox alongside your other programs on Linux. I used to run Android Studio in a Windows VirtualBox and it worked perfectly. Never had an issue.
Re:Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option wh... by chopin on Sunday September 29, 2019 @05:35AM (#21106077)
I run that with no problems in Linux.