News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share. Parent comment

Re:After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share by jdietrich on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @07:28AM (#36679472)
A lot of people are stuck on Windows or MacOS because of one killer app - Photoshop, a CAD/CAM package, a video or audio editor, or some proprietary bit of business software. Many of these applications have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of dev time invested in them and it just isn't realistic to expect an open source alternative to compete.

I'm in that boat, but I don't especially mind. I run Windows because it allows me to run Fusion 360, but Windows Subsystem for Linux gives me a full Linux dev environment. A younger me would have got angry about it, but present me accepts that platform lock-in effects are very strong; fortunately for Linux, it dominates every new category of platform. I sincerely doubt that anyone will ever develop a new proprietary OS from scratch, because the business case for putting a pretty UI on Linux is overwhelming.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share by resolutebat on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @07:39AM (#36679571)
Sure but we were talking about students at schools here, where this is usually not a problem.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share by deadbyte on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @08:51AM (#36680257)
I hope that Photopea (browser-based Photoshop) can gain traction to break that dependency.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share by RAM-bunctious on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @07:49PM (#36688695)
I know the evidence is that plenty of people are totally happy with applications running in a browser -- Office Online, Google Sheets, etc. are compelling evidence -- but I strongly prefer dedicated and native applications for something I'll be spending a lot of time using.

I'm not even necessarily blaming this on the performance difference, although that is a pertinent topic, but just the mental structure of something I'm using living in a browser tab rather than actually running on the computer.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share by vengefulduck on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @09:24PM (#36689382)
Installable web apps would give you a workaround for that wouldn’t it?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share by pjmlp on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @03:47AM (#36691531)
They are still bound by the constraints of the Web.

For example WebGL 2.0 (2009 hardware), WebGPU (2015 hardware), any GPU capabilities after 2015? You ain't going to get them.

[ Parent | on HN ]