E.g. "I'm going to go to the beach all day" and "I'm going to keep my job" are both likely the results of ideal type wants whereas "I'm going to go to my job today and then the beach tonight" would likely be the result of a constrained want.

One of the boons of console hardware is also the strict execution environment that is presented on the system. While this of course doesn't prevent all cheating behavior in online games, a large selling point of it as a platform to publishers is not only the market segment available, but the security aspects of the runtime environment.

https://www.protondb.com/

Scrolling to Medals, 50% of all 25.000+ games tracked by the site are playable, either working perfectly or mostly (Platinum or Gold ratings). Another 20% can be alright under specific circumstances, and with compromises (Silver rating).

At some point, Proton users reported success using some patch, then that stopped working, then there was a different patch... A lot of user reports say "thumbs up" then have a comment explaining how it goes out-of-sync unless you fiddle with it, so it's hard to trust.

Seems the root of the problem is this game's picky netcode, which is similar to the original 1998 game I played as a kid. If your game state diverges from the other players' at all, it goes oos and ends the game for everyone. And yes this happened often enough that people had an abbreviation for it.

Oos can till happen, but as you said it can also happen on Windows, hard to blame Wine for that.

Since gold means "works as good as Windows with workarounds" I think that's a correct rating.

Also, "gold" should mean that it works by default, not that you have to patch in a DLL. The only place the site even says "playable with tweaks" is in a tooltip if you hover over the gold symbol, right above a separate list of details that doesn't mention tweaks. I didn't even know until now.

We can argue all day over what a rating means, but if it would work without a tweak I'd say it should be rated platinum. (The only other thing I know is missing is Xbox live login, but I don't really care about that)

That was as far as I was able to take it. Another much more skilled dev at CW dug in a lot deeper and wrote a blog post about it[1], but as far as I know the problem remains unsolved.

[1] https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/rbernon/2022/9/12/ucrtcring...

For a practical solution, just using the Windows dlls seems to work fine. Without AoE2:DE goes out of sync immediately, with I've played hour long games.

Anyway it'd be great if the game devs included their own math libraries instead of relying on the OS's. That would fix the problem quite nicely.

One problem that was unsolved last time I checked: Saving highlight videos. It used to work if you told Overwatch to use webm format instead of mp4, but Blizzard broke that somewhere along the line, possibly in the transition to Overwatch 2. (I worked around this with OBS Studio and its replay buffer feature.)

Anything "denied" won't work ever unless they change their minds. Anything "broken" is...well...broken.

The former ran slowly at low settings, with the occasional complete single digit slowdown. On the same laptop in Windows 10, it ran medium settings and easily twice the frame rate, no issues.

The latter wouldn't connect to multiplayer, and would occasionally just crash out.

(Comment written from memory, but I enshrined my experiment here: https://retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm )

i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again.

then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again.

then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again.

now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file because we run a psql container in a different way under wsl... let's see how long we endure until saying never again.

No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.

Totally hear you though for things like CNC milling software that's meant to stay static for the lifetime of the mill - that's not going anywhere.

The compromise of using SaaS in the cloud in lieu of regular, native software, is affecting both you and society directly.

It doesn't have to be slow and bad, that's just a ""skill issue"" (poor prioritization by the companies making it).

How do Deepin and such solve this?

How many months can you use a Linux desktop to do daily externally mandated processes and not drop down to a bash shell at some point?

Average consumers and users do not want to use the unix utilities that Linux people love so much. Hell, developers barely want to use classic unix utilities to solve problems.

Users do not know what a "mount point" is. Users do not want a case sensitive file system. Users do not want an OOM killer that solves a poor design choice by randomly culling important applications at high utilization.

Users do not care for something that was designed in the 60s before we understood things like interface design and refuses to update or improve due to some weird insistence on unix purity.

Users do not care about ABI stability. They care about using the apps they need to use. That means your platform has to be very easy to support, Linux is not at all easy to support, and at least part of that is a weird entitlement Linux users feel and demonstrate in your support queue.

Hilariously, users DO WANT a centralized app repository for most day to day apps! Linux had this forever, though it had mediocre ergonomics and it was way too easy for an average computer user to manage to nuke their system as Linus Sebastian found out in a very unfortunate timing situation. Linux never managed to turn this potential victory into anything meaningful, because you often had to drop into a bash shell to fix, undo, modify, or whatever an install!

Assumming everything is setup the way I usually do when someone asks me for a new Windows PC (Setup an account, install basic utilities, Office suite, automatic updates, etc)

More or less everything

- ThunderBird + OnlyOffice is close enough for regular usage (Coming from Outlook + Office)

- Flatpaks and system updates are on the background by default and only take when you restart, so they're more or less invisible (And for someone else, I'll usually do the oldest channel available, maybe even the CentOS based LTS when that's out of beta)

- Discord, Teams, Stuff like that is electron based anyway

- Steam for games is reasonably good (Depending on your library, Everything in mine works, but not everything in my wishlist)

- Windows only utilities are on a case by case basis (Depending on the program, they'll usually call me to procure it, because god knows, no sane person wants to deal with the likes of adobe)

For the sake of transparency, I would use the CLI to setup quite a lot, but I wouldn't expect them to use it for anything

I actually switched to Linux full-time when Starfield wouldn’t run on Windows but worked in Proton. We are now in a world where Valve provides a more sable Windows API than Microsoft. The only limitation now is anti-cheat but that’s a political problem, not a technical one.

I guess you meant Linux here

For a gamer... still not quite, but very close.

For the corps ... it's a legacy issue, but that may slip away as a side effect of Trump destroying global soft power and making it a hard sell to remain on a US led platform, purely op sec concerns, the spyware issue will add more weight to that.

I've been using windows since I was 6 or 7. I currently work in a Mac environment and hate it. I worked in a linux one for 5 years. Nothing feels like the first language you learned I guess?

My home computer is windows and it'll be that way until windows stops existing.

Switched my main Linux and desktop environment multiple times as well.

Yeah, the spyware is annoying and stupid. But once you strip it out (it can be removed/blocked), Windows 11 is absolutely rock solid.

I'm convinced that many these people saying Nvidia has serious issues on Linux must be (by no fault of their own) going by habit and downloading the driver installer .bin from the Nvidia website and trying to install drivers that way. So yes, if you do that you're going to have issues.

Learn to do things the way your distro does them (use a package manager) and most problems go away.

It's MOSTLY painless. Some GNOME extensions seem to randomly hang everything on startup (I'm currently investigating which ones, I believe Dash to Dock and/or Unite are to blame) and there's a weird issue with VR when streaming via ALVR: SteamVR launches, but games crash unless I disable the second monitor (no such issues with WiVRn, so not entirely sure if it's a driver problem or not)

Besides that in my daily driving I saw no other issues.

Their GTX series cards all used proprietary blobs that required unmanageable device specific interfaces.

Starting from the RTX series cards, they still have proprietary blobs but instead of having device specific interfaces, they all use a shared public interface which makes compatibility and performance much better.

It's not across the board, but there are instances of gaming benchmarks showing more performance under linux than windows.

Now, it's been barely a couple of months since I reinstalled Ubuntu, and a couple of weeks since I found out the latest release runs even worse, so this is new to me. I don't plan to use Windows at home ever again, so I could sell my GPU and buy AMD, but so far I'm simply disappointed.

And the subsystems concept was quite common in micro-computers and mainframes space, Microsoft did not come up with the idea for Windows.

It got actually somewhat usable with the 2k/XP version, slightly better in Vista (notably: the utilities installer had option to use bash a default shell) and IIRC with 7 MS even again mentioned existence of the thing in marketing (with some cool new name for the thing).

I am aware it got much better later on, but given the way it was introduced, the mess with third party integrations, as Microsoft always outsourced the development effort (MKS, Interix,..), it never got people to care about afterwards.

First impressions matter most.

As there is another alternative one where Microsoft doesn't sell Xenix and keeps pushing for it, as Bill Gates was actually a big fan of.

IIS and SQL Server (Win) boxes are fairly typical, still.

[1]: In fact, Active Directory was specifically targeted by EU antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.

If Microsoft had wanted, Windows could have officially been Unix too-they could have licensed the test suite, run it under their POSIX/SFU/SUA subsystem, fixed the failures, paid the fee-and then Windows would be a Unix. They never did-not (as far as I’m aware) for any technical reason, simply because as a matter of business strategy, they decided not to invest in this.

Whatever computer people would be getting at the local shopping mall computer store already had UNIX support.

Lets also not forget that UNIX and C won over the competing on timesharing OSes, exactly because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it in first place, there was no Linux on those days, and had AT&T not sued BSD, hardly anyone would have paid attention to Linux, yet another what-if.

Also feels a lot less intrusive for light terminal work.

I probably would, in this context. Well, maybe not WinME, because that was a dumpster fire. But any Windows coming down from NT line, which is what's relevant in the past 20 years, sure. Same bucket.

But WSL2 is freaking incredible, I'm super excited to see this and just wish the rest of windows would move to a Linux kernel and support bash natively everywhere. I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine

The whole point of Windows right now is having a kernel that a) does not shove GPL down the device manufacturer's throat and b) care about driver API stability so that drivers actually work without manufacturer or maintaner intervention every kernel upgrade.

And thanks to no ABI/API stability guarantees, Linux can innovate and doesn't care about what others might say. Considering Linux is developed mostly by companies today, the standard upkeep of a driver is not a burden unless you want to shove planned obsolescence down the throats of the consumers (cough Win11 TPM requirements cough).

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

https://creativecommons.org/faq/#is-creative-commons-against...

Closed source is protected in other ways besides copyright. Trade secrets, confidentiality, NDA, proprietary ownership, obfuscation, and in the case of hardware, big globs of epoxy and other countermeasures to ensure nobody can get in and reverse-engineer it.

While I'm a strong Free Software proponent, I'm not a zealot and insist on a black or white approach.

Yes, some software can be closed source, I agree, but it shouldn't be the bedrock software, i.e. anything required to enable hardware (firmware, OS, and preferably the utilities).

For the record, I'm paying for a couple closed source software packages on Linux which provide very unique feature s. These are inSync and Pagico.

On top of that, you can always sell GPL software (remember, you shall ship the source with the product. opening it it to everyone is not a requirement). On top of it, you can sell support or special versions. curl has a special version for paying customers, and ccid driver developers sell ccid compliance testing.

So, there are always alternatives, and the reality has more shades of gray than two distinct colors.

I was working as a freelancer wher a lot of my job meant interfacing with files other people made in Software that only runs reliably on Windows or Mac (and I tried regularly).

So WSL provided me with a way to run Linux stuff without having to run a fat VM or dual boot. In fact my experience with WSL is probably why I run Linux as my daily driver OS in academia now, since here the context differs and a switch to Linux was possible.

Whether a thing is useful is always dependent on the person and the context. WSL can absolutely be a gateway drug to Linux for those who haven't managed to get their feet wet just yet.

We tend to forget that "Horses for Courses" and "Your Mileage May Vary" applies way broader than we think.

But you're asking the wrong question. It should be "why not use MacOS?" if you need a stable UI with UNIX underneath :).

Other than that, macOS plus some tools (Fileduck, Forklift, Tower, Kaleidoscope to name a few), you can be 99% there.

I use macos as my daily driver, but any real work on it happens on a linux container or VM. Using one of {cursor, vscode, windsurf} with a devcontainer is a much better approach for me.

Why not both? Like me?

It depends on what you're doing. PowerShell is incredible for Windows sysadmin, and the way it pipes objects between commands rather than text makes it really easy to compose pretty advanced operations.

However, if I'm doing text manipulation, wrangling logs, etc, then yes, absolutely I'm going to use a *nix scripting language.

It's good. But if/when you start using it as your main work platform nagging issues start cropping up. The native linux filesystem inside it cannot actually reclaim space. This isn't very noticeable if you aren't doing intensive things in it, or if you are using it as a throwaway test bed. But if you are really using it, you have to do things like zero out a bunch of space on the WSL disk and then compact it from outside in the Windows OS. Using space from your NTFS partition / drive isn't very usable, the performance is horrible and you can't do things like put your docker graph root in there as it is incompatible. It also doesn't respect capitalization or permissions and I've had to troubleshoot very subtle bugs because of that. Another issue is raw network and device access, it basically isn't possible. Some of these things are likely beyond the intended use of WSL2, in its defense. Just be aware before you start heavily investing your workflow in it. For these use cases a traditional dual boot will work far better and save you much frustration.

But VMware still excels at running desktop Linux on Windows. Especially for distros that use 3D accelerated desktops (aka literally anything that uses a recent GNOME or KDE release).

They didn't prioritize it until fixing at a late stage, barely before WSL 2 came out. Sometimes i do wonder if they made a premature decision to move to WSL2 since there was quite a lot of basic applications/runtimes that were crashing due to this fix lacking (Naturally a lot of other new Linux API's like io_uring probably would have made it an api chasing treadmill that they just wanted to circumvent).

I thought you could do it using ntdll functions, no?

https://www.jeremyong.com/winapi/io/2024/11/03/windows-memor...

Regardless this led WSL1 to have fatal incompatibilities for a long time, iirc basic stuff like the rpm system or something similarly fundamental for some distros/languages relied on it. And once WSL2 existed people just seems to have gone over.

As for NTFS: it's not NTFS specifically, it's the way the I/O system is designed in the NT kernel. Imagine any call from outside that layer transitioning through a stack of filter drivers before actually reaching the implementation. Very powerful stuff, but also very bad for performance.

Linux BPF programmers say, "hold my beer, watch this!"

They can code 12 BPF filters for the price of 3 Windows filters.

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/wsl/pico-pro...

Regarding Steam, do you install it with distro provided or through Flatpak?

What is the spec of your machine that you do Linux gaming on? I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.

I don't mean to dismiss your comment at all, but I'm surprised that such a low overhead would be the primary reason holding you back from switching. The difference between, say, 100 FPS and 91 FPS seems so negligible in my mind that it would be pretty near the bottom on the list of reasons not to switch to Linux.

But I'm hunting for reasons here. A gaming setup should be using adaptive sync so those concerns mostly go away. But there may be problems with Linux support.

Regarding fps, it's around 15fps diff, and it's bad in my case because I had a potato machine.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LI-1Zdk-Ys

CachyOS provides packages for Steam, handles nvidia drivers for you and they even provide their own builds of proton and wine, allegedly compiled with flags for modern hardware + some patches (not sure how much they help though - before Cachy I used Pop OS and also had no problems with performance).

Cachy is based on Arch though, so unless you're ready for your system to potentially break with an update - maybe used something more stable (again - I quite liked Pop OS, it was extremely stable for me)

But i also believe there's a lot of special software for laboratories etc, that run on windows only

It gets worse. When we go to the manufacturing side of the building, there's a high chance they're still using Windows 7. Yeah, still! And IT or Controls has no idea what to do with it since, well, it's still working. Is it secure? They don't know because the team is comprised of kids who memorized the CompTIA exams and use Windows 11 at home.

Trying to get the business world to switch to Linux with all that in mind is an impossible task. It's the same as asking an American city to rip out all its old infrastructure at once and replace it with new instead of patching the old. The cost and knowledge required for such a task is unthinkable, to them. Believe me, I've tried.

Microsoft was quite brilliant in the way that they shoehorned their way into the fabric of the way we do business, not just in the US, but on a global scale.

When company is forcing you to use something out of inertia, then it's probably not for a good reason.

Actually regarding the "global scale" – I'm not really sure it's true, I think MS has influence mostly in US. Many EU and Asian companies I worked with were using OSX/Linux.

I mean, think about it - most companies are still stuck on Windows 10 or 11, and they're using all those Microsoft services like Teams, Outlook, and Exchange. It's like they're trapped in this Microsoft ecosystem, and it's gonna take a lot more than just a few people saying "hey, let's switch to Linux" to get them out of it.

And don't even get me started on the IT departments in these places. A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing. They're using Windows 11 at home, but they have no idea how to deal with all the outdated Windows 7 machines that are still being used in manufacturing.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has been really smart about this. They've managed to get their products and services woven into the fabric of how we do business on a global scale. It's gonna take a lot more than just a few open-source projects to change that.

> A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing.

Well, this is true throughout IT, even those who went to college for a CS or IT-based degrees. People want to make money, and IT has been a safe haven so far to do so.

Yep, it's mostly this. Especially for businesses under 300 users, you get Exchange, EntraID, Defender EDR, InTune(MDM) + the Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot all integrated for $22/user/month. For a little extra you get a half way decent PBX for VoIP too.

If you tried to piece all that together yourself with different services, then integrate them to the same level, it's going to cost a hell of a lot more than that.

Microsoft is smart too, as none of that requires Windows either. Even of these companies switched to Linux or macOS en masse, they'd still be using Microsoft.

Plus, there's still no competitor to Excel for business types. We might be able to use Google Sheets to great effectiveness, but the finance department at the behemoths can't. The world runs on Excel, like it or not.

> A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing.

This is true for all fields not just tech/IT. Competent windows sysadmin work nowadays isn't all that different from macOS endpoints or Linux. Everything can be scripted/automated with PowerShell, or just using the Graph API for 365 stuff. You can effectively manage a windows environment and never touch a GUI if you don't want to.

Microsoft usually isn't the best at anything, but what they excel at is being "good enough" and checking boxes.

Personally i don't really believe in AAA (or UbiSoft's AAAA) titles that much anymore. Strange exclusivity for some console or device may bring some money early on, but i have plenty games in my Steam libary that could run perfectly under many platforms. And most AAA games heavily drop in price after a few months, Nintendo being the sole exception.

I enjoy older, smaller games nonproportionately more when compared to big titles which require much more resources and time. Yes they look nice, yes they use every documented and undocumented feature of my GPU, yes "it's so fluffy", but it is not enjoyable, esp. with shoved down microtransactions.

If we're talking FPS, give me any Half-Life (and Portal) title and I'm good. Gameplay first, unique art direction, good story, and a well built universe which is almost palpable with lore.

If we're talking RTS, C&C series, Dune Emperor, Supreme Commander and StarCraft is enough.

I have more than 2000 games on Steam and i love my Steam Deck which i got for pretty cheap. It's a very fun game system and you can tinker a lot with it. Upgrading (bigger disk capacity) is very easy.

Just bought Black Mesa for two bucks. Works almost flawlessly. Ten year old game , but much fun to be had. Most games i buy on the very very cheap. Bought Skyrim couple of weeks ago for five bucks.

Sure, i click on the free thursday game on the Epic Games store, but i hate that interface with great passion.

There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.

You can't just edit Excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets, or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.

If the only problem is migrating from XLSX to some other format I'm sure this is trivial and some tooling must be available.

As Google's JavaScript API also doesn't work in open office and whatever else they all have in extra layers.

However i am not sure when and why I encountered such a software last time, but my dad is a Visual Basic guy and has done a lot of these weird sheets for internal business stuff.

macros, vba, onedrive/sharepoint/office integration

I think you highly underestimate the Microsoft Office ecosystem and the tight integration in enterprises.

> I'm sure this is trivial [...].

nope.

But you're right, they surely added a bunch of smaller stuff to keep everything connected, and I'm kind of underestimating it since I never used that ecosystem but heard rumors and complaints from other people who had to use it :)

>There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.

this is just silly, it really means "There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on exclusive Visual Basic macros"

Not true. Sharepoint and OneDrive are key enablers for real time collaboration. It lets multiple people work on the same file at the same time using native desktop applications. Dropbox has tried to bolt stuff like that on, but it is janky as heck. OpenOffice, etc can't integrate with Excel for real time collaboration (honestly, I'm not sure they support any level of real time collab with anything). Google Sheets won't integrate with Excel for real time. Google is great for collaboration, but sticking everything in Google's cloud system isn't dramatically better than being stuck on Microsoft's stuff. Also Google Sheets just doesn't work as well as Excel.

You don't seem to have much of a familiarity with this ecosystem. If you're curious, I'd suggest hunting down these things on learn.microsoft.com, but to dismiss them is only showing your lack of understanding.

I get it, it would be a technically better solution, remove Microsoft lock-in etc, but the cost-benefit analysis isn’t that good in this case.

There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.

The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.

If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.

There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.

Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.

Google Sheets didn't even support tables until fairly recently.

Power Query the language is nice, I kinda like it. I've read the UI and engine works quite well in PowerBI, but I haven't used it.

The Excel engine is way too slow though. Apparently they're two entirely separate implementations, for some architectural reason, not exactly sure why.

Excel's Power Query editor on the other hand, is an affront to every god from every religion ever. Calling it an "advanced editor", while lacking even the most basic functionality, is just further proof of their heresy.

CFO was/is an excel wiz, so he would whip up crazy Rube Goldbergs with Power Pivot (And Power Query), that couldn't be modified by mac users (They can open the files, but they can't interact with it, not even changing filters

PowerQuery is another one, also not available outside of Excel for Windows, not Mac or Web

A lot of it is stuff that should be handled by SQL more properly, but the data people usually can't keep up with the Excel wiz

Which is 5% of its users probably.

--- start quote ---

The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")

--- end quote ---

vs.

--- start quote ---

How much data have we collected?

- About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.)

- Over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080324235838/http://blogs.msdn...

--- end quote ---

I wish there were more recent studies on this, but they would paint the same picture

Sure Photoshop and Gimp both edit pictures, but the workflow is so different that professional users of Photoshop aren't going to switch just because it's FOSS.

And this is coming from a very Linux-hesitant newbie who mostly uses Windows.

I have not tried Fortnite.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcr...

Fortnite doesn't work because Sim Tweeney doesn't want it work: both BattleEye and EAC can work on Linux, Epic just chooses not to enable that functionality.