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Ask Slashdot: What Windows-Only Apps Would You Most Like To See On Linux?
An anonymous reader writes: With all the recent brouhaha about Windows 10 privacy violations and forced updates, I'm one of those that wants to thank Microsoft very gently, while taking it by the hand, and slamming the door behind it for good. Fortunately for me, I don't use any special software that is tied to Windows, except games, of course. One program I would really miss though is Total Commander file manager, which is basically my interface to the whole OS. So, I know there are Linux alternatives, but which one is the best? Also, I currently use PaleMoon fork of Firefox as my main browser, but there doesn't seem to be a Linux variant. What other software would you want to transplant to Linux, if any?
Microsoft Excel
Free Libre/Openoffice versions suck balls.
With the current brouhaha about systemd perhaps you should skip linux and aim for pc-bsd.
(Half joking)
I could do pretty much all my research on Linux, if it weren't for SolidWorks and the damned Word.
Regarding Word: I like LaTex a lot, and use it whenever I can, but I research in a multidisciplinary environment and am first author for articles submitted in such a multitude of journals, that Word is, sadly, unavoidable - there's plenty of journals that only accept Word docs.
And regarding SolidWorks: yes, I know there are other 3D CAD packages that can do similar things, but I am so proficient with SW that I am not going to switch to something else. There's a lot of time and money invested in my rapidity with SW.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Steam has a pretty good number of linux-compatible games now. Not nearly as many as Windows, of course, but it's moving in the right direction.
Frankly, I think that users who like both OSs and use Steam should probably buy and initially download the games that are compatible with Linux ON Linux so that Steam gets those metrics (which would hopefully provide encouragement to continue Linux offerings).
And by "Exchange" I mean software that provides all the functionality of Exchange beyond simple email. Calendar and contact management; synchronization of mailbox folders, calendar, contacts with mobile devices; user specific server side email processing rules; replication of mailboxes (email databases) for high availability; security model that allows administrative assistant and other delegations; etc.
In short the features that cause large companies to choose Exchange and therefore Microsoft Office.
How light-duty? F-Spot is more like Lightroom than a simpler Photoshop.
Ufnfortunatly most of the programing tools I use for embedded systems are windows only.
Wait wat?
Which embedded systems do you target? I've been doing embedded systems for 10+ years now, and the only tool I need Windows for is Excel - to fill in the company travel expenses.
Synopsys, Mentor, Xilinx, Altera, TI, ARM - they all run on Linux. Plus all the compilers for the microcontrollers tend to be gcc based anyways. And the small startup companies' embedded system IDEs seem to invariably be built on Eclipse.
Have I just been lucky? Or do we define 'embedded' diferently?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Except, of course, the large amount of proprietary software that does run on Linux just fine - Oracle software, Matlab, Steam, C-Forge IDE, shall I continue? There is nothing wrong with proprietary software - it should be the user's choice if they wish to use it.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
This are 3 apps that keep me on Windows.
There is Skype for Linux, but it looks ugly and camera support is very random.
I tried all sorts of money management apps for both Linux and Windows, nothing gets close to what Quicken can do, so I'm stuck there (even though I hate Quicken the alternatives are 10 times worse).
I can probably survive without Outlook but there is no real alternative for using best features of Exchange server, without Outlook I feel like I'm back to nineties.
Gimp eventually did become decent feature-wise, but of course it can't replace Photoshop for people who want Photoshop. People learn to work with images, using photoshop, and they don't want to learn a different way of doing things. They shouldn't need to. If you need Photoshop, you should just use that.
For me, I never learned photoshop, I tried to, several times, but just couldn't do basic stuff. Gimp was very easy for me to learn, I use it only for very simple stuff, like resizing pictures, color management, basic compositing, sprites, logos for web development, that kind of thing.
I'm not sure what it is that you dislike so much about GIMP or why you find it so intolerable. Yeah, it is not a direct drop-in photoshop replacement for most people, but nothing can be.
I can tell you from my experience that I was once traveling with my wife - who is a graphic designer who uses the latest versions of every Adobe product - and we only had my laptop with. She needed to edit an image in a hurry so I told her to try GIMP (as her Adobe licenses are all Mac, which made them unusuable for me anyways). She didn't love it, but she was able to do what she needed in a short amount of time. I myself use GIMP all the time, but my needs as a scientist are much different from hers as a designer.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
People say this a lot, but Photoshop's UI is just as clumsy and awkward as GIMP's. You're just too used to its weirdness to see that anymore.
People pay for Office because other people actually use Office at work, and at least 3/4 of the time, trying to port documents that are created in Office between it and Open/LibreOffice is only going to lead to gratuitous quantities of pain as formatting gets fucked all to hell.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You're a bunch of assholes who cannot understand business. People pay for Office because it's better.
No, people pay for Office because they have to. Nobody actually thinks it is better.
It was better. Then Ribbon and Metro screwed it up royally. It was like Microsoft Bob got applied to Office.
I find LibreOffice is a lot faster to work with for the vast majority of what I do. Only problems I have using it are when someone takes custom documents/templates too far and they don't want to work right because they're so locked down that they even don't always work right in MS Office.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.