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?

Comments

Photoshop

[jfdavis668]

I think Linux memory management would go well with Photoshop. Might struggle with video card support.

Re:Photoshop

[sanf780]

I will add other Adobe tools here. After Bibble got assimilated by Corel, I migrated my photo catalogue to Lightroom. I know there are alternatives for GNU/Linux, but I still play videogames in Windows.

Re:Photoshop

[JMJimmy]

Apps aren't the blocking element for the switch to Linux. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's the ability to recover relatively painlessly that is lacking in Linux. As for apps, there are hundreds of business specific ones (TimeMatters for the legal profession, Photoshop for graphic artists, Final Cut Studio for film makers, and so on) the open source alternatives for these are woefully lacking - most don't exist and if they do they are pale imitations of the originals (GIMP vs Photoshop... there's just no comparison). First and foremost, something like the MS KB system for errors with the OS rather than 3rd hand forum jockeying. Remote & trusted diagnostics/fixes that do not reset personal settings. Online anti-virus/malware/etc akin to Panda Software's old 'Active Scan' so that when stupid user syndrome hits it can be dealt with *without* having to lock my system down with every anti-whatever under the sun.

Once it's easy to recover, people like me will make sure the people around us switch and with userbase come the app developers.

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

try Krita, its interface is somewhere between photoshop and fractal painter

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP can handle the pictures. Now FrameMaker would be cool.

Re:Photoshop

[pr0fessor]

I don't do much work with photos or digital art however I do use gimp it can be skinned and switched to single window mode so it more resembles photoshop's interface. I have no idea if it has the same features but was under the impression that it did have nearly all the same plus a few.

Re:Photoshop

[jones_supa]

I assume you are referring to Photoshop having a Mac version as well. But in this case, "Windows-only" probably refers to the software having a Windows version instead of both Windows and Linux versions.

Re:Photoshop

[orasio]

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.

Re:Photoshop

[SQLGuru]

Also, GIMP should implement a like-for-like JavaScript language so that you could easily port Photoshop plugins over to GIMP easily. That's one of the main reasons that GIMP isn't a viable alternative to Photoshop.

Re:Photoshop

[BronsCon]

You're joking, right? I use GIMP much more often than Photoshop, but I do keep Photoshop handy for all the times I need to do any *real* work. As a software developer, those are few and far between; my wife is the designer, here.

Re:Photoshop

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate Adobe. I hate Flash. I hate the new Creative Cloud junk they're doing and will probably stick to Photoshop CS6 until I literally cannot use it for some reason or other. But GIMP is laughable compared to Photoshop. You can't even rotate text without rasterizing it.

Re:Photoshop

[TemporalBeing]

Apps aren't the blocking element for the switch to Linux. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's the ability to recover relatively painlessly that is lacking in Linux.

Recover from what? Apps in Linux are typically very centralized in app-specific manners compared to Windows where everything tends to get thrown in and around the Windows Registry. Have an issue with Firefox? Reset firefox - rename its directory (~/.mozilla/firefox) and start-it up again; you can even recover the old stuff if you like. Have a user account issue? Just rename your user folder (/home/username) and login again.

The same cannot be said on Windows. Have an issue with an App on Windows? Good luck - find the registry setting that's causing the problem and reset it and its 4 or 5 backups. Have a user account issue? You might be able to get by with resetting a registry setting, but more likely than not you'll have to create a new user using the tools - so now you have all new ACLs, a new user directory, and you've lost all your settings, etc.

As for apps, there are hundreds of business specific ones (TimeMatters for the legal profession, Photoshop for graphic artists, Final Cut Studio for film makers, and so on) the open source alternatives for these are woefully lacking - most don't exist and if they do they are pale imitations of the originals (GIMP vs Photoshop... there's just no comparison).

Agreed. I can't move my wife to Linux simply because she's an accountant and needs access to Quicken/QuickBooks and others tools (MS Excel) that are pretty much industry standard for her. It would be great to have those all ported to Linux, but you'll have to convince a lot of corporate oriented software development houses (f.e Intuit) to do so. It's a big chicken-vs-egg issue - corporates won't move over unless there's software and the software devs won't make the software without the corporates.

First and foremost, something like the MS KB system for errors with the OS rather than 3rd hand forum jockeying.

So you do realize that every distribution has that kind of thing already, no?

Remote & trusted diagnostics/fixes that do not reset personal settings.

Well, the first part here is remote access. For Linux users that means adding a new user account and enabling SSH for a third-party to be able to access it. True, you could install TeamViewer, LogMeIn, or similar third-party services, but you have to first and foremost solve the remote-access issue.

Online anti-virus/malware/etc akin to Panda Software's old 'Active Scan' so that when stupid user syndrome hits it can be dealt with *without* having to lock my system down with every anti-whatever under the sun.

So now you're projecting issues from Windows onto Linux. Even then, there are tools - like the venerable Open Source ClamAV - which can do the job; but you typically don't need them to start with.

Re:Photoshop

[TemporalBeing]

I don't do much work with photos or digital art however I do use gimp it can be skinned and switched to single window mode so it more resembles photoshop's interface. I have no idea if it has the same features but was under the impression that it did have nearly all the same plus a few.

I believe GIMP introduced the single-window mode in version 2.4 or 2.6; the multi-window mode was just a PITA. Overall, GIMP is suppose to be on par with PhotoShop; it's just got a lot higher learning curve so it's harder to take advantage of it.

I've tried a few times to use GIMP for the small things I do on occasion - making icons, etc - and given up each time simply because it was too difficult to get the tools I needed working right and easily. Even with single-window mode, they still have a long way to go on usability.

Re:Photoshop

[swv3752]

Apps aren't the blocking element for the switch to Linux. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's the ability to recover relatively painlessly that is lacking in Linux. As for apps, there are hundreds of business specific ones (TimeMatters for the legal profession, Photoshop for graphic artists, Final Cut Studio for film makers, and so on) the open source alternatives for these are woefully lacking - most don't exist and if they do they are pale imitations of the originals (GIMP vs Photoshop... there's just no comparison). First and foremost, something like the MS KB system for errors with the OS rather than 3rd hand forum jockeying. Remote & trusted diagnostics/fixes that do not reset personal settings. Online anti-virus/malware/etc akin to Panda Software's old 'Active Scan' so that when stupid user syndrome hits it can be dealt with *without* having to lock my system down with every anti-whatever under the sun.

Once it's easy to recover, people like me will make sure the people around us switch and with userbase come the app developers.

CorelDraw (and the companion app) were really nice programs. There was even a version proted to Linux back in the day. Problem was, they were not Photoshop. Does not matter how good the program is, it does not have the UI of Photoshop so people complain.

You want a Vendor supplied knowledge base? You mean like http://rhn.redhat.com/ ? Satellite, Puppet, or Chef can all automate and remote administrate machines. I am not aware of remote scanning for Linux, but not really needed if you enable SElinux.

None of this is available for cheap home use. If you want cheap, go do a web search for a solution to your problem.

Re:Photoshop

[future assassin]

I'm not ragging on gimp because you can't do stuff on it as obviously you can its just you shouldn't fight the tool to use it. Car analog, you go from driving a nice auto luxury car to diving a hoopty, manual with a bad clutch. They're both gonna get you to your location is just you'll be frustrated as hell with the hoopty.

Don't get me wrong for a free software Gimp is very nice.

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

That was one of RMS' original arguments for Guile (Scheme) as the official GNU scripting language. With macros he said it'd be easy to implement other languages on top for compatibility reasons.

Re:Photoshop

[JMJimmy]

Recover from what?...

OS to be easy to recover, not the apps. And by easy I do not mean a re-install.

So you do realize that every distribution has that kind of thing already, no?

For Ubuntu as an example, I know there's a wiki and a bug tracker but nothing that compares to the MS KB pages that detail problems, error codes, version application, fixes, etc. What I know of Ubuntu's solutions is more MS Answers quality than MS KB.

Well, the first part here is remote access. For Linux users that means adding a new user account and enabling SSH for a third-party to be able to access it. True, you could install TeamViewer, LogMeIn, or similar third-party services, but you have to first and foremost solve the remote-access issue.

I don't need to know what it involves, I just need to know it works for stupid people. My aunt-in-law has a problem with her computer, I send her a link to a fix and it fixes the problem without me having to go to her house or have a working remote login for myself on her system. I spend enough time fixing peoples computers, I want to be done with it as quickly and with as little inconvenience to myself as possible. Like it or not, those "Mr FixIt" scripts save a LOT of time.

So now you're projecting issues from Windows onto Linux. Even then, there are tools - like the venerable Open Source ClamAV - which can do the job; but you typically don't need them to start with.

It's a reality, the more popular an OS is the more likely it'll be a target for malware. Right now there's no need but I guarantee there are thousands of security issues waiting to be found in Linux code that are getting by because of security through obscurity. Apple has seen it, Android has seen it, and Linux will too if it gains any real marketshare. Even if security was perfect there's no stopping stupid user syndrome. When that happens I want a cloud based tool that can fix the damage caused by malware. Win8/10 don't have it yet and it really bothers me because I haven't run active anti-X software in a decade and don't want to return to that particular nightmare.

Re:Photoshop

[pr0fessor]

Mostly I only use gimp to make icons or the occasional logo but since it was the first software of it's type that I learned to use I imagine it made learning it easier.

Re:Photoshop

[JMJimmy]

I can't access the redhat link without an account - MS KB is public. Satellite/Puppet/Chef aren't exactly what I mean, I mean something akin to Mr FixIt scripts that can fix specific problems.

Re:Photoshop

[JMJimmy]

I wanted to reply to the CorelDraw thing separately as that's a conversation worth having. In my opinion GIMP's interface is nearly as good as Photoshop's in many respects. I was able to pick it up, coming from the latter, and understood 90% of it right away. What I found difficult was a lot of the refinements in things like line detection, box manipulation, and many of the filters... they just didn't have the same level of refinement, would jitter frequently between objects, wouldn't allow for certain actions to be performed easily (though there was often a more complicated method available via the menu). The tools seemed very much what you'd expect from a programmer. They do the job, they do it accurately, but they don't understand the user and what the user wants to do most often. Photoshop does have the opposite problem, in compromising for the "most often" they do make some actions more tedious to do accurately with objects snapping to when you simply want to place them nearby forcing you to zoom in/out.

It's difficult to say whether open source can make those types of choices without creating conflict/forks for people who don't want to compromise to truly improve the user experience.

Re:Photoshop

[paulatz]

[she] needs access to Quicken/QuickBooks and others tools (MS Excel) that are pretty much industry standard for her. It would be great to have those all ported to Linux,

Actually, MS Excel has already been ported to Linux, although and to be completely fair, it is a rather specialized distribution of Linux called "Android"

Re:Photoshop

[goose-incarnated]

I'm not ragging on gimp because you can't do stuff on it as obviously you can its just you shouldn't fight the tool to use it. Car analog, you go from driving a nice auto luxury car to diving a hoopty, manual with a bad clutch. They're both gonna get you to your location is just you'll be frustrated as hell with the hoopty.

I feel your analogy is inaccurate: I've never used Photoshop but I have used Gimp since it came out. Now when I try to use Photoshop I cannot understand the workflow and find it very unintuitive.

IOW, you're labelling one of the options bad because you're used to the other way of doing things. The way you're used to doing things may not necessarily be the best way to do things.

Re:Photoshop

[BlackPignouf]

Yes. I had a very hard time understanding the weird UI of Photoshop.
It still doesn't change the fact that some crucial Photoshop features have been lacking in GIMP for a *long* time.
I can get past the weird (and different) GIMP UI, but I cannot live without adjustment layers.
See http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Road...

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Most of the UIs in Creative Suite/Cloud applications are pretty bad, but it's the features that count as much as anything.

For example, look at popular FOSS tools like the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. How well do they support CMYK images? Serious typography with OpenType fonts? Professional colour books for the spot colour in your client's logo?

If you want to create work that looks like it was designed with WordArt from the early '90s, I'm sure this stuff is great. If you need to produce a professional quality magazine ad to the publisher's specs or professional quality graphics for a client's new web site, not so much.

Re:Photoshop

[Lord Bitman]

in Gimp, layers have boundaries. This doesn't seem to be a problem nearly as much as it used to be, but I have still run into it semi-recently. "I cropped your image because the part you were working on moved at some point in its history" is completely insane. Layer boundaries are visible by default, meaning your image starts with some square around its visible area, showing you... well, I don't actually know what it's intending to show you, as they seem to auto-resize for most operations these days.

The UI for the "resize" tool is so absurdly backwards that I suspect that it was implemented as a proof-of-concept for some pre-1.0 version and then never looked at again by a developer.

I'd say the same for the "text" tool, but I do recall a time when it was actually worse (it once didn't give any preview at all)

Want to change something's opacity from 0 to 100%? How about changing a brush size? Or maybe you want to select a colour from a range of hues? Each of these sliders has a completely different interface. Two of them share the ability to change their behaviour based on where (not indicated on the interface itself) you click / slide.

I'm not a graphic designer, so I rarely have need of GIMP or anything like it. When I do need it, I almost always want to: Paste a layer, resize it, probably copy it a few times, maybe change the opacity, maybe draw a circle around something, probably type in some text to explain what was circled. I don't need a lot from GIMP. The only things I interact with are the most basic of tools: move layers, resize layers, draw a squiggle, type some text. Even with these absolute basics, I encounter painful UI issues every time I load up GIMP.

I really enjoy graphic design, image manipulation, etc. But I would sooner install Windows and sign up for a £40/mo subscription to Photoshop than I would attempt to use GIMP for anything more complicated than I already use it for.

Just in case you were actually curious, that is what I find so intolerable. I can go into more detail, but I expect this summary is enough to give you an idea.

tl;dr: Try to do the most basic things I can think of wanting from an Image Manipulation Program; encounter UI which consistently prevents me from either seeing what I'm doing; never bothered trying to do anything less-basic because of it.

Re:Photoshop

[Jim Hall]

Gimp eventually did become decent feature-wise, but of course it can't replace Photoshop for people who want Photoshop. [..] 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 [..]

I think that's the important point, and something that I found a few years ago when examining the usability of several free/open source software packages. Does GIMP have good or bad usability? There were some strong statements on either side: About half said it had good usability, and about half said it had bad usability. However, I decided to skip GIMP in my usability study, as it is intended for people who do need/want to do graphics work, and my usability test targeted the general user. But I didn't discuss the split opinions in the usability of GIMP.

In following up, it seemed that two types of users thought GIMP had poor usability:

1. Those who used Photoshop a lot, such as professional graphics editors or photographers
2. Those who never used Photoshop, and only tried GIMP because they needed a graphics program

Users who thought GIMP had good usability used Photoshop occasionally, such as hobbyist photographers or casual web designers. Digging further, I believe this is because:

• Those who only occasionally use Photoshop understand the concepts and terminology used in Photoshop and so are easily able to transfer their knowledge from Photoshop to GIMP.
• But those who never used Photoshop were completely lost in the terminology and concepts. GIMP relies on layers for image construction (so does Photoshop). "Layers" are a difficult concept for someone who has never worked with them before. A simple paint program like MS Paint usually suffices for these users.
• And those who use Photoshop all the time were confused that functionality and features differed slightly from Photoshop v GIMP, or was accessed differently, or used different terminology; these users were stymied by what they perceived as a dramatic change from Photoshop to GIMP.

So GIMP is an interesting case. It's an example of mimicking another program perhaps too well, but (necessarily) not perfectly. GIMP has good usability if you have used Photoshop occasionally, but not if you are an expert in Photoshop, and not if you are a complete Photoshop novice.

Re:Photoshop

[jeti]

Reminds me of the time I tried to batch-convert hundreds of icons. GIMP is scriptable. So I looked at Scheme and then at the API and examples. Scheme wasn't the issue, but the API just didn't seem to make sense. After a few hours, I gave up and started Photoshop. I pressed record, converted an icon and applied the recorded script to the folder within a few minutes.

Re:Photoshop

[hairyfeet]

How about a "roll back drivers" or "system restore" when updates go wrong, something Windows has had since Win2K? The zealots can get pissy and downmod all they want but there is a reason that "the hairyfeet challenge" has lasted for 8 years with nobody passing, its because updates break shit in Linux and when it does you had better 1.- Know EXACTLY the make/model/rev of the affected hardware, 2.- Have a SECOND device to hunt for fixes, as the first one can easily be broken beyond use, and 3.- Have the skills to take a bunch of arcane bash commands and tweak it for the hardware in question as the "fixes" are often NOT written for YOUR hardware, they are written for a previous version and Linux is so God damned picky that if you have hardware Foo, rev bar version X and the fix is for hardware Foo, rev bar version X1 it will not work and the end user HAS to fix it himself!

I can take a copy of Win2K, go from RTM to EOL and the drivers that worked at the start will work at the finish and the same is true of every subsequent release, Hell just for shits and giggles I went from Vista to Win 7 to Win 8 to Win 8.1 once, guess what? ALL of the drivers worked! The fans can scream all they want but Linux in 2015 reminds me of Windows in 1998, where if something fails? You are SOL unless you are a geek with some serious troubleshooting skills, if you don't have those? Well give it up Chuck, you are just boned.

Re:Photoshop

[TemporalBeing]

How about a "roll back drivers" or "system restore" when updates go wrong, something Windows has had since Win2K? The zealots can get pissy and downmod all they want but there is a reason that "the hairyfeet challenge" has lasted for 8 years with nobody passing, its because updates break shit in Linux and when it does you had better 1.- Know EXACTLY the make/model/rev of the affected hardware, 2.- Have a SECOND device to hunt for fixes, as the first one can easily be broken beyond use, and 3.- Have the skills to take a bunch of arcane bash commands and tweak it for the hardware in question as the "fixes" are often NOT written for YOUR hardware, they are written for a previous version and Linux is so God damned picky that if you have hardware Foo, rev bar version X and the fix is for hardware Foo, rev bar version X1 it will not work and the end user HAS to fix it himself!

Funny, given how much breaks when you update Windows; and the only solution there is to typically to take it into a help desk of some sort (e.g GeekSquad). Most people do not know how to use System Restore or Roll-back drivers - even in Windows.

Now you can top that off by the fact that with Linux, many issues that break things in an update will be fixed in another update, typically released faster than a user can drop it off to support and get it back.

As to hardware, you really do have the same issue in Window and on Mac. The main difference is the included installation disk. For printers, most Linux systems will auto-recognize the printer and load up the CUPS driver (thank you Apple) to use with it.

So even most Windows users would not pass your "Hairy Feet Challenge" when running Windows.

I can take a copy of Win2K, go from RTM to EOL and the drivers that worked at the start will work at the finish and the same is true of every subsequent release, Hell just for shits and giggles I went from Vista to Win 7 to Win 8 to Win 8.1 once, guess what? ALL of the drivers worked!

That's funny, given that every release of WIndows uses a different driver model. And the driver model between Windows XP and Windows Vista was an extremely great change. One of the main issues with Vista was that Microsoft changed the device driver interfaces between Vista RC2 and Vista RTM with no RC3 in between - so all the drivers that Microsoft did not themselves support broke! Hmm...wonder what you're smoking...

The fans can scream all they want but Linux in 2015 reminds me of Windows in 1998, where if something fails? You are SOL unless you are a geek with some serious troubleshooting skills, if you don't have those? Well give it up Chuck, you are just boned.

Funny how that's the same issue for Windows users. The big difference is that Windows users learned to stop complaining and pay someone to fix it. They just don't know who to call for Linux, and the various support groups out there (f.e GeekSquad) don't officially support it. Change that aspect and the support issue will quickly go away.

Re:Photoshop

[TemporalBeing]

[she] needs access to Quicken/QuickBooks and others tools (MS Excel) that are pretty much industry standard for her. It would be great to have those all ported to Linux,

Actually, MS Excel has already been ported to Linux, although and to be completely fair, it is a rather specialized distribution of Linux called "Android"

Well...not really. If I'm not mistaken it's just a dumb interface to Office365.

Re:Photoshop

[fizzer06]

Micrografx Picture Publisher 8. (I tried WINE but it was unstable)

Re:Photoshop

[TemporalBeing]

Recover from what?...

OS to be easy to recover, not the apps. And by easy I do not mean a re-install.

Linux does not typically require a re-install to recover the OS, and if you're having that kind of issue, then it doesn't matter what OS you're using - most users will typically call someone else or pay someone to fix it; that someone else typically knows where to look - whether MS KB (which is horrendous), TechNet, or Linux Distribution equivalents.

And, FYI - Ubuntu and Red Hat all have equivalents of MS KB and TechNet for their subscribers to support the corporates that want that kind of thing. However, that's just a centralized copy of all the decentralized works. MS has nothing comparative to that amount of software shipped in a normal Linux distribution - they (MS) only have a few products compared to the thousands of products in any given Linux distro. If you have an issue with GIMP you may first try your distribution, but the issue will more likely be documented with GIMP unless it is distro specific. Same goes for any of those other pieces of software in the distro. Not necessarily an ideal situation, but not one that is easy to rectify either.

In comparison, you don't go to MS KB to solve an Adobe Photoshop issue; you go to Adobe. MS could care less.

So you do realize that every distribution has that kind of thing already, no?

For Ubuntu as an example, I know there's a wiki and a bug tracker but nothing that compares to the MS KB pages that detail problems, error codes, version application, fixes, etc. What I know of Ubuntu's solutions is more MS Answers quality than MS KB.

Again, MS doesn't do that for every single application that runs on Windows. They do it on their own, and they may have some high profile ones where they are the culprit of the issue. It's no different with Linux distros other than the fact that you don't have to go to 1000 different places to get all the software to start with.

Well, the first part here is remote access. For Linux users that means adding a new user account and enabling SSH for a third-party to be able to access it. True, you could install TeamViewer, LogMeIn, or similar third-party services, but you have to first and foremost solve the remote-access issue.

I don't need to know what it involves, I just need to know it works for stupid people. My aunt-in-law has a problem with her computer, I send her a link to a fix and it fixes the problem without me having to go to her house or have a working remote login for myself on her system. I spend enough time fixing peoples computers, I want to be done with it as quickly and with as little inconvenience to myself as possible. Like it or not, those "Mr FixIt" scripts save a LOT of time.

Typically for Linux the solution is: "Go to updater, refresh, click apply" Sometimes you'll have to add "log out and log back in" but that's it. You can do that over the phone. Some times, you may have to wait a day while the patch comes through, but that's really it.

Of course, there are other solutions that you could do too - like giving her text to copy/paste into a terminal (with minimum direction to do so) that would run a shell script you wrote - e.g "wget https://mysite.com/myshellscri... | bash" and you could automate some things yourself.

And again, it's not really any different on Windows aside from the fact that you would have to go to one of any number of websites to download an update to a particular package, hope she gets the right one (and it's not infected with malware), and then guide her through running the install -which could be as simple as click-click-click or as complicated as building a 747 depending on the vendor.

Conversely, the Linux distros validate everything that is being updated against its source

Re:Photoshop

[gabereiser]

I laughed at this a little...

Re:Photoshop

[tezbobobo]

It's not the interface. It's the lack of support for colour systems from CMYK through Pantone, and so on. Gimp is fine for web work, but impssible for colour managed print.

Re:Photoshop

[hcs_$reboot]

Give GIMP 2.8 another chance. The Gimp folks made huge improvements into the 2.8 release.

Re:Photoshop

[YouGotTobeKidding]

Sorry but that is just bullshit. Rightly or wrongly the industry standard is Photoshop and its workflow. Sticking your fingers in your ears and going la la la I cant hear you doesnt make the truth any less real. This is a common problem with many FOSS programs. They do their own thing in their own way just to be different. Not because it is better. Now Im not saying GIMP is total shit. GIMP is fine if all you have used is Corel Draw or MS Paint. Once you go beyond that its work flow SUCKS. Its advanced features....are not advanced, even when compared to even 3 year old versions of Photoshop GIMP gets it ass handed to it. The best and only good thing about GIMP is it is free. That is not saying much. Honestly if there WAS a Linux FOSS version of Photoshop CC (not even CC 2014...just one gen out of date CC) Linux would find a hell of a lot more traction in professional circles outside the IT dept.

Re:Photoshop

[Jethro]

A lot of people automatically compare Photoshop to GIMP, but ignore some of the tools that come with Photoshop, such as Adobe Camera Raw.

I've tried several different RAW processors for Linux, and none of them even came CLOSE to ACR. Not by a long shot.

I've used GIMP since version 0.54, sometime back in the '90s. It was an awesome tool back then. It's still a very impressive program. Then I did a pretty big year-long photography project, and some time in the middle of it I tried the trial version of Photoshop. The workflow improvement going from Shotwell (or whatever) -> UFRaw (or rawtherapee or dcraw) ->GIMP, to Bridge->ACR->Photoshop was unbelievable. Again, at this point I'd been using GIMP for well over a decade, and going to Adobe's tools made my life incredibly easier and more effective and I was getting much, much better results. GIMP was always awkward to use, whereas Photoshop was almost completely intuitive.

But Linux has nothing that can compare to ACR.

Re:Photoshop

[issicus]

the worst part of photoshops UI is how windows handles pressing the alt key. i hate that.

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee! You seems one of these that never need to print a Pantone or photo. GIMP cannot handle colors for the design industry, several graphic designers would be happy for use Linux. But when they see that GIMP prints an Aquamarine as Safe Web Blue, they come back to Mac or Windows. When GIMP comes out of the comfort zone of "Web only. We never print a paper" maybe you may have more users around.

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a litle bit like “I wish I could use Garage Band on Linux” There are other editors that do similar things to GarageBad, but the number and high quality of the samples it ships with just make it a no brainer go go and buy a $700 mac mini if you just want GB, and yo ucan book linux on it 8)
Same for photoshop. Yiu pick the app you need to get teh work done, then you pick the OS that runs that app the best, then you pick the hardware to best run the OS with the performance you need for the app. In. That. Order.

There are philisophical reasons to pick Linux, and they are all well and goo, as long as you are aware of the freedom compromise you are making to pick the app that you want to use..
Every day at work, I curse the crappy windows dekstop I have to use to manage and troubleshoot the network, because there are a lot of great utilities that just either come with most linux distros or are just an apt-get install away, but the environment we have requires a domain authenticated computer before the switch will let me out of the quarantine network, so I have ot use Windows 8(
But at home, we only have one windows PC, and that is my laptop from 2010 that never gets turned on 8).

Re:Photoshop

[Wolfrider]

> How about a "roll back drivers" or "system restore" when updates go wrong, something Windows has had since Win2K? The zealots can get pissy and downmod all they want but there is a reason that "the hairyfeet challenge" has lasted for 8 years with nobody passing

--I accept the hairyfeet challenge, and offer a quick google: OpenSuSE has had this feature since 2014; see:

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20141110#news

--From the article:
[[
However, perhaps the biggest advancement is the way openSUSE automatically takes snapshots of the Btrfs file system and allows the user to rollback to previous configurations by rebooting the machine and selecting an old snapshot from the boot menu.
]]

--FYI, I have been using a btrfs Root filesystem on Debian (Antix--64) for the past few months and it's been stable for me. I'm running stock repo kernel 4.x. Apart from that, I do a full system tar backup before doing *any* apt-get update, and log every package that is being changed...

--You're one of my Friends here on /. -- I imagine the SuSE forums might benefit from some of your input and ideas regarding system recovery ;-)

Re:Photoshop

[MrKrillls]

"it's the ability to recover relatively painlessly that is lacking in Linux." Huh? If the OS borks, as I trust all will eventually, from bitrot if not my idiocy, I can just reload Linux and go on from there. No one tells me I can't do so. No one charges me anything. I don't need permission from someone at Apple or MS to fix my computer. As long as I have done real backups, I can recover from darn near anything short of a planet size asteroid collision. I'm far more worried about recovery from problems with commercial software than from things from the Linux universe. KB maybe works for you, but my experience with it has not been so encouraging. Sometimes KB is right on, but it usually doesn't help. With Linux, once I figured out that somewhere out in the searchable web, someone has written out a detailed and workable answer to every issue I've had, I've never since worried whether an answer exists for Linux issues. I can't offer quite the same confidence for KB (on it's own). KB plus the web is, however, quite workable; mainly the web. As far as losing personal settings etc, with hundreds of flavors of Linux out there, someone's making one that requires little tweaking to feel right for most potential users. So, with a good choice of OS, you'll neither need nor want many settings and tweaks that might need to be replicated. With my favored distribution, it is pleasing and workable from the moment I finish an install, and only a few subsequent tweaks will make it darn near perfect - for me. I essentially live on the road, and sort of commute between machines I have set up. After installing on my machines once, I'm simply not bothered by concerns about ease of recovery.

Re:Photoshop

[tepples]

I think the argument is that of the pool of graphic designers you can hire in any given city, far more are used to Adobe Photoshop's way of doing things than are used to GIMP's. That and your clients and suppliers prefer PSD over XCF.

Re:Photoshop

[dave420]

And that doesn't change a single thing. You still can't use Gimp if you need Pantone.

Re: Photoshop

[master_p]

That's why no one can touch Deluxe Paint: RGBA image editing at its finest.

Re:Photoshop

[Gunstick]

I'm happy with pinta. It does what the photo viewers do not provide and has all typical tools you would expect in a simple paint program.
http://pinta-project.com/
It is not meant as a photoshop but as MSpaint alternative

Re:Photoshop

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I can take a copy of Win2K, go from RTM to EOL and the drivers that worked at the start will work at the finish and the same is true of every subsequent release, Hell just for shits and giggles I went from Vista to Win 7 to Win 8 to Win 8.1 once, guess what? ALL of the drivers worked!

That's funny, given that every release of WIndows uses a different driver model. And the driver model between Windows XP and Windows Vista was an extremely great change. One of the main issues with Vista was that Microsoft changed the device driver interfaces between Vista RC2 and Vista RTM with no RC3 in between - so all the drivers that Microsoft did not themselves support broke! Hmm...wonder what you're smoking...

While MS will introduce new driver models with new features, old drivers will typically still work. However the architecture must be the same. 32 bit Windows XP drivers will work on 32 bit Windows 7, but not on 64 Bit Windows 7. Drivers relying on half baked helper applications, or installers may break. Largest breakage occurring from XP->Vista which forced manufacturers to stop half baking software.

For shits and giggles I installed Windows 7 on an old Pentium 3. Half the drivers I installed were Windows 2000 drivers.

One of the big changes between XP and Vista drivers specifically was the Video driver. There were "XPDM" XP drivers, and "WDDM" Vista drivers. WDDM drivers were required for Aero. Crappy hardware like the intel i910/i915 (at the center of the "Vista Capable" fiasco) only had XPDM capability, so though they would work at full resolution, etc, Aero would not work.

Re:Photoshop

[Mike Frett]

Why do you need to restore or rollback anything? The drivers usually just work and if they don't you just purge them and revert to older ones. System restore? ha, it's called a Live CD. Back up your junk from that and reinstall.

Windows has those two "features" because of how badly it was needed due to crashing and incompatibilities with that OS. Linux doesn't suffer even remotely from many of the problems of Windows; hence why you don't see those features. And like TemporalBeing said, most people don't even know how to use those features anyway they're mostly there for those PC Repair people to use. I should know, I use to repair Windows Computers.

You want to know how we fixed your problems most of the time? We backed all your stuff up and reinstalled the OS. Something you could've done yourself. That's your System Restore and Rollback, something we hardly bothered to use since most of the time it created more problems than it solved.

Re:Photoshop

[TheRaven64]

GIMP and Photoshop both have pretty terrible UIs. If you've spent a lot of time and effort becoming comfortable with one, then having to switch to the other is painful. At least a bad UI that you're familiar with means that you've learned to work around its brokenness - an unfamiliar bad UI is far more painful than a familiar one.

Re:Photoshop

[captjc]

Paint.NET can be made to work via wine or mono. De facto standard for easy to use free image processing.

Re:Photoshop

[AmiMoJo]

Most people do not know how to use System Restore or Roll-back drivers - even in Windows.

If your system fails to boot or has some other serious problem, the first thing Windows does is suggest you roll back to the last system restore point. In fact on Windows 7 and later if you select the "fix it for me" option it will do it automatically in many cases.

Re:Photoshop

[jez9999]

GIMP became usable for me when they implemented single-window mode; now I use it all the time as my main image editing program. I'd probably find Photoshop harder to use because I've gotten used to the way GIMP does things.

Re: Photoshop

[nashv]

There is also the situation that Photoshop is objectively better implemented compared to GIMP. Many Photoshop features have no GIMP equivalent. Eg: Liquify.

Re:Photoshop

[TemporalBeing]

One of the big changes between XP and Vista drivers specifically was the Video driver. There were "XPDM" XP drivers, and "WDDM" Vista drivers. WDDM drivers were required for Aero. Crappy hardware like the intel i910/i915 (at the center of the "Vista Capable" fiasco) only had XPDM capability, so though they would work at full resolution, etc, Aero would not work.

You also skip over the fact that Video and Sound Driver in Vista and later are user-space drivers, not kernel space drivers. They entire architecture of the drivers changed.

Re:Photoshop

[fgouget]

Agreed. I can't move my wife to Linux simply because she's an accountant and needs access to Quicken/QuickBooks and others tools (MS Excel) that are pretty much industry standard for her. It would be great to have those all ported to Linux, but you'll have to convince a lot of corporate oriented software development houses (f.e Intuit) to do so. It's a big chicken-vs-egg issue - corporates won't move over unless there's software and the software devs won't make the software without the corporates.

Note that recent versions of Quicken should be quite usable on CrossOver and maybe Wine too. Same thing for Excel 2010 or older. Unfortunately it's not the case of QuickBooks :-(

Re:Photoshop

[Schmorgluck]

In my opinion the real problem with The Gimp is the limited overlap between its target user base and people with the skills to create useful add-ons. Photoshop is developed by teams of people of various backgrounds: programmers, artists and writers, mainly. They are brought together by the company they work for. This doesn't happen on a sufficient scale with The Gimp. Programmers and artists don't communicate enough with each other in the Free Software community. As a result, The Gimp lags behind. As for writers, well, let me put it bluntly: Free Software hackers seem to be allergic to documentation.

Re:Photoshop

[Zardus]

Linux has had such "rollback" support for driver/kernel updates for a very long time. On Debian-based distros (such as Ubuntu), when the kernel is updated, the old images are left on the system, and can be selected and launched via the boot menu. This recently happened to my dad -- an update *did* break something, he called me in a panic, and we had him booted into the previous kernel revision in about two minutes.

Where it *could* improve is feedback about errors. My dad's issue manifested as a mysterious error message at boot -- having him boot into an earlier revision was a guess on my part that just happened to be correct. It'd be nice if a failure to boot resulted in a dialog detailing possible next steps that could be taken. But that's very different than not having this functionality. In fact, this has been around at least since I started using Linux, which was shortly after Win2k came out, so there you go.

Rolling back other software upgrades is a more mysterious process, though. It'd be cool to have some seamless git-like support for that, with some sort of easy way to select the "system revision" at boot. I'm sure there are projects out there that do this, but it's definitely not mainstream.

Re:Photoshop

[TemporalBeing]

Most people do not know how to use System Restore or Roll-back drivers - even in Windows.

If your system fails to boot or has some other serious problem, the first thing Windows does is suggest you roll back to the last system restore point. In fact on Windows 7 and later if you select the "fix it for me" option it will do it automatically in many cases.

If a Linux system fails to boot, the first thing you typically do is select to boot the previous kernel, especially if you did a kernel upgrade. That functionality has been there since the 1990's - before Windows even let you choose between booting multiple systems.

Re:Photoshop

[david_thornley]

It's the apps, as you point out in your third sentence. Most people don't know what you mean by "recover relatively painlessly". Heck, I don't, and I'm a geek. Recover relatively painlessly from what?

I'm willing to bet that approximately nobody, statistically speaking, uses the KB system for OS errors, or "Active Scan".

Re:Photoshop

[LinuxIsGarbage]

One of the big changes between XP and Vista drivers specifically was the Video driver. There were "XPDM" XP drivers, and "WDDM" Vista drivers. WDDM drivers were required for Aero. Crappy hardware like the intel i910/i915 (at the center of the "Vista Capable" fiasco) only had XPDM capability, so though they would work at full resolution, etc, Aero would not work.

You also skip over the fact that Video and Sound Driver in Vista and later are user-space drivers, not kernel space drivers. They entire architecture of the drivers changed.

Because regardless of what changed, drivers designed for Windows XP (or Windows 2000) can run unmodified in Windows Vista / 7. I ran Windows 7 on my Intel i810 graphics in the Pentium 3, and it worked just fine with the Windows 2000/XP drivers.

Re:Photoshop

[ChrisMaple]

I don't entirely understand the concept of adjustment layers, but it looks to me like most of the functionality can be achieved with the "undo history" and/or copying everything to a new image.

Re:Photoshop

[TemporalBeing]

One of the big changes between XP and Vista drivers specifically was the Video driver. There were "XPDM" XP drivers, and "WDDM" Vista drivers. WDDM drivers were required for Aero. Crappy hardware like the intel i910/i915 (at the center of the "Vista Capable" fiasco) only had XPDM capability, so though they would work at full resolution, etc, Aero would not work.

You also skip over the fact that Video and Sound Driver in Vista and later are user-space drivers, not kernel space drivers. They entire architecture of the drivers changed.

Because regardless of what changed, drivers designed for Windows XP (or Windows 2000) can run unmodified in Windows Vista / 7. I ran Windows 7 on my Intel i810 graphics in the Pentium 3, and it worked just fine with the Windows 2000/XP drivers.

What would be interesting though is verifying that it is actually using those 2k/XP drivers - it may have auto-updated them to a newer compatible driver set.

Even in Windows, drivers don't typically work across major kernel versions (5.x to 6.x), but will within minor version (5.1 vs 5.2). Now sometimes they may work if the kernel interfaces didn't change too much...it depends on the driver, but that's rare.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if it auto-upgraded the driver on you without you realizing it. Otherwise it's relying on some pretty neat sand-boxing functionality and while MS is good at user-space backwards compatibility they usually don't care about kernel space backwards compatibility at all. Realize too that MS does ship a lot of drivers for older hardware by default, so it (Win7) may have decided it had a better driver than you for the same hardware.

Re:Photoshop

[ChrisMaple]

WineHQ claims that Photoshop CS6 installs and runs on wine, although the testing that's been done is not extensive.

Re:Photoshop

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Windows update wouldn't find any driver, which is why I manually loaded Windows 2000 drivers for the video card. The card is so old and hopeless that MS update assumed no one would use it in Windows 7.

One feature that XPDM video drivers has that WDDM drivers does not, is the ability to do fullscreen console windows. So XPDM drivers, loaded in Vista or 7 allow full screen console windows, while not allowing Aero. The same graphics card, if loaded with WDDM drivers, allow Aero, but not full screen console.

Re:Photoshop

[armanox]

It used to be on Solaris, HPUX, IRIX, and I think AIX too!

Re:Photoshop

[SpinyManiac]

Windows has supported "point to focus" or whatever it's called since 95. It's just that there's no interface to enable it without installing TweakUI.

If anyone reading this far down wants to try it, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask.
The bitmask starts with 9E for off, and 9F for on.

Re:Photoshop

[strikethree]

Hm. As far as drivers go, all mainstream distributions and recommended best practice is to have two kernels selectable from the boot menu. The first (default) one is the newest kernel while the second is the older kernel which you are upgrading. That way, if you have an issue with drivers, you can merely boot off of the older kernel which is known to work.

Is that ideal? No idea. It works fine for me. Applications? Meh. Worst case scenario, you can uninstall the newest version and reinstall the older. Not quite a rollback but it has the exact same effect.

In summary, you are most assuredly not SOL if something goes wrong with an upgrade. If you are talking about upgrading entire versions, I would be interested in seeing your test for upgrading from Win2k to Win2003 to Win 2008R2 and let me know how rolling back works for you.

Re:Photoshop

[SQLGuru]

Yes, I know. But Photoshop uses JavaScript as the scripting language. If GIMP implemented a like-for-like API, all of those Photoshop plugins would port over and people wouldn't complain that they couldn't use GIMP......it's the App argument for mobile phones (People think other platforms suck because it doesn't have certain apps.....which isn't the fault of the platform but the devs). People want their plugins and their plugins only exist in Photoshop, so they won't use GIMP.

Re:Photoshop

[hairyfeet]

It is trivial to tell the difference, thus proving your theory incorrect. if you have to use previous drivers Windows will say "unable to find drivers" and will leave the device a question mark in device manager. At that point you simply manually install the previous driver and voila!

So yes Virginia you can use Win2K drivers on Windows 8.1, probably Windows 10, so we are talking 23 YEARS of driver support (since 8.1 will be supported until 2023) which no Linux comes even close with their driver support which despite all the BS about how "Linux supports more hardware" is in reality quite poor.

Re:Photoshop

[graphius]

I tried really hard for a couple of years to use GIMP exclusively. (I am a pretty serious photographer and do sell some images) It did work, but I often found advanced techniques* harder in GIMP than in Photoshop. Eventually I ended up back using Photoshop.

*things like actions are stupid simple in Photoshop. History retouching and even masking I found much easier in Photoshop.

Re:Photoshop

[jwhitener]

As a developer, I turn off windows automatic updates. Sometimes I allow only security updates to be automated.

Most the stuff that 'breaks' in linux when an update happens are things like video drivers, X, sound, wifi, etc.. very little of that is found in security updates. I wonder if different linux distros have the ability to only allow security updates?

For the record, I have about 10 different flavors of Linux in virtualbox right now, and I have yet to see any of them break after a full update. I wonder if they are artificially more stable inside a VM (which perhaps uses very basic emulated hardware)?

Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[erapert]

VS is definitely a very nice IDE for C++. It would be awesome to have in Linux especially to work on projects with Unreal 4.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[MatthewCCNA]

MSVS and MS SQL Server on Linux and OS X would be sweet.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[gQuigs]

This is the smaller "Code" version, but still - https://code.visualstudio.com/...

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[FranTaylor]

MS SQL Server on Linux and OS X would be sweet.

yeah it's called "sybase"

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[JamesRing]

I wonder how CLion (https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/) stacks up. I've been using it and I love it, but I haven't used VS in years.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[cbhacking]

Code is a pretty nice editor, and I am really glad to see Microsoft working on releasing products for Linux (and OS X, but I don't much care there). It's not even close to full Visual Studio, though. As far as I can tell, it has almost no integration with compiler or debugger, beyond the standard *nix code editor "Run this command and show me the output of it" functionality. It certainly doesn't include any compilers. No background compilation means no syntax checking, etc. It doesn't use Visual Studio solution or project files (I'm not even sure it can parse them; it suggests it can but I haven't managed to get it to do so usefully), which makes it minimally useful on larger Windows code projects.

On the plus side, it's free, easy to configure, and getting rapid updates.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[bhcompy]

Yes, but try finding an ASE DBA. Or, better yet, try finding an ASA/SQLA DBA. Watcom SQL? What's that?

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[FranTaylor]

Yes, but try finding an ASE DBA.

You do realize that SQL Server is a fork of sybase? Microsoft never had the chops to write a competent SQL engine so they went out and bought a copy of the sybase source. They have diverged slightly over the years but their clients are compatible with each other and you will generally find them to be just about identical.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[show me altoids]

Oh my God yes. I worked for a consulting firm that specialized in PowerBuilder front ends with Sybase as the backend in the early '90s and saw the whole thing go down.

MS: Hey Sybase, let's form a partnership!

Sybase: You want little old us to partner with the most powerful software company in the world? Hell yes!

MS: Just let us make our own version of your database for ahem, fun, you know, and we'll call it MS SQL Server. Just to get it spread wide, and get it known, you understand.

Sybase: Uh, well, I guess, Okay.

...time passes, MS knows all the secrets to the Sybase database...

MS: Hey, nice knowing you, we got all your stuff now, bye, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[FranTaylor]

MS: Hey Sybase, let's form a partnership!

This is not how it happened at all. Microsoft bought a source license to sybase with the rights to modify and redistribute. Sybase will sell it to you, too, if you pay them enough.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[mdm-adph]

You know, I was going to reply with a snarky comment about how "Can we all just admit to ourselves that we'll probably never see Microsoft programs on Linux", but seeing how Microsoft has been changing ever so slightly recently, I'm not sure anymore. They do seem a bit more inclined with their new CEO to be present everywhere and to be seen as more of a service you can use anywhere, but I'm sure they'd have to balance this with the resources necessary they'd have to assign to making them work, and work well, on Linux.

I never thought I'd see their programs for Android either, though, but it has a vastly greater market share than any sort of Linux desktop.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[markhb]

No, Microsoft supposedly licensed Spyglass with a promise to pay them for every copy of their derived software (IE) it sold. Then, as of IE 2 or 3 (IE 1 was bundled with the Windows 95 Plus Pack, a retail product, and I think IE 2 was Windows NT only), they went to a free distribution model which meant Spyglass got nothing else from them, and were left with an unsellable product (since their competition was free) to boot. I've never heard what the terms were surrounding the Sybase deal, but I do know that Microsoft has never been in the habit of giving unrestricted licenses to SQL Server away.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[TemporalBeing]

VS is definitely a very nice IDE for C++.

I can understand the appeal of Visual Studios having used it for a number of years; however, I have found I am by far a better coder without it. And no, I don't miss VS.

If you want integrated debugging, there are a number of projects that do that and do it well. GDB has been extended to have interfaces specifically for doing so - so it's easier for programmatic access to GDB, and programs like ddd (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/) and QtCreator utilize it.

And honestly, QtCreator is about the closest thing to VS, and in many ways superior for JS/C++/Qt programming.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[Gr8Apes]

Sybase thought it had made some extra money from an obsolete codebase. They were about to come out with their new engine, and figured if MS wants to pay for this stinking pile of crap, why not. Their mistake was that MS cut the price and backed it to the hilt while Sybase failed to get much advertising time for their new engine. So it worked better than Access, worse than everything else out there. That was enough to get it traction. MS SQL is still a crappy DB.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[pla]

yeah it's called "sybase"

Having used both, and knowing they share their ancestry... They diverged a looong time ago - MS SQL blows ASE out of the water; for performance, for reliability, for 3rd party tool and connector support, and even for their native tools (SSMS counts as just about the greatest IDE Microsoft has ever created; and I've tried a lot of FOSS clones with not a single one even close enough to stand in its shadow).

And no, not a MS fanboy. I love Linux but make my living in the MS world, and know both well enough to know what I love and what I hate about them. And MS SQL rules the DB world (Oracle aside... Though syntactically, I would still say I prefer tSQL over PLSQL) for a damned good reason.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[fredgiblet]

Yes. The first option is shady, the second isn't.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[jandersen]

VS is definitely a very nice IDE for C++. It would be awesome to have in Linux especially to work on projects with Unreal 4.

I haven't been anywhere near VS since the late 90es, so I don't know what it is like now, but I do know there are several IDEs that look a lot like what I remember, and in some cases are better: NetBeans, Eclipse and what is now called "Oracle Solaris Studio" are all free to use. I know Netbeans quite well - I use it for Java EE, although I still prefer vi for C/C++. I am not an expert in Java, so NetBeans' ability to spot errors and fix them intelligently (if you choose to do so) help me a lot. Plus, it somehow knows how to deploy to an application server and can debug remotely. I'm sure it handles C++ equally well - it would surprise me if VS was better.

I suspect that a barrier to VS going outside Windows is that its toolset is built up around Windows specific APIs, that simply have no direct equivalent in Linux. Remember that Windows is deliberately built to be incompatible with its competitors. You could conceivably move many user tools, like MS Office, to Linux, but a developer tool would be really hard.

Re:Visual Studio + g++ || Clang

[jwhitener]

"And MS SQL rules the DB world"

Really? Without looking I would assume the number of installs by product would be something like

1. MySQL
2. Oracle
3. MS SQL
4. Postgres

I just found a site that ranks them (no clue how they obtain the data though...)

http://db-engines.com/en/ranking

MS SQL is 3rd. I got 1,2 swapped as well, Oracle is #1. And I was surprised that MongoDB was in slot 4 and postgres is 5.

Games

[Gaygirlie]

Almost all the actual apps that I use are more-or-less open-source already. Or, well, Netflix I would also like as a native app; as far as I know the web-browser client still doesn't support 1080p resolutions or surround-sound.

Re:Games

[psych0sis]

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).

Re:Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I've acquired a lot of Windows-only games as a byproduct of bundles that include Linux games (where often it's cheaper to get the bundle than to buy the Linux games directly). Happily, my experience has also been rewarded with several games being ported to Linux after-the-fact so that I can enjoy them in Linux too, but most those games were already well behaved enough to run under WINE.

Meanwhile, the other end of the spectrum are the difficult to run games that I imagine there's (by raw numbers) more Winodws users having trouble running the game (1%) than Linux users (99%). To me that's one of the bigger flaws in Steam for Windows under WINE. Because WINE provides such a non-standard collection of library support and even loading a lot of Windows dlls is not enough if the underlying functions don't exist or work well enough, it's often necessary to create a separate PREFIX with the required collection of dlls and registry patches to get a game to work. But thanks to Steam, that's neigh impossible as Steam was never designed to allow 20-30 "Windows installs" so even something like PlayOnLinux which is designed to heavily automate the task really can't do the job.

Of course the long-term best option would be for WINE's compatibility to be greatly increased. But, then, we'd at best be back to the Windows user circumstance (1% of users with issues/games not working). The closest thing to a real panacea is to use a console for gaming, as undesirable on how limiting that is. Which is why I'm still using Steam (and admittedly a lot of non-DRM Linux games). *shrug*

Microsoft Paint

[Spy Handler]

the choice of oekaki artists

Re:Microsoft Paint

[Tablizer]

GIMP is indeed overkill for many tasks or users. A light-duty image editor would be nice.

However, please add local and general blurring, brightness/contrast/alpha tuning, and basic color adjusting with red/green/blue channel shifting (alpha curve). Don't need layers.

Re:Microsoft Paint

[wonkey_monkey]

oekaki

Ohhh, no, I ain't googling that.

Re:Microsoft Paint

[omnichad]

How light-duty? F-Spot is more like Lightroom than a simpler Photoshop.

Re:Microsoft Paint

[CronoCloud]

Surprisingly the term itself is "safe" From wikipedia:

"Oekaki on the Internet refers to a bulletin board system allowing artists to draw online and share their pictures. The drawings are generally not uploaded; pictures are done using an online drawing program inside the web browser. "

It is probably a "weeaboo" thing outside of Japan.

Re:Microsoft Paint

[dotancohen]

GIMP is indeed overkill for many tasks or users. A light-duty image editor would be nice.

However, please add local and general blurring, brightness/contrast/alpha tuning, and basic color adjusting with red/green/blue channel shifting (alpha curve). Don't need layers.

You want KolourPaint:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It is part of KDE. Install it on *buntus with:
$ sudo apt-get install kolourpaint4

Re:Microsoft Paint

[UnknownSoldier]

Or true masters ...

"How to paint he Mona Lisa with MS Paint"
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Microsoft Paint

[cbhacking]

KDE has a load of dependencies to just install one tool. It's a good experience if you're just using the whole environment, though.

Except, Kubuntu isn't even the red-headed stepchild of the family. It's more like the sickly foster kid you keep locked in the basement except when the social worker comes around once a month. It's got egregious bugs, in both current and LTS versions, which basically never get addressed (admittedly, I don't know of any that impact kolourpaint; I haven't used that in years and it wasn't on Ubuntu). Nobody gives a damn. I recently tried to get kmail working on Ubuntu for around five hours, then concluded it would be easier by far to replace the OS with a half-decent distro.

Re:Microsoft Paint

[radish]

I see that one of their main highlighted features is support for easily creating Photo CDs! I've been waiting years for this - where do I sign?

Re:Microsoft Paint

[Gunstick]

http://pinta-project.com/

Re:Microsoft Paint

[cb88]

mtpaint is my favorite light duty editor... http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/ it would be nice if someone ported it to FLTK though.

Re:Microsoft Paint

[Reziac]

Thanks. I'm not a regular linux user but when there I do prefer KDE, and I usually like the K-apps... yet had somehow never noticed this little program exists.

The Windows program I can't live without? Corel PhotoPaint, which runs rings around Photoshop for usability. I use v8 by preference, but any version would do. There was a 'native' linux version at one point but I never got it to run.

Tools

[dennis_k85]

Ufnfortunatly most of the programing tools I use for embedded systems are windows only. Some are just becoming availible for MAC, but for the most part are not availible for Linux. The one current exception is MPLAB-X which is fairly new and java based. But being new it is barley usable, currently even on windows.

Re:Tools

[LWATCDR]

Or PIC or...

Re:Tools

[CurryCamel]

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?

Re:Tools

[OzPeter]

Have I just been lucky? Or do we define 'embedded' diferently?

Well there is this Windows CE embedded OS from a company called Microsoft. You may have heard of them.

Re:Tools

[TemporalBeing]

It probably depends on what tech stack you're working with.

At a former employer, we did a lot of embedded stuff, but the tools were only Windows-based. Some of the vendors had started a Linux port of their toolchain, but it depended on which version of the tool-chain you licensed as to whether or not you got access to that port, which also was determined by what hardware you purchased.

So for large embedded shops, they're probably all supporting Linux as they have a very large customer base since Linux is extremely popular for embedded work; but the smaller shops that don't have a lot of turn over[1] then they probably are on the trailing wave of the ports.

[1] My former employer purchased cameras from one such shop. We bought one camera to test with and see if it could do what we wanted; 1.5 years later when we bought them for the lab and customers, the serial numbers had barely moved - I think it was a delta of 20 or so. Good cameras, but low volume. They were on the trailing edge; sadly we didn't purchase the right edition to get the Linux support.

Re:Tools

[inasity_rules]

I'd add to this:- All PLC and SCADA systems. Please!

Re:Tools

[ichthus]

He didn't say there's no tool chain available for Linux. He said the tools he uses (eg. Keil uVision) have no linux versions available. I'm in the same boat. The rest of the firmware team I work with use uVision. I could use gcc, but then I wouldn't be working with the rest of the team and what they have all chosen.

Incidentally, I have gotten uVision working under WINE, I just can't get the ST-Link (debugging/programming) to work.

Re:Tools

[goose-incarnated]

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?

You have been lucky. You've been lucky not to have coded for that software-crippled, anti-OSS platform known as PIC micro. The last I used it (MPLAB 5.5?) I had to hunt around for a windows machine just to run the damn IDE, which wouldn't let you use your own editor and you were forced to use the crappy less-features-than-notepad editor. It generated the hex files in ram, not on disk, so that the IDE alone (which generated the hex files) could program the dev board (pickit?).

I've worked on only one project using PICs. I will never work with them again. Luckily, I never have to as they are increasingly sidelined by superior dev environments :-)

Re: Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

All replies to the OP in this thread are either bone heads or are deliberately misinterpreting the post. The subject says tools and you guys are recommending embedded kernels? Come on.

Microsoft Excel

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Excel
Free Libre/Openoffice versions suck balls.

Re:Microsoft Excel

[GameboyRMH]

This would make a big difference to accountants. To most of us, LibreOffice Calc does the job, but it's missing a lot of little features that heavy users depend on, and working around them would be too much of a PITA.

Re:Microsoft Excel

[TemporalBeing]

Microsoft Excel Free Libre/Openoffice versions suck balls.

Funny since LibreOffice/OpenOffice have better mathematical formula support than Excel does. Please be ware that most Excel users do not know that there are major short-comings in the mathematical functions in Excel, some of which can have huge impacts on businesses.

(Note: see the OOXML debacle regarding the accuracy of the Excel formulas, and check how FLOOR() and CEILING() work with negative numbers with respect to their mathematical definitions.)

Re: Microsoft Excel

[Anonymous Coward]

> it assumes you are not doing math

This. My god, this. I hate how Microsoft made the decision that if someone enters "2+2" then they do not want to do math even though you're using a spreadsheet. This is their typical arrogance.

Re:Microsoft Excel

[buchner.johannes]

Gnumeric is so much better than Libreoffice Calc.

Re:Microsoft Excel

[hughbar]

Yes agree. I do a fair amount of work with small non-profits in the UK and this is the main thing that they use. Nearest thing for one table [forgetting Ruby on Rails] is http://www.phpmyedit.org/ with https://www.apachefriends.org/... for example, but it doesn't deal with anything more complex.

My feeling is that Access applications should be re-coded as web, give them more reach and a saner architecture, but non-specialists can use [and make a mess with] Access. Maybe we need a migration toolchain, convert to MariaDb and generate web forms? That would still leave some manual work though.

Re: Microsoft Excel

[cyber-vandal]

The popularity of Excel for such things is mainly because IT is too busy to build something decent.

Re:Microsoft Excel

[TheRaven64]

I've not used Access since it ran on Windows 3.11, but I recently tried OpenOffice / LibreOffice Base and was amazed. Their form builder is incredible. Even simple joins in the UI require writing SQL by hand. How anyone can ship that as a GUI database tool, I have no idea.

Re:Microsoft Excel

[thinktanknl]

I use WPS Office Suite, perfectly compatible with the MS formats and works great.

Re:Microsoft Excel

[Fudoka]

In fact, the whole of MS-Office. It doesn't matter how crap it is so many businesses are based on it and if that's what you use all day at work it's what you want on your home PC as well. It's the lack of MS-Office that stops a whole bundle of businesses from running Linux (or even Macs for that matter)

Re: Microsoft Excel

[PPalmgren]

Deserves 99 recs but I aint got one.

You should see the kind of quotes we get for building insanely simple things from IT. Stuff I can create a one-click workaround in two hours with excel, they want to charge 6 figures. Then charge us again if we initiate a change request.

Excel is popular because it allows people to get things done without going through a 6 month mess with IT.

Games

[Snotnose]

Steam is getting there from what I've heard, but as a hard core gamer I need games.

Embedded toolchains would be nice too (esp ARM), but that's my boss' Windows box, not mine :)

Definately

[Anonymous Coward]

3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#3D_Pinball_for_Windows_.E2.80.93_Space_Cadet

Re:Definately

[jfdavis668]

I saved a copy from XP and still play it to this day. It's a little small at modern screen resolutions.

foobar2000

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm startled to realize I've been on Linux fulltime for nearly 10 years now. Wow.

The only thing I still think back at fondly is foobar2000. gmusicbrowser makes for a decent alternative, but still...

Oh, and Photoshop. CS2 run decently under wine, and is enough for most of my needs, while darktable picks up the rest, but it sure as hell would be nice if there just was a native Linux version of Photohop.

Re:foobar2000

[erapert]

Have you considered Amarok to replace Foobar2000?

Re:foobar2000

[occasional_dabbler]

+1 for Foobar, but on Linux why not try Clementine, which can be configured to be bit-perfect in a similar way to Foobar, and has the benefit of a neat remote control app for Android?

Re:foobar2000

[sound vision]

I've never used foobar for bit-perfect playback, and from what I've seen on the foobar support forums that's not a very common scenario for foobar users either. The reason foobar is so far beyond the competition is because of its simple but highly customizable scripting features - particularly relating to file management and tagging. It's also got a huge list of smaller features that don't come together in any other player / library management software... ReplayGain scanning, applying RG to MP3s without re-encoding (useful for devices that don't support RG tags), a nice way to assemble stats on pretty much any aspect of your library or tracks you select in any combination (sample rate, bit rate, codec, running time, file size...). or to sort by any of those in the playlist view. The converter functionality is great too, you can use any command-line encoder with it. Processing with DSPs during the encoding process... being able to script the file name and folder path during the encoding process. I could probably go on for quite a while.

Other players might have a subset of these features, but they're all missing big chunks of what foobar does, and almost all of them use way more system resources. I checked out the latest version of Amarok recently, and got blasted with a gaudy inefficient UI and the program trying to connect to something over the internet for some reason, without me even having clicked anything yet. There's really nothing to compete with foobar on Linux (or on Windows for that matter). It's in a class of its own and has been since at least 2006 when I started using it. I'm frankly surprised there is no open-source equivalent - all the OSS developers seem to be stuck emulating Winamp or iTunes.

Re:foobar2000

[Foresto]

Does Audacious do what you need? That's what I used to replace foobar2000 when I dumped Windows.

Linux brouhaha

[Anonymous Coward]

With the current brouhaha about systemd perhaps you should skip linux and aim for pc-bsd.
(Half joking)

Re:Linux brouhaha

[JSG]

Why, to be honest I've pretty much forgotten what init system I've got running on my laptop and desktop. They just work. I very rarely have to bother with systemctl, KDE even has a GUI for it but a quick spell at the bash prompt is quicker.

I have to manage sysvinit, upstart, openrc and systemd based systems. systemd sucks less than the rest in general although I hate the verb in the middle thing. I once had to write a openrc script which was a bit of a pain, now I just copy a unit from wherever I fancy and tweak it a bit.

I think you'll find the brouhaha has near enough expired and people are cracking on with doing stuff.

Re: Linux brouhaha

[quintus_horatius]

I think you'll find the brouhaha has near enough expired and people are cracking on with doing stuff.

You must be new here

A more interesting question...

[realmolo]

What Linux-only apps would you like to see available on Windows?

I honestly can't think of any. Almost all the useful apps available for Linux are available for Windows, too. And what's left is mostly Linux-specific system-management stuff.

And THAT is the problem with Linux on the desktop. There simply aren't any compelling applications that aren't ALSO available for Windows or OS X. Yes, security is good (though ACL support still sucks, which is ridiculous), and not having to worry about viruses is nice, too. But those are secondary concerns, honestly.

Re:A more interesting question...

[coldsalmon]

Duplicity, and by extension rsync. I tried using Duplicati on Windows for a while, but it didn't really work, so I migrated my server to Linux to get a more robust backup solution. It is true that this is a server and not a desktop, and all of my office and home desktops still run Windows. Microsoft has really improved Windows a lot in the last 10 years, and I don't miss Linux on the desktop at all anymore -- except for rsync. And if I really wanted it, I suppose I could use Cygwin.

Actually, I also miss Debian package management. apt-get is so incredibly easy and elegant. Nice try, "Windows Store."

Re:A more interesting question...

[cbhacking]

I actually have a response to this: I would really like to see the KDE-on-Windows (http://windows.kde.org/) project picked up again. KDE has some nice utilities, but the last version of them that was built for Windows is now years old. There is, of course, no reason why this *couldn't* be done; it was done before, and the build scripts may well still work. I could probably get it building again myself, at least on MSVC. Without making it easy, though, I probably won't make the effort for the relatively few tools (Kate, maybe Amarok, maybe Kopete, used to use Konqueror but probably wouldn't now) that I'd like to get out of it. Part of that is because the alternatives have improved, but a lot of it is just because any given KDE utility has a slew of dependencies that really want to be built as part of an automated and comprehensive build process.

Re:A more interesting question...

[Gavagai80]

For me to use Windows, I would need Synaptic, Konqueror (as an FTP/SFTP client, haven't seen any others that don't frustrate me), Kate, Yakuake, kcolorchooser, and some of kwin's handy features like zoom and stick to top. I suppose most of those have Windows equivalents, but without Synaptic I wouldn't be able to easily find a safe trustable non-invasive equivalent.

Re:A more interesting question...

[TyFoN]

Darktable and Kdenlive.
I use both quite a lot and there are no builds of them for windows.

Re:A more interesting question...

[chispito]

What Linux-only apps would you like to see available on Windows?

I honestly can't think of any.

That's because Open Source.

Re:A more interesting question...

[omnichad]

These are system management, but not Linux-specific (other than system requirements).
GParted and ddrescue. I don't use Linux full time, but these are the two that I boot into Linux for time after time because there's no suitable alternative.

Re:A more interesting question...

[gsliepen]

apt-get

Re:A more interesting question...

[occasional_dabbler]

Synaptic, or any other package manager for that matter are one of the marvels of modern Linux distros. They had to be to fix the dependency hell problems we had previously. The original 'App Stores'

Notepad++ is one of the nicest text editors around, is Windows-only and open-source. I prefer it to Kate and let's just not go anywhere near Gedit.

Re:A more interesting question...

[TWX]

What Linux-only apps would you like to see available on Windows?

I honestly can't think of any. Almost all the useful apps available for Linux are available for Windows, too. And what's left is mostly Linux-specific system-management stuff.

And THAT is the problem with Linux on the desktop. There simply aren't any compelling applications that aren't ALSO available for Windows or OS X. Yes, security is good (though ACL support still sucks, which is ridiculous), and not having to worry about viruses is nice, too. But those are secondary concerns, honestly.

A good command-line SSH program that fits into the command-prompt like the telnet program does. I don't want to navigate dialogue boxes when I just want to ssh to a given IP address or hostname.

Re:A more interesting question...

[Baki]

It depends. If you are used to linux workflows (often involving the command line) then there is no way you can have that good enough in windows. cygwin is not good enough. For many users today (but still a small minority, I admit) linux is nicer and there is just a few apps "missing", which is the question of this article.

Personally, I get by with wine for the 2 missing apps (3d games). The rest (games) is available on steam today. There is no windows "productivity" app that I would need, but that is just me of course.

But to anser your question: I would like to have a complete linux-shell with all tools that truely feels native under windows. I don't think that is possible today.
OSX on the other hand sometimes combines the best of both worlds (but has other quirks).

ACL's: often they are used "brute force" (creating long-term maintenance issues) instead of using more elegant mechanisms or setups.

Re:A more interesting question...

[Flavianoep]

XKB.

While KDE is my first answer why I won't switch to Windows, although I thought that Win 7 was a decent OS, the keyboard layouts in Windows are what makes it harder to work for me in practical terms.

If you write in a single language, they're OK, but having to change layout to type in German looks like too much for too little. Also, the Greek (polytonic) layout in Windows is harder to learn, as you can't just combine diacritics. Typing IPA is also horrible and the workarounds my colleagues use cause a lot of incompatibility and produce unreadable text sometimes.

With XKB (part of X, I know), however, if the available layouts, and key combinations, do not suffice you, you can modify them or, at least, create your own pattern of key combinations. Even if there is, or was, a tool for that on Windows, the system has went on a trend that make customization always harder, so, I do not want.

Re:A more interesting question...

[cbhacking]

You can easily install a SSH client on Windows. There's no lack of them, really, unless you specifically mean one built in. For myself, I used to use OpenSSH on Interix (Subsystem for Unix Applications), but after Microsoft canned SUA with Win8.1 I switched to just using the client that comes with the Git for Windows package.
ssh -V
OpenSSH_6.6.1p1, OpenSSL 1.0.1i 6 Aug 2014
Server is harder, though you can find it. Interix supported SSHD as well as the client, as does Cygwin, and there are probably others.

Powershell will be getting SSH (apparently both client and server) sometime soon as well. Not here yet though.

Re:A more interesting question...

[rnturn]

``A good command-line SSH program that fits into the command-prompt like the telnet program does.''

What about Cygwin and the software package/subset that includes ssh/sftp? (AFAIR, it's not installed by a basic installation and, sorry, I've forgotten which one you need.) I'd much rather have that on a Windows box than Putty.

Cygwin runs fine on the missus's Win7 laptop. Not sure about anything newer.

Re:A more interesting question...

[Greyfox]

I use cygwin for that. You can install an ssh server as well, which is handy if you need to copy files to/from the machine and don't want to dick around with setting up samba. Cygwin actually makes for a pretty decent working environment. I set it up with Emacs, X.org and a bunch of network utilities that Windows doesn't come with.

Re:A more interesting question...

[Major Blud]

"What Linux-only apps would you like to see available on Windows?"

systemd.....err, wait.....

Re:A more interesting question...

[Wolfrider]

> But to anser your question: I would like to have a complete linux-shell with all tools that truely feels native under windows.

--Look into MobaXterm - it comes close.

http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

Re:A more interesting question...

[MrKrillls]

I've got to the point that I just don't care anymore whether some application is not available for Windows. I wouldn't use Windows unless forced to. That sounds way more "hatey" than I want. I just like using Linux more.

Re:A more interesting question...

[TWX]

I want something that doesn't require a new environment started in order to use it. I want to Win-R, "cmd" enter, "ssh user@host" and be on my way.

There is no reason for it to have to be embedded in a subsystem.

Re:A more interesting question...

[mikrus]

What Linux-only apps would you like to see available on Windows?

I really love my wobbly windows on linux. Not necessarily an app. But there is something about the wobbliness that I really like. Even the name is perfect. :)
It would be great if it became available on MS windows.

Re:A more interesting question...

[basecastula]

Pacman package manager

Re:A more interesting question...

[basecastula]

Compiz?

Re:A more interesting question...

[Shinobi]

Add putty.exe to your path, then you can just do Win+R, putty -ssh user@host. It won't be inside CMD's window, but rather a window of its own, but hey, it works

Re:A more interesting question...

[armanox]

For a while there I was using KDE on windows. I think the project might be dead though.

Cygwin

[Anonymous Coward]

Cygwin

Re:Cygwin

[brokenin2]

Oh I wish I had some mod points today! +1 funny does not do this justice!

Re:Cygwin

[ClickOnThis]

Well, in all seriousness, you could run it under Wine. Emphasis on could.

Re:Cygwin

[occasional_dabbler]

Indeed! Well done AC, should have logged in today.

Re:Cygwin

[MakerDusk]

You definitely got a laugh out of me!

Re:Cygwin

[MyAlternateID]

Oh I wish I had some mod points today! +1 funny does not do this justice!

It just wasn't that funny.

Does everyone here have a sense of humor like Ned Flanders? I suppose you also think "darn it" is terribly harsh language?

It would explain the stupid memes that constantly get +5 Funny after being repeated ad nauseum for (literally) years. The latest Austin Powers movie was what, 13 years ago?

Re:Cygwin

[cryingpoet]

Being able to run cygwin in Linux should be a release test for Wine. It would sure make scripting some of the unit tests easy. Great idea.

Re:Cygwin

[hcs_$reboot]

It is funny, but you have to know why.

Re:Cygwin

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

Download a Windows VM, and use QEMU. Problem(?) solved.

Current Adobe Flash support...

[kyubre]

Just kidding. What I really wish for is platform independent, standards based browser support by all web content. Time to kill the promise that became a curse called "Java" as well. Write once, run everywhere my ass....

Music/DAW software

[Wain13001]

If I can't use Finale, DP, maybe Cubase and Protools, not to mention all the VSTs and pro audio hardware, I can't move to a different OS.

Re:Music/DAW software

[bobdehnhardt]

I'll second this. Muse is nice, but it doesn't match Finale or (my preference) Sibelius. I can do around 90% of my stuff in Linux; I only have dual boot for a few games and music composing/editing.

Re:Music/DAW software

[CronoCloud]

I take it Rosegarden+LilyPond and/or Muse or Ardour don't meet your needs?

Re:Music/DAW software

[frank_adrian314159]

You ever try to use them? Compared with even prosumer-grade DAWs (like Reaper, Sonar, Cubase, ProTools, etc.), the functionality and built-ins just aren't there. Hell, just getting normal audio hardware up and running on Linux is usually a nightmare, let alone dealing with things that don't exist on Linux at all (like a driver for my MOTU 24i/o audio interface unit). And try finding any sort of expandable audio interface that has a Linux driver... you won't. Hell, some vendors don't even have Windows drivers (Apogee, I'm looking at you).

Re:Music/DAW software

[Wain13001]

The problem is I need *everything*; meaning I also need the East/West Libraries, and the Komplete Native Instruments packages in addition to the DAW (and several other VSTs/plug-ins). I also need to be able to save my projects and bring them to other locations and set them up on other machines/studios.

On top of all of that, I do not have the time to sit down and learn another set of software from scratch, or struggle with a driver interface I know nothing about for the hardware. I'd be willing to take one thing on as a learning curve, possibly two, but I can't afford the downtime of using all new software and *maybe* having working audio hardware, even if I had the interoperability working between systems and didn't have to worry about the studio I'm moving to being on Protools, or some other DAW.

Re:Music/DAW software

[Dutch Gun]

prosumer-grade DAWs (like Reaper, Sonar, Cubase, ProTools, etc.),

If those tools are "prosumer-grade", I'm curious what DAWs you'd identify as "professional-grade"?

Re:Music/DAW software

[frank_adrian314159]

OK, ProTools there, but hardware units like RADAR and actual tape decks count, too.

SolidWorks and Word

[blind biker]

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.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[LWATCDR]

Solid Works for sure but also Office Photoshop, Visual Studio, and Flight Simulator X.
  There is not a single 3d FOSS CAD system as good as Solidworks.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[stasike]

Have a look at the recent versions of FreeCAD.
I was very surprised how much progress they have made since I have last looked at the project.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[FlyHelicopters]

Is the OpenOffice/LibreOffice compatibility so poor that it can't be used in place of Word?

Yes, it is...

Don't misunderstand, it is close, but close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear weapons...

When it comes to professional submissions to journals and other business uses, close isn't good enough...

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[jonnythan]

Yes, it's not even close when you get to anything other than very basic formatting. I tried to open a few lab reports in OpenOffice recently, and the formatting was completely incomprehensible. It's laughably bad.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[FranTaylor]

When it comes to professional submissions to journals and other business uses, close isn't good enough...

you are correct, LaTeX is really the only choice here

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[cbhacking]

Do the journals only accept Word docs, or merely only accept document formats that Word can open? Word has had support for ODF files for years now (I think it was a plugin for 2007 but it's been standard in versions since). Try saving as "OpenDocument Text (*.odt)" format and see if they can accept that. If so, you should be able to use Open/LibreOffice (Word's support for ODT should be better than Writer's support for DOCX).

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[sanf780]

The thing is the poster knows his way around SolidWorks, and he reckons he is fairly efficient working with that tool. Learning a tool like FreeCAD is not a trivial task, so it definitely has to be better than SolidWorks in order for him to consider the switch. It also needs to be as stable as SolidWorks. We are talking about money not gained when any software crashes for whatever the reason.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[thegarbz]

Unless it's not a choice at all, which quite often is the problem.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[Anomalyst]

Any chance you forwarded the documents to LibreOffice support, perhaps with a word PDF export to show the desired result? They caant fix it if they dont know there is a problem.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[Anomalyst]

For the lazy http://freecadweb.org/

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[Drethon]

LibreOffice works good if you are not concerned with formatting, such as publishing papers in a particular format. I thought it would work good for a PowerPoint alternative but LibreOffice removed all of the nice backgrounds and font colors the provider of the PowerPoint did everything in and half of the slides were unreadable.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[HydrusZ]

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.

Word Online has been available for free for over a year. Just sign into OneDrive on any platform and create/edit/save a Word doc.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[lexman098]

I don't know what you're waiting for then. Last time I checked Word and SolidWorks work great under wine. It's unfortunately only games that aren't worth the performance hit running in wine.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[FlyHelicopters]

you are correct, LaTeX is really the only choice here

While that sounds nice, and it may be true sometimes, it isn't true when the place you're sending your "whatever" to asks for it in MS Word format.

When people send me documents, they are either in PDF or DOCX format. When I send documents out, they are usually in DOCX format, sometimes in PDF depending on what I'm sending (sometimes password protected PDF).

I can't recall the last time someone had a problem with either format.

---

I've tried OpenOffice, it butchers some documents, makes minor changes in others. Only very simple documents remain the same.

But try this... Create a 10 page Word document with some detail and formatting to it, save it to DOCX format, then open it in OpenOffice, make some editing changes, move things around, add a page between page 3 and 4, resave it in ODT format. Then open that ODT file in LibraOffice, make some more changes, save it in DOCX format, then open THAT file in MS Word.

Let me know if you get something useful out of it. I wouldn't expect it, at the very least...

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[blind biker]

Have a look at the recent versions of FreeCAD.

Quoting my original post:

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.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[blind biker]

Word is, sadly, unavoidable - there's plenty of journals that only accept Word docs.

Is the OpenOffice/LibreOffice compatibility so poor that it can't be used in place of Word?

OpenOffice's compatibility isn't really bad (LibreOffice does seem to have some huge bugs, though . it's why I switched back to OpenOffice). In fact, it's pretty good, all things considered. The problem is that some editors will reject your manuscript for a formatting pet-peeve of theirs, and you never know which one. If you have too many formatting problems in your manuscript, you're playing with fire.
Also, I use Zotero, and OpenOffice's integration with Zotero _is_ indeed poor.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[blind biker]

The thing is the poster knows his way around SolidWorks, and he reckons he is fairly efficient working with that tool.

Bullseye! And there's also this, extremely important, question: say I invest the necessary time to be as proficient with FreeCAD as I am with SW (let's ignore the fact that SolidWorks can do a whole lot more than FreeCAD). Is it sure that one can be as fast working with FreeCAD as he/she can be with SW, once achieved parity of skill? You know that some 3D cad packages just don't allow for the same speed of work.

In other words, I am not going to go through the same amount of training I did with SW, just to find out that FreeCAD doesn't allow for such fast work as does SW.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[Baki]

You should have chosen another field of study, where you can submit everything in Latex :).

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[blind biker]

SW works under Wine? You know that's bullshit, don't you?

See SolidWorks 2012 (the one that has GOLD compatibility with Wine):
https://appdb.winehq.org/objec...

Let me quote:

What works
Installer (partially), see notes

What does not
Creating a new file (File -> New.

So there you have it - the most Wine-compatible version of SW can't even be used to start working.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[lexman098]

You're quoting from the 2012 version (which is rated gold btw). From the 2014 version (bronze for some reason) it says:

What works

Almost everything, the core modeling functions are usable for production work.

It's true though, the program is not made for Linux and will always have some issues (minor or not). Upgrading will be a pain etc. My point was just that you could use it as a daily-driver OS if you were stubborn enough, and that games are really what requires full support.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[cbhacking]

What if you open the ODT in Word? MS Office supports the Open Document Formats, and has for most of the decade.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[blind biker]

To be honest, I am intrigued by BricsCAD. Thank you for pointing it out.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[Angstroman]

Many posts here talking about retraining time and familiarity. I have used SW for five years and PTC CREO/Wildfire/Pro-E for more than twenty. The simple fact is that while FreeCAD is a nice try and has some useful features for very simple work, it is not even in the same discussion group as "real" CAD software. A similar thing can be said regarding program for FEA and CFD analysis. The irony is that Pro-E was actually developed for Unix (OK, Solaris) and abandoned that field. A sign of hope is some of the newer programs, like Abacus, will run in a linux environment. But there is no indication that any of the full-feature CAD and analysis combination packages are even remotely thinking about running in linux. I manage better than most commenting here with LibreOffice replacing Word and exchanging documents with my Microsoft-laden friends. But there is a Win7 workstation under the desk to run SW and CREO that I would love to replace but cannot.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[MeNeXT]

No, it is not.

Not sure what you are talking about but I've had compatibility issues with Word on Word documents worse than OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Word documents do not always display the same on all systems and all versions of Word. You can never be positive that a Word document will be represented identically on two different systems. Them very well may but they very well may not.

Word and Excel are good tools but for long term document management they are a complete disaster. One day you may need to deal with older documents 5, 10, 20, 30 or even 50 year old documents. If your choice was Word, trust me you will be lost. I know this from experience. Not sure how ODT will fare but since it's an open standard I can at least write a program which can open them. I have old text, jpeg, pdf, and eps documents and I'm hoping that these will be supported in some form for some time to come. All the wp and doc files that are over 10 years old I have to convert. In most cases if you upgraded Windows and Word as they come out 5 year old documents do not display as they were created/printed in the original.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[FlyHelicopters]

Word 2013 documents will open properly on Word 2013...

You're correct that Word 2003 documents won't always look right in Word 2013, and so on...

So... if you're a professional, get on the latest version... There is no excuse for being out of date on your MS Office version by more than 1 version. Office 2010 generally is fine, but yes, go back to 2003, 2002, or 2000, and you'll have issues...

BTW, to open those documents, I still have a system with Windows XP on it and Office 2003 on it, for just that reason. Large companies, if they have any brains, do the same thing.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[blind biker]

After having a second, and third look at that CAD package, I am.... I am kind of totally sold on it!

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[blind biker]

There's no other closed source CAD system that's as good either.

Sure there is - CATIA for one.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[fgouget]

Just something to keep in mind: SolidWorks 2014 seems to work in Wine and/or CrossOver. Whenever OpenGL is involved this can depend a lot on your graphics card and driver. Word 2010 or older should definitely work just fine.

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[q4Fry]

XPlane as a substitute for MS Flight Sim X?

Re:SolidWorks and Word

[q4Fry]

Same outcome, sadly. If you try to do certain kinds of footnote formatting, the document is not going to look the same in Word and LO/OO, no matter which file format you specify.

I wish as much as anyone that it were otherwise.

Microsoft Word

[Ecuador]

Ok, I kid, I kid, although it would be nice to be able to open a word document and have it layout exactly as the Windows-based writer intended it...
My vote goes to Photoshop.
Also some specialized software that are popular for processing astrophotos like Deep Space Stacker, Registax etc would be nice to have in Linux, but I'd be generally happy with just a native Photoshop.

Re:Microsoft Word

[erikscott]

Word doesn't even completely interoperate with Word for Mac, as far as that goes.

Re:Microsoft Word

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Word doesn't even completely interoperate with Word for Mac, as far as that goes.

Word on Windows doesn't even completely interoperate with Word for Windows, as far as that goes.

Re:Microsoft Word

[cloud.pt]

Only it doesn't. I'm a long time Sharepoint user, and I can tell you, if it's anything close to that, might as well stick to Open/LibreOffice compatibility-wise (and it still sucks balls), or Google docs collaborative-wise (and you will still have the finnishing overhead when the collaborative part ends and you need it printed/PDF'd and you want to add that camera-ready Word look, those fancy Excel formulas and dynamic pie charts, or present in that old amphitheater computer that only supports _true_ ppt formatting). If they can do it for MacOS, they can do it for Linux. They just don't see the (commercial) point, so it won't happen. Office 365 is nothing more than a desperate shout which can faintly be discerned as "we are still here, doing our best for you to go back to that Windows version of Office, even though you moved 50% your dayjob routine to Unix-like using portable platforms such as Android and iOS".

Necessary tools.

[Anonymous Coward]

OrCad Schematic Capture Tool.
Alegro board layout tool.

Remote WMI

[selectspec]

It would be nice if a fully supported and working version of remote WMI worked on Linux. That way you could manage and monitor windows servers from Linux.

Notepad++

[Anonymous Coward]

Still have to find a similar tool.

Re:Notepad++

[HornWumpus]

Emacs has a vi built in, it should also have a notepad++ built in.

Re:Notepad++

[dahlellama]

I love Notepad++. I have been looking for a good replacement for awhile.

Re:Notepad++

[GameboyRMH]

Tried SciTE? It's based on Scintilla like Notepad++

Re: Notepad++

[Anonymous Coward]

Try notepadqq it is a notepad++ alike for Linux

Re:Notepad++

[erapert]

If there's one thing that Linux has plenty of choices for it's text editors. Here's some I've tried that are similar to NP++:

• Kate (as the AC mentioned)
• Gedit (not bad, just a little lacking in plugins and cumbersome to install color themes for)
• Sublime Text 3 (I personally use this)
• Lime Text (an open-source replacement for Sublime Text)
• Atom (rather heavy weight and a bit buggy)
• Vim (there are a bazillion different flavors and versions with gobs of plugins)
• Emacs
• Genie (sort of a mini IDE)

Re:Notepad++

[erapert]

I forgot to mention: NP++ runs very well for me under WINE.

Re:Notepad++

[Hognoxious]

systemd has all three, plus IBM PE.

Re:Notepad++

[Foresto]

I'm think you must mean Geany. It's one of the best lightweight programmer's editors I've ever used.

Re: Notepad++

[eneville]

vim.

Re:Notepad++

[Zontar The Mindless]

Kate isn't bad, but one of the 3 things* I still miss about Windows is UltraEdit.

*Node.JS might take care of one of these, and a port of 3D Space Cadet Pinball would be nice as well. I can't believe in 2015 there are STILL no decent pinball games for Linux.

Visio

[lazlo]

Just about everything else I've found good alternatives for, and maybe there are some good alternatives for Visio and I just haven't found them, but the real deal certainly does seem nice. There have been times when I've needed to use it fairly often, these days it's pretty rare actually, maybe once a year or so...

And while there's lots that's nice about it, I'm not even sure it's the application that's really the killer for me, but the large available base of existing stencils, and I think that's causing a feedback loop: no one makes stencils in any other format because there isn't a widely accepted alternative format, and no apps can get a foothold because of the lack of stencils. So it's really the format wars all over again, but in a smaller niche.

Re:Visio

[Snotnose]

Try LibreOffice's Draw to replace Vizio. Haven't used Vizio since Microsoft bought them (not a decision, just didn't have access to it), for my personal stuff Draw does everything I need.

Re:Visio

[GameboyRMH]

Tried Dia? I know it does flowcharts and UML but I just use it for network diagrams, it works well for that at least.

Re:Visio

[pacman on prozac]

Agree with this, I do network designs and have never found anything to replace Visio and it means I always need a Windows VM on my laptop.

Inkscape came closest but just wasn't as slick and took far longer, especially with complex layouts, I ought to try it again really as it's been a few years.

Re:Visio

[hcs_$reboot]

Even the latest visio on windows is not as intuitive and use friendly as used to be the older versions. But with the web, now, you can easily find google images -> line drawing about whatever you need and arrange them the way you want on a page.

MS Visio

[djrok212]

I know there are alternatives, but none can match up against Visio.

Sony's Sound Forge and Vegas Video

[QuietLagoon]

Those two are among the best in their respective class, if not the best.

.
The current offerings for audio and video editing in Linux are not close.

Re:Sony's Sound Forge and Vegas Video

[dfsmith]

I second the Sony Vegas suites, and add Quickbooks (which is bizarrely feeble under Wine, even though it's a "simple" application).

Re:Sony's Sound Forge and Vegas Video

[tulimulta]

What's wrong with Lightworks? For audio, there's Bitwig Studio (among others) for your DAW needs and Audacity for sound editing. Vegas and Sound Forge were the crème de la crème like 15–20 years ago.

Re:Sony's Sound Forge and Vegas Video

[QuietLagoon]

I've used Audacity, and it's no Sound Forge. If you're an amateur, perhaps Audacity is adequate.

.
Sound Forge still is the crème de la crème. By a long shot.

As someone recent converted to Linux

[torqer]

I've been using linux full time for about 6 months now. There definitely have been a few gotchas that I've come across. Most of them are resolvable, but I would still put Outlook as an program that needs to run on Linux. I can make do with Open Office for the rest of the MS Office suite.

I've used Evolution and Thunderbird as replacements, and they can for the most part function as email clients, neither of the calendar options are anywhere near "Excellent"

While I have run across a few issues with in Calc (it has a lower limit of columns than Excel does), None of them are show stoppers.

I work in the Call Center industry so I'd like Avaya's applications to run natively as well. CMS Supervisor and One-x Agent to be specific. Those I have resorted to a WinXP virtual machine.

All in all, I'm 99.9% functional in Linux... But as far as my own stats go... I was probably only 99.9% functional in Windows too.

Re:As someone recent converted to Linux

[torqer]

Oh I want to add Skype as well.

It works, yes... as long as you don't want to view someone else's screen. It's horribly blurry trying to view someone's desktop.

Re:As someone recent converted to Linux

[jerpyro]

OWA is ok for reading your email and that's about it. Some of the advanced functionality, integration tools, plugins and company specific items (aka sharepoint integration) you *need* to have the desktop copy for.

Adobe CreativeCloud & BlackBerry Blend

[benmhall]

I'd take BlackBerry Blend and Adobe's Creative Cloud. (Specifically InDesign.)

Re:None

[yuhong]

Why do you dislike it so much?

Pale Moon Browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately I can't help you with any Linux specific software, but I do know that there is an official Linux version of Pale Moon, available at http://linux.palemoon.org/

Killer apps

[Anonymous Coward]

All the killer apps:

Adobe Creative Suite and all the individual pieces
MS Office (must have Outlook for business email)
AutoCAD ...and anything else that is a business critical application.

The latest version of Windows, while asthetically improved, has all those privacy concerns, price/subscription costs, heavy handed update requirements. I want out of Windows but those and some other issues are have forced me to stick with Windows.

Re:Killer apps

[labnet]

Altium
Creo
Outlook
Visual studio
Office
PSoc creator

Re:Killer apps

[Gumbercules!!]

Visual Studio for Linux (kind of): https://code.visualstudio.com/...

.NET is also supported on Linux, now. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet...

Music apps

[rhintintin888]

Foobar and Traktor Pro I'd have gone years ago if it wasn't for these two.

Re:Music apps

[erapert]

Foobar2k --> Amarok (there's tons of other music players on Linux)
Traktor Pro --> Mixxx

Delphi

[spudnic]

A fully compatible version of Delphi so Christian can write Total Commander for Linux to run natively.

Re:Delphi

[LWATCDR]

I wonder how well it would work compiling it under FreePascal?

Re:Delphi

[neiras]

A fully compatible version of Delphi so Christian can write Total Commander for Linux to run natively.

Not quite, but maybe close enough?

Exchange

[Nkwe]

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.

Re:Exchange

[Ynot_82]

Check out Sogo
http://www.sogo.nu/

Highly recommended

Re:Exchange

[gQuigs]

Give Zentyal a try - http://www.zentyal.com/

Re:Exchange

[Lorens]

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.

That would be Zimbra. It has all of that except *maybe* "mailbox replication for HA", which is either useless (run it off DR-enabled VMs running on a replicated SAN) or in the future "cloud" version.

Re:Exchange

[Anomalyst]

Zentyal is not FOSS, it does have a free trial if you think you can add it to your budget.

Re:Exchange

[gQuigs]

It's GPL. The community page makes that a bit clearer. Now I do believe they have some proprietary extensions for something but I can't seem to remember what now...
http://www.zentyal.org/server/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://github.com/Zentyal/zen...

Re:Exchange

[Fencepost]

Given its history of being acquired, sold, etc. and its most recent acquisition by Synacor I'm not sure I'd call Zimbra a "dead project," but it doesn't fill me with a feeling of comfort either. I get some feeling of "we can pull some cash out of this thing," though given the money involved in the purchase I can't see them doing it just to let it die.

I'm not 100% sure that all the features you're looking for are there, but it might also be worth looking at Kolab - I think much of it is there, but the folks we have using it are mostly just interested in the email side, so I don't have a lot of experience with other parts.

Re:Exchange

[aybiss]

You mean like the feature where I as the *end user* get 12 emails a night about synchronisation problems. TEMPORARY synchronisation problems.

Or perhaps you're referring to the way its client can't remember the extra calendars I've opened or that I want to see them in full week view?

Or is it the way that Outlook screws up drawing your list of messages, so you go through your inbox deleting stuff and you're off by one but can't tell.

Oh I know, it's the way that when you're typing near the bottom of the email it thinks you're in the signature area and stops spell checking and showing paste options?

People crap on that they need this and that from Microsoft. Bullshit. What the human race really needs is at least one properly functioning office suite.

Re:Exchange

[jez9999]

Good luck with that.

Literally every time I have asked about something like this I get exactly the same response: bundling all this functionality together is "not the unix/linux way". Literally. Every. Time. No-one in the Linux world seems to have any other opinion.

So the only recommendations you'll get from within the community are a combination of Postfix, Dovecot, Squirrelmail, and a few others.

Onenote

[happyhungarian]

It doesn't have a worthy alternative except Evernote, which not only lacks free floating textboxes, images, etc., but is also Windows and OSX exclusive. I would totally donate to a Kickstarter campaign promising to create an open, cross-platform Onenote clone...

Re:OneNote

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

It must be extremely frustrating to write music with such a program.

Pale Moon does work on linux

[Xenolith0]

Also, I currently use PaleMoon fork of Firefox as my main browser, but there doesn't seem to be a Linux variant.

Pale Moon does work on Linux, just fine a I might add. You can even copy over your profile from windows to Linux and everything will continue to work:

http://linux.palemoon.org/download/installer/

Re:Pale Moon does work on linux

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

Nowadays a browser is the least reason you'll have for not switching. Except for IE pre-7 all of today's major browser present pretty much the same user experience. Graphical browsers fall into three or four major camp, Webkit browsers like Chromium and Safari, Gecko-based browsers like Firefox, and the Microsoft browsers. Recent Microsoft browsers tend to be standards compliant enough for a web developer or web site to ignore. The major problem nowadays is whether to code for the desktop or for mobile, which is dominated by whatever browser engines Apple and Google use.

Excel.

[Anonymous Coward]

Excel. I use it all the time, and the competitors are so far behind on features there really isn't a substitute. I've tried replacing it with Open Office, Libre Office, and Google Sheets, but I've ended up needing to export from those into Excel to get some things done, or at least done without long and complicated workarounds that still aren't as functional.

Yes, there are problems and annoyances with Excel, but the functionality and feature list is staggering.

Re:Excel.

[aybiss]

I'm not sure if you're joking or not when you talk about a 'functional' spreadsheet program that by default prevents you from looking at two spreadsheets at once. :-P

I'd also love to know just what Excel does, apart from blindy executing native code it finds in a spreadsheet, that the others don't do. Isn't that in fact the problem? That nobody else would be stupid enough to allow embedding DLLs into spreadsheets or executing them without asking?

I mean there's only so many sorting, summing and graphing options you need on a normal day, so either it must be the scripting that people miss, or since I checked out OoO it has removed hundreds of already working features.

Re:TurboTax

[mknewman]

+1 for TurboTax

InDesign

[danieldids]

I'd like to have InDesign for Linux. Scribus is just ok (at least in the last time ive used it), but doe's not compare at all with InDesign. Version CS3 would totally be ok for me, for later version are only slightly better and CS3 already has JS support. For ME, linux versions or generic versions (libreoffice vs ms office, gimp vs ps, inkscape vs illustrator, and so on) of softwares are very good tools already. One can already do anything using linux.

Re:InDesign

[spiffyspiff]

this.

I just need Indesign (CS6 ideally) and PDF preflighting, plus decent cmyk support in The Gimp. As it is, i only run windows in a vm anyway, for those two things.

everything else in linux works great for me. :-)

The ones I use in VirtualBox/XP

[AntronArgaiv]

Exchange (or Fully Compatible Linux App)
MS Project (or FCLA)
Adobe Lightroom Pro
Starry Night
iTunes

Re:MS Money

[FranTaylor]

Been using it for 12 years, so I have a lot of historical data that I don't want to give up (yes, I'm a digital hoarder).

if you don't have a backup that you can restore onto another computer, you are guaranteed to be totally screwed when your computer has a hardware failure

SketchUp

[dahem0n]

I currently use it with wine, but still have some small issues

Re:SketchUp

[TommyNelson]

Yes, a Linux version of Sketchup would be really nice. I use it professionally and its pretty much useless with Wine (Sketchup itself has issues, then plugins won't work, LayOut is a mess...).

Re:SketchUp

[serbanp]

Yes, yes, yes! SketchUp running in Linux would be very nice.

A real device manager

[pyster]

A real fucken device manager as robust as what we see in windows.

TurboTax, H&R Block, other complete tax softwa

[Anonymous Coward]

Tax time is the only time all year when I have to fire up a Windows VM, to run the tax software.

Photoshop

[future assassin]

I've a Linux lover and pusher but not a zelot. Sorry to say but GIMP tools and icons are just way to awkward. to use. I did manage to get some use out of it when I found this theme http://ubuntuforums.org/showth... but could not get past the way the tool work and how they are manipulated. Yes I had a hard time switching from Windows to OpeSuse when I went full Linux in 2007 but that only took a few weeks with GIMP I just can't vs Photoshop.

Paint.NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Paint.NET. It doesn't work AT ALL in Linux/WINE, and is fantastically easier to use for simple tasks than GIMP.

Re: Paint.NET

[kubis]

Try Krita

Re:Paint.NET

[CronoCloud]

Pinta? xpaint? mypaint? mtpaint?

Re:Paint.NET

[Bathroom Humor]

Pinta is probably the closest thing to Paint.net available for Linux. I use it often, and I'm thankful it is around. But it is no replacement, even though one of the goals was to be. It simply lacks developer time needed to make it as useful as Paint.net.
I hope that changes in the future, but considering how few people are working on GIMP, I find that doubtful.

MS OFFICE

[Anonymous Coward]

Just say it! Office!

Sorry, but Libre, Open, and other FOSS solutions don't cut it.

I tried using them but I have better uses for my time - and the $159 is worth it - than doing all the work arounds. And Adobe is complete shit - don't get me started.

Video Editing Software

[Art3x]

Video editing software, like Sony Vegas or DaVinci Resolve.

In my limited experience, the editors on Linux are either unstable or limited in advanced features like picture grading and audio clean-up (dynamic range compressors, frequency filters, etc.).

Re:Video Editing Software

[im_thatoneguy]

Uhhh... DaVinci Resolve is available for Linux.

Platform
[ ]Mac OS X [ ] Linux [ ] Windows

In fact the Windows version is the port from Linux. Hence all of the oddball drive mounting features in the media browser.

Re:None

[yuhong]

But OP also mentioned switching to Fastmail too. SQM is not new and I know about the forced telemetry on non-enterprise editions, but I do feel bad about in particular the hosts file bypass BTW if it is actually true.

Regedit

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, Poettering, you can do it.

Re:Regedit

[jez9999]

You jest, but the Windows registry is quite a nicely organized way of storing settings (and easier for programs to interact with) compared to the 1001 variants of Linux config files scattered about all over the place.

Re:Regedit

[Saija]

Stop giving any ideas to the man!!

Real OS question

[krisbrowne42]

I don't care if it's ported to Linux, I'm more concerned if it will run in my OS of choice, Emacs....

Re:Real OS question

[purpledinoz]

I'm waiting for notepad to be ported to Emacs

Nvidia/ATI driver quality equal to or surpassing..

[TheBilgeRat]

along with the entire Steam library over on Linux. DirectX as well.

My listing

[Ol Olsoc]

I'd like SmartSDR, a Software defined Radio program. If I had that, I wouldn't need Windows at all.

Re:My listing

[jandrese]

I suppose Gnuradio is out of the question? It probably is given how awful the user experience is with Gnuradio.

Re:My listing

[Shinobi]

There is no comparison

You use GnuRadio for the FOSS religion fuzzy feels, or if you're a masochist.

Outlook Clone

[tacokill]

How about an Outlook clone that can handle email, contacts, calendar, and the rest of Outlook? Use with or without Exchange and it's linux clone.

Do that well and corporate linux users will take notice.

Re:Outlook Clone

[pr0fessor]

I could switch to linux on my personal box anytime I'm not a gamer and all the software I use is open source and cross platform. At work on the other hand outlook would be the top of the list... they have it working mac shouldn't be that great a leap.

Re:Outlook Clone

[varkk]

Evolution is pretty close for this. It can connect to Exchange. Only thing lacking I found was connecting shared calendars was a bit clumsy.

There is a version of Palemoon for Linux.

[trparky]

http://sourceforge.net/project...

If I had to pick just one

[ShieldW0lf]

If I was going to port just one piece of software to Linux, it would be the Windows 7 Desktop Environment.

Re:If I had to pick just one

[FranTaylor]

If I was going to port just one piece of software to Linux, it would be the Windows 7 Desktop Environment.

I know, right? I love it how you double click on an application in Windows explorer and the whole computer becomes unusable for several seconds. No other desktop environment has this feature.

Re:If I had to pick just one

[brokenin2]

Ewe...

I've found that configuring the heck out of Compiz lets me create an environment that suits me well.. One that I have never been able to even remotely come close to under any version of windows.. Some versions of Compiz (or it's plug-ins) could be more stable though.. They're generally fine when just being used, but sometimes I get crashes when re-configuring..

Try installing "ccsm" (compiz config settings manager) and see if you can adjust things to your liking..

Re:If I had to pick just one

[meloneg]

That shows what you know! SlackWare had this feature back in the days of 386SX vs DX.

Re:If I had to pick just one

[Kjella]

Really? Because I find there's plenty "good enough" Linux clones when it comes to the basic OS interface. It helps that I think anything past Windows 95 is perfectly usable. Unless by that you mean the whole bells and whistles with DirectX, Active Directory and everything else except the applications. Personally I'd go with MS Office Professional, though technically that's a suite not an application but it's sold under one highly discounted sticker price and the only one they'll push in volume licensing agreements. Why? Because the "pro" version with Outlook is the lifeblood of most companies. If you could replace that, Windows as the "must have" OS would disappear in a puff of smoke and you'd see far more professional apps support Linux, which would bring workstation users over and it'd just spiral from there. Of course trying to kill a >$10 billion/year money machine is a lot harder than it sounds...

Re:If I had to pick just one

[cbhacking]

The Win10 one supports virtual desktops and improved Aero Snap. There's plenty of room to make the Win7 DE better. With that said, yeah, the current crop of Linux DEs all seem to leave something to be desired as well.

Re:If I had to pick just one

[jez9999]

If I was going to port just one piece of software to Linux, it would be the Windows 7 Desktop Environment.

Yep, this is a biggie for me. Here's some things that most (maybe all) linux GUIs get wrong:

- The close icon in the top-right should go all the way to the top-right pixel to make it "infinite in size".
- The start menu's layout should be determined by the file system and not a bunch of .desktop files in 100 different locations.
- There should be a system tray with a well-defined API for applications to add themselves to it.
- Window borders should be several px wide and not 1px wide.
- There should be one unified clipboard (in my dreams).
- There should be a decent file explorer bundled (nothing comes remotely close to Explorer)
- Every "file select" dialog should be an instance of that file explorer, allowing on-the-fly operations when selecting a file such as "create new folder" and "create new file" (I'm not joking, having a unified Explorer interface is massively useful)

Outlook

[rrohbeck]

It's the only reason I run a Windows VM. Corporate processes :(

Re:Outlook

[JSG]

Evolution with the EWS connector works very well for me and the missus. Calendars, address lists and all. You can't create/edit Exchange rules but Evo has its own rules system and you can always create them on Outlook and the server will run things for you anyway.

Unfortunately you have to miss out on all that rebooting after each update.

Funnily enough, you can get your Exchange system to be PCI DSS 3.1 compatible via HA Proxy but for those blasted Outlook Anywhere clients, OK and pre Lollipop droids (they wont do TLS 1.2) ...

Re:Outlook

[rrohbeck]

Wat?

How about ...

[fahrbot-bot]

... all the new-fangled Telemetry stuff? :-)

Industry-specific applications

[coldsalmon]

There are a few application that I use in my business which are specific to my industry. My office can't function without them, and they only run on Windows. Many businesses have similar software that caters to their niche. The developers probably only sell a few dozen licenses every year, so it doesn't make sense for them to port to a different OS. I'd love to use Linux on my office desktops (my office server runs Linux), but I need to be in Windows for these applications, and they are definitely never coming to Linux.

Re:Industry-specific applications

[higuita]

most of those apps can be rebuild for running in the webserver... not only you get the app working in linux, but tablets also
so nag the companies to support tablets and you will get the rest :)

doesn't work all the times, but some companies do agree with this
of course all depends of the apps... i had apps running still in windows 98 and windows 2000, just because old software is always a big anchor for progress in companies

My list

[acoustix]

Microsoft Office + Visio (yeah yeah...I know)
MSSQL Management Studio
VMware Client (I know it's on the way out, but I like it better than the web client)
Cisco Jabber
Cisco UC tools
Sophos EC

I'm sure there are others too, but that's a start.

Re:None of them

[armanox]

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.

Need for speed

[aj_jaswanth]

I would like to see this game running native on linux.

Looks a gFTP type program

[calarndt]

From the screenshot on the total commander website I see all the functionality I used to use in gFTP. Really tho I don't use an program of that nature any more. Tar wget rsync and dd do it all for me nowadays!

Visio only

[DFDumont]

This is a key tool in every networking group. The only other Win-only piece of software I use is Turbo Tax but I suspect their online version will soon include the schedule C I need.

Unity 3D Editor

[bluefoxlucid]

64-bit Linux native Unity 3D Editor in an Ubuntu Partners repository.

Re:Unity 3D Editor

[Dr_Barnowl]

They just released a beta build (with a .deb) last last week.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/...

Re:Nvidia/ATI driver quality equal to or surpassin

[Arkh89]

For as much as I use Windows, I find that the NVidia driver on Linux is way better than its Windows counterpart in terms of stability and ease of installation (using binary straight from NVidia).

Skype, Quicken, Outlook

[salnikov]

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.

Re:Skype, Quicken, Outlook

[camperdave]

I went from Quicken to Gnucash. Now I'm on YNAB, which is about budgetting, not money management; focussing on where your money is going to go rather than where it went. Sadly, YNAB isn't linux native. It runs in WINE.

What other software...

[FlyHelicopters]

What other software would you want to transplant to Linux, if any?

You mean besides MS Office?

Well, I use Quickbooks for accounting, I use TurboTax for my taxes, I use AmazonMusic to listen to music, etc.

Actually, let me focus on that last one for a minute...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/featu...

There is the download page for the desktop version of Amazon Music, a wonderful free app that lets you listen to both your own music (either downloaded or streaming), as well as a large collection of Prime Music, either specific songs or "stations" similar to Pandora.

They have a Windows version and a Mac version, but no Linux version.

It is a small example of the problem with Linux. Even if you find a replacement for MS Office (hard to do for a business, it really isn't the same), Quickbooks (fine if you're not invested in it already and don't have a CPA that you have to send the files to), etc.

There are many small programs that really only have a Windows version, and sometimes a Mac version. Yes, you can play your music in a web browser, but it isn't the same.

---

Linux is a nice idea, and on a techie site like this people love to talk about it, but it isn't really an option for most people because of the above.

My #1...

[Lumpy]

Sony Vegas or AVID.

I want a pro video editing suite not the useless buggy toys we keep getting. I would happily pay a lot for it as well.

After Effects would also be nice, but I have been doing a lot of compositing in Blender lately.

And no Blender is NOT useable for video editing, it's a kludge.

BSOD

[Muntzsky]

That cool one which stops you at random intervals and makes you reexamine your life.

UX/UI of the OS

[darkain]

For me, it isn't the applications themselves, it is the UX/UI of the Linux desktops themselves. Microsoft did something very VERY nice in the early 90's, and that was building Common Dialog Box API. This handles file open/save, printing, color picker, and a few more. With most applications relying upon this one single API, as the dialog's interfaces are upgraded, the applications gain the same upgrades. All applications have the same dialogs, regardless of which application they are or who made it. Open a Windows 95 era application in Windows 7 or newer, use the open/save dialog boxes, and they'll have all the modern file browsing features of the current OS. These windows are resizable and easy to navigate. They're quite feature rich, and generally keep getting better and better with each release of Windows, thus making the applications that use them better and better.

Intertia

[Dega704]

MS Office(preferably not like the awful OSX version) and Adobe CS are the ones I would most like to see; not so much because I use them extensively myself, but because they are the biggest killer apps and would give a significant boost to Linux. Then there is the plethora of Windows-only enterprise applications that make it impossible to switch to Linux on the business side, even when you are dependent on Linux VMs to do your work. That pendulum swings both ways, after all.

Multimedia

[supertall]

Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop, Ableton Live, Native Instruments Apps, anything using VST plugins; Sony Vegas Yes, there are Linux alternatives but they are just not as good.

It's about those last few that tie you to Windows

[mr_mischief]

Different people have different things tying them to Windows (or Mac, or Windows/Mac). Many of them have mostly equivalent software that does run on Linux, but require retraining people or missing features some people actually require.

Quickbooks
Peachtree
Oculus
lots of games
Exchange
MS Office
Adobe Creative Suite
Filemaker Pro and software built around it
Alpha Five and software built around it
Lots of business-specific apps built in older Visual Basic versions, or with VBA, or even QuickBasic
Many things put together using C, C++, Pascal, or other libraries that are thin wrappers around Windows-specific libraries without a lot of abstraction.

There's a lot of legacy apps that people run once in a while that could be made to work elsewhere if there was still development around them. Many of them aren't developed at all any longer. Some will run under Wine, or with faked up shim support libraries, or could be reimplemented in more modern and more portable ways if there's enough interest in doing so.

Informative

[cbhacking]

This should be modded higher.

On the other hand, it sounds like the Linux version is still a little clunky, at least to install. It really should be available as a set of .DEB/.RPM/whatever packages, or ideally already in the standard repositories. By all means continue to have a version that is independent of package management software, but a tarball and an install script... well, that's not really what people are looking for.

Re:Informative

[nickweller]

@cbhacking: "it sounds like the Linux version is still a little clunky, at least to install"

Seems pretty straightforward to me, download pminstaller-0.2.0.tar.bz2, extract into your home dir and type ./pminstaller.sh else use one of the Contributed builds of Pale Moon ...

Re:Informative

[cbhacking]

Contrast
sudo (apt-get|zypper) install palemoon
  though... Plus then you can uninstall it equally easily. Good to know the contributed builds exist, but the whole thing could definitely still be better.

Not for me...

[nine-times]

It's not for me, but as a IT guy, it'd be nice to be able to run Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office on Linux, since a large number of people at any given client live in those two office suites. Tell me about FOSS alternatives all you like, but telling 50 professional graphic designers that they need to switch from Photoshop to the GIMP is only going to get me fired from that client.

It'd also be nice if the UI looked nice and professional, didn't include garish greens, pinks, or oranges as the primary colors. Also, ideally the GUI will hide most of the unsightly filesystem. Do Linux distros still have problems with proper text kerning?

I know, it's all superficial stupid shit that you don't care about. My clients, though... they don't care what compiler or bootloader their OS uses. They want something that's pleasant looking, easy to work with, and had Photoshop and Outlook. It's hard to get around.

Re:Not for me...

[armanox]

Professional looking UI? Perhaps you've missed recent changes in the UI in Windows and OS X?

Total Commander?

[CronoCloud]

Gee there's been Total Commander clones on Linux for years: mc, tuxcmd, Krusader.

Besides there is no "best", only the one that works "best" for YOU.

Re:Total Commander?

[psergiu]

And the official GNU Norton Commander* clone: https://www.gnu.org/software/g...

Of course, with Emacs keybindings (Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C to exit)

* Total Commander is a Norton Commander clone.

Re:Total Commander?

[rduke15]

I use MC and Krusader since I switched to Linux several years ago, but I still miss Total Commander. None of the Linux equivalents are as rock-solid or as feature-rich. In fact, if Windows had Bash and the GNU tools, (and apt-get), I probably would go back to Windows as my main OS.

Re:Total Commander?

[rduke15]

* Total Commander is a Norton Commander clone.

Well, sort of, yes.

Except that version 1 of Windows Commander (as TC was called at the time) was already so much better than the latest version of Norton Commander or Symantec's miserable attempt at a Windows version.

Re:Total Commander?

[TeknoHog]

If you expect a *commander equivalent to be your main interface with the OS, you'll miss the point of Linux, unix and open source. I can almost understand the need for that one single Windows-only app, but it's best to open up to a new kind of OS rather than expect a free Windows clone.

Re:Photoshop - Framemaker

[Old-Claimjumper]

GIMP can handle the pictures. Now FrameMaker would be cool.

Way back when... I was a heavy Framemaker user on our Sun Workstations. I was bringing in Linux on 486s. I served as a beta test site for Adobe Framemaker on Linux. It worked flawlessly and I was ready to fork over similar license fees as I paid on my Sun Workstations. Then Adobe axed the release with some statement about how Linux users only wanted free stuff. My take away was, and remains, that Adobe is the most anti-linux shop out there. Way more of a problem than Microsoft.

Pale Moon?

[chill]

Uh, what? I use Pale Mon on my Ubuntu system at home. What makes you think there is no Linux version?

Evernote, SketchUp, Outlook, WinMerge, Acrobat

[silentquasar]

Some of the above work OK in Wine or have passable native alternatives, but those are some I've recently wished for in my day-to-day work and hobby time.

Re:Nvidia/ATI driver quality equal to or surpassin

[jandrese]

It depends. Ubuntu is terrible at keeping the driver up to date, which is a problem when you run into games that specifically require a newer version of the driver. There is also the longstanding bug where every time the kernel is updated (about twice a week) it breaks the nVidia driver and the devs just don't seem to care. They even know it's a major problem because the webpage it forwards you to tells you that it's a very frequently reported bug and to not comment because it would break the comment system.

Luckily other distros are better at managing binary drivers, but Ubuntu is the one that's supposed to be user friendly.

Also Notepad++

[silentquasar]

How could I forget Notepad++? I write all my Bash scripts with it at work. Also, some of the alternatives I might want require KDE and I need to stick with XFCE for my older hardware, so no go there. (e.g. Okular)

Re:None of them

[MagickalMyst]

"People pay for Office because it's better."

No, people pay for Office because they are sheeple and don't know any better; and because Micro$oft has a stranglehold on the market.

On the plus side, if you used an open source office suite instead of wasting hundreds of dollars on M$ Office, you could save enough to get your dick properly sucked by a professional and not have to resort to lame, unsatisfying blow jobs by open source asshole dickwads.

That's easy

[Minwee]

I forget just what it's called, but I would really like to see that software that samples ambient sounds from the microphone, records keystrokes and queries the location service for my current position, then sends everything it finds off to a server in a foreign country where it can be used to "improve my experience".

Without that, obviously my experience will be unimproved, and that sounds bad.

Metal Gear Solid 5

[cloud.pt]

Linux is nothing without the self-entitled "last true closs-platform cross-gen AAA" game. Especially when it's that good.

Seriously, this game has a Steam (cardboard) Box inside yet it won't run on a real Steambox with SteamOS. What gives?

Is this real life?

A modern IDE and a consistent API

[Qbertino]

I'd love to develop applications for linux. The fuss of developing a half-decent GUI app on and for Linux is a huge turn-off though.

Anjuta crashes on me, code blocks doesn't run and gives me awkward compiler messages, Kdevelop requires a bazillion libs and still looks really tacky around the edges. The only two IDEs that are halfway professional for sorta-kinda native Linux apps are Monodevelop/Xamarin and QT Designer - ironically both commercially supported x-plattform kits - all though I think the latter also got pissy with me upon compiling.

This is all on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a neat Lenovo W510 Thinkpad.

The plain and simple truth is, development and deployment on Linux is a freaking mess.

Developing useful GUI stuff for Linux is a complete and utter disaster, with no way to know how your programm will compile, let alone run on the countless distros out there. Until that is fixed and Gnome, KDE and whatnot finally get their shit together, unify and fix this, it will remain to be seen as a toy in the desktop/gui department.

Re:A modern IDE and a consistent API

[Yosho]

So... first, an IDE is not a compiler. If you can't compile your program cleanly with no IDE at all, you've set it up wrong, and no IDE is going to fix your problems.

I've done a fair amount of GUI development on both Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04, and in general Qt Creator is great, even for non-Qt projects; I'd be curious how it "got pissy" with you, if you had a project that compiled cleanly from the command line. Lately I've also been liking CLion a lot, which is very powerful, although it's also pretty new and has a few rough edges. (boost accumulators give it a heart attack)

Given how widely various distros differ, it's impossible to have a single build that targets everything, but you can certainly write a CMake build file that will work in most scenarios and fail cleanly if dependencies are missing (and it's not like any other platform is better at dealing with missing dependencies). You don't need to write a program that will run on all of the "countless distros" out there, just the specific one you're targeting, and Ubuntu (and other Debian variants) are generally stable targets.

Re:need a way to sync iphone

[cloud.pt]

Linux might not run iTunes. But it boots and runs just fine with an iSheep between chair and computer. Profit.

Re:Endnote

[erapert]

Why not use LaTeX?

Office

[Barlo_Mung_42]

I'd be happy with just Outlook, Word and Excel. Don't need Powerpoint so much but might as well ask for that too.

Business applications

[MatthewWalker]

We are married to QuickBooks and United Parcel Service WorldShip. Without them, we cannot function.

If I attempted to convert this office to Linux without them, I would be humiliated, publicly flogged, and my bones left for the crows to pick on.

Re:MS Money

[camperdave]

Been using it for 12 years, so I have a lot of historical data that I don't want to give up (yes, I'm a digital hoarder).

if you don't have a backup that you can restore onto another computer, you are guaranteed to be totally screwed when your computer has a hardware failure

You mean a backup that you can restore onto a virtual computer, right?

Re:tortoise SVN!!!

[erapert]

Tortoise Git is fantastic on Windows as well. Check out Rabbit VCS

Re:RDP, dopus

[jomcty]

Ditto for DOpus.

Clippy

[tgibson]

[drops mic]

Re:Clippy

[Wolfrider]

--Been done.

http://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/vigor

/ *MIC DROP* // slashies :b

Re:TurboTax

[TemporalBeing]

Why Turbo Tax? I mean 8 or 9 years ago I would get the CD. 7 years ago I would download the installer. But now it just works on the web. Sign up, pay, and use it in the browser. Why would anyone install it anymore?

That works fine for simple tax returns; but you can get more advanced versions for the more complex returns. Not everything in the client-side installed software is available in the web version.

There's many but one would make my day

[gencom]

Skype (Because not all remote teams will use Hangouts), While you're at it.. Facetime for completeness
iTunes
Sketchup
Adobe Creative suite (But at least the Mac crowd can work with this better than Windows)

And something still completely surprising to me:

Scanning software like the one included in the ScanSnap products ... These device can be used from Linux, but the automatic side/colour/size detection with automatic feedback (for jams and misfeeds) from the scanner AND automatic OCR really make it worthwhile to launch virtual box to use it.

But all in all, just the Blizzard games (SC2) would be still make my day.

Re:There's many but one would make my day

[woobieman29]

Skype is available for Linux, FYI.

Re:There's many but one would make my day

[woobieman29]

I probably should have mentioned that it lags behind the Windows version by a substantial amount, but hey - it does exist.

Re:There's many but one would make my day

[gencom]

Yes it is, but it's stuck at version 4.3 and is becoming increasingly unstable when talking to the new versions. It looks like version 6.x, which has just been released on iOS, may finally break it.

Avisynth

[GuB-42]

Well Avisynth may not be the most important windows-only app around, however I feel like it is a special case.
Avisynth is basically a script-based video editor popular with people encoding movies or anime. It is possibly the most powerful tool for this job. What makes it special is that it fits very well within Linux philosophy, yet it is Windows only :
- It is opensource
- It is script-based, no built-in GUI. It is a frameserver, so it will work with an external video player / encoder.
- It is highly modular, plugin based

There are linux ports but they are incomplete.

Re:None of them

[mark-t]

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.

Re:Evernote

[lupinetine2896]

Yeah, this. I tried using the clone, everpad, and it doesn't even synchronize notes properly.

Lets just start with AutoCAD

[onkelonkel]

If someone were to come up with AutoCAD for Linux, I might be able to get work done on Linux. Until then Windows is the only option.

Re:TurboTax, H&R Block, other complete tax sof

[omnichad]

Why not just use a web-based system? You have to send the data online to the company to e-file anyway.

Visual Studio 2015.

[Fragnet]

No, I'm not joking. For a developer it's best in class.

Avisynth with all it's plugins&filters

[Selur]

Avisynth (not Vapoursynth) is the main reason I use Windows nowadays, since running it through wine isn't that good.

Outlook & Lync/Skype

[butchersong]

Only reason I have to maintain a Windows VM at work is for these.

How about a version of Active Directory

[gestalt_n_pepper]

With user messages in English that describe the actual problem instead of misleading the user entirely. One that actually works consistently?

But that's just crazy talk...

Linux variant of PaleMoon browser ..

[nickweller]

You can get a Linux version of Pale Moon for Linux here ..

Re:MS Money

[ClickOnThis]

In my experience, KMyMoney is easier to use than GnuCash. I haven't used it lately, though.

BSoD

[zapatero]

Several years ago I tried to port the Windows Blue Screen of Death, but just couldn't get it right... couldn't get that rich marine blue hue just right. Gave up ultimately. I think Windows 7 BSoD is a masterpiece, and would really like to see it on Linux where the primitive black/white just doesn't cut it really - and window's rows of hex values on the BSoD is really aesthetically pleasing. I miss that on Linux.

TurboTax!!

[CharlesRHead]

Our family return is too complex to allow us to use the on-line version of TurboTax. Thus, I'm stuck with running the Windows version, and maintaining a Windows box on which to do it.

Re:TurboTax!!

[Admiral_Grinder]

Same here, it would be great. I could run it in VirtualBox but I dualboot anyways. However, in that case it causes me to use Dropbox for more stuff than I want.

Re:What Windows App?

[haroem]

that makes no sense at all. You use linux because you hate windows apps and don't want to use any of them? Nothing about Windows itself, just the apps that run on Windows? "nah dude, I don't want to deal with that library of 100,000 vinyl records... I have the best 20 records right here and you probably have a bunch of scratched ones in your collection anyway." Yeah, those are the words of insanity. With that logic I'm really surprised linux desktop apps aren't just bursting at the seams. /s

Wine

[HannethCom]

Ironically, using Wine in Linux causes Office programs to run faster and more stable.

Download it here:
https://www.winehq.org/

Re:None of them

[TWX]

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.

Winamp

[Admiral_Grinder]

Seriously, it was the best music player I ever used. Sure it had some bloat, but the basic stuff was easy as hell and feature rich.

Re:Winamp

[Wolfrider]

--Look into deadbeef. I too like Winamp / xmms from the old days, and it is the closest I've seen for Linux.

http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/

Re:Winamp

[kbrannen]

The best Winamp clone I've found so far is "qmmp".

Re:Winamp

[toddestan]

Winamp is a big one. While there are a few clones for Linux, I've yet to see one that can also do video like Winamp does. Winamp is my favorite video player because you get the exact same playlist editor for video files as you do for audio files, and that video window is separate from the rest of the program which is great for dual monitors. The only other program that's close is Zoom player, and that's also Windows-only too.

I know that both Qmmp and Xmms have a plugin architecture. One of these days I need to see if it's possible to make a plug in which would hand off video files to mplayer to play them back in a second windom.

CLion

[PatientZero]

Have you tried CLion, the C++ IDE from JetBrains? It is built on the same base as IntelliJ and their other IDEs which are all cross-platform and work very well. They also developed the ReSharper refactoring VS plugins for C# and C++, so I gotta figure they know what they're doing with C++. :)

Most of my experience is with PhpStorm and WebStorm as our Java projects were already using Eclipse, and they are very good IDEs. If you haven't, check out CLion and see how it compares to VS.

Re:TurboTax

[Admiral_Grinder]

How many versions can you go back on though with the online only? Granted a disk will go out of date and support dropped, but as long as it is installed locally I can do amendments with it.

Re:Games.

[GameboyRMH]

Games in general are why my gaming PC still runs Windows. Last Windows computer I have.

The Windows-only app would I like to see on Linux?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Mac OS X Quick Look, of course!

Re:None

[LVSlushdat]

I suffered with using/supporting Windows during my working life, from 1991 to 2010, and I decided that, once I retired, I'd skip the hassles and malware vulnerablities of Windows and move my computers to Linux. Having started working with Linux in 1995, with Slackware, this move was not particularly hard.. I tried out the Windows 10 previews and thought it looked pretty good, but when it became clear what a privacy nightmare it was, and even when you were able to disable certain of the especially egregious parts of it, they continued to "phone-home" to MS, I decided then and there that I will NOT allow any MS OS on my home network... It just isn't worth it...

Re:use the right terminology, ffs

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

But

"apps" is just short for "applications".

Maybe you meant programs?

BKReplacem

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

If there was a tool like BKReplacem (now called "Replace Text") for Linux, that would be damn handy.

(There may be one for all I know, I'm just not aware of one.)

GUI for HMA

[freeasinrealale]

Windows has a GUI for HMA pro to setup/change VPN locations. Linux has a terminal/shell command line screen only. Too techy for the missus who now has become a linux convert and refuses to go back to windows. C'mon HMA.

Re:Internet Explorer

[crow]

I was thinking of posting this as a serious answer. There are far too many web sites that require IE. These are mostly internal corporate sites where the developer can say that IE is the corporate standard, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't run on anything else.

So yes, I find that IE is the most common reason I boot Windows (in a VM under Linux).

I want a decent mouse configuration GUI.

[Yosho]

I've been using Linux for decades. I think its modern GUIs have shaped up quite nicely (in particular, I'm a fan of Cinnamon) and offer a good level of polish with regards to configuring almost everything that an average user would need to touch.

Pretty much everybody nowadays has a fancy multi-function mouse, right? Sure, your desktop computer come with a cheap optical mouse that just has two buttons and scroll wheel, but the first thing you do is shove that in a bag somewhere and plug in a nice wireless laser mouse, and it probably also has three or four extra function buttons and maybe a tilt wheel.

And then, you run into the exact same problem in every Linux distribution: there is no way to configure what all of your mouse buttons actually do. Every couple of years I look around to see if anybody's made a decent GUI yet, and nope, there's still none. I know it's possible -- I've written more than my fair share of .xbindkeysrc files. No "normal" user is going to do that, though. Why isn't there a GUI that gives me a list of mouse buttons and lets me pick a key or event to associate with them?

There isn't really a common Windows app for this, because every mouse manufacturer provides their own; since the Logitech one supports all the Logitech mice, the Microsoft one supports all of the Microsoft mice, and so on, there's not really a need for a unified one since you won't be switching mice very often. But surely it's not that hard to just write a generic one?

Windows...

[rgbatduke]

... as a VM. Then you can run anything you like (but high end games) from under Linux.

This is by far the best solution. I've been using it since early (still free) vmware days. It also lets you keep functional images of multiple versions of Windows and run WINDOWS software that doesn't run on Windows (any more). I have XP-Pro frozen and encapsulated, virus free, ready to run should I need it or anything inside. I have Windows 7 frozen and encapsulated ditto. I can laugh at broken Vista, my-laptop-is-not-a-tablet Windows 8, and preserve all the work that went into making them semi-functional.

But I've been using Linux as a primary desktop since SLS and Slackware (somewhere in the late 90's?), and I personally almost NEVER boot a Windows VM unless it is to run some very specific application that simply doesn't exist under Linux. Do this and you don't NEED to port Windows apps (except for high end games) to Linux -- they are already there!

rgb

Power Director

[rlumpy]

I have a WIndows machine primarily to run video editing, Power Director. KDEnlive almost does what I need, but frequently crashes. I am also disappointed that Hulu and Amazon Video don't run in Linux. (Netflix does run in Chrome, but not in Firefox.)

Adobe acrobat

[WarJolt]

I can't fill out forms on Linux and the acrobat for Linux is so old and doesn't support forms. Open source pdf readers don't work either. Fix the chrome pdf reader on Linux might work or a working web version.

Pdf on Linux is so far behind.

irfanView

[safetyinnumbers]

I know that there are plenty of other image viewers, but I find it fast and easy to use, while having a lot of useful features for tasks that fall short of requireing a full image editor (e.g. view EXIF info, brightness curve editing, rescaling, lossless jpeg 90-degree rotations).

Re:irfanView

[cpufrier37075]

+1 for iview

Everything

[zedaroca]

Not everything that windows has, the search software Everything. There is no real substitute, just very poor alternatives. It is so fast to find stuff with it. Way better than navigating folders. I gave up linux twice because of this one. Time to try again now that windows telemetry rolled out.

Re:Everything

[brad3378]

^^^ THIS

I logged in just to mention Everything.
It's my favorite free program for Windows and and I don't care what the zealots say. There is NO comparable alternative for Linux.

One nice feature on Everything is the ability to add text files containing file lists to your search.
I use it to search multiple computers simultaneously and this way they can even be powered off.
The external file lists can be stored and synced on Google-Drive or an equivalent cloud storage.

I haven't tried it yet, but I might try creating a daily cron job that generates a text file list of all of my linux files and then try to use Everything via Wine as a viewer. It's a very clumsy alternative, but that's the best alternative I can think of.

Gitextensions

[NeoXon]

I would like a native port of Gitextensions for Linux. It is currently a pile of crap on Linux with Mono, but a pretty good software on Windows.

Documentation, and ease-of-use

[obarthelemy]

Not really an app, but what scuppers all my Linux attempts is documentation. Case in point: I'm trying to set up a RAID server with heterogeneous drives of various sizes. I had to have someone tell me to look at mdadm and LVM, which I am now doing, but most articles seem to pertain to older kernel versions (2.6/2.8, ArchWiki doesn't even seem to have a date on articles) and I have no clue if such older info is still relevant, outdated, in-between... I'm stuck.
My last try before that, I had to resort to trial-and-error to create upstart jobs (is there a user doc, anywhere ?), and ended up using the wrong virtual terminal software (there was mux, and.. xterm, I think ? can't remember) because that's what Google came up with, and I had no clue where else to start.
And before that, I had to spend hours trying to get dual-screen to work acceptably, and in the end I couldn't (something about having 1xATI +1xnVidia card w/ different-definition screens, and wanting to watch videos, brought the whole house down)

So... not sexy... not peer-reputation/hacker-cred enhancing... but I'd strongly advise to work on documentation, not apps.

Re:Documentation, and ease-of-use

[Yosho]

For what it's worth, typing "man mdadm" or "man lvm" in a console should provide you with the documentation for those tools, as it will with most command-line utilities. Consider GParted or system-config-lvm if you need pretty GUIs, both of which have help built into them. "man upstart" works as well, although if you want something with pretty formatting and extensive examples, searching Google for "upstart manual" results in this as the first hit: Upstart Intro, Cookbook, and Best Practises

I don't think there really is a "wrong virtual terminal". Use whatever you like. xterm is pretty bare-bones; konsole also works and is more powerful, among others.

Out of curiosity, what distribution are you using? It sounds like you're trying to do some pretty complex system administrative tasks, and, well, I don't think it's unreasonable that those would be difficult to do for somebody who is unfamiliar with Linux and doesn't know where the documentation is.

I will say that generally, modern distributions with a focus on usability make it simple to configure multiple displays... but trying to get a single desktop working across multiple video cards (especially ones that use different drivers!) is either very difficult or impossible. You're better off using a single video card that has multiple outputs.

Re:Documentation, and ease-of-use

[obarthelemy]

Thanks for the advice. It's a bit overwhelming though, I get the feeling you have to either be an expert, or shut it down. That's frustrating.

That was all a few years ago, frankly, I've given up on Linux, the learning curve is to steep for me, especially for stuff that Just Runs (tm) in Windows (ie multiple different screens on multiple different graphics cards, autoruns...) Windows has nothing for my RAID issues, so I'm wondering again if Linux both can do it and can do it w/o my spending days trying to figure out how.
For the upstart jobs and terminals, I was using text-based Ubuntu on an ARM netbook. Had to have a friend recompile the kernel to add SMB support. Very reliable once I got it to work, and then fun to hotkey between the different terminals from my remote Windows console, which were mostly displaying daemon status info. I think I even got it to tile (non-overlapping) several terminals onto its screen. Went back to Windows though because I kept forgetting the CLI commands.
For the multi-screen, that was my main PC at the time, an ATI APU mini-ITX, with a entry-level nVidia card for the second screen. Still running at my parents', but under Windows.

Autocad

[Doke]

Autocad, at least a decent viewer.

Re:Tortoise SVN

[guus_deleeuw]

I second that. One of the most useful tools I miss on Linux.

Re:None of them

[Dr_Barnowl]

Office is better.. at being compatible with Office. And since that's what everyone (mostly) uses, that's it's killer feature now.

I hate having to use it, but I keep a Windows VM for Office (and the few other Windows programs I need to use), LibreOffice just isn't capable of writing MS Office documents well enough not to embarrass you when your boss opens it.

That's it, slashdot is dead

[Eunuchswear]

What the anti-systemd trolls couldn't do this topic has done.

See you next year in Abidjan.

MS Office, Adobe Stuff, Finale, Cubase, Kontakt

[execthis]

Here's my list:

MS Office
Canon Printer Software/Drivers/Utilities
Adobe: Photoshop, Premiere, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Pro
MakeMusic Finale
Cubase
Kontakt

Re:None of them

[westlake]

People pay for Office because other people actually use Office at work

Microsoft makes using Office at home ridiculously affordable for those using it at work.

This is just one example:

The Microsoft Home Use Program (HUP) is available to Volume Licensing customers with active Software Assurance benefits. Eligible employees may purchase qualifying Office software for use at home through an assigned Program Code provided by their organization.

Home Use Program

The Power of Office in Your Home Only $9.95

No one in FOSS has come close to integrating a credible alternative to Outlook into a "free" office suite.

The stand-alone desktop office suite is a product for the nineties. Both Google and Microsoft see the future as tightly integrated office systems with components built for the client, the server, and the web, and mobile is not an after-thought or also-ran.

MS Office

[erp_consultant]

Open Office, while free, doesn't come close to Office in overall functionality. MS Project, although I don't use it that much, does not seem to have anything open source that works well.

SharePoint sucks big time but it seems that every place I go to uses it. If you use Linux or a Mac you are out of luck, unless you want to spin up a VM with Windows. In which case you might as well just use Windows.

Re:Big Hitters

[cryingpoet]

+1

Quicken/QuckBooks

[snadrus]

Not-only would this move over a huge number of accountants (and back-offices), but also: isn't your company's financial data a good place for security?

No PaleMoon for Linux? Not true!

[rnturn]

``I currently use PaleMoon fork of Firefox as my main browser, but there doesn't seem to be a Linux variant.''

Huh? There's a PaleMoon executable for Linux. At least there was a copy on my systems when I was running openSUSE 12.2. I don't see it as available via the software manager in YaST but it's definitely downloadable off the 'Net.

Evernote and Google Drive clients

[walterbyrd]

I can hardly believe they don't have them.

Re:Photoshop, GIMP, and batch conversions

[rnturn]

I'm not sure just what you needed to do to hundreds of icons but the first tool I would have looked at to perform a batch operation like that would have been ImageMagick and a simple shell script.

Quickbooks is the killer app

[tanstaaf1]

The one app which has kept me -- and virtually all small to middle-sized businesses -- locked to Windows for the past twenty years is Quickbooks. It used to be Microsoft Office, but not so much any more. GnuCash could be a contender, I believe, but for some reason I can't comprehend, its interface and flexibility, particularly in setup, remains stubbornly ugly and clunky. It's like the GnuCash programming leadership has never seen Quicken/Quickbooks, remains oblivious that Quicken/Quickbooks runs circles around them in terms of usability, or just doesn't care. But if they really don't care, why do they keep rolling out updates? But if they care, why don't they seem unable to learn from history... pretending that Quicken/Quickbooks didn't change the game more than 20 years ago? Just as LibreOffice has, finally, and quickly become a contender to Microsoft Office by focusing on usability and interface, GnuCash could do the same. GnuCash should strive to COPY Quickbooks as much as possible. Make it trivial to jump from Quickbooks to GnuCash by copying the interface. In particular Quicken/Quickbooks uses a dynamic "outline" interface for setting up and changing accounts and subaccounts. In Quickbooks you can change nearly anything with a simple drag and drop. You can make an account a subaccount or a subaccount a top level account. You can even drag and drop to move an account (with subaccounts) from, say, an asset to an equity account. You see the change and all the accounting is taken care of behind the scenes. I really want to be constructive. And I really want to flee Microsoft and Intuit (look at Amazon reviews and you'll notice that a huge percentage of Quickbooks users really are upset with Intuits' predation and really want to find an alternative..but feel trapped. GnuCash isn't that alternative. And it will NEVER be that alternative until they "get it" that Quickbooks changed the game on accounting software at least two decades ago. And, again, they COULD become that alternative in, perhaps, one version upgrade if they would get their heads in gear and pay attention to their competition. And you you know what? If GnuCash would undertake that self examination and change their development focus, they could change the whole Linux dynamic almost overnight. And if the GnuCash crew is too ossified or arrogant to undertake that self-examination and change, it would be nice if someone would fork GunCash. Maybe the Libre people could undertake that?

Re:Quickbooks is the killer app

[tanstaaf1]

I want to point out one other thing: The business users who would jump to Linux BECAUSE OF a good Quickbooks alternative would be high quality, influential new users. They would bring money and, commonly, would convert their entire office over to Linux. So bringing GnuCash ALONE out of the interface/usability stoneage, or replacing it entirely if necessary, with a real Quickbooks competitor would likely add millions or tens of millions of new, and unusually high quality end-users to Linux. Strategically it would be brilliant. If only the GnuCash management wasn't effectively keeping the doorway to the Linux elevator signposted "Out of Order".

Re:GIMP

[rnturn]

``I believe GIMP introduced the single-window mode in version 2.4 or 2.6; the multi-window mode was just a PITA.''

Yes. GIMP began offering the single window interface a couple of point releases ago. As for the multi-window PITAness you mentioned... having a single honkin' window must be be something you like about Photoshop. I've been using GIMP for years in multi-window mode and find the single window interface is just not my cup-o-tea. We all has our druthers.

Traktor

[kodabmx]

Traktor would be nice. and my BMW scan tool...

QuickBooks

[Mrrrrrrr]

QuickBooks. Lots of small businesses could possibly be moved to Linux if they could keep QuickBooks.

I'm a designer so...

[tezbobobo]

sPhotoshop, Illustrator, Indesign (Scribus is not a replacement for people doing it on a daily basis) Acrobat Distiller, Premiere, and AfterEffects. Also, Photoshop Lisghtroom and DxO. There are also a myriad of smaller apps like image resizers. Also, I'm at uni, so Endnote would be nice. Having a look at my startmenu more than 50% of the apps are not supported on linux. My whole ecosystem would need to move over to allow me to change. Note: I have been running linux on one laptop or another since the 90s.

Meade Autostar updater

[flightmaker]

I'd love to have a decent telescope but won't buy anything that depends on the Dark Side.

Re:TurboTax

[HappyDrgn]

If you need to do advanced tax preparation you're probably better off having a CPA do them and avoid the software altogether. A CPA is worth their weight in gold.

For Small Offices

[Akili]

One of my greatest sticking points has been Quickbooks. There are several little office shops I've helped that would be just fine using Linux for nearly everything else - Thunderbird, Firefox, and a few other odds and ends cover their general needs.

Except Quickbooks. Gnucash is just not a suitable alternative for their business accounts. I can get the Quickbooks database to run on Linux (with difficulty, sometimes), but the GUI must be not-Linux.

That'd be my vote.

Blue Iris

[roc97007]

Blue Iris video security software. I'd much rather run it natively on Linux rather than run it on Windows in a virtual box or try to get Wine working.

Adobe Lightroom

[roc97007]

There's always going to be a debate on Photoshop, but what I really need is Lightroom. Specifically on Android. The only thing keeping me from buying an Android tablet is that I'm a content producer, not a content consumer, and the apps aren't there yet. (Adobe Carousel is a joke. Don't even mention it.)

Re:What Windows App?

[TeknoHog]

The real question should be, what is it I want to do today? If you're dead set on using that one app, chances are you'll also expect Linux to act as a free clone of Windows. You could probably run it on Wine, but in any case you'd miss the whole point of unix and open source.

Ableton Live

[drkvogel]

Anyone?

Re:use the right terminology, ffs

[riondluz]

Actually, ffs, the terminology is prob correct.
Apps got hijacked by marketdroids bec applications is too long by 3 sylables.
From the hardware firmament, its programs all the way down

3D Modeling Software

[Cramit]

I am stuck running a windows virtual machine for Autodesk Inventor. I wish it or SolidWorks or something equivalent ran natively on Linux.

ABBYY FineReader

[Opyros]

I've tried open source OCR software, but found nothing with anything like the same accuracy.

Skype

[Trogre]

An up to date version of Skype, ie one that isn't three major versions behind, would be nice. A bit awkward when Linux users can't take part in multi-way Skype conference calls.

Or, better, a real free alternative.

Winmerge

[toadlife]

There is nothing that comes close to it in Linux. I went so far as to run it under WINE once when I was playing with my own Android kernel and wanted to compare sources.

Re:Winmerge

[kbrannen]

I like Winmerge when on Windows. For linux, you want "meld". I think I prefer meld a little more, but that may be just because I use it more.

HTH!

Re:Winmerge

[toadlife]

I tried meld and all of the native ones. Winmerge had some features that none of the native versions could match.

I have much more experience in Windows and with winmerge, so it's possible I just didn't know how to properly use the programs.

ExamDiff Pro

[GeekyGuru]

Would love seeing a Linux port of "ExamDiff Pro".

Microsoft Bob

[marciot]

Because Linux needs a friendlier interface.

Re:MS Money

[tepples]

But can you restore a Microsoft Money backup into GnuCash?

CrossOver

[emblemparade]

I feel your pain. But: I run the complete Office 2010 suite using CrossOver without a hitch. It doesn't quite feel "native," but it works well enough for all my needs. CrossOver even creates links so that, for example, when you double-click on .docx documents, they will open up with Word 2010.

It actually works so well that I have a terminal-server-based office (based on LTSP) running Word 2010 over CrossOver.

This is not a great solution (you will have to buy a license from Microsoft), but it is a solution to allow my setup to stay in Linux and still collaborate with others.

Cheers!

Re:CrossOver

[blind biker]

How does that CrossOver-ed Word work with Zotero?

The big parts

[Vlijmen Fileer]

The Windows GUI (The combined failure of Gnome, KDE, FVWM, Mintamon, Cinnamate and whatever you have more is outright sickening)
Active Directory plus its supporting GUI programs
Powershell

Re:Endnote

[Elendil]

Have you heard about Zotero http://www.zotero.org and Mendeley https://www.mendeley.com/ ? They're both much better than Endnote IMHO.

The apps that really keep me on Windows?

[Shinobi]

There are quite a few apps that keep me on Window of which these are just some of them:

Photoshop
Lightroom
Sony Vegas Pro
Visual Studio
BL BokfÃring(an accounting software, only supports Windows for local data saving etc)
Directory Opus(I've been using this since back in the Amiga Days, so it's a force of habit as much as anything else so....)
Electronic ID Certificate software

MS and SAP Apps

[petermp]

1. Native MS Office 2013, MS Outlook and Excel in particular 2. SAP GUI(real one, not JAVA)

Applications is not the real problem for Linux

[ibib]

* Me as a private person: ALL games, Pages (OS X application)
* Me as a professional: MS Excel, MS Outlook or other Exchange client equivalent
* My colleagues: SPSS, Nvivo, MS Outlook or other Exchange client equivalent
* My father as a professional: Adobe CS

The real reason why I don't switch to Linux on any of my computers at home: usability. Linux for the desktop is still too difficult to work with, even for a power user like me. EVERYTHING that reasonably needs to be configured has to be configurable in the GUI. You should never ever need to open a Terminal to fix things.

Anything related to audio and music production

[bugl.benjamin]

the state of linux audio is a disgrace. not only are a lot of audio interfaces (both usb and firewire) not supported (which is the manufacturers fault) but also the drivers (jack in particular) are so stupidly hard to install and configure to perform correctly and with low latency that one almost needs a specialized degree for that. when do people realize, that stuff is only adopted when it's easy to use.

VST Plugin Support

[TractorBarry]

I'd love to see audio VST plugins fully supported on Linux. Given that Reaper will run under Wine being able to use my collection of VST plugins would give me the opportunity to finally move off my XP audio machine. There's no way in hell I'm going to ever use Windows 8 or 10 as I will simply not be spied upon. And Windows 7 is neither use nor ornament as it doesn't have drivers for my audio/MIDI interfaces (which run fine under Linux).

Following the recent obnoxious spying behaviour of Microsoft Windows is now a completely dead platform to me. However I'm running a standalone Windows XP machine (which isn't connected to any networks) purely because it runs the audio software I need to do my work.

VST support for the win !

Internet Explorer

[Pieroxy]

What I'd like is to have all versions of IE available on Linux. I can't stand running VMs just to test the websites I'm working on. What a waste of resources...

IE is the only reasons I still have Windows (both VMs and real machines) around at home.

Directory Opus

[Warma]

Directory Opus (https://www.gpsoft.com.au/)
Nothing on Windows or Linux comes close to this in ease of use and power of this program. Basically DOpus has good UI-level tools for the stuff you typically need to use bash scripts to do (complex rename or move, duplicate finding and syncing directories, etc).
In addition it's the only file manager replacement with an FTP/SFTP feature that actually works.

Optical Music recognition

[yotam]

The OMR (Optical Music recognition) feature of music typesetting (like Finale has).
That is - I would like to be able to scan a music score and import it to LilyPond.

OneDrive

[fuzzywig]

If anyone knows of a good way to get OneDrive syncing working on linux, I for one would be super happy.

All the solutions that I've found so far are, basically, crap.
"Why don't you use Dropbox/Ubuntu One/Rsync etc?" Because the customer wants to use OneDrive.

Flight Sim X... FS98, FS2000, FS2002, FS2004

[advocate_one]

just can't get on with Flight Gear... got a lot invested in flight sim aircraft, cockpits, scenery etc.

Re:tortoise SVN!!!

[drkstr1]

No comment to add. Tortoise is so great, no linux tool get close to tortoise svn!

Came here to say this, but you beat me to. I do a lot of SVN tasks from within my windows VM because Tortoise is such a joy to use!

Macromedia FreeHand MX

[WillAdams]

It's ``just'' Altsys Virtuoso for NeXTstep w/ some updates (Virtuoso 2 was ~= to FreeHand 4, plus some bugs).

The thing is, what I'd really like to have is Altsys Virtuoso (which was announced for Windows NT), but on NeXT/OPENstep. Using Windows at a new task at work, and every day, I miss Mac OS X, or at least the things which OPENSTEP afforded to Mac OS X:

  - pop-up main menu
  - tear-off / repositionable sub-menus
  - Services
  - Shelf (Sidebar on Mac OS X)
  - Miller column filebrowser
  - Display PostScript (Quartz née Display PDF on Mac OS X)

Could we just finish up GNUstep?

Explorer.exe

[Not-a-Neg]

I want the Windows GUI on Linux. The ability to right-click on something and run it as Administrator would make life A LOT simpler.

Re:GIMP

[TemporalBeing]

``I believe GIMP introduced the single-window mode in version 2.4 or 2.6; the multi-window mode was just a PITA.''

Yes. GIMP began offering the single window interface a couple of point releases ago. As for the multi-window PITAness you mentioned... having a single honkin' window must be be something you like about Photoshop. I've been using GIMP for years in multi-window mode and find the single window interface is just not my cup-o-tea. We all has our druthers.

If the multi-window mode made things usable...then I'd agree. Rather, it makes it really hard to find stuff and know what's associated, etc. Most often, I'd end up losing track of which went with GIMP or did what, etc. So yes, I prefer a single-window mode that operates like Eclipse/VisualStudio with dockable parts - if you want to move something, undock it and move it. That alone can make a really big difference in the learning curve for GIMP.

Origin

[alexmagni]

where I'm working (materials science research) what everybody using Linux agrees on is that we really miss Microcal Origin - that's the only reason many here have a virtual machine with Windows on it...

Re:TurboTax

[TemporalBeing]

If you need to do advanced tax preparation you're probably better off having a CPA do them and avoid the software altogether. A CPA is worth their weight in gold.

My wife is a CPA who specializes in taxes. :) Nearly all the software she uses is Windows only and has significant license costs.

Re:None of them

[mark-t]

. The problems occur when people start pissing around with style mid-document, which MS themselves have lost control of in binary blobs.

When the problems occur is not as important an issue as that they occur in the first place, and make the software behave in ways that the user does not necessarily expect.

*facepalm*

[MarbleMunkey]

The OP should be censured; It's the first thing it says on the Pale Moon webpage!

"Pale Moon is an Open Source web browser available for Microsoft Windows and Linux"

https://www.palemoon.org/

media

[xuvetyn]

windows live movie maker and a decent mp3 player (winamp?)!

Re:Fire up ubuntu

[Teun]

With that level of 'knowledge' it's just as well you are anonymous, coward.

Drivers & 3D applications

[Segelflieger]

Drivers for laptops & netbooks are a problem, especially Wifi and Audio. I would like applications such as Unity3D and 3D Studio Max to run and Linux. I would then say that getting the maximum performance from GPUs is also a big thing. If only nVidia, AMD & intel would invest as much effort in Linux drivers as they do in Windows drivers Then there are things like DirectX12, and support for VR devices & sensors like OculusRift, Kinect, Leapmotion, etc. And yes ... a complete rewrite of Gimp to give it the ability to be used by Photoshop users without investing hours ... (a bit like Blender did for Maya & 3Dsmax users).

Flow Chart

[metzjtm]

Visio I have to keep a Win partition to use Visio . It's an engineering standard.

OPEN source

[Evan Langlois]

Linux isn't free beer. The only way this stuff improves is people donating time or money. If everyone that complained about Gimp donated the price of Photoshop to the developers, we would be well past 2.8 a long time ago

Once Linux has...

[MainCore_01]

... Office 2013 and Adobe CC, we will have no need for Windows anymore.

Re:TurboTax

[therealbev]

1. Tax stuff is serious shit. I want it HERE on MY computer, not in some ephemeral cloud only available when I actually have internet access or where somebody else might hack into it. I also save .pdf files in several places. I print only enough paper to make it easy to deal with next year (for extremely low values of 'easy').

1a. One year I tried to submit electronically via TurboTax on April 13. I got ambiguous acknowledgments back, so I sent paper forms -- I checked later and the electronic version never got through. Never again.

2. California charges $20 to submit tax forms electronically. This is insane, but so is the rest of our government.

3. I'd rather have my tax software on linux than windows. I trust windows as much as I trust the cloud.

Re:None of them

[mark-t]

What? Office to Office has that problem.

True... but it's less often if only because people tend to use the same version of the software consistently wherever its available.

Quicken/Quick Books

[DaveJ45]

The number one program most people that I deal with use as their 'deal breaker' reason for not converting over to a LINUX based OS is Quickbooks. Both personal and business users have too much of their financial history already invested into these programs, and would have to either re-enter a massive amount of history to bring any other solution up to speed, or they would have to switch over to a new LINUX based software solution but still have to run a Windows machine to access their past data, which is obviously a stupid option as well. Although at one time there were vague rumors of a LINUX version of Quickbooks in the future, it's obvious that now the preferred 'fix' is to sell everyone their monthly cloud based accounting instead.

Re:Quicken/Quick Books

[RyuMaou]

Yes! A thousand times, yes!

I've tried some of the FOSS "replacements" for this, but they couldn't even port my data correctly from my Quicken backup. Also, along with this, TurboTax. These two programs are the *main* thing that keeps me on Windows in my personal life. I have other programs, too, but they could be replaced or I would be willing to use a virtual machine for the little I use them any more. Quicken and TruboTax, though, are a lot more important to me and simply have to work and be supported.

On GNU/Linux I would like....

[edwyr]

Quicken

Re:Nvidia/ATI driver quality equal to or surpassin

[Druegan]

Yup. This. The only reason I own a Windows box is gaming. If I could get away from it for the titles I want to play, I'd wipe that box and put some Linux variant on it.. Till that can be a thing, well, I'm stuck with a shitty OS on my game rig.

Re:Internet Explorer

[armanox]

Well, there used to be Internet Explorer for Solaris, HP-UX, and Mac OS....

Windows to Linux - Bring it On!

[darrenadelaide]

Hi Everyone,

For me the answer is absolutely nothing.

I do a lot of work with Excel and writing code in VBA, but when the recent details of Microsoft's Security Violations came to light we had to investigate the changeover to Linux ( My secondary machine is Linux Mint and has been for nearly a year now).

Libreoffice actually was very good, and although it means an entire rewrite of the codebase (fortunately not as big as it sounds) which does the data mining research as Libreoffice is very different in the way code needs to be written to interface from Excel VBA, it was actually not a great issue with over 90% now ported (although the last 10% will take time due to lack of documentation at this stage).

The biggest Issue I have is that NTFS on Linux is a bit of a hack and I dont consider reliable, meaning I have to transfer something like 40+TB of research raw data to drives formatted under EXT4, and verify the data (Tip - Try DC++ to generate the TTH for the files so you can compare), before the previous source drive is reformatted for the next transfer of a drive. As im working with sensitive data I have no choice but to ditch Windows for good after air-gapping the network for now.

When it became apparent what was happening with the Microsoft/NSA spying, it sent shudders down my spine, I am trained in PCI Compliance and data mining /security and this would mean the all corporates who deal with creditcards (and users who use their card online) are leaking data to Microsoft and NSA et al, and this is NOT ON!.

Goodbye Microsoft, you may have had me as a customer for over 30 years being an IT professional, but no more. The only issue I have now is finding a good antivirus (dont laugh I have used Trend for sometime, and they just dont have one as Linux is a lot more damn secure than Windows).

Where Do I want to go today? Definately not with MS.

TomTom app, Tyre

[MoarSauce123]

How else would I update the device and plan my trips? I have yet to find a Linux alternative that works as well.

Re:TomTom app, Tyre

[MoarSauce123]

Forgot also MadCap Flare and associated applications and a decent app that works with my TV card. Yes, I know, there are plenty of TV card apps, but did you ever try to configure one of them? It is a total pain in the rear.

A decent media player

[ThePhilips]

Two things I use the most on Windows and which are missing on Linux:

A media player similar to MPC-HC. (VLC's UI is kind of crap. Nowadays - animated crap. Always was and it seems that they are not going to ever fix it. Still no click to play/pause. And some keyboard shortcuts are missing too. And the video tearing is also much worse on Linux than on Windows.)

A tool similar to AutoHotKey. There are efforts to replicate the tool on the Linux, but they are all castrated because of security and missing features and whatnot.

But in reality, though the state of the video players on Linux is as frustrating as it ever was, there is really nothing I'm missing too much.

TFA is stupid

[allo]

Who cannot find, that there are linux builds of palemoon should not post on slashdot.

Re:Nvidia/ATI driver quality equal to or surpassin

[higuita]

AMD open source driver is getting better and better, mesa 11, being release this month adds OpenGL 4.1
I'm already playing several OpenGL 4.1 games from steam. OpenGL 4.2 and 4.3 are also with most of the work done so probably in the start of next year it is ready
Performance is also getting better. So with mesa11, most people can forget catalyst driver

DirectX... that don't exist anymore, MS killed it... but you are probably talking about Direct3D ... you have gallium nine!!
that with a patch wine version, you can play many games in wine directly with Direct3D at full speed... but it only works with gallium mesa cards, so nouveau and radeon. Intel and closed sourced drivers can't use it

Games, there are already many GOOD linux games in steam! yes, more the better, but buying and using linux in steam right now helps the port of future games

Re:None of them

[higuita]

on each libre office release the compatibility improves a lot. I now almost don't have any problem

Re:None of them

[kbrannen]

"People pay for Office because it's better."
> No, people pay for Office because they are sheeple and don't know any better; and because Micro$oft has a stranglehold on the market.

Some people are sheeple, but some of us want/pay-for Office because it has programs that there are no equivalents for on Linux. Someone above mentioned Outlook (personally I hate Outlook with a passion). For me, it's OneNote; nothing in the OSS world comes close and I've looked. Even Evernote, which is about half of what OneNote is doesn't even have a native Linux app.

Just dumped Windows too

[Javaravanava]

I am 1 week into converting my Main PC OS on bare metal to Linux Mint from Windows which I have frankly enjoyed since the days of 3.1 and through to Windows 10. I've also played with linux machines since the days of slackware on many floppies and am familiar with it as well when suited but never as a main OS with a GUI. I've never been against using Microsoft products, actually I've praised them and very much enjoyed using them for work and play. I had upgraded our main machines quite quickly from 8.1 (which i frankly liked) to Windows 10 which I also liked. I was concerned about how deep Microsoft and others tendrils reach into my environment and after testing Mint in VM for a while I stuck another HD in my machine and now run Mint on the bare metal. Other than games (Minecraft and Steam are fine) I have not missed Windows one bit. I am very impressed with mint and for general use, Web, youtube, streaming media, downloading Mint hits all the targets. I'm actually very impressed with it and how easy it has been to use and replace my Main OS. Thing is, I'm a techy, I enjoy the challenge.. the millions of mums and dads out there won't care a cracker.

We don't need any Windows apps

[chris_clay]

Seriously, what would you possibly need to keep? There are thousands of applications with every GNU/Linux distribution, more than Windows has in some areas. I think it's more of a matter of finding out what GNU/Linux apps will replace the Windows equivalents, and go from there. That's the hard part. I migrated over to GNU/Linux over 7 years ago, and don't need any Windows apps. In fact, we've been using all GNU/Linux native apps during the past 7 years, and it's been wonderful. It wasn't an easy migration, but it can be done with a little work up front, but the payoff in the long run is definitely worth it. Things like Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, and other smaller apps that make up the GNU/Linux OS, are more than what we need. Once in a great while I may want to play a game or two that was released for Windows back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, but I use Wine and DosBox to run those in GNU/Linux.

Re:Photoshop - Framemaker

[Zontar The Mindless]

Adobe did us all a favour, and you complain?

Re:MobaXterm!

[Zontar The Mindless]

What are you lacking other than a tabbed terminal? Yakuake.

Window App

[Sing929]

Would most like to Quicken ported to Linux. They did it for the mac how 'bout Linux?