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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[FranTaylor]

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

yeah it's called "sybase"

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

[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

[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.

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).

Microsoft Paint

[Spy Handler]

the choice of oekaki artists

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

[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

Microsoft Excel

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Excel
Free Libre/Openoffice versions suck balls.

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

Linux brouhaha

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Cygwin

[Anonymous Coward]

Cygwin

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

[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

[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.

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.

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/

Regedit

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, Poettering, you can do it.

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....

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: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?

How about ...

[fahrbot-bot]

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

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.

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: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.

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: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.

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.