Ask Slashdot: Could Linux Ever Become Fully Compatible With Windows and Mac Software?

dryriver writes: Linux has been around for a long time now. A lot of work has gone into it; it has evolved nicely and it dominates in the server space. Computer literate people with some tech skills also like to use it as their desktop OS. It's free and open source. It's not vendor-locked, full of crapware or tied to any walled garden. It's fast and efficient. But most "everyday computer users" or "casual computer buyers" still feel they have to choose either a Windows PC or an Apple device as the platform they will do their computing on. This binary choice exists largely because of very specific commercial list of programs and games available for these OSs that is not available for Linux.

Here is the question: Could Linux ever be made to become fully compatible with all Windows and Mac software? What I mean is a Linux distro that lets you successfully install/run/play just about anything significant that says "for Windows 10" or "for OSX" under Linux, without any sort of configuring or crazy emulation orgies being needed? Macs and PCs run on the exact same Intel/AMD/Nvidia hardware as Linux. Same mobos, same CPUs and GPUs, same RAM and storage devices. Could Linux ever be made to behave sufficiently like those two OSs so that a computer buyer could "go Linux" without any negative consequences like not being able to run essential Windows/Mac software at all? Or is Linux being able to behave like Windows and OSX simply not technically doable because Windows and OSX are just too damn complex to mimic successfully?

Comments

Yes and No

[dunkindave]

Could it? Yes. Will it? No. The other OSes will always be putting something in that makes it break, and playing catchup isn't viable. You also don't want always to be the tail getting wagged by the big dogs.

Re: Yes and No

[WarJolt]

The question is malformed. Will Windows and Mac ever be made compatible with Linux?

Windows 10 has implemented Linux system calls. You can run Linux apps on Windows.

Re: Yes and No

[Junta]

I suppose the goal is 'can linux desktop become the universal application platform' and the answer is theoretically yes, practically, no.

For OSX apps, there hasn't even been much of an interest in theory. GNUstep had an injection of liveliness for people wanting to make at least code compile for OSX and Linux, but that enthusiasm died out. It never ever began to think about binary compatibility.

For Windows apps, sure, wine has been doing it's job admirably, but it's chasing a moving target that has much more resources than it does.

Now the phenomenon you mention speaks to another possibility: kernel system call emulation and just use the Windows/OSX system as-is. This is of limited utility as there isn't a supported/licensed way to do this. It's one thing to borrow the userspace of a free operatiing system, but doesn't really work for closed-source applications.

Re: Yes and No

[WarJolt]

I don't call this emulation, just like wine is not an emulator. It is a implementation of the Linux system calls.

Re: Yes and No

[FudRucker]

okay, lets see you run GQRX on windows, it requires qt5, python, gnuradio, gr-osmosdr, and the libraries of any SDR hardware you plan to be running with it, it is a little more complex than than what microsoft would want you to believe

Re: Yes and No

[OrangeTide]

Emulation of the system calls. Rather than emulation of CPU and hardware. Same concept, but line draw at a different layer.

The overhead of something like 'wine' is very low, compared to something like qemu or even VMware. Which I think is the point that was trying to be made, rather than any semantics about the definition of emulator. (in my industry most of these are called simulators, and emulation is a different beast all together)

Re:Yes and No

[DontBeAMoran]

Seeing how even hackintosh systems running proper macOS are prone to potential problems, I think software emulation would be even less reliable.

Re: Yes and No

[bondsbw]

Also it depends on what you call "Windows software". You won't have great success with consumer software on the GUI stack, but server software is a different story nowadays. Command line is much better and Microsoft has taken big steps to making Windows Server headless. PowerShell and .NET Core now run on Linux. And ASP.NET Core is cross-platform for hosting web applications.

Re:Yes and No

[Ichijo]

No. The other OSes will always be putting something in that makes it break

I doubt that. Windows XP seems pretty stable now, and someday Windows 10 will be just as stable.

Re:Yes and No

[DickBreath]

A pirated Windows is not zero cost. Microsoft does everything possible to make it have lots of costs in terms of workarounds and inconvenience. Or it just flat out failing at an inopportune time.

Yes, Linux is zero cost. So it is definitely cheaper than the non-zero cost of pirated Windows. But Linux is also superior. The only reason for Windows is the legacy software.

A significant fraction of people who don't use computers in their job get by with chromebooks. A whole chromebook generation of school children is also growing up.

Re:Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

You're asking a mostly volunteer-based open source project to be compatible with two closed-source platforms that won't let you see their internal specs without signing an NDA and who make arbitrary platform-specific changes at random times. The solution is the other way around: the companies need to their platforms compatible with Linux because they *do* have access to Linux's internal specs.

Microsoft has already started doing so with its Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka. Windows Bash Shell), which emulates a Linux kernel and partners with the Ubuntu repository to allow Linux software to run on it (mainly console tools; GUI software is not officially supported although it reportedly works to some extent).

Re:Yes and No

[techno-vampire]

And it is unusable garbage (unless you're one of those weirdos who *LIKES* to do everything the hardest way possible).

Wrong, wrong, wrong, utterly wrong. About a decade or so ago, my sister, who knows how to use a computer but not how to do any troubleshooting asked me to convert her system from Windows to Ubuntu. Since then, she's asked me for computer help about once or maybe twice a year, mostly about system upgrades. Aside from that, It Just Works.

About three years ago, I did the same for a friend's wife because he doesn't know Linux. Again, It Just Works and she's never needed any assistance. If you can't get Linux to work, either you have hardware problems or you're doing something wrong, and I've no idea which it is in your case.

Re:Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Windows has many problems, faults and flaws. But that doesn't change the fact that Linux is unusable garbage. And that's the opinion of 98% of the people in the world.

I disagree with you on many points. First, it is not unusable garbage. My Linux desktops and servers are much more stable than the Windows desktops and servers I've run. I can do anything on Linux that I can do on Windows, except play some of the games I own. As for your 98%, the most you can say is 98% of the people "that use computers" aren't using Linux. Not using something doesn't mean they agree it's garbage. I've seen many people that were given the opportunity to use Linux, and quickly realised how fast and stable it was, and didn't go back to Windows. Plus when considering servers, Linux is over 75% of the market share.

Side by side, I hate Windows. I hate the problems, the update process, the senseless GUI changes, all the new features in Windows 10, and the problems with online activation. Online activation doesn't stop the pirates, but it does hinder the people that pay for Windows. I don't prefer Linux because it's free. I prefer it because it is faster, more reliable, and in my opinion more pleasing to use.

Re:Yes and No

[steveg]

98% of the people of the world? Not at all.

97% of the people in the world don't even know Linux exists. Would they dislike Linux if they did know? Some would, some wouldn't. Since they don't know about it, drawing conclusions about the relative proportions of users is meaningless.

It may be *your* opinion that Linux is unusable garbage. But then again, that's the opinion of someone who thinks that they are qualified to judge the opinions of billions of people who *have* no opinions, so forgive me if I discount *your* opinion on the subject.

Re:Yes and No

[aqui]

When will Application developers finally cross compile their code to work on linux, and release linux versions of their software?
If they aren't doing it why not?

There. Fixed your question.

Answer: They already are. The entire cloud / internet runs on open code that runs on a nix stack. Steam is available under linux. Open and Libre office run under linux. I've found suitable replacements for almost all software I used to use under linux.
I haven't booted into Windows (at home) in years. If a company just wants to support wall gardens then I'm happy not to use their software.

Re:Yes and No

[sn0wflake]

This will probably be labelled flamebait because I'm hurting some Linux users feelings. I don't know where you people buy your hardware, but it must be located in fairy tale land. I tried giving Linux a chance once a year since 1997 until 2015, and each time there was always a problem with hardware recognition. Last time I tried giving Linux a chance it couldn't recognize a standard Intel RAID card that has worked out of the box since Windows Vista, yet Fedora had no drivers for it, and it didn't give the option to search online for a driver. So I downloaded a driver from Intel and tried installing it. Fedora couldn't find the package because it was in a different package format. I simply rolled my eyes and mumbled "f*ck this sh*t". That is Linux in a nutshell; constant stupid idiotic problems with everything.

Re:Yes and No

[TheFakeTimCook]

And it is unusable garbage (unless you're one of those weirdos who *LIKES* to do everything the hardest way possible).

Wrong, wrong, wrong, utterly wrong. About a decade or so ago, my sister, who knows how to use a computer but not how to do any troubleshooting asked me to convert her system from Windows to Ubuntu. Since then, she's asked me for computer help about once or maybe twice a year, mostly about system upgrades. Aside from that, It Just Works.

About three years ago, I did the same for a friend's wife because he doesn't know Linux. Again, It Just Works and she's never needed any assistance. If you can't get Linux to work, either you have hardware problems or you're doing something wrong, and I've no idea which it is in your case.

Oh, boy! You managed to defined a stable configuration of email client and web browser.

But now, your sister says she wants to try her hand at multitrack audio recording and editing, and she's buying a MIDI keyboard because she heard there are a lot of nice soft-synths she can use.

NOW is she going to be happy?

Re: Yes and No

[_Sharp'r_]

FreeBSD already has Linux binary compatibility, but that's helped a lot by the fact that the FreeBSD team has access to the source and can even re-use some of the code if they want.

So if you want similar functionality for MS Windows, a big step would be having a copy of the code to build it from, but not 100% necessary. There is a lot of API documentation out there, so as Microsoft forces programs to actually use documented features and not take shortcuts (currently in the name of security), it's likely to be more feasible to just drop in an executable and have it run.

It would be a good secret project for someone like Dell to try, in order to announce one day that they are switching all their computer sales and their new OS was windows compatible with software. It would only save them $25/computer and they may have some legal expenses as a result, so they may not see it as worthwhile.

Re:Yes and No

[TheFakeTimCook]

When will Application developers finally cross compile their code to work on linux, and release linux versions of their software?
If they aren't doing it why not?

There. Fixed your question.

Answer: They already are. The entire cloud / internet runs on open code that runs on a nix stack. Steam is available under linux. Open and Libre office run under linux. I've found suitable replacements for almost all software I used to use under linux.
I haven't booted into Windows (at home) in years. If a company just wants to support wall gardens then I'm happy not to use their software.

If you want to spew Apple Hate, then at least man up and invoke the enemy by name!

Oh, and don't insinuate things that aren't true:

1. MacOS NAS NEVER been a "Walled Garden".

2. iOS hasn't been a "Walled Garden" since iOS 8, over FOUR years ago.

Next time, do at least TRY to not embarrass yourself.

Re:Yes and No

[techno-vampire]

This will probably be labelled flamebait because I'm hurting some Linux users feelings. I don't know where you people buy your hardware, but it must be located in fairy tale land.

I certainly wouldn't call it flamebait and I've been using Linux for about 20 years, first in dual boot and as my only OS for the last 11. I can only speak for Fedora and Ubuntu (I use Fedora and do what little tech support my sister needs with Ubuntu.) but generally speaking, you don't need hardware drivers unless you've either got something bleeding edge or very old. There are, of course, exceptions, where hardware companies won't reveal enough of their hardware specs for anybody to write proper OSS drivers. (nVidia, of course, is the worst offender here.) I can, however explain that Fedora doesn't have any built in functions for searching on-line for third party drivers as a matter of policy, but there are ways to transform one package format to another if you need to. Yes, this does take a little more work, but it's not as exclusionary as you seem to think it is. And, to answer your question, I used to have a hardware tech who bought mainstream motherboards, cards and drives, nothing fancy. Now, I have a Dell tower, right out of the box, with whatever went in at the factory. It Just Works.

That is Linux in a nutshell; constant stupid idiotic problems with everything.

Fedora isn't for everybody; it's a bleeding edge, techy distro that's used as a testbed for new things that might later turn up in RedHat. If all you want is something that Just Works (Including downloading and installing the proprietary nVidia drivers every time there's a kernel update.) try Ubuntu, because it's designed mostly for people who don't want to have to get "under the hood" to get things working.

Re:Yes and No

[techno-vampire]

Oh, boy! You managed to defined a stable configuration of email client and web browser. But now, your sister says she wants to try her hand at multitrack audio recording and editing, and she's buying a MIDI keyboard because she heard there are a lot of nice soft-synths she can use.

Now, now, now, don't forget all of the work she's done with LibreOffice, chairing two annual SF conventions. However, I see your point. Although that's not the type of thing she's interested in, if she were, I'd tell her to check around on the Ubuntu Forum, find out what brands/models are known to work and pick one from that list. It's not exactly rocket surgery, doing a bit of research before you buy something like that, is it?

Re:Yes and No

[Dragonslicer]

This will probably be labelled flamebait because I'm hurting some Linux users feelings. I don't know where you people buy your hardware, but it must be located in fairy tale land.

My laptop is a Dell, and everything works fine. Only hardware change I've made is to replace the hard drive that came with it with an SSD.

For my desktop, I think everything in it came from Microcenter.

Re: Yes and No

[OrangeTide]

There is Linux syscall emulation on NT kernel and on L4 kernel already. And I used the Linux-compatibility in LynxOS back in the day for an RTOS project.

FreeBSD/NetBSD carried a lot over from the older iBCS (Intel Binary Compatibility Standard) to provide Linux compatibility. NetBSD is interesting in that it still supports really old 386BSD binaries.

Windows compatible is harder than Linux compatible. You can start from wine, Longene or ReactOS, but really unless you have the resources of Microsoft and their level of internal documentation it's not going to go well for you. But feel free to run your Linux binaries on Windows 10, it does work as advertised.

Re:Yes and No

[sensei moreh]

It's not exactly rocket surgery,

I don't do rocket surgery, but I do have been known to do rock surgery (cut open rocks and sometimes even extract individual mineral grains).

Re: Yes and No

[hunterkll]

It's not emulation though. It's equally as native as Win32 is - a translation layer / environment subsystem on the NT Kernel.

If the linux implementation on windows is 'emulation' then so is the regular Win32 environment. They had to implement special IPC hooks in the NT kernel to allow the two environment subsystems to talk to each other, even!

I mean, if a translation layer is 'emulation' in the fullest sense, then Win32 on NT was NEVER native and has always been emulated, because the win32 layer is translated into NT kernel syscalls, as well.

Re:Yes and No

[Immerman]

That's not surgery, that's just dissection.

Now, if you can put the rock back together and have it work better than before, *then* it's surgery.

Re: Yes and No

[Junta]

Yeah, after dealing extensively with powershell.. I really don't think the linux world has anything to gain by jumping on powershell.

This extends to the .net stuff, I'd much rather have the leading open non-.net api to any of the horrendous .net apis I've had the displeasure of dealing with.

Powershell may be better than cmd, but as a scripting language it is far more headache inducing than python, and as a commandline it has some nice tricks, but those nice tricks create some weird syntax to contend with as well.

Re: Yes and No

[Junta]

I just don't see this trend accelerating becoming more dominant than it already has. People still use their desktop applications all the time. My work has *repeatedly* tried to make people use brwoser hosted apps and time and time again they find whatever contortion required to open in a desktop app. Some people won't go and not all applications work out well that way.

Re:Yes and No

[mea2214]

Windows comes pre-installed on practically all OEM boxes. Until that changes Linux will never compete on volume of users.

Re: Yes and No

[nashv]

Which is actually more of a threat to Linux. Anything you can do on Linux...you can also do on Windows. The reverse is not true yet. If you ask me, ChromeOS + Android has a much better chance of actually shaking up the big dogs than traditional Linux ever will.

Re: Yes and No

[phantomfive]

Also it depends on what you call "Windows software". You won't have great success with consumer software on the GUI stack

I just want to point out that the latest version of Wine is working really well here.

Re:Yes and No

[Waccoon]

Yes, Linux is zero cost.

The fact this comment was upvoted shows how out of touch the Linux community is, and why after decades of development the OS is still just a blip on the desktop radar. Lack of software is the result of Linux's market share, not the cause.

Re: Yes and No

[bondsbw]

Sure, Python is just fine as a scripting language. But it is terrible at the command line. PowerShell is better than any common CLI by a long stretch in just about any usability metric besides "I am more used to X".

And even the Linux fanbois tend to acknowledge that .NET is a good framework and language set. Not perfect, maybe not the best for your use case, but this is literally the first time I've ever heard it called "horrendous".

Re: Yes and No

[bondsbw]

Fair enough, I haven't used it in years.

Re: Yes and No

[OrangeTide]

How do you think system DLLs work on Windows?

Re: Yes and No

[OrangeTide]

They had to implement special IPC hooks in the NT kernel to allow the two environment subsystems to talk to each other, even!

*Yawn* how do you think FreeBSD and LynxOS do it. It's kernel supported emulation of Linux syscalls. L4 doesn't quite have the concept because L4 loads personalities that are more driver-like than kernel-like, but L4 is weird.

Re:Yes and No

[Bert64]

If you expect everything to work out of the box, get a mac...
I've had just as many problems getting windows to support random hardware as linux, often the wifi or ethernet is not supported and i have to download the drivers on another system, often old hardware is not supported at all on 64bit windows but does work on 64bit linux. Having to hunt for windows drivers is just as painful, if not more so than linux.

The advantage windows has is being either preinstalled, or provided with a custom made restore image thats already configured for the hardware it ships with. The same is true of macos, it's tailored specifically for the hardware it ships with.
Linux is pretty much the only os that is downloaded and installed separately.

If more general purpose linux systems were available preinstalled then it would be far easier for users. Noone has driver problems with preinstalled chromebooks, android phones or any of the thousands of embedded linux devices out there on the market.

Re: Yes and No

[Mnemennth]

That's like saying you can run a 50-yard dash in swim fins; the only reason you'd do it is as a joke.

Re:Yes and No

[TheFakeTimCook]

Oh, boy! You managed to defined a stable configuration of email client and web browser. But now, your sister says she wants to try her hand at multitrack audio recording and editing, and she's buying a MIDI keyboard because she heard there are a lot of nice soft-synths she can use.

Now, now, now, don't forget all of the work she's done with LibreOffice, chairing two annual SF conventions. However, I see your point. Although that's not the type of thing she's interested in, if she were, I'd tell her to check around on the Ubuntu Forum, find out what brands/models are known to work and pick one from that list. It's not exactly rocket surgery, doing a bit of research before you buy something like that, is it?

I was actually just picking a hypothetical interest that I suspected Linux might not be so good at.

As a Mac user for decades, I am well-familiar with the "must find a COMPATIBLE "... So the question becomes, "If your sister WERE to develop a sudden urge to create music, would Linux STILL serve her needs? IOW, after she conducted that research, what would she find?"

It's not a given that there would be SOMETHING, even in this day and age. I was looking for a suitable blood pressure monitor with Mac-compatible software (even though every one of the devices have a USB interface, with an undoubtedly bog-simple comm. protocol!) for a friend of mine. No dice. I could find no end of BP Monitors with iOS Apps, but NONE with a Mac Application!!! And even though my friend had. MacBook Pro, he actually had no smartphone, nor any iOS device. So, after nearly sweet of on and off searching, I had to give up! In 2016!!!

So, even now, it STILL seems to be primarily a Windows-World, and, even in the 21st Century, the rest of us still have to but HOPE we can get what we need/want to get done on our platform of choice!

Re:Yes and No

[techno-vampire]

"If your sister WERE to develop a sudden urge to create music, would Linux STILL serve her needs? IOW, after she conducted that research, what would she find?"

I have no idea and no reason to do the research. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find that there are a number of Linux programs that work with that kind of hardware. I do know, as an example, that when I bought a laptop and replaced Windows Vista with Fedora Linux, the program Cheese detected and used the built in webcam right from the start, with no need to install extra software.

Re: Yes and No

[stooo]

>> Anything you can do on Linux...you can also do on Windows.

That's not true.
Under Linux, I can work without having to call IT every other day for weired problems
Also, I have one package manager that covers all software.
You can't do that on Windows.

Re:Yes and No

[stooo]

>> iOS hasn't been a "Walled Garden" since iOS 8, over FOUR years ago.
What is it then ?
A golden cage ?

Re:Yes and No

[stooo]

>> Lack of software is the result of Linux's market share, not the cause.
BS.
Linux market share is fine, thanks. And there are two major software ecosystems around it, we don't need the Windows junk software, thanks.
FYI, Linux market share is currently approx 5x that of windows on shipped devices(not counting private installs on used devices.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Yes and No

[walshy007]

As someone who has had a quite decent midi keyboard for some years, and a linux user for close to 20.. yes, she would be quite happy.

The jack backend is absolutely lovely for connecting everything together, and there are a myriad of sampled synths and modelled synths available. In terms of mixing/recording ardour is a popular choice but again with jacks architecture there are plenty of choices.

While there still may be some things that can be hard to do on linux.. I cannot off hand think of any.

Re: Yes and No

[buchanmilne]

"Because you don't need a package manager on Windows. You just download stuff and install it, and use the Control Panel to manage it from there on out."

Sure, you don't need a package manager, but without one, for each 3rd-party application you downloaded and installed:
- you aren't receiving regular updates
- you are spending more time than necessary checking for new versions, downloading them manually and upgrading them manually
- You have another updater running in tge background to check for updates, which may require additional privileges and thus be vulnerable, see tge recent skype updater vulnerability."

"I enjoy working with Linux but the myriad inconsistent package managers have to go."

Why? They provide value, and they don't prevent other options for distributing software.

"The Mac solved the installation problem in 1984"

So that's why I have to upgrade lots of software by "brew upgrade" or "brew cask upgrade" for software that is available that way (and no indicator to show that there are updates as one gets on Linux :-(), and have other updaters (Adobe, Microsoft Office etc.) on my work Macbook? This seems like a poor solution to one aspect of software distrobution.

"and it's like the Linux guys have learned nothing from that approach."

The Mac approach (bundling all files and deps in one image) is available to developers using e.g. AppImage (https://appimage.org), which provides good tooling for creating .appimage files. A number of open-source projects use it to provide new versions, especially if they adopt new features of new versions of big frameworks (e.g. Qt).

There are other, more modern, approaches, which try and provide the advantages of traditional linux packaging but with distribution independence, such as Flatpak. A number of proprietary applications (Skype, Spotify, etc.) are available as flatpaks from flathub.org, and can be installed with the Gnome Software GUI app on most current distros, and with KDE GUI in the next releases of most distros, or using the cli tool.

Re: Yes and No

[Junta]

The commands are way too verbose to type, and the tab-completion is helpful, but the verb-noun arrangement is exactly opposite of helpful tab completion (noun-verb would have been better). There is inconsistency about what you can do when you pipe (if you pipe with an exe, you have to do text manipulation, others you must do format- cmdlets instead). If you have something with spaces that is executable you have to quote it, and because powershell assumes a string value without a command is a return, needs to be prefaced with & to say "I really mean to execute this", which wouldn't come up so often if not for the fact than windows likes to standardize on directories with spaces in them. It also is another weird inconsitency, the first word is generally an action to do, except hen it looks like a vlue then it isn't an action to do. It takes a relatively long time for the powershell runtime to load up. bash is barely measureable, but even then dash was popularized by wanting an even faster runtime, a .psh incurs a rather heavy startup cost. It inherits a lot of the things in terms of readability that people rightfully criticize perl and javascript for, though admittedly not as bad as javascript when it comes to complex server interactions. Ultimately, the powershell terminal in windows is still pretty bad, compared to terminals on other platforms, despite improvements.

Ultimately there is an upside (function based rather than process based makes for more efficient execution), but the supporting ecosystem is still rather weak for powershell, as windows developers generally either ignore it or put a token effort in to mark the 'supports powershell' marketing tickbox, but not grasping what would really make their cmdlets useful. The concept is however interesting, since on the bash side you might fork three or so processes to do a simple command and very simple text processing, which when put into automation makes for slow stuff.

I will say that my exposure to .net was heavy on the TLS part. It was also prior to interacting with OpenSSL, but OpenSSL was a huge relief after dealing with .Net TLS. The windows concept of how to manage certificates is maddeningly convoluted, particularly. Note I've seen hints of Java and it also looks pretty maddening, and seems to resemble .Net, but I have thus far avoided more in depth Java development to really make that determination.

Re:Yes and No

[LS1 Brains]

And it is unusable garbage (unless you're one of those weirdos who *LIKES* to do everything the hardest way possible).

You're probably the same guy who will talk tons of trash about how iPhones suck, but your Android phone is the most secure, stable thing ever.

Re: Yes and No

[bondsbw]

Yeah, certificate management can be a PITA on Windows. That (and the domino effect it caused) forced me to work a lot of overtime a couple of weeks ago.

Oh and stay away from WCF if you can help it. Otherwise, .NET tends to be pretty decent for just about any job I've come across.

Re:Yes and No

[TheFakeTimCook]

"If your sister WERE to develop a sudden urge to create music, would Linux STILL serve her needs? IOW, after she conducted that research, what would she find?"

I have no idea and no reason to do the research. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find that there are a number of Linux programs that work with that kind of hardware. I do know, as an example, that when I bought a laptop and replaced Windows Vista with Fedora Linux, the program Cheese detected and used the built in webcam right from the start, with no need to install extra software.

Well, although I just guessed at an area that Linux was deficient in, if you look down through this article's comments, you will find posters that HAVE done that research into audio production on Linix, and came up wanting. Apparently, Linux has had longstanding issues with sound drivers, and it just hasn't gotten much better over several years.

Also, knowing the Linux-friendly bent of this site, if there were some facts to clobber me with, SOMEONE would have come along and "educated" me..

Re: Yes and No

[lsatenstein]

I believe that wine is a mapping of windows calls to Linux calls.
Perhaps, Microsoft has done the reverse.
It is always best to go vanilla, except where graphics drivers are concerned. A vendor should only be required to make a unique driver that serves all platforms.

Re:Yes and No

[TheFakeTimCook]

>> iOS hasn't been a "Walled Garden" since iOS 8, over FOUR years ago.
What is it then ?
A golden cage ?

Haha.

What I meant was that Apple has officially supported "side-loading" of applications on iOS devices (without Jailbreaking) since the release of iOS 8, which, IIRC, happened in 2014.

Two ways to do this:

1. If you have a Mac, you can use XCode (free, no developer license required) to download and "make" any one of a number of Open Source iOS Apps available written in Objective-C and Swift. Here's some sources:

https://github.com/dkhamsing/o...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

This list has some amazing Open Source Apps written in Swift:

https://medium.com/@pradeep_ch... ...and that's just the beginning. Search For "open source ios apps" for a real eye-opener!

Ok, so you don't have a Mac? You can still play, thanks to the folks at Cydia...

2. You can upload any number of precompiled ".ipa" packages into your iOS devices using Cydia Impactor (which does not require Jailbreaking), which has versions that run on Mac, Linux and Windows. And of course, there have been websites that offer these packages. Again, Apple is FINE with all this... (Or at least fine with the many apps that don't require Jailbreaking) :

http://www.cydiaimpactor.com/

https://www.ultimatetech.org/t...

https://www.unlockboot.com/bes... ...and like with the open source list, above, there are many other search results. Try a search for "iOS .ipa files download sites".

So, THAT's what I meant by "no longer a Walled Garden"; because it just ISN'T, and hasn't been since September, 2014:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Weren't expecting THAT answer, were you?

Re:Yes and No

[TheFakeTimCook]

As someone who has had a quite decent midi keyboard for some years, and a linux user for close to 20.. yes, she would be quite happy.

The jack backend is absolutely lovely for connecting everything together, and there are a myriad of sampled synths and modelled synths available. In terms of mixing/recording ardour is a popular choice but again with jacks architecture there are plenty of choices.

While there still may be some things that can be hard to do on linux.. I cannot off hand think of any.

So where are all the examples of this myriad of sampled and modeled synths?

Re:Yes and No

[walshy007]

Well for sampled I tend towards using LinuxSampler with one of it's gui frontends.. For non-sampled it depends on what you want. Bristol takes care of all of the modelled analog synths that you could care for (and for free, the commercial packages for those synths for other platforms can cost a mint).

Yoshimi is a lot lighter synth on the cpu than the analog modelling bristol. There's a few others like fluidsynth that I rarely use but are about. And if you want to use a different more tracker like workflow with a commercial product there's Renoise that has a more all-in-one approach than the lego set that the other packages provide.

But seriously, you could have just googled.

Re:Yes and No

[techno-vampire]

If you expect everything to work out of the box, get a mac...

I can remember when one of Apple's slogans for the mac was, "It just works." Now, unless you're using bleeding edge hardware or something where the OEM won't release the specs (nVidia is a good example, as well as some of the printer manufacturers.) the drivers are either built into the kernel or available in the standard repositories so that most of the time Linux Just Works.

Re:Yes and No

[unixisc]

Could it? Yes. Will it? No. The other OSes will always be putting something in that makes it break, and playing catchup isn't viable. You also don't want always to be the tail getting wagged by the big dogs.

In terms of Windows, does Linux really need to be compatible to Windows 8 or later? If any Linux distro, or Linux in general, finds a way to fully support Windows 7 applications, it should be fine, since much of the computing population has done their level best to cling on to 7 and resist kicking & screaming the move to 10. Just look at the apps available for the Windows 10 App store, and that'll tell you a story

On the Mac side of things, are they talking about OS X compatibility or iOS compatibility? If it's the former, is there a huge base of applications for OS X, aside from Apple's own applications like Pages or Numbers? And if it's the latter, the argument now shifts to Linux running VMs that support these apps. But why are we trying to run phone/tablet apps on a laptop, instead of the platforms they were designed for?

Re: Yes and No

[Junta]

It is of course that, but it is more than that and implements much of the windows 'userland' libraries.

In the WSL, they stopped at implementing the linux system calls, and the linux userland has to come from a linux distro.

Re:Yes and No

[Reziac]

My experience has unfortunately been identical to yours -- been chasing linux since ~1997 and always there's some too-much-annoyance due to weird bugs and stuff that just doesn't work (and I've tried literally hundreds of distros). But last year I did finally find a keeper in PCLinuxOS (Trinity or KDE desktop). It's still not my everyday OS, but at least 1) almost everything works, and 2) I'm not constantly so annoyed by weirdassed bugs that I wind up deleting it. Oh, and 3) performance is finally comparable to Windows on the same hardware.

Re: Yes and No

[Reziac]

All to the good. The KDE-to-Windows kludge sucked. Now if only we could get Windows apps to run seamlessly on Linux... without having to finick it through obscure WINE tricks. For average users, it needs to be point-and-install.

There's one bloody Mac app that I'd really like to be able to run on Windows or Linux (cuz I'm not buying a damned Mac just for that)... will that ever happen?

Why?

[F.Ultra]

Why is this even a question? If you want to run your Windows 10 applications, why don't you simply use Windows? Why switch to Linux if you just want it to be another form of Windows?

Re:Why?

[Stormy Dragon]

Because it could be another form of Windows that's not recording everything I do, installing applications without permission, deleting files without permission, etc.

Re:Why?

[FudRucker]

yup, i favor Linux a LOT, but i keep windows around because there is some apps not available on Linux that can be found for windows, and vis-versa, there are apps that run on Linux that is not available on windows but is for Linux

Re:Why?

[Korak Silvercloud]

Spend just a little time learning Linux and you will find you don't need Windows. I really don't get it, people's main complaint against Linux is it is hard to use or doesn't run what they want. The "hard to use" is just that you need to learn a little bit. Once you get used to it Linux is no more difficult than Windows. The "doesn't run ____" is fixed by spending a little time looking at Linux software till you find a replacement. Sure, you don't some proprietary software, on the other hand you normally get something open source that does the same thing and is free. Then also you get an OS that listens to you and respects your rights. No recording everything you do, no installing apps without asking, and no "You busy? Too bad I am rebooting right NOW."

Re:Why?

[PPH]

Are you certain that this spying behavior isn't built into the DLLs that Windows libraries depend on? Or compiled into the apps themselves as static libs?

If you want a secure system, you have to inspect every component that you touch.

Re:Why?

[bspus]

What you really want is reactOS. Unfortunately, despite being in development for almost 20 years, it's practically unusable. Desktop OSes will probably become obsolete before it even comes out of alpha

Re:Why?

[PmanAce]

Please find me the equivalent of Visual Studio for Linux.

Re:Why?

[ThanatosMinor]

Why is this even a question? If you want to run your Windows 10 applications, why don't you simply use Windows? Why switch to Linux if you just want it to be another form of Windows?

The applications are not the OS. Wanting to run a common application that runs easily in Windows is not the same as wanting to run Windows. Since this is Slashdot maybe a stupid car analogy will help.

Suppose operating systems were cars and applications were features in the cars. Microsoft makes cars and ValveCo makes valves and caps that fit on the gas tanks but they only make them for Microsoft cars. Gas stations have licensing agreements and if you go to one its nozzle almost certainly fits a ValveCo valve. So if you want to get gas conveniently you pretty much need to use ValveCo devices, and if you want one to work well with your car you need a Microsoft car. Problem is Microsoft cars get terrible gas mileage and smell like old cabbage. You can buy a different and better car pretty easily, but it won't have a ValveCo valve and then if you want to get gas you'll have to find one of the few gas stations with nozzles that integrate well with your car or use a hack someone put together that will adapt a ValveCo valve to your car. The former sucks because the station near your house and the one by your work and the ones in between all use nozzles that require ValveCo valves, and the latter sucks because since they're hacks they're always a little leaky.

What you want is to be able to buy a car that doesn't smell like old cabbage but use industry-standard gas caps on it so driving it isn't super inconvenient and you don't have to go miles out of your way to get gas from a station outside the MS system.
What computer users want is to be able to use industry-standard applications without using hacks like Wine or dealing with the bullshit the Microsoft OS puts you through to do it.

Re:Why?

[the_B0fh]

There's never a 1 for 1 replacement. And if you want to develop stuff in Visual Studio doing dotNet and things like that, you're barking up the wrong tree.

But IDEs? Linux has plenty of them, and some are even pretty mature.

Re:Why?

[Patrick_Champion]

The current Eclipse is 4.7.2 or so.

I used a much older version with the nickname of "Helios" or something like that and 7 years ago I was able to set it up to debug a Fortran app that called C++ libraries that call Fortran libraries. I also debugged Java apps that called C++ libraries which, I think, called Fortran libraries. I was able to step from a call in one language to the library in another language, track, and even modify the variables at different levels and see the results in the other language levels.

VERY useful. Eclipse works with a gazillion languages and environments (Linux, Windows, Android, IOS, along with various CPU's like ARM, MIPS, Intel, you name it). BUT, if you have to debug something like SQL Server SSRS packages, that I doubt would work, but hey, maybe nowadays, someone has extended Eclipse to even work with SSRS/SSIS/SSAS packages.

Eclipse is the grand daddy. Most environments are more speciallized to things like just Java or just Android.

Re:Why?

[the_B0fh]

Your analogy is flawed. You bloody well know if you want to run a MS app, you run it on windows.

Some development might be cross platform, but only because they made the effort.

Stop trying to say it's all the same. The base OS is not all the same. Learning how to use the APIs is not all the same.

And I say this as someone who hates and loathes windows and used to run linux/wine on my laptops since before 2000, and now use OSX as my main desktop platform.

Re:Why?

[fahrbot-bot]

Eclipse is the grand daddy.

And, of course, Emacs is the great grand daddy.

Re:Why?

[MightyMartian]

Indeed. Eclipse is every bit as polished as Visual Studio, and is there a programming environment that isn't supported?

Re:Why?

[sconeu]

<flame value="on">
Emacs is a great OS. All it needs is a good text editor.
</flame>

Re:Why?

[Korak Silvercloud]

Your once again though saying "I tried it for a short time, got frustrated and gave up". You didn't learn Windows overnight. Why would you expect to learn Linux overnight?

You also just need to learn some basic commands first then you never have to "trust someone's commands". There is this magic command "man" all you have to do is type "man ______" filling in the blank with whatever command you want to know about. Suddenly you have the manual. After a few times of following a tutorial and using "man" on ever new command you see you suddenly will find you know what your doing.

The other option is to just stick to what is in repositories or comes with packaged installers. At least till your comfortable. I know you can't tell me during your "over 30 fucking years" of using other systems you never had an install blow up in your face. Tossing out Linux because of one failed install is bit silly.

Re:Why?

[sn0wflake]

It's 2018. Why among that trillion distributions isn't there a single one that just works? I've tried ten different distributions and each one always fail with one piece of hardware, and funny enough it's always a different piece of hardware. Why isn't there one that just works like Windows where it's uncommon that a piece of hardware doesn't work out of the box, and if it doesn't then getting and installing a driver is easy. The Linux community is also incredible toxic which just kills the one final grain of interest left to those that put themselves through the torture of Linux hell.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding right? Visual Studio Code is NOT Visual Studio. It's just an editor very similar to Atom.

Re:Why?

[Stomper_Stoddard]

Because it could be another form of Windows that's not recording everything I do, installing applications without permission, deleting files without permission, etc.

A good solution to this issue is to force Microsoft to make a better product.
A bad solution to this issue is to introduce all of Windows problems into Linux.

Re:Why?

[mikael]

Either that or you monitor every possible network connection path that a system has. That isn't easy, especially with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, and every other possible data transmission method (adjusting speed of CPU / PC case cooling fans etc...). Even wireshark had to play catch-up when IP-over-USB suddenly appeared.

Even then, the debug features of network drivers are at the top of the driver and not the bottom.

Re:Why?

[PPH]

Right. And you'd also have to watch for apps that periodically belch out a bunch of surveillance data and then go quiet.

Re:Why?

[duke_cheetah2003]

Please find me the equivalent of Visual Studio for Linux.

Eclipse isn't bad. It's not Visual Studio, but it's open source and a good start. Open Source simply doesn't have the resources to rapidly develop stuff like a corporation like Microsoft. Corporations can throw massive resources at a project and get it super shiny in very little time. Open Source evolves at a much slower pace cuz most people working on Open source do it in their free time, without pay or compensation.

But for the price, Eclipse is usable.

Re:Why?

[Stormy Dragon]

If I had the power to force Microsoft to do things, do you think I'd be hanging out here?

Re:Why?

[twistedcubic]

Beginners are usually told not to try Debian stable, for whatever reason. You tried 10. Did you try Debian? If not, install it. I've been using it (STABLE, not testing, not sid) for the past ten years and all I do is just get work done.

Re:Why?

[Bert64]

Having to "trust someones commands" is not as bad as having to "trust someones binaries", or "trust any other form of instructions supplied on a website"... At least with commands, you can more easily research what the commands actually do before you execute them.
With any platform you have to trust something, somewhere.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I spend any time at all learning Linux when windows already does what I want?

Before you go off, I've been managing unix and later Linux boxes since the late 80s. I know what I'm doing. It still sucks as a desktop. For home use and my mom I have Windows.

Windows was designed for the desktop but can be used as a server. If you're stupid.

Linux was designed for the server room but can be used as a desktop. If you're stupid.

Use the right tool for the job. Everything is not a nail.

Re:Why?

[Stomper_Stoddard]

If I had the power to force Microsoft to do things, do you think I'd be hanging out here?

Actually you have more power than you think, customers can and do change how companies act, you just have to standup and do something.

Re:Why?

[telek83]

Windows doesn't work out of the box, work in IT and tell me how drivers from the manufacturer are out of the box? Linux doesn't have the luxury of having drivers made for it by third parties, the community has to make their own drivers. If all hardware works out of the box on windows then why do video cards and most hardware even come with drivers at all? The simple reason is while windows does have some drivers, it doesn't have them all. Getting a driver is easy in Linux too, if you buy from non brain dead companies, if there aren't any drivers for it, then it's either not popular enough for someone to make one, or its a specialized piece of hardware that only works with special Windows software. The Linux community is not toxic, we're just tired of people telling us that we should make there system work for them, because they don't want to take the time to learn something, If Linux and Windows were in a reversed position it would be the same with Windows, since you grew up with Windows, you are used of doing things the "Windows Way" if you grew up with Linux like some of us did, its easier for us to do things the "UNIX Way". If you don't have the time to learn Linux then buy a RedHat license and have paid support. They get paid to help you, the community doesn't, while most of us are nice, we won't respond to fix it for me, we aren't your personal IT service desk. If you have a legit question and not a demand getting an answer is easy, Most people don't even think when they ask about something, when asking a question, you need to provide as much information as humanly possible about what is going on in you system, we aren't there, and this is where we start to get bitter, because you are asking a question and its translation to us is: Can you please fix that thing with that other thing and make it work that yet another thing..." If we don't know what your talking about, or the issue has been solved on the web already, why are you asking the question to begin with? Easy way to get help in Linux without getting "Toxic" feedback is do the following: 1) State the question in a clear and obvious question, do not demand someone go fixing your shit, its not the way it works. 2) Provide as much information about the process, provide any logs that are relevant to the error/issue. 3) Be polite about it, if someone is helping you and its not exactly what you need (eg: You want something done a certain way) you don't lash out and for all crazy like a little shit stain. This person took the time to even bother with your issue, they didn't have to, but they did. There is nothing toxic about the community, unless it starts in the form of the question being asked and how the question is being asked.

Re:Why?

[stooo]

>> Because it could be another form of Windows that's not recording everything I
Yeah. but it's not.
It's a better software ecosystem with typically one central package manager for everything.
Installing random external software manually is not the way to work on Linux.

Re:Why?

[stepho-wrs]

Not to mention earlier editors like vi, ed, SOS (DEC machines), teco.

Re:Why?

[PmanAce]

Impossible. You cannot effectively build .net stuff in eclipse. I'm actually using VS 2017 Enterprise, Android Studio (latest version) and Eclipse (Oxygen.2 Release (4.7.2)) professionally and ecplise is the worst. 4+ times slower to load up, very laggy, feels like I have to wait to do stuff all the time. Us devs have windows server 2012 machines, so we have more than enough RAM + CPU.

Re:Why?

[F.Ultra]

So in other words you do not understand what the word "compatible" means in this context. Most software does not just run on an OS, it uses the various infrastructures provided by said OS.

No

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Next dumb question?

Re:No

[ruir]

Pretty much this. We are not interested in retro-fitting a Ferrari with bike and rollerblades parts.

Re:No

[FormOfActionBanana]

I don't agree. Why shouldn't there be some kind of "App runtime" that provided a sandbox and basic UI components that were standardized across platforms? I mean no, not stuff like antivirus or a device driver, but rather an email program or a reminders app or a video chat program. The same kind of stuff we abuse web browsers for today?

There have been tons of such runtimes but nobody ever really launched one for general purpose computing. Think of the potential of Flash (yuck) without the browser, or Qt or Silverlight without the browser or .NET Core or Java or etc. etc.

It's just nobody ever did a sandbox runtime right, with two or three anchor apps, and an app store ecosystem to go with it.

Re:No

[DickBreath]

Actually the answer to "could it" is: Yes! Yes, it could.

"Will it" is a different question.

When a manager or market droid asks "could we make our software to X?", my answer sometimes is: "Yes! It could! It's software. We can make it do anything. It's just a question of time and money. How much of each did you want to spend?"

Re:No

[Teun]

I would say there is a great deal of compatibility in Linux.
Displaying a website, mail, picture or video using Linux gives the same result as doing it on OSX or Windows.
Similar for printing it.

If there is a problem it would be with the awful Open Document implementation of Microsoft Office, not with Linux or it's Office suites.

Also, most of the internet is connected using Linux or other Unix like computers and any type of media or document passes through them without problem.

Re:No

[kzwork]

To be compatible, Linux has to imitate even bugs and short comings in design of Windows and Mac otherwise compatibility will be questionable. Also Linux has to "improve" file system to get fragmented over time, to combine /var with /etc even with /bin directories which is necessary for Windows programs to run. All the config files and log files to be converted to be binary. Has to kill repositories and package managers in order software to be installed more "easily" and implement "infrastructure" programs to self update automatically from the vendor. Linux is also behind with availability of Antivirus software (there are plenty idle CPU cycles available nowadays to be utilised). Better compatibility and consistency can be achieved by centralised design - one kernel, one DE, one distro.

Re:No

[admin7087]

Java in the 90s (Java applets) by Sun was probably the last serious attempt to break the application barrier. It didn't work, because Apple and Microsoft put in artificial hurdles, little incompatibilites and a vast number of platform-specific code. Web browsers as a platform are somewhat of a half-hearted and technically even worse attempt to do the same. I'd say that closest to cross-platform is Qt. But you still need to compile binaries for each platform.

The only way to break the application barrier would maybe to create a very good, easy to use, multi-language cross-platform application framework and legally protect it very aggressively against the introduction of any incompatibilities and platform-specific libraries.That won't happen for many reasons. First, the GUI user experience would have to be unified to a smallest common denominator. Second, such a license would be incompatible with common free software licenses like the GPL and e.g. FSF has zero interest in this, they want free software, not integration with proprietary platforms. Third, companies with like Apple, Google, Microsoft would probably prohibit such a framework or applications created with it from running on their platforms, or find a way to make the user experience miserable (e.g. not allowing the developers of such a framework full access, slowing down programs, not allowing apps in their app stores, etc.).

Re:No

[stooo]

>> It's just nobody ever did a sandbox runtime right
That's the actual root of the problem.
It can't be done right.
It cannot be all of that:
- Fast
- Safe
- Compatible across OS
- Adopted massively by applications
- Efficient on ressource usage
- Complete in features

Basically, it would create in the end a massive bloated shim layer which must be maintained for many different O.S. and Hardware configurations.
Why not just use Linux instead, as this layer it runs on nearly any hardware you throw at it.

Re:No

[dadman]

Java in the 90s (Java applets) by Sun was probably the last serious attempt to break the application barrier. It didn't work, because Apple and Microsoft put in artificial hurdles, little incompatibilites and a vast number of platform-specific code.

Java would only work if there is infinite computing resources and the user experience delivered is perfect to everyone. This is the ideal case outcome. In a non-ideal world, It is almost impossible to deliver the matching user experience of all the native platforms that the Java code would run on, thus the fine tuning and minute adjustments in the APIs and HCI parts. These changes have eventually led to incompatibilities and performance bottlenecks that ultimately destroyed the write-once, run many claim.

What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption?

[Camel Pilot]

Personally I have a been using Linux as by desktop for 2 years (Redhat/Mate). I have Windows on as dual boot. I had to dual boot twice in that time - just to use IE due to poorly designed websites. I know my work process is different than others. I know many must have the Adobe suite of tools, or maybe Quickbooks, other than that what App/Tools do others must-have these days to keep Windows around? Just curious.

Dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to run Windows applications, you need Windows libraries and kernel. At this point you are running Windows.

We need to people to "port" apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of using Wine, we need to release patches to the Linux kernel to load Windows and Mac binaries natively like ReactOS does. Or even better, release patches to software to get it running on Linux. Instead of cracking software for piracy purposes, people should "crackport" software to Linux. I'm surprised no one has done this already.

Re:We need to people to "port" apps

[ruir]

Instant virus and blue screens in Linux, great. We also should make Linux patches for it to run natively DOS, CP/M, iOS, and Amiga binaries while we are at it.

Re:We need to people to "port" apps

[Anonymous Coward]

A while back there was an attempt to make a Windows/Linux hybrid kernel called Longene.

Dunno whatever happened with it. Longene.org is gone and I couldn't read the Chinese on the site anyhow.

In one word

[CptLoRes]

No

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[imgod2u]

A lot of people pick up these walled garden platforms now. For instance Slack (for work chat) is very popular along with the Microsoft suite of Office/OneDrive.

People rail against these platform companies but they offer a lot of productive features when working in teams.

Stupid idea

[DCFusor]

Most other opsys have significant security flaws to allow "more efficient" gaming via giving direct access to hardware. And if you look at windows (I don't know as much about OSX but hey, BSD) - things like OLE/COM/ActiveX/stupid mixing of code and data - keep that away from me.
Even using Wine lets you get some of the badware infections. Why on earth would I want that?
Far better to get enough people moved over to real opsys so that software vendors will support them.
Of course, they'll find out their cheap tricks that made their stuff crashy on windows won't fly at all if we stick to the good architectures and rules...and they'll have to learn to write better code.
Meanwhile...some decent stuff is showing up on Linux already (or finally, depending on your point of view).
How is that a bad thing?

Wrong Question

[ipb]

Could WIndows and Mac ever become fully compatible with Linux software?

Re:Wrong Question

[mrun4982]

I have to admit that Windows Subsystem for Linux is good enough for me. That has eliminated any desire for me to run Linux on my desktop, either in a VM or on hardware.

Re:Wrong Question

[93 Escort Wagon]

Could WIndows and Mac ever become fully compatible with Linux software?

There's a lot of unix software which will "configure - make - sudo make install" just fine on Mac. For other stuff that's more complicated, projects like Fink or Brew or MacPorts can often help. And, even if these projects don't offer the software you're looking for, those tools can probably provide the underlying libraries your software requires for building.

(although I have yet to manage to get mlocate installed on my Mac)

Re:Wrong Question

[tbuddy]

Haven't really had any trouble running whatever I want that's Linux on a Mac since 2001-2002. Before there were a lot of good OS X applications I would install Linux apps via Fink and run them in X. Nowadays most of the Linux apps have wrappers on the Mac so you don't even need to piss with compiling them or having X running.

Re:Wrong Question

[JeffTL]

As far as Unix applications are concerned, macOS is one of the BSDs; it's a certified, trademark UNIX 03 system that (to simplify greatly) can be thought of as FreeBSD running on a Mach microkernel with a NeXT-derived front end. A lot of common free software is already out there on Homebrew and MacPorts. So most of the porting work is done if your software will run on BSD, though Mac users usually prefer a native graphical interface to X11. Of course, binary compatibility with Linux would be even better.

Re:Wrong Question

[asylumx]

Could WIndows and Mac ever become fully compatible with Linux software?

For that matter, could Windows ever be fully compatible with Windows software?

Re:Wrong Question

[tepples]

What X server software do you use with WSL?

Re:Wrong Question

[kurkosdr]

Who cares about that? Any sufficiently mature (read: usable) FOSS piece of software has a Windows port or Windows equivalent (OpenShot video editor is the latest example of a piece of software getting a Windows port once it got mature enough to be usable). It's Linux that has various holes in application support. Try to watch BluRay (or protected video streams) on Desktop Linux or doing content creation without Adobe's tools.

No

[Vairon]

No, because OSX and Windows 10 contains proprietary code and probably 3rd party licensed code that Apple, Microsoft and their partners will never license under a free (libre) license that is usable in a Linux distribution. Projects like WINE will never be 100% compatible because they are trying to implement a moving target. As soon as they have reproduced the old API, there is a new not fully compatible API they have to work towards.

Fully compatable? No. Mostly? Possibly.

[jfdavis668]

To be fully compatible, Linux would have to run all software. The would include things like Windows hardware drivers. Linux and Windows handle the interface between hardware and the OS very differently. As long as the software you plan on using does generic type things, like write files to the hard drive or display a picture on the screen, you could possibly run software. But, the OS is the interface between the hardware and the various running programs and components. I don't think they will ever develop a way to figure out what a driver from another OS is trying to do and perform that function in an OS designed to do it differently, as well as manage requests from other programs trying to perform the same function.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[mrun4982]

Games and MS Office are the big ones. In addition to that, just about every industry has their own set of standard applications that most people use and those are generally Windows only apps.

Additional Questions.

[jellomizer]

Can Windows be fully compatible with Windows Software
Can OSX be fully compatible with OS X Software

Normally whenever the OS gets an upgrade, legacy compatibility is broken, or security patches are in place, which may prevent some software using that vulnerability as a core of its function.

To have full compatibility or 99.9% compatibility. You are in essence virtualization an other OS in Linux.

Tools like Wine which offer a compatibility layer, does so at a cost of redirecting system calls to a compatibility layer, which ten translates it to do something else.

WINE

[transformania]

If this is what you want, I encourage you to become one with the community behind WINE. And, chances are they have already put a lot of effort into making, the few Windows apps worth your time, work (cough..Photoshop...cough...games...)

Nope

[XSportSeeker]

Step out of the technical realm and try to understand economics.
A whole metric ton of said software and functionalities only came to Macs and Windows PCs because there was financial incentive for it, when not direct sponsorship from the OS companies themselves.
Deals with Apple and Microsoft, bundling schemes, the estabilished potential market, marketing itself...
Hardware is pretty much like that too... high end features are often paid for and made exclusively for, when not directly developed by Apple and Microsoft engineers.
But Linux already has other problems to deal with to reach the end consumer... image problems, easy maintenance and knowledgebase, among others. Depending on what you use a computer for, you can already get the "essencials" on any Linux distro. But what happens when you need help figuring something out, or getting something new everyone is talking about or starting to adopt?
Enough time has passed to know that this won't change anytime soon unless there is some drastic change in how the entire PC/laptop conundrum works. Apple and Microsoft have a very strong and distant lead when it comes to presenting new hardware and software for consumers. Linux dominates on servers, IoT devices and embedded categories.
Given the abuses in security and privacy that's happening on the commercial software and OS side, I sure would love to see Linux catching up... I'd at least want to see a successful mobile distro that is more widely adopted (and yes, I know it's the basis for Android). But unfortunately, up 'till now, the market has spoken - they really don't care a whole lot about privacy and security.
So, it is what it is. At least Linux is still there, and I hope it keeps going. But for the majority of the market, it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense to switch, so things will remain as is.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[93 Escort Wagon]

For what you're doing - why dual-boot? A VM would serve just as well.

Yes!

[Gravis Zero]

With billions of dollars in funding, we could fund developers to successfully implement all the APIs needed to make Linux a desktop alternative that runs Windows and OSX applications. Without significant funding, it's not going to happen but it definitely could be done.

Re:No.

[ruir]

We use Linux or Unix to not run a shitty OS like Windows. Honestly, I *do not want to see it happen* *BSD or Unix running Windows apps.

Bug-for-bug compatibility

[Tablizer]

Maybe 99.9999% compatible, but that 0.0001% could make it crash or give wrong results. Emulating complex/messy things is always a challenge.

Re:Bug-for-bug compatibility

[OrangeTide]

Maybe 99.9999% compatible, but that 0.0001% could make it crash or give wrong results.

Thus was the pain of running third party Win95 applications on top of WinXP. But we accepted it and survived.

It already is/can ..

[AnthonywC]

Through docker which can also run in windows/mac, you can already run many version of Linux.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[Actually, I do RTFA]

XCode (for iOS development) requires OSX. Visual Studio (for ASP.NET development) requires Windows (although the editor has been opensourced and works on Linux).

Also, a lot of clients still want Windows applications, so all the work I do for them.

It's not apps

[rsilvergun]

most computers are sold to OEMs and if an OEM pushes Linux Microsoft threatens to pull their OEM discounts. The CEO of Acer (Asus?) bitched about it publicly around the time netbooks took off.

On the plus side Linux _is_ competition. Microsoft was forced to drop prices substantially on a Windows license. On the downside this lead to them doing all sorts of nasty stuff to monetize Windows (subscription fees for business editions, installing demo software without permission, the Windows Store, etc, etc).

Re:It's not apps

[Teun]

Because Microsoft told them to limit RAM to 1 or 2 GB etc?

Re:It's not apps

[ruir]

I suspect there were OEM deals unknown to us were a vendor could not sell a machine with Linux cheaper than the one with a Windows license.
Even ASUS in the height of their Linux adventure, was selling side-by-side Windows and Linux installed models that were identical externally, down to the same model, but the Linux model had more RAM to justify having both the same price. (yeah, it did not make sense even at the time)
Anyway, netbooks lived with the limitations of the technology of the time. Nowadays even an Android phone is more powerful than that.
The netbook idea was probably killed, because when you sell a netbook, it is less one more expensive computer that some families buy.

No, never! Better options...

[slashname3]

Why? In order to run native windows software an emulator would be needed.

The better option is to find open source options for each of the windows type applications that are considered "essential".

Openoffice or what ever the current variation is, provides a majority of the applications typical users need.

Gimp provides another alternative, and so and so on.

Trying to run apps natively is folly. Better to get or make better alternatives to required functions.

Back in the day Wordstar was the required application until it was supplanted by Word. It can be done.

Also, don't go the dual boot route. Commit to linux and run it at all times. That is the way to find solutions to all the little programs people think they need.

Do Developers want to be compatible?

[Prien715]

Software can be cross-platform if that's one of the goals of the developer.

VLC is the best video player out there -- and it works for Linux/Windows/MacOS. So is Libre Office and Microsoft has even managed develop a cross-platform code editor -- and each one is in an entirely different programming language (C++/Java/Javascript respectively).

Will there be a day when developers mostly write cross-platform software? One can hope.

Re:Do Developers want to be compatible?

[Voyager529]

Software can be cross-platform if that's one of the goals of the developer.

VLC is the best video player out there -- and it works for Linux/Windows/MacOS. So is Libre Office and Microsoft has even managed develop a cross-platform code editor -- and each one is in an entirely different programming language (C++/Java/Javascript respectively).

Will there be a day when developers mostly write cross-platform software? One can hope.

These aren't the greatest examples.

VLC is the sort of app that "if it works, great, if not, there's the forum/wiki/IRC, if it doesn't work, go use one of a dozen other media playback applications", and have that be a practical answer. LibreOffice also doesn't really have to care. Visual Studio is on the other end of the spectrum and is the product of Microsoft wanting to keep Visual Studio the go-to choice of developers who prefer Linux and are perfectly happy using Eclipse instead.

Writing cross-platform applications means testing and supporting multiple OSes. Linux is particularly difficult because of how many individual components are iterated slightly differently - if it's all CLI then yeah, make a shell script to pull all the dependencies, but it's not nearly that simple for GUI stuff...and there are a thousand cottage industries who rely on Windows software to file taxes, take MRIs, control sign making equipment, and handle plenty of other things whereby supporting Windows is tough enough, and supporting Linux is the chicken-and-egg problem that no one dependent on their software uses Linux because they are dependent on their software.

Also, Quickbooks. Intuit has been screwing people over so long there is zero incentive to change for them.

Steam!

[FormOfActionBanana]

Oh wait, no, SOMEBODY DID do it: Steam. If you install Steam for Windows, Mac or Linux I think you can run any Steam game exactly the same on any of the three.

Nobody has created a Steam word processor or a Steam photo editor... but I can't see any compelling reason not to.

Re:Steam!

[Robyrt]

Oh wait, no, SOMEBODY DID do it: Steam. If you install Steam for Windows, Mac or Linux I think you can run any Steam game exactly the same on any of the three.

Nobody has created a Steam word processor or a Steam photo editor... but I can't see any compelling reason not to.

Steam apps are not cross-platform unless the developer builds support for that platform into their app. Most Steam games run only on Windows.

Re:Steam!

[FormOfActionBanana]

Oh, really? I had no idea.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[PmanAce]

Visual Studio Code, not Visual Studio, two different things.

What X server on Windows 10

[tepples]

Windows 10 has implemented Linux system calls. You can run Linux apps on Windows.

Using what X server, if the app happens to be graphical? Microsoft doesn't provide one, and the free version of Xming hasn't been updated in a decade. Or would the app run in a localhost web server, with JavaScript in a web browser handling user interaction?

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[postbigbang]

One day a VM or container will contain enough guts to safely run the apps in less than a hypervisor mode. Until then, the answer for all three is: Not really. Better still, it shouldn't happen. One flaw in Windows affects Windows, but rarely MacOS or Linux/BSDs. One well-done flaw can kill/maim one host, but not all three.

We survive.

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[sconeu]

Have you tried Cygwin/X?

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[Scoth]

I've had this work, but part of the attraction of the Linux layer in Windows for me is not having to mess with the whole cygwin layer on top of everything. Keeping it running and updated was a bit of a pain and it's been nice not to have to mess with anymore.

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[Scoth]

Xming was last updated in 2016, and I use it fairly often just fine even in Windows 10. Works with the Linux subsystem fine.

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Keeping it running and updated

Going to go out and call bullshit here. Cygwin doesn't break, it just runs. If you need to update you simply rereun the setup program and the installer will automagically update all your packages and dependencies. I would consider myself a heavy Cygwin user, in that I leverage it on a daily basis and use multiple versions of packages installed. To that extent, I have never once had a version collision nor a random failure that broke everything to the point beyond repair. So while I dont' think Cygwin/X is the solution to the universal platform problem, it's sure not the bastard stepchild that you make it out to be.

either that or you are an overly power user that tweaks everything and runs bleeding edge this and that or you are simply inept at troubleshooting. these are all OK but don't fool yourself into thinking that they are not the case when they are

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[ChunderDownunder]

X11, how quaint. Did you steal a Delorean and travel back to 1985?! Both Gnome and KDE are rapidly migrating to Wayland. GTK+ and Qt have had a Windows backend for well over a decade.
What WSL needs is to transparently switch backends to the Win32 implementation of GTK+ or Qt. e.g. that if a user runs a KDE app, it launches the program in passing the graphics calls to the Qt libraries on Windows.
(Even if paying a Canonical employee to write some cleanroom glue code for wine to get automated UI testing working for the win32 backend under Linux, yes turtles all the way down)

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[HiThere]

It's been a couple of decades now, so this may be obsolete, but in my experience while CygWin might not break, Linux applications running on it sometimes depended on things that didn't work the same way. It's quite plausible that this is still true.

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[tepples]

the free version of Xming hasn't been updated in a decade.

Xming was last updated in 2016

Xming and the free version of Xming have been separate since May 2007 according to Wikipedia's article about Xming.

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[tepples]

In theory, one could use both Cygwin and WSL: Cygwin for X and WSL for everything that isn't X. I don't know how practical that would be though.

Re: What X server on Windows 10

[tepples]

That's the idea. I'm just trying to figure out how to avoid having to install Cygwin just for its X server.

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[Scoth]

Yeah, it's a weird situation I've never been able to really puzzle out over the years. The dev asks for donation/licensing for the downloads from the website, but provides MIT/"Public Domain" downloads on sf still. It gets the job done at any rate.

Re:What X server on Windows 10

[Scoth]

I called it "a bit of a pain", nothing about "bastard stepchild". Not sure how you made that leap. There's rather a couple orders of magnitude of difference between what I said and you said.

Re-rerunning (and often having to redownload a newer version) and running through the installer again is not as convenient or straightforward as most Linux distros. It's a bit of a pain.

Most of the other failures I've have had been around cygwin DLLs getting lost, or some other application bringing along its own cygwin dlls that make a mess. Nothing too hard to fix, but it's a bit of a pain when something fails unexpectedly.

The future (present?) of the desktop is web-apps

[fplant]

What exactly are average people running on their desktop/laptop that doesn't have a web-app equivalent? I swapped out my family computer for a Chromebox a couple of years ago and no one even really noticed because all they ever used was a web browser.

Not in the way you are asking

[davidwr]

I can see "invisible once things are set up emulation layers" that let Windows and Mac apps run in Linux the same way that DOS apps used to run in 1990 versions of Windows, Windows 16-bit apps used to (and may still) run in Windows x86, Mac Classic 1990s apps ran in MacOSX, Mac OSX PPC apps ran in the early Intel versions of the Mac OS etc (this compatibility list is far from exhaustive).

Unless someone wants to throw tens of millions of dollars at the problem for several years in a row or the "ease" of making "Windows compatibility" or "Mac compatibility" goes way up, we will always be several years or a decade behind on the "compatibility" race.

So, will there ever be a Linux distro that runs almost all early-2018 Mac and Windows applications "as is" so they look like native Linux applications?

Sure, but I'm betting it's not until 2028 unless someone plunks down the big bucks first. Even then, it will take time to catch up.

By the way, you can run most popular 20+ year old PC and 30+ year old Mac operating systems and their programs quite nicely if you can get legal access to the Microsoft and Apple code (including Mac ROMs). In 30 years - maybe 10 - we will be able to say the same about early-2018 Windows and Mac programs.

why, dumb question, why?

[sootman]

> Could Linux ever be made to become fully compatible with all Windows and Mac software?

You have it backwards. Software runs on the OS, so it is the software's responsibility to run on the OS, not the other way around. Adobe would have to write CC for Linux for this to work. MS would have to write Office for Linux for this to work. Etc.

> What I mean is a Linux distro that lets you successfully install/run/play just about
> anything significant that says "for Windows 10" or "for OSX" under Linux,...

Well yes, that could technically be possible...

> ...without any sort of configuring or crazy emulation orgies being needed? ... but no, not without something happening behind the scenes. Emulation in one way or another is EXACTLY what would be required, if vendors don't want to write software for Linux. Even when vendors write their OWN layers for their OWN OSs (like Mac OS X's "Classic" mode for OS 9 -> OS X, or Rosetta for PPC to Intel) it's not perfect, so it is be effectively impossible for "Linux" to create PERFECT emulators for OS X and Windows. Like, 0.0000000000000001% chance of it happening. Like "A million monkeys on a million typewriters" impossible. Like "quantum computers spitting out infinite OSs per second" impossible.

> Macs and PCs run on the exact same Intel/AMD/Nvidia hardware as Linux.

Humans, cats, roses, and beetles all live on Earth, drink water, and breathe air. Why can't they all mate with each other?

not really

[bigdavex]

It's not really going to be perfect unless there's an abstraction layer (like a JVM or a browser) between the OS and the application. Native support is still important, but clearly less so than it was a decade ago.

Huh? What are you talking about

[danlor]

They already are compatible. Have been for decades. I save a text file on linux, open on my pc, I can read it. Linux machine can browse the same websites, edit the same files, leverage the same protocols... So what exactly are you asking for? Run a single app binary on linux mac/windows? Java.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[Camel Pilot]

Yeah that is an option. From what I understand I would need a MS Windows license to run in a VM... Don't want to do that.

Applications still not ported after 7+ years

[tepples]

The "doesn't run ____" is fixed by spending a little time looking at Linux software till you find a replacement.

Since I posted this list of applications that are not ported to GNU/Linux several years ago, Netflix has become ported. But the majority have not been. So what replacement would you recommend for each of the following?

Adobe Photoshop, including adjustment layers, print color matching, and full compatibility with PSD files you receive from clients or team members
Adobe Animate (formerly Flash), including exporting vector animations to HTML5
TurboTax
Stone Edge Order Manager
Sonic Mania
Diablo III
StarCraft II
Street Fighter V
Call of Duty: Black Ops III

Re:Applications still not ported after 7+ years

[Anonymous Coward]

A girlfriend

Re:Applications still not ported after 7+ years

[dgatwood]

You can use TurboTax on the web for nearly all use cases.

Re:Applications still not ported after 7+ years

[Anonymous Coward]

Finding a replacement doesn't necessarily mean you will find an exact port of something.

No, but you have requirements which must be filled in order for that replacement to be useful. If my requirement is "build widget Y consistently every time" and my tool can only build widget X half of the time, then the replacement simply does not work.

I've spent the past 10 years building an open source only IT department, and you know what? It sucks. Nothing exists to replace common use cases for Exchange, Outlook, Word, Photoshop, etc. Thus you cannot fully divest yourself of Windows. Make a featureful word processor that challenges Word. Make an easy to administrator mail server -- the closest which exists is Zimbra and that's not exactly Open Source(TM). Make a mail client that can handle LARGE mail stores reliably -- Evolution and Thunderbird can't handle mailstores over 100k messages without insane memory thrashing and cpu utilization.

2018 will not be the year of the Linux desktop

Re:Applications still not ported after 7+ years

[phantomfive]

Most of those will run in Wine, fwiw.

Re:Applications still not ported after 7+ years

[blind biker]

StarCraft II works perfectly well on Linux, using WINE/PlayOnLinux. The exact same seems to be true for Diablo III, but I haven't tried because the only game on your list I give a shit about is StarCraft II.

How this might happen in the future

[davidwr]

In the future, market or MS/Apple-heavy-handed forces will coerce most applications to be dependent on only a small-by-today's-standards set of APIs.

Everything else will be either using non-OS-specific "outside code" such as portable libraries or "really outside" code such as internet-based or other non-local-machine-based code.

This is the way many phone apps work today: They are not much more than a front end to a web site or other internet-based resource. If the limited set of APIs needed to make such apps work were ported to Linux and and the hardware itself were virtualized or emulated, well, that's the bulk of what is needed for "it looks like a Linux app to the user" compatibility.

Some if not many phone apps are also written against cross-platform libraries so the vendor can sell to iOS and Android users with a mostly-common code base. If the library vendor has a Linux implementation and they write "glue/translation code" so that a non-Linux-binary can indirectly call the Linux version of the libraries, then, again, the bulk of the work has been done.

As far as MacOS and Windows applications go, we are far from there. However, if "walled garden stores" that enforce strict rules continue to gain popularity, I can see the day when 90+% of Windows and Mac applications that people use that don't come directly from Microsoft or Apple or hardware vendors are much easier to "seamlessly emulate" than today's mix of applications.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[DogDude]

Our entire ERP system is Windows based. Literally all of the software that runs our entire company. It works well.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[imidan]

I use the Esri ArcGIS suite quite a lot in my work. There are open-source alternatives to many of its functions, but they're not always practical to use while maintaining interoperability with colleagues. That's the main one that comes to mind, but there are other spatial tools like Crimestat that I use on occasion that only have Windows binaries. It may be possible to run some of these things using Wine or whatever, but I haven't tried.

I have both a Windows 7 and an Ubuntu desktop with dual displays and use Synergy to share the mouse and keyboard between them, so for the most part I can use both systems fluidly. To transfer files between the two, I have a Windows share that I access via samba on the Ubuntu side. That's a little cumbersome at times, but it's way easier for me than dual boot and preferable to virtualization.

Ecma standardized the CLR

[tepples]

Why shouldn't there be some kind of "App runtime" that provided a sandbox and basic UI components that were standardized across platforms?

There is. It's called the Common Language Runtime, standardized by Ecma International. Microsoft maintains .NET Framework, a CLR application player for Windows. An open source project maintains Mono, a CLR application player for GNU/Linux and macOS.

Oracle [bought a company that] previously tried the same thing with Java, but several policy missteps by Oracle have since dissuaded many from the Java platform.

Re:Ecma standardized the CLR

[slew]

Oracle [bought a company that] previously tried the same thing with Java, but several policy missteps by Oracle have since dissuaded many from the Java platform.

As I recall, wasn't it google/android who bought into that whole standardized Java-thing ;^)
I heard they also made a standardized rendering platform for their apps called chrome, or something like that... ;^)
I'm not sure it was very successful, though, maybe that was Oracle's fault... ;^)

(...ducking to avoid the backlash...)

Mistating the situation

[DaveV1.0]

Computer literate people with some tech skills also like to use it as their desktop OS.

No, People with a lot of tech skills who don't mind spending a lot of time manually adjusting things on their computer use Linux as their desktop OS. People with better things to do use Windows or OS X.

But most "everyday computer users" or "casual computer buyers" still feel they have to choose either a Windows PC or an Apple device as the platform they will do their computing on.

No, most "everyday computer users" or "casual computer buyers" don't know or care about Linux and those that do know there are too many things in Linux require a lot of tech knowledge and the ability to use the command line that they don't wish to learn.

This binary choice exists largely because of very specific commercial list of programs and games available for these OSs that is not available for Linux.

The problem is the mindset of the Linux faithful.

"Closed source applications are EVIL!"

"Software should be free!"

"We want source code!"

"You need help?!? RTFM, you fucking n00b!"

"No one should use Windoze! You want us to make Linux more user friendly and accessible? Fuck you, Windoze Luzer!"

Until Linux gets a larger desktop user base, those applications you want to see on Linux won't be available because there is no profit in it. Linux won't get a larger desktop user base until the community gets it's collective head out of it's ass. Until then, the only hope for Linux on the desktop is a killer app and I don't see that coming anytime soon.

Bottom line, almost all Linux development is geared toward server use and even the people who want to see Linux succeed on the desktop either can't or won't do what is necessary to see it happen.

Re:Mistating the situation

[iggymanz]

Wrong, I've been using a Linux desktop as my main home platform for almost 20 year and I can have a new desktop up and function in less than 25 minutes, much less than it takes to set up a windows box.

Re:Mistating the situation

[DaveV1.0]

A) I don't believe you can take a random box and do it. You can probably do it using a box filled with components you know work with Linux and using a distro you know and like because you know exactly what to pick. Also, I have little doubt you won't install a lot of things besides the very basics because simply copying the data can take longer than that

B) You are a techy person. You have been using Linux desktop as your main home platform since 1997ish which means you have 20 years experience. On average, it will take an average person much longer simply because of the package selection and drive space allocation. And, when their printer or, worse, network card doesn't work what will they get from the community much of the time? "Fucking n00b, RTFM." BTW, have you used it exclusively or no? How about your wife, kids, or whatever, have they used Linux as their main home platform as well?

Re:Mistating the situation

[HermMunster]

Much of what you said is sophistry.

Linux is perfect for the average person. It doesn't require tweaking unless you choose to do it.

A base install of linux requires no more tweaking, adjusting, preening, correcting, or anything else than windows does. Claims to the contrary are demonstrative of an inexperienced emotional user.

There are few if any driver issues that exist. The desktops are easy to use and stable. The os requires little to no administrative access. Programs are installed from well established trusted and tested repositories (which is what online stores actually are).

It installs fast taking you to a full desktop capable of performing just about every task you want.

The size of the user base becomes a diminishing factor as more people adopt it. So the "until Linux gets larger" argument is moot. Linux has close more than 100 million users world wide, nearing 200 million as the share has nearly doubled in the past year. Adding another 100 million though good will not have the same impact as the first 100 million.

Linux development is geared toward both the desktop user and servers. Thats the beauty of not having a central entity controlling development. You get more developers working on more aspects of the OS over a greater period of time resulting in a more complete, secure and stable platform for both desktop users and servers.

When Windows becomes just another piece of rental software acting as a thin client web app much like the mainframe terminal that PCs replaced Linux will still be developing full feature rich desktop experiences while still supporting cloud access, and will be free of cost and will continue and extend your privacy and security.

Re:Mistating the situation

[HermMunster]

Yes he can and likely he does as I do the same thing. Easy.

Re:Mistating the situation

[iggymanz]

believe it, the only thing I know for certain when I buy used box on ebay is that I'll be putting separate graphics card in. Linux has just worked on desktops and laptops for years.

nothing hard about the normal Linux Mint install, the DVD is a live one so you can see if everything works before pulling the trigger on install. install is simple. a person can get fancy and start shell on desktop of the installer if they want to use LVM with disk which is advanced thing I do, but it's not necessary for average joe.

kids use chromebook required by school, wife likes mac.

Insecure

[Ayano]

I'd prefer that I know what code I'm running. Windows as so many back doors that the user isn't made aware of. I on the other-hand know every open port and remote connection going out, I'd rather virtualize Windows in isolation, and for when that doesn't cut it, I have a windows drive that's on my 'hot eject' SATA port for.. reasons.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[AlanBDee]

Rocksmith 2014 is the last program that I use regularly that requires windows and keeps me from switching. The other issue is time. Linux has continued to improve but it isn't the turnkey solution that windows is. The time it takes me to get all the little issues working stops me from using it. It also stops my extended family from using it. It can work 99% of the time but that one time it doesn't work they'll want windows back.

I've upgraded all my computers to Windows 10 Pro and have not noticed the issues with adverts, popups, or it automatically installing software that people are claiming. I'm sure it's happening but it's not yet annoying enough for me to get in a huff about it.

Two disadvantages of a virtual machine

[tepples]

why dual-boot? A VM would serve just as well.

Dual booting has two advantages over a virtual machine that for some may outweigh the inconvenience of rebooting:

Use of existing OEM license The Windows software license agreement allows dual booting but not converting an OEM license included with your laptop or other pre-built PC for use in a virtual machine. Only a $120 retail license can do that. Reduced RAM use Use of two operating systems, one for the host and one for the guest, requires roughly twice the RAM compared to running the guest alone. If you have already maxed the RAM in your laptop, and you see more than 50 percent usage (other than disk cache) during normal use, you may not be able to fit the host and guest into RAM without thrashing swap. And even if you haven't, DRAM prices have trended upward for the past couple years.

God I hope NOT!

[timjones]

Linux will lose most of its security advantages if it ever runs Windows software off the shelf (especially those viruses, trojans and ransomeware).

Those emulation layers are PROTECTION from the scourge of Win32. If I ever need Windows, I'll do it in VirtualBox with a fresh dev VM from http://modern.ie/ then nuke the image the minute I'm done.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[ruir]

If only someone invented web based clients...

I'd love to seee it, but...

[RFjunkie]

I'm not a coder. I build my own PC's and install OS/software, do upgrades, scans and detail configs. The usual stuff, right. For me, I wish my PC could become a screwdriver. It's a tool, it allows me to do other stuff. Alas. I know enough to know how much I don't know. Over many years of using/building/trubbelshooting these infernal things, most of us acquire a fairly broad collection of compooter skills. I've dabbled a lilbit with Linux, enough to know I'd surely use it a lot more if I could. I know, it's simple and nice to surf the web, do business stuff, crunch data, run a server. Me, I only surf, the usual web stuff. And, play games. That's the bulk of what I do. I'm old, retired, and have plenty of "free" time, something work once kept me from. Now, I have this tremendous TOY, my PC. My compooter is configured for games, played on a 60in. HD screen. It's also great for the Web, Usenet, etc. And, it runs Win10. And, if I could run all of my games on Linux, and they look/play smooth and purty, I'd happily leave Windows. I look, periodically, for any news that Linux now plays today's PC games. Sadly, it appears that's not doable, or those that could do it don't. I know a few other oldfarts like myself that enjoy compooter games, esp. stuff like CoD, World of Tanks/Warships and ultra-realistic ground/air combat/casual flight and auto-racing simulators. In a recent discussion, changing to Linux came up, and it sounds like most of us would gladly change, esp. if it freed up some processor/memory resources that Windows and it's myriad associated drivers eat. There's a real, significant demand for a (reasonably)simple way to play all our Windows games in Linux, and it's more knowledgeable users, folks that accept/tolerate/learn from doing cfg stuff, as long as it ain't too convoluted and 'splained simply for us older fellers. Why isn't this sort of use/user considered? If the idea is to get Linux on more machines, in more faces, it's already doing most of the other compooter stuff folks do, so making it compatible with Windows games oughtabe in work.

A better question is should it?

[thejeffwhite]

A better answer is no, it should not.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Visual Studio Code is the editor that comes with Visual Studio. But yes, that's what I'm referring to. I think it's a good editor, but the whole IDE obviously adds a lot.

Please

[movdqa]

Someone asked me to compare Windows with OSX and my answer is that I can't because I use OSX almost all the time. The only exception is two programs that I need to run. One of them has ported to OSX though and I will be purchasing it for OSX and running it. The other program is Windows-Only. No evidence that it will run under WINE. So I run a WIndows 7 VM on OSX to run it. It leaks VM on Windows 10. I would be so happy to get rid of Windows. Would I move from OSX to Linux. Unlikely. Too much nice UI candy and Apps that sync well with iOS.

Re:No.

[kiminator]

Even in that case I'd have to say the answer is still no. There will be bugs that Microsoft isn't aware of, that game devs either intentionally or unintentionally exploit, which will always lead to discrepancies. The Windows APIs are just far too complicated to do the emulation precisely enough for it to always work.

For a simple kind of example, imagine a game dev writes a multi-threaded algorithm that has a concurrency bug. This concurrency bug remains undetected because in Windows, the various threads always execute in a certain order due to the way thread scheduling and timing work out. But the moment you port it to Linux, the thread scheduler is different, so the threads execute in a different order and the game deadlocks immediately.

This is just one possibility of many that can result in bugs when games run on an emulated Windows stack.

To highly just how absurdly difficult this is, notice that not even Microsoft can get it 100% right when trying to emulate older versions of Windows on modern versions. If you've ever tried to install really old games, you know how those edge cases can bite you. They do an impressively good job, but ultimately there are always edge cases that remain.

Use a VM

[Hal_Porter]

I'm writing this on Mac running Yosemite. With Parallels VM I can run the following OSs in a VM

Windows XP (walled off from the Internet)
Windows 10
Mac OS Sierra - for XCode 9

I'm installing High Sierra now

It's not as fast as having a native OS, but it's not too bad, so long as you have loads of Ram and an SSD. Unactivated Windows 10 is free.

On Linux you could run Windows 10 and the latest macOS in VirtualBox.

And yeah, I know this violates the EULA. The reason I got a Mac because I wanted to run XCode legally. Problem is that back when I got it I could buy a Macbook Pro mid 2012 for around the same price as an Asus Zenbook, i.e. $1099. It came with 4GB Ram and a 500GB SSD but I could upgrade to 16GB Ram and a 1TB SSD for a few hundred bucks. That means I can run a whole load of VMs without much lag. Now if I want a machine with that much Ram and storage I need to buy it with the machine because nothing is user upgradeable. And Apple charge a lot of cash for it, $2299

So suddenly rather than being around the cost of a Asus Zenbook and then a few hundred bucks for an upgrade I need to spend about 2x as much as an Asus Zenbook.

Running macOS legally is getting more and more expensive...

Open software on all platforms

[AncalagonTotof]

Instead of changing Linux to render it compatible with the others, let's use the same multi platform open softwares.
I know, it's not possible in 100 % of the cases, but for example, it took me just few years to make my father switch:
- from M$ Office to OpenOffice, then LibreOffice
- I can't even remember what he was using before Mozilla Suite (or what was it's name ?). A bit later, Firefox and Thunderbird
- from Windows to Linux at one point

One universal point: whatever the OS is, he never know where he saves his files.

will it ever have a desktop that just works?

[Nick]

Been using Linux in some form since pre-1.0 kernel. Years ago I stopped using it as my main OS because quite simply, I got tired of constantly fixing multi-monitor setups and just getting the desktop to be stable. Sure there was large periods of time when things were fine, but always a hassle when upgrading hardware. The open source vs vendor supplied (if you were lucky to have a vendor to supply) drivers was always a tradeoff; gaining something but losing something else. Fortunately there are type-2 hypervisors now and huge ass monitors that can split the screen multiple ways.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[DogDude]

Web based clients come with extra security problems, poor performance, and the problem of constantly changing browsers. We made a specific choice not to use web-based clients.

When will my software run on Linux?

[alienghic]

You probably actually want the answer to the question "when will the software I care about run on Linux"?

And the answer is "if there is a market for it, developers will port their software."

There are a fair number of games available via Valve Steam for Linux, there would probably be more if more if more people bought games on Linux. Hopefully Valve will put some more time into SteamOS as Windows 10 S is a threat to Steam's business model.

One thing that might also help is to set your browsers user agent to a Linux. The low representation of Linux on netcraft is used by larger companies to justify not supporting Linux.

Re:no, but

[Dynedain]

Almost every one of Adobe's Creative Cloud products are for both Windows and OSX. What would they have to lose by selling Linux versions as well?

I guarantee you they have spent many times your annual paycheck in order to evaluate if they'll number of licenses they sell for Linux will pay off the development costs of making Linux versions of their desktop software.

For a totally contrary perspective to your argument, in the "enterprise" space (Microsoft Azure and Adobe Marketing Cloud respectively) both companies do a huge amount of revenue on Linux stacks.

Yes, but it won't be

[Dasher42]

Microsoft and Apple still have the same attitude from the good old days of "It's not a new release until it breaks Lotus 1-2-3", and there's always the boatload of malware and spyware we don't want compatibility with.

In the meantime, I've used Linux as my primary desktop for the majority of the past two decades, and I don't even bother with dual-booting anymore. Why? You get a clean ecosystem of software right out of the box with all the popular distributions for office software, development, raster and line art, 3D modelling, mathematics, so on. The popular games are native or work well in Wine. If you're really hard up, a virtual machine and a second GPU with I/O bypass could see you through.

The trouble to migrate pays off with a lean, clean system that isn't riddled with spyware, and doesn't wake up at odd hours regardless of your settings to do Microsoft's bidding. It isn't license-restricted to your CPU - I've switched laptops simply by popping my SSD out of an old broken one into a new one and been fully up and running with my software and custom settings in minutes, without fuss.

I wouldn't give up those advantages just to run everything in Best Buy, and it's possible that, once over the speed bumps, you wouldn't want to either.

Re:What apps are preventing Linux desktop adoption

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Hmmm... I misunderstood then. I've never installed Visual Studio Code as a standalone. I thought it was the same editor I installed with Visual Studio, but cut out of the IDE and opensourced. Apparently that's not the case. Now I kinda wanna download it and test.

What Wayland server on Windows 10

[tepples]

Using what X server, if the app happens to be graphical? Microsoft doesn't provide one

X11, how quaint. Did you steal a Delorean and travel back to 1985?! Both Gnome and KDE are rapidly migrating to Wayland.

Using what Wayland server, if the app happens to be graphical? Microsoft doesn't provide one.

What WSL needs is to transparently switch backends to the Win32 implementation of GTK+ or Qt.

Likewise with SDL, Allegro, SDL 2, Allegro 5, and wxWidgets. I'm curious to see through what technical mechanism this sort of proxying could be made practical.

What a quaint question!

[wolftone]

Nah. But seriously: nah.

That's not on "Linux"—which you seem to describe in monolithic terms and as if this monolithic community could magically sprout an appendage that does everything you want. There's already emulation. Some emulation software isn't terribly difficult to use. Most Linux users are still expected to read the documentation before expecting things to simply work.

Until Microsoft or Apple drop out of the desktop market, there will be no substantial incentive to make it any easier to run software built for those operating systems in a foreign operating system.

Games do not interoperate; use cases explained

[tepples]

Half your list is games, there are now LOTS of good games that run on Linux. If you look around you can find games like those on your list.

But none that are network-compatible with those on my list. Unlike business software, whose users can collaborate through a shared file format, different games do not interoperate in multiplayer. A user would have to get all his friends to purchase a different game and switch from their preferred game to that (possibly inferior) game.

I don't know your use case for Stone Edge so kind of hard for me to find a drop in replacement.

Consider the e-commerce back end of a toy shop. Tasks include adding and updating product information, taking orders from customers in person (POS), importing customer orders from the seller's account on online sales channels such as Amazon, purchasing stock to cover existing and future orders (comprising making a purchase order with a distributor, adjusting the PO quantities based on the invoice, and receiving it to stock), updating stock quantity on online sales channels, allocating stock to orders, and mobile or web applications to pick, pack, and ship.

Photoshop can probably be replaced with GIMP. This again would require some learning and probably some plugins to get all the features you need.

In Photoshop, an adjustment layer is a layer generated by applying one or more filters to the pixels in layers below it. It automatically updates itself when the layers below it change. It's sort of like a spreadsheet, where a cell can contain a formula for its value, or a makefile, which applies a recipe to some files to create another file. A web search produces results showing that this functionality is highly desired by users of GIMP but not implemented, such as "How to create the equivalent of an Adjustment Layer in an editor that does not support it?". What plugin for GIMP automates this process of tracking dependencies on lower layers and applying a filter when they change?

Adobe Animate can be replaced by a number of animation tools. Again you would have to find best for your use case.

The features I'm looking for in a replacement for Adobe Animate include timeline-based editing, automatic inbetweening, rendering the finished animation to video, and exporting to HTML5 vector animation using Canvas or SVG (which is much smaller in bytes than video). Slashdot users often mention Synfig Studio as a replacement for Adobe Animate, but "export" in Synfig Studio means something completely different. If I wanted to animate and just render to video, I'd probably use Blender, but exporting to HTML5 vector animation is important to users on slow or capped connections to the Internet.

In the end though I am too lazy to do all your homework for you.

Then a measurable advantage of sticking with Windows, at least for a small business without the resources to hire a specialist in migration to GNU/Linux, is that sticking with familiar industry-standard software requires spending less time==money on doing homework.

The very worst case you use virtualbox and run a VM for that program.

Because this VM would require purchasing an operating system license, for the purpose of the article, this would correspond to Betteridge's answer: "no".

LOL Lindows

[slashdice]

just use ninnle linux.

I remember when

[Zobeid]

I remember when some people were claiming that we'd soon be doing everything with web apps and with Java apps, which are "write once, run everywhere", and then platform-specific Windows or Mac or Linux programs would be obsolete. How long ago was that? Hint: Some people actually thought this would save the Amiga platform.

For all the resources it would take...

[ShamblerBishop]

If instead you took all the resources required just to meet full compatibility with Windows, and instead put that into proper Quality Assurance for the most popular Linux distro and the software it most commonly depends upon (forking out all of those projects from their toxic communities, that hinder proper quality development...) - then Linux would simply obsolete all other platforms, as the de-facto standard operating system. The fact is, the quality of Linux is just not up to scratch. Until your everyday fuckwit can use it without any frustration, then it's a waste of breath to even be talking about any of this. That day won't come, until someone with tens of billions puts the money into paying a gigantic team, with the aim of un-fucking all of the problems with program quality and usability, across the most essential parts of the Linux ecosystem - while expecting fuck all in return. That's all there's ever been to it. The problem is the community, the incumbent developers and community, stuck in their ways, holding back all progress in this direction - such that it's going to require a Fuck Load of money, to get people to do things properly.

What would be the point?

[Tony Isaac]

The whole point of Linux is to be _different_ from Windows, to be free and open source. The main point of Linux is NOT to be user friendly to the point that your grandma can use it without help. Every tinkerer out there thinks they have a better idea how to do each and every task that a computer does. Grandma doesn't care about all that, she just wants something that you can click and go.

The design of Windows and OSX are controlled from the top. Linux is controlled from the bottom. This is why Windows and OSX are relatively coherent and user friendly--this is a major goal of both companies. User friendliness is not on the top of the list of Linux attributes.

Re:What would be the point?

[HermMunster]

I agree that Linux is meant to be unique, however I vehemently disagree with your supposition that it isn't meant to be something your grandma can use. I would venture to say that it has already accomplished that. I have installed Kubuntu on many elderly people's computers, sometimes in place of Windows 10 (and obviously earlier versions). It currently is, imho, a matter of only a few apps & a learning curve that holds a lot of people back.

Stupid Questions

[Tenebrousedge]

You know how they say there's no such thing as a stupid question?

Congratulations.

Linux sucks

[eminencja]

I wrote a short, silly (C) program the other day. I ran it on a Mac and it kind of worked fine, but choked once in a while and stopped producing output. I had to Ctrl-C it. I wanted to troubleshoot it on Linux where I had proper dev tools installed. Unfortunately my Linux box broke. It would freeze and I had to reboot it. Turned out that my program had a bug and would go into an infinite recursion and allocate a lot of memory along the way. Mac continued to run without any problem, Linux had to be hard-rebooted. Hence I say Linux sucks on the desktop.

Re:Linux sucks

[HermMunster]

I have both Macs and Linux PCs. The opposite is generally true in my experience. The Mac generally becomes unstable faster, whether that is due to the underlying OS is debatable yet seems true.

Can you say at what point a buggy app indicates the failure of the OS? Your example is incomplete as it doesn't include how the app was run under Linux? Was it a port or was it running on an api layer or was it native?

Container

[therealspacebug]

If it will ever be possible to run programs on multiple OSes I guess some kind of container instance would be needed.

Re:Container

[JustNiz]

Isn't that what Java was all about?

yes

[saif ali shah]

http://a10onlinegames.com/russ... vist us...

Containers / VMs / ...

[bromoseltzer]

What is an OS? If you use containers or VMs or Snaps or whatever to carry all the local-system-dependent stuff, what really needs to run on bare metal? That's the hypervisor, which can be pared down from your favorite current OS.

But if each app then carries around its own GUI system, what's to keep them coherent for the poor user? So maybe you need to think of the GUI as part of the hypervisor... And then you're back to ground zero, where we are right now.

If you don't have a common user experience, you don't have much compatibility.

Re:Not a chance the OS will disappear

[ebvwfbw]

Whatever it is you're using when the OS is gone, it'll be Linux.
What do you think runs chrome books and such. The tablet fairy?

Re:MacOSX and Windows: birds are dino.

[ebvwfbw]

Windows NT was just the same old OS with networking that Microsoft couldn't give away the year before. Just repackaged. Get a short skirt to show it off.... Boom, sales.

A Rose By Any Other Name

[jman.org]

'doze? Wine. Much better than past days, but still not quite there.

OSX? Already Linux-adjacent, being based on BSD.

Given the vastly greater ability to modify 'nix to suit ones personal tastes (keyboard shortcuts, etc.), one could *mostly* make it work just like 'doze, but why?

Certain things would have to be relearned, such as paths that do not have colons in them with delimiters going the other way.

If one can handle such cosmetic changes, it doesn't really matter. 'doze, 'nix, Mac ... it's all just pushing buttons.

Short answer?

[McFortner]

No.

Long answer: MS and Apple will never let anybody play in their playground that will take away market share. 100% compatible Linux is such a threat to their bottom line. If they have to, they will require the OS to be "always connected" to call in to verify it's on their OS before getting permission to run the software. Their gaming platforms needing it just a prelude to this.

The IBM PC moved us away from mainframes and in the last 10 years or so the "Cloud" is moving us right back to it.

I, for one, welcome our new OS overlords. All Hail Saint Bill and Saint Steve and their Infinite Wisdom!

Not their intent

[HermMunster]

Linux is about Linux. There is an an api called wine, even then it isn't there to make Linux Windows and Mac compatible.

I think most users want their Linux PC to be unique. They don't want their machine to be a Windows PC or Mac PC.

Re:Irrelevant...

[HermMunster]

Driver issues have been long past resolved on Linux.

Do people have selective memories? Windows has had massive driver compatibility issues over the years and still has them to this day with Windows 10. I fix computers for a living and the last batch of computers that have come in are units that wouldn't load Windows 10 because of drivers. Lets not even start in the limited support for hardware on the OSX

Most Windows releases have had spectacular driver issues. Linux has had by all measure a fraction of issues with drivers for hardware. I'm someone that fixes computers for a living and have for decades and I use Linux on my desktops throughout my business and at home. There's a reason why. It is because Linux is so stable and free of malware and other crap/bloatware. It isn't even funny.

So whats with the selective memory.

Re:Irrelevant...

[erp_consultant]

I think you might have misinterpreted my post. I'm well aware of Windows driver issues. The point i was trying to make - unsuccessfully :-) - is that the driver issues with Linux are well behind them. In fact, the version of Linux I am running right now installed without a hitch and everything works fabulously.

To be perfectly honest, I am sick of Windows. For years I used it at work because I had to. About 8 years ago I switched over to Macs and enjoyed them for a time but grew weary of the walled garden and, as you pointed out, hardware incompatibilities. All the while, I have dabbled in Linux. Each iteration got better and better and now it's my full time OS. Linux does everything I need and does it well.

No, it won't

[sfsp]

Linux will never become fully compatible with Windows and Mac software, just as Windows will never become fully compatible with Mac software, and Mac will never become fully compatible with Windows software. Here are some reasons why:

1. Microsoft and Apple both need to make money. If Linux, being free, were just like them, they would lose market. Therefore, if Linux became just like them, the cheese will move.

2. Linux does not have 100% compatibility as a goal. It's not necessary for Linux's success. And make no mistake, Linux has succeeded. The only significant market where Linux is not a MAJOR player is the desktop. Supercomputers? Check. Servers? Check. Home automation? Check. Telephony? Check.

3. People who try Linux want it to be "better", for various values of "better". This demands that it be DIFFERENT. Read "Linux is NOT Windows", http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm

4. Linux is built on a different worldview. Read "In The Beginning Was The Command Line", http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html