If you trust Russian developers

While I can understand that it's frustrating. Kernel level Anticheat is a abomination in itself and should in no way be supported. It is a security flaw in itself!

Read this: https://gist.github.com/stdNullPtr/2998eacb71ae925515360410a...

GIMP can't compete even with the version of Photoshop from 2000.

Writer is awful too. It will randomly mess up formatting, especially in tables. Also in tables, it will insist to try and parse cell values like Calc would (breaking numbers and dates), even though Writer doesn't even provide a way to run calculations on those numbers anyway.

> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite > > writer, perhaps. calc, not even close

This really depends on your needs. I'm sure it's not enough for someone who does Excel wizardry for living. But I use it for tracking personal finances and other simple tasks and graphs, and it is completely sufficient.

This in my book easily earns it the "okay office suite" badge. To be honest all office suites in the last 20 years have been good enough for most small scale needs, including OpenOffice back in the early days.

LibreOffice Calc works well and does the job for what most people needs, I don't see any issue recommending it.

If you're a finance professional then there's no alternative to Excel. But otherwise Libre office calc is perfectly fine.

Any task that warrants a complex spreadsheet can be done better in a Python notebook using pandas or polars IMO

Calc is far better than Excel.

CSV import in Excel sucks. LibreOffice Calc is far better there.

Best feature of all in LibreOffice Calc: highlight current row/column, so you have a cross-like cursor.

Easier and better embedding of Python and other languages, not the "Python in the Cloud" crap that Excel does.

Less crappy conversions like "oh, that surely looks like a date, let's mess up your data"...

I've used calc every day for years. It works well.

The overwhelming majority of games that came out this year are from smaller studios and will work perfectly on Linux. It's only the big budget "AAA" games with corporate publishers pandering to shareholders/investment firms which insist on custom DRM and anticheat which are a problem.

Online competitive games with anti-cheat are the problematic ones in general.

If you play single player games with no or limited online features you'll be fine in 99% of the cases (number pulled from my ass).

Expedition 33 is a GOTY contender this year and it’s been working great for me on Linux

or https://photopea.com

Aren't they're used for slightly different things though? GIMP for image manipulation and Krita for digital drawing?

(Krita is pretty awesome though, it's up there with Blender for me)

Let's be realistic, accessibility — whether you like it or not — is an edge case. This is also why as you said, the amount of people working on it is low.

It is really not the limiting factor in Linux desktop adoption. The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.

Buy the wrong laptop, and you have to fight with X, wayland and Nvidia graphics like a terminally inclined caveman in danger

What software do you have that doesn't work in a VM? Without going to extra effort the environment should be indistinguishable for the application.

A good-enough compromise is a dual boot with a tiny Windows partition for the rare cases

Have you tried PCI passthrough of a USB bus? Worked for me with a device that didn't work with regular USB passthrough.

Manufacturing and automation is another big one. Think about a water plant that is air-gapped but needs computer automation software to run. These things are everywhere, in every town that has indoor plumbing and sewer. The specialized software that automates these plants only runs on Windows. It relies on industrial hardware and touchscreens that are designed for use in harsh outdoor environments. All of these types of plants rely on high school educated operators that need to understand what's going on at a simple level. Having an OS that in any way relies on Internet access is a non starter. A Linux based system would be removed within a year of operation. You could get it approved maybe if you really worked at it but it would not be accepted in the long run, after the initial startup. There are physical constraints, technical constraints, and human/political constraints that are all working against Linux.

How about OpenAIs whisper[0]? My social science friends tell me it‘s been great for them. Not sure whether data privacy et all would be an issue of course, but I guess you can just run it locally :)

[0]https://github.com/openai/whisper

Dragon in Wine. A lot of the Talon users do it that way.

correct, the solution is to fully switch and use the native software there not wine

Outdated ffmpeg, good for dated formats, not good for new stuff

Players like mpv are way better unless you want to use nightly build of v4

Outlook on the desktop is pretty much in maintenance mode only and Microsoft is already breaking it[0]. As for web version runs on linux just fine so you are in luck.

In general, unless you need advanced Excel features, you can switch to linux.

[0] e.g. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-cant-help-break-window... and couple others

And the crazy thing is that while outlook is my life it's also unbelievably bad. Why can't I have the calendar and email client open at the same time? Why don't newly received email addresses appear in the valid auto complete for sending out calendar invites? Why is search practically useless?

Outlook in its recent versions is (barely) functionally just the repackaged web version.

It is the poster child for enshittification.

cant Office be run in a VM?

If it's a one-off program, have you tried Winboat or running it in a Windows VM?

Have you tried Bottles? I helped a friend a few weeks ago getting his game library to work after he migrated to Bazzite and there are a few games from Japanese studios / indie devs. It was mostly setting the locale for a separate bottle configuration and from there they installed and worked.

I've not really had a problem with Japanese software, but I mostly stick to old games and the like. You do need to make sure you install cjk fonts, and if your system locale isn't Japanese you need to make sure jp locale is enabled then set it before running with `LANG="ja_JP.UTF8"` (or possibly LC_ALL if that fails) but other than that I've not had any major problems.

What kind of software isn't working?

In Europe it's free although you have to log in with a Microsoft account for... reasons.

I stayed on Win7 until December 2023, until there was some exploit that was attackable by just viewing an image, so just browsing the web would've made it vulnerable (I believe in the WebP format).

Although it seems there are people still Frankensteining Win7, and even patching DLLs to make the newest browsers/apps still run on it.

Famously MS Teams was really screwed up, but I had to use it for work..

> VM for things that NEED to be windows.

The big two that spring to mind are online games and Adobe softwares. I don't think a VM can usually meet the performance needed for either.

I do wish more artists would take a chance on open source softwares, but most of the ones I know are still insistent that nothing can ever come close to Adobe. But that's a rant for another time.

Browsers are the problem.

Firefox outright refuses to install on older Windows versions for a couple of years now. Very lazy and negligent move on Mozilla's part.

Presumably even if you pay you still need to log in with an account so they can verify the update licence is actually bound to your account?

Win10 IoT LTSC does not cover all use cases though.

When it comes to gaming, for example Windows Mixed Reality is not included and cannot be installed afterwards (but then again, Microsoft dropped it from Windows 11 too, so no loss there).

Only way to keep it is staying with consumer Windows 10 or use 3rd party software like Oasis.

The later Intel Macs with T1/T2 chip also come with a number of caveats on Linux. Don't expect those to work out of the box with standard Linux distros.

it might work well today for m1/m2 but the writting is on the wall for linux in newer macs.

asahi development slowed down and is getting further away as apple releases new malcs yearly.

i don't think this is a good bet for those who want to use linux.

I've only ever used windows. Recently got a mac mini so I could compile for iOS. I'm debating embracing the entire Apple ecosystem given I use iPhone. Not a huge fan of iCloud's pricing though. Curious what issues you ran into with your macs/Apple experience?

I'd rather suspect it has a lot more to do with 40+ years of application backward compatibility and the ludicrous stack of software available for the platform.

> “terminal holds it back”

Presumably the it here is Linux? That’s not what I would have said. The terminal makes maintaining your own systems much easier because it’s all text. Opposed to having to mix screen shots and instructions. Which is to say, I don’t imagine people who can’t handle the terminal (and are on Windoz) are doing any maintenance or configuration beyond a few GRRR items they’ve convinced themselves is ultimately intolerable.

From a small business I’d say what keeps the accounting office on Windoz is software (ie. quickbooks, excel). But a close second would be tighter integration of file management and core office apps (ie email). It’s very easy to rename, move, copy, files on windows. You can perform many of these file management tasks inside an app experience (ie saveas dialog box). Apple has the mindset with their suite of Apple productivity apps, Chromebooks are very easy for general users to get their head around. If Linux could roll up a Chromebook environment with a QB clone into a dedicated accounting solution, I think our firm would consider the switch. It would certainly have the appearance of stability and simplicity which is always a plus when your job is not maintaining IT systems.

Yeah, I don’t understand the parent commenter either. Even with my latest laptop, it took days and weeks to make everything work (like audio, my monitors, DPI, VLC/mpv, even networking). And even then I had to turn off some hardware functionality, because it’s so buggy (bye-bye battery life). And this is before introducing Wayland for example…

Also installing is way easier for beginners with Windows. I’m happy that Linux installation now at least reached the level of Windows 98, but I still need to search for things every single time, even when I do it about every other years for several decades now. Just because somebody thought that it’s so important to ask simple users about an implementation detail which almost nobody care about. And this is before bugs… which I encounter quite frequently.

It’s getting better, but by not much. It could be a very stable OS with the right hardware even 20 years ago. That didn’t change, you still need to be very careful if you want a good experience with Linux and a GUI. I had no laptop or PC in the past 30 years on which I could install Linux without serious hiccups if I wanted anything more than terminal. I could almost always make it usable (it was impossible with one laptop), but I always had to give up something, like battery life, game performance, my headset at the time, etc. And of course a ton of time.

> Watch someone who is not familiar with Linux and how it works attempt to install it and use it.

What a dumb analogy. My mother can use Windows very well, it doesn't mean she could also install it. The same rule applies to most Windows users. That's why it comes preinstalled, and not with an attached bootable USB stick.

UX of recent Windows versions is crap. The bearish tendency started with 8 and have never recovered, with Windows 11 being the cherry on top of the crap. Telling that as a user of almost every Windows version since 3.11. Microsoft completely changes user interface with every recent version, this is an anti-pattern in UX world. How is that I can smoothly switch between Debian and macOS major updates, and when Windows does the same it is a nightmare? "Oh no, where are the network settings again..."

I imagine youtube has the same automated system comply with eu, but the videos linked in the reddit post mention how quickly the appeals were denied, so accessing and contesting decisions alone doesn’t fix the automated system problem.

Thank you. I haven't tried this. I'll look into it.

I work primarily with GT3 teams across the highest level championships (WEC, IMSA, DTM, GTWC, ALMS), with a variety of manufacturers.

Primarily I'm building (with a small team of software engineers and data scientists) a cloud based motorsports data analysis platform which eliminates the friction involved in handling motorsports data and the differences between different manufacturers' software systems, and quickly gives drivers & coaches insights on how to improve their driving. So this involves getting into the weeds of a lot of this legacy software.

There are a few teams I work more closely with where I've set up their entire trackside network/tech stack, although nowadays I'm more focused on the software.