Hacker News Reader

Comment by buggythebug | Hacker News Reader

performance means nothing if the software you require doesn't run on it

which is why I "need" Linux.

The software that I need, will run on Windows, but hardly and always with great effort and abysmal stability. And sometimes not at all.

ruby/rbenv, nvm/node, rust/cargo, docker, nvim, ripgrep, git, rsync, ssh. All of which I sometimes, somehow managed to get running at some point when helping co-workers with their Windows machines. But the amount of fiddling, trial-and-errorring and such is terrible. For example PuTTY is a fantastic beast, but it's nowhere near as well integrated and easy to setup and use as SSH on Mac or Linux. If only because the latter already have it. Most was before WSL, though. I presume with WSL it will be much easier. But that's because its running on Linux...

I use a chunk of those. They work absolutely fine on WSL2.

My windows machine can quite happily pull shit out of Excel files, into R/Python stack on Linux and squirt them back out into SQL Server with no real cohesion issues. Also I mostly spend all day with VScode open on a Linux box from windows.

I also maintain old windows stuff on windows and loads of infra from Linux. It all just works together fine. And it stays working (unlike my 25 year long hate affair with the linux desktop)

Oh and I own a Mac as well for when I want to do some shit I actually care about rather than just earn money from.

So you are using Linux. On Windows, sure. But Linux nonetheless.

We are at a stage where games built for Windows actually run better on Linux so this argument will probably not be relevant for too long anymore.

If they run at all, that is. The latest update to League of Legends seems to have broken it for all Linux users.

WoW also crashes randomly every 30 minutes using lutris after the latest update, it's quite annoying. This happens on both my wife and my computer. She has an AMD gpu and I have a nvidia.

Otherwise it has been running really well.

You mean some games built for Windows run better on Linux (and I'd be curious to know which ones actually run better). Some games barely run on Linux, some just don't work, some get broken by new versions, etc.

And computers aren't just for gaming. Some people actually work with their computers. Let me know when photoshop or autocad run smoothly on Linux.

Cyberpunk runs exactly 3fps lower on NixOS than on windows during benchmarks on ultra, with dlss and ray tracing. Totally negligible performance difference but being on Linux is not.

Not sure how this is supposed to answer what I wrote, but okay, thanks for the information.

If a game that runs bleeding edge features on windows can be made to run on Linux, then it’s safe to say that anything can run on Linux.

If autocad or photoshop don’t work it’s not because Linux can’t handle it, it’s because the authors of those programs don’t want you to. It’s DRM, every time; not some limitation on what wine can do.

That, and Windows being the only OS with good fractional scaling. My main problem with Linux is that, in order to have tolerable fractional scaling, you have to use tons of hacks to make sure everything is running on Wayland. And even then some basic stuff is just broken, like JetBrains IDEs just not supporting scaling (except on KDE but then other stuff like icons are broken), drag and drop being broken in VS Code, cursors sometimes going absolutely massive, etc. macOS straight up doesn't support fractional scaling, which is even worse (good luck using a 1440p 24" display with it).

By your downvotes it looks like the Linux users can't accept that there are superior Windows applications still.

Do you have particular applications on mind?

There are a huge number of business-specific Windows-only apps out there, because for so long Windows (and DOS before it) was what everyone ran on. So when you hired some college CS student for three months to create that custom app for your business workflow, it ran on Windows. And it's still there running the business, and so you can't change because that would mean replacing the app. Source code? What's that?

How is Wine these days for such apps?

IIRC, there used to be a problem with .Net and/or Silverlight apps in Wine. But I could be 100% remembering wrong.

(I also have no idea if/how Wine supports apps that use ActiveDirectory.)

Anything Adobe falls into that camp saddly..

Luckly fewer and fewer bits of software remain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com