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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

I wholeheartedly agree with you. Unfortunately, the commercial desktop OS market is a duopoly. Either we must deal with Windows and its shenanigans, or we must deal with macOS and its drawbacks (the chief ones being limited hardware choices, soldered RAM and storage, and highly inflated prices for RAM and storage upgrades). Switching to Linux or the BSDs is an option for some people, but what about those who rely on software that is only available on Windows and macOS?

Having to choose between Windows and the Mac has been the situation since the late 1990s. There hasn’t been any strong commercial challengers to these operating systems since the demise of BeOS.

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> the commercial desktop OS market is a duopoly

No, it's not. I've been happily running Linux on my personal machines for more than two decades.

> what about those who rely on software that is only available on Windows and macOS?

Matlab is the software in question in this particular case, and as others have already posted, it runs on Linux.

Even for particular software that might be Windows/Mac only, there are almost always functional equivalents that run on Linux. For example, OpenOffice (and later LibreOffice, which is what I run now) as an alternative to MS Office.

I have had plenty of opportunity for comparison because, for all the time I have been running Linux on my personal machines, I have had to use Windows at work. I have always had much more hassle with my work machines, and if I had a dollar for every time I have had the thought that, if only my employer would switch to Linux on desktops, my work life would be so much easier and my productivity would be better, I'd be retired now. And that's not even counting all the times I have had the thought that if my employer would run Linux on servers instead of Microsoft crapware, our IT infrastructure would be so much more robust.

The one example I have seen in this discussion of software that is truly limited to Windows/Mac is Solidworks. But that's a particular product for a particular niche, not a general office application.

I switched to Linux full time two years ago and I'm never looking back (until a "trusted" OS is required by law). There are times when I truly need windows for something so I keep it around on a spare HDD to boot into it.

In the future I plan on relegating it to a VM on a separate VLAN to keep the cooties at bay.

> There are times when I truly need windows for something so I keep it around on a spare HDD to boot into it.

That's the problem. Most Linux users need Windows for something. I use mostly Linux, but I also have a Windows boot partition. For things like gaming, Fusion 360, VR,... Some things don't work that well on Linux: YouTube sometimes gets out of sync, print quality is really bad,...

On the other hand, I don't really need Linux, except for jobs that involve Linux specifically, and these are pretty technical jobs, far from a typical use case for non tech workers. And even with such tech jobs, >90% of these cases could be dealt with with WSL.

There is a video by LinuxTechTips where he tries to go 100% Linux, he is relatively successful but it is painful. I love this video because I think it is representative of the experience of a computer-savvy consumer.

On the other hand, if auto-restarts are a real problem to you, you are probably not a typical user. For most, it is an annoyance, but not really a problem, and it can be important for security. I don't really mind them personally, except that my dual-boot machine restarts on Linux (the default) when Windows does that, with the update process paused half way, annoying.

I got my start in Unix sysadmin a few decades ago, so have always been comfortable in Linux even in the early days. I used to maintain a dual boot setup, but my primary system has been Fedora Linux only for the past decade or so. The laptop I use occasionally boots to Linux by default, but I keep the Windows partition around that it came with. Only time I boot into Windows is if I need to use the slicing software for my 3D printer (after I've created the model in Linux). In that case, didn't realize that Monoprice's rebranding of a popular 3D printer included a customized firmware signature and matching change in the slicer software, so I can't use the OEM manufacture's software (either Linux or Windows versions), and am stuck with whatever Monoprice wants to distribute.

For work, my work laptop is Windows and provided/maintained by internal IT. I support exclusively Linux based systems for our customer facing product, and the main reason I keep the Windows install on is so I can make any workstation issues a helpdesk issue.

In general though I've had no issues getting Office 365 working on Linux (Chromium / Chrome is best supported, but Firefox works OK too for most functions).

I said commercial OS market to distinguish proprietary desktop operating systems (Windows and macOS) from Linux, the BSDs, MINIX, Haiku, Plan 9, OpenSolaris, FreeDOS, and other alternative operating systems. Windows and macOS is a duopoly, much like how US politics is functionally a two-party system. The existence of the Greens, Libertarians, and independent candidates don’t take away the fact that the Democrats and Republicans utterly dominate American politics to the point that third parties and independent candidates face major hurdles campaigning. Likewise, the existence of Linux doesn’t take away the fact that Windows and macOS combined dominate desktop computing.

Sometimes one needs proprietary software packages that only work on Windows or macOS. Granted, the situation in 2024 isn’t as bad as it was in the 2000s thanks to the evolution of Web apps as an alternative to desktop applications. Still, some people rely on heavy-duty desktop apps that rely on Windows- or Mac-only APIs. The GIMP and Inkscape may not fully replace Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. FOSS diagramming tools, last I checked, aren’t at the level of proprietary tools that are unavailable for Linux like Microsoft Visio and OmniGraffle. Some people need functionality in Microsoft Office that is unavailable in LibreOffice.

I'm sorry but I can't run a laptop without functional hardware video decoding, or even hybrid sleep. I tried my Linux switch this year on 2 laptops - an older 8th gen with Intel graphics and a new one with the latest AMD. Still the same stuff. I need to do lots of workarounds for simple stuff to work properly and some things are just broken. I can't tolerate a laptop that eats 70% of CPU and murders the battery when I'm just trying to watch a video and crashes randomly when resuming for sleep. Windows 10 enterprise ltsc it is :(

I feel like the practical duopoly would be one thing if we were back around Vista/7 and Apple’s kittens, but the awful thing about both Microsoft and Apple these days is that they’re not happy with just selling software or hardware, they also really want to push their services, making it harder and harder to escape M365 or iCloud, with Microsoft going so far as to make it a convoluted process involving the command-line and a restart to even allow offline accounts on Home/Pro.

This is true. I’m thinking about contributing to open source projects, perhaps even starting one, to further help with developing alternatives to “Big Tech” and their increasing levels of control on personal computing.

> but what about those who rely on software that is only available on Windows and macOS?

No-one ever considers the dual of this: if you started using Linux, what software would be so vital that you couldn't consider switching to windows?

Rockwell Studio 5000. FactoryTalk View Studio. Autodesk Electrical. Autodesk Inventor. Fanuc Roboguide.

This package is part of the pay-to-play entry barrier in my industrial controls industry. My quotes don't win jobs if I can't use these tools. None of these very expensive (the above items add up to more than $25,000, not even counting the subscription fees), closed source applications have native Linux installers or have any hope to run in Wine.

I run a Linux host OS with Windows VMs for the various incompatible versions of these pieces of software that I have to keep around to maintain old equipment, but these software packages are only available on Windows.

Fortunately, the industry has embraced Windows 10 LTSC (in machines where we're not still running Windows CE 6.0, LOL), so I'm good through at least 2032.

> or have any hope to run in Wine.

Why not?

Funny how your responses are proving your point that nobody can even think about that.

The most brutal category of all is ERPs/Accounting packages ... and Office.

Why is limited hardware choice a drawback?

Like is anyone wishing they had an Intel chip in their MacBook instead of an M3?

I "choose" longer battery life, and maximal computing load, both of which are only really optimizable when you vertically integrate hardware and software

And I do not give a flying fuck about battery life since I work in my home office only for the last 20 years and mostly deal with desktops and laptops configured just the way I want.

So what works for you is not always what works for me.

Sure. But would you say your usage of a laptop is the typical use case? Using it as a permanent desktop?

If you were going to design a laptop from scratch for a market, would you optimize it for your example?

> Sure. But would you say your usage of a laptop is the typical use case? Using it as a permanent desktop?

Guess you never saw 15.6" laptops in your whole life.

Like come on, my 14", 1.2kg is a thing what even I (185cm, 110kg) sometimes find exhausting to handle and I'm not always with it. If my work depended on it 24/7 I would go for 12" or even less. Yet vendors are constantly make those 15" or 17" 2-3kg monstruosities, mraning there is a demand for it.

Try walking in their shoes, I guess?

I'm not sure what your point is. Big, heavy laptops are heavy, so they should be desktops?

I've got great news: guess who makes the lightest laptops in the world? Know why they're so light? Vertical integration.

As an aside, if carrying 1.2kg is "exhausting to handle," I'm not sure what will convince you of any point on this topic.

I've got a great news for you: those who buys 17" laptops aren't interested in the "light and vertical integrated laptops". They need the screen estate, they need a lot of [upgradeable] storage, they need a discrete video card. Guess who doesn't make these?

As an aside, go carry at least 1.2 for a full day and tell us back. Not your 'imma sit in starbucks and imitate cool hipster dev' but like a full day, especially commuting.

Though I'm not sure anyone can convince you of any of the points you don't want to accept, because they contradict the only true way of yours. Even if the people directly say what they don't need your vertically integrated laptop.

What you can't choose: NVIDIA card, having a desktop instead of a laptop, all kinds of stuff you can put inside that desktop...

Linux isn't much better either these days, with the same shenanigans leaking in like cancer for no reason.

Every time I forget to kill and purge unattended-upgrade on some Ubuntu install it ends up messing up my system at some later point because apt just can't keep its grubby little hands of my fucking packages. The other day it broke Nvidia drivers on one machine which took me a while to fix. Sometimes it'll just decide it needs to run an update for something e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y-s-l-o-w-l-y while blocking all apt installs for like an hour if you happen to be on slow wifi.

Canonical's worst design decision by far, and that list includes picking Gnome as their desktop environment.

There are distros that don't have the same problems (and I will probably be switching to one the next time I have to configure a new Linux machine, since Ubuntu, as you say, is getting way out of hand). That's one of the nice things about Linux.

I'm sure there are, but like those Windows users I'm unfortunately locked to flavors of Ubuntu by ROS and some other software. Kubuntu is generally pretty nice once you take out the trash and add the missing bits. At least it stays configurable enough to fix for now.

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