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Comment by zuminator | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is making Windows into the Nigerian Prince of operating systems. Classically, Nigerian Prince scams are so obvious that they weed out all the people smart enough to avoid being swindled, leaving the easy pickings to be plucked without much effort.

Windows is the same. By Microsoft removing all bypass measures that make it tolerable, their remaining user base will just end up being people who don't care about security and privacy, people who won't complain about being inundated with ads, AI, and bingware, people who have no idea that a modern operating system should be fast, customizable, and open. That 90% customer base is easy to fleece with 10% effort, so why bother with the 10% base that will require 90% effort?

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The thing is linux desktop is pretty damn good for a lot of people for their day to day needs. It's just the office tools and gaming. Cloud tools like google docs can handle the office side and valve can sovle gaming. But there still remains the issue of convincing people.

My mom works as a translator and all she needs is email, something to edit documents in and a browser, thats it. She was able adapt to ubuntu pretty fast even though she's not the kind of person who likes learning new tech.

There must be millions of users just like her. But people are very resistant to change and few have an annoying linux evangelist like myself in the house to push them.

We need to get them young somehow. I'm thinking around highschool.

Is there a way to chain launch a "qemu VM --> windows 10 client --> autodesk product" in a transparent way? If we could do that reliably and with a stripped down win10 image, I think the serious office users could just pretend they are running autodesk or whatever software in linux. The big downside I presume is this will not work with software that need tight interaction with custom hardware (mocap suits etc).

'Winapps' and 'winboat' on Linux allow a windows image to run in a Linux docker container and permit just the app to be streamed to the Linux desktop (after initial setup). I haven't played with it yet..but you could theoretically set up a windows host on a different remote server via tailscale or netbird and have them RDP into the windows docker container remotely.

Unfortunately my parents run macos and these tools are not meant for Macos. But like you said there are apps like UTM that provide a nice shell for QEMU on macos. Not as nice as streaming just the app, but a good start. These work great on new macmini with apple silicon.

Yes, doing that by hand would be three lines of bash to launch it.

  virsh start ms-malware11 # or any other method to launch your vm
  sleep 20
  remmina -c /home/me/ms-malware11.remmina

Make a shortcut to above script and the only thing the user needs to do is click it .

It requires a bit of setup on Linux. First install a win11 vm, you can do it graphically via `virtual machine manager` from libvirt. Then install remmina and configure a profile `ms-malware11.remmina`, also graphically. In that profile, under Advanced, have Startup Program "AutoDesk.exe" or whatever that is called.

Then Autodesk runs like any linux application, the user doesn't see it runs in a vm. This feature depends on RemoteApp feature in Windows.

This is something your mom probably wouldn't setup by hand, but anybody here should be able to.

Ooh remmina looks really cool.

>ms-malware11

lol

libvirtd really is such a quality piece of software making local VMs so trivial to spin up and manage.

Hyper-V and Virtualization Framework wish they were so user friendly.

There is winboat which I think can help in this

https://www.winboat.app/ (Their motto is "Run windows application with seamless integration " so I think it might work for your use case as well)

I built that setup over a decade ago, when I virtualized my parents' WinXP installation and gave them Debian on the host.

  - transparent ethernet switch on the host (i.e. br0)
  - old disk copied into an LVM volume (to ease with later migrations and partition growth)
  - qemu instance managed by virt-manager (for autostart and managed shutdown)
  - tty5 linked to spice-client in its own X server (i.e. startx -- spice-client-gtk in inittab)

I considered my solution kinda hacky back then, it effectively ran the entire spice client as root. But it did what it needed to do, and I'm sure it would have been trivial to add a su call somewhere in the startup chain.

I'm sure that between systemd and virtd the same solution should be easier to build today, if it weren't for Wayland and logind complicating the hell out of single-app (think kiosk mode) display sessions.

I replaced Windows with Fedora (KDE) on my moms computer, and she's never even commented on it. The browser icon looks the same, and it's in roughly the same place.

Lol! Brilliant!

> Cloud tools like google docs can handl

This.. but whenever this is mentioned people will start the other point. Google is not for privacy.

I have become a silent spectator.

Neither is windows. Google at least works and is easily protable.

My dad's always searching for some usb drive he lost with hours of work on it. He'd be much better off using google.

It's weird, users will happily accept Google Docs and Sheets as replacements for Word and Excel despite the considerable differences but are more reluctant to give the LibreOffice suite a try despite arguably being more capable. But at this point I'm not going to judge as long as they're happy.

With all respect libre office startup times are awful in Linux. UI still needs work over. Lots of resources. Libre office works poorly if one has 4 or 8 GB RAM.

If there was a minimal footprint libre office (like online with collaboration line or next cloud it will be great but it is very unreliable)

And often people have gotten used to

- simple just open with browser - needs few resources - love or hate Android is most popular. So people are able access documents in phone

There are also companies slowing realizing the strong use of Google docs so that definitely design it more compatible with Google docs rather than libre office. And many companies have already bought into Google ecosystem.

Libreoffice can handle most office documents these days. Steam can run many games via proton/wine. In fact, for normal “day to day” stuff, I find Ubuntu is a solid replacement. The problems arise the moment some non-mainstream/non-prepackaged install is needed on any distro. The newest drivers, some alternative program, a non-standard networking configuration, etc. The moment any of that is needed the Linux distros immediately fall back to terminal commands which are not end-user friendly. I would guess that 99% of “normal” (but non-standard) things can be done with Mac and Windows via GUI only. Installing another driver, a program, etc. Linux is far from there and only seems to achieve that for the absolute most common operations overall (basics). I like Ubuntu, and I am coming to hate this new Windows approach, but the ecosystem of flexibility and “just use a terminal command” mentality will never really let it go fully mainstream (at least until that is resolved).

Unfortunately LO can not handle most people's document requirements. Not at any fault of LO, it's Microsoft who make comparability hard or impossible. So when working with most people who will be using Office, LO will fail to correctly format a document.

I'm reminded of this great article on the subject

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...

Unfortunately MS make everything a moving target.

To be a little fair to Microsoft, they have made it much harder to enable macros over the years. So when stuck with a bank's spreadsheet that requires a win32 macro to convert for upload, I blame the bank.

Luckily grey market keys for both windows and office are so cheap I can just relegate these to a VM for those times it's needed.

The above is probably enough to keep the typical user on Windows forever though.

My guess is that they are focused only on to cashcow -> enterprise, office, (and all Copilot BS). Sadly very few of IT people I know of move to Linux or macOS for this specific reason. Just like XP users tolerated the tons of systray, toolbar crap - most are tolerating AI shit. To be fair to even knowledgeable people, most are happy to live their live on Smartphone (+ maybe tablet). Most get a corporate laptop from work.

Or gamers that are already used to Windows. So inertia.

Many gamers are married to Windows exclusive games like Fortnite etc., but gamers are also more rebellious than corporate IT staff and many have actually built their computers from parts, so they are not scared of flashing a USB drive. I'm optimistic that this group is the next one to break away from Windows.

Gaming is the biggest thing that keeps me on Windows, followed by the fact that I use an Nvidia GPU, followed by a very localized case of inertia where I have so much data, settings and programs concentrated in my OS install that migrating it all over is going to be a monumental pain in the ass. But luckily, Linux gaming has gotten way better and I don't play the kind of games that categorically refuses to run there (anything with highly involved anti-cheat systems), so once my version of Windows becomes unsupported, I'll bite the bullet and make the Linux install into my primary one.

I think people like me are the real first line that's most likely to switch - techy people who play games (which had so far kept them on Windows) and that suffer firsthand at Microsoft's attempts to get them directly in addition to already being treated horribly by default. This group is less afraid of changing things up and has more incentives to switch. But if we talk of gamers in general, it may take a while until a meaningful number of them switch over, even though they are far more motivated than the average PC user. Even though they're the prime candidates, it's going to be a very, very steep uphill battle.

> ... localized case of inertia where I have so much data, settings and programs concentrated in my OS install that migrating it all ...

Your first step is start swapping out Windows-specific programs for cross-platform alternatives. Eventually you'll have to just cut the rest loose and make the jump though. Don't bother dual-booting either or you'll just delay it further.

I made the transition a few years ago and it was far less dramatic than I imagined.

Luckily, there's not that much Windows-only software I must use. Unluckily, it's pretty essential:

- Fusion 360 (the only alternative seems to be learning a different, likely far more involved CAD)

- Paint.NET (a simple, quick, no-nonsense image editor - while there are image editor alternatives, as far as I can tell there's nothing quite like it)

The bigger issue that might keep me dual-booting are graphical features. Things like VR and HDR are already known to be janky on their "native" Windows implementations, so I'm scared to imagine what any of that is going to be like on Linux. Neither are common use cases, but I still want to hold onto those where possible.

I feel that pain. I was using Lightroom since 2009 or so and I it took me many hours over many Saturdays to extricate myself from its grasp. That being said, my efforts to abandon it was the only thing that exposed a lot of problems (metadata, duplicates, etc.) so... it worked out in the end.

Which lightroom replacement are you using on Linux?

I was hoping you wouldn't ask :P

I don't have a replacement at all but this coincided with a reduced desire to tinker with and touch up my photos in general. I'm currently working on a modular Unix-y/CLI-focused way to safely ingest photos (archive originals with PAR2; then move from source and rename), reject/rate as needed, ensure timestamps are correct (UTC for DSLRs), geotag with whatever GPX I have, and then eventually some sort of LLM-based tagging. Exif will do a lot of heavy lifting here.

All I really need now is a way to rate my photos and I'll probably use Digikam for that. Raw processing doesn't have a CLI solution that I like so I'll probably have to use RawTherapee or something as well.

> where I have so much data, settings and programs concentrated in my OS install

Don't forget to back up.

Right. I said that when Windows loses the gamers, its monopoly will eventually collapse. Office-use is another area where Windows has a stronghold, but the gamers are typically quite clever people, whereas elderly people often have physical problems and grew up in a time where computers weren't so dominating.

> Gaming is the biggest thing that keeps me on Windows, followed by the fact that I use an Nvidia GPU

The Nvidia issue is overblown IMO. If you use their binary blobs it works pretty well.

This is just a personal anecdote, but I was speaking from past experience. Perhaps things have improved now, but back when I seriously used Linux on my own PC, the 2-3 times when the system randomly stopped booting properly and had to be tinkered with for me to be able to do anything with my computer, all of these issues were caused by something (Nvidia) GPU-related.

The situation is much better now. I've never had any issues with using the proprietary drivers on Arch on wayland in the past few years. If anything, AMD's drivers are noticeably more buggy.

I can't help but feel that 10% "smart" users have failed the rest of the 90% users.

10% is approximate casual Linux user base

> people who have no idea that a modern operating system should be fast, customizable, and open

What a ridiculous idea. Any serious person knows that a modern operating system must, above all, be profitable, profitable and profitable. Caring about people doesn't make you any money, and since you already make up most of the market, it's not like you need to entice anyone over.

A slightly less provocative and crass version of the above, yet one that still conveys the exact same message, is probably what most of the higher-ups of the software world believe. At least the ones that call the shots seem to.

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