Comment by esrauch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by esrauch | Hacker News Reader

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Photoshop and Lightroom aren't available on Linux; Linux is generally still considered a viable option as a Desktop replacement by a lot of people. Anything that used to be Win32 only and is now on OSX or Linux was also "written from scratch", and any product that has had the demand has been able to do it.

I'm not going to get a Surface, but to be clear every singe app that I currently use on Windows is definitely going to be available at launch on Windows RT, assuming you count Chrome and IE10 as interchangeable (which non-experts do) or if a version of Chrome launches (like the version on iOS). It's going to launch with a browser, a chat client, a media player, and a random set of games. There is nothing else that I run on Win7.

Anything intended to be used on a touchscreen device needs to be written from scratch. Any application intended to be used by a mouse used on a touchscreen is an absolutely awful experience (I used a WinXP laptop with a touchscreen display about 6 years ago, totally fine laptop but the touch screen is useless because the usability in apps is not there). You can't expect to just run Lightroom on a touchscreen and expect it to work well.

I had never heard of Lightroom before, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like it is targeted at professional photographers or hobbyist photographers who have $1000+ camera equipment. I dual boot Ubuntu for development, and I recognize that is esoteric hobbyist usage, and I don't expect Windows to start supporting all the tools I want for development out of the box. I can't imagine who really thinks that level of usage should be supported by a low end consumer device.

> Photoshop and Lightroom aren't available on Linux; Linux is generally still considered a viable option as a Desktop replacement by a lot of people. Anything that used to be Win32 only and is now on OSX or Linux was also "written from scratch", and any product that has had the demand has been able to do it.

Don't move the goalposts: you "what legacy Win32 apps are you actually looking to use?" I responded with some common ones. Let's go simpler then: dropbox is a "legacy" app that you cannot install.

The conversation was in the context of desktop operating systems, you yourself said it: "Is it not true that Linux and Mac OSX are viable for new desktops"

You can debate for hours if linux is "viable" for desktops (Year of the desktop! 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002...) but that just confuses the conversation further. It's impossible to argue that WinRT is.

'Surface is a PC because Adobe haven't released their Photoshop for Linux either.'

Doesn't make a compelling argument does it.

Presumably the point is that if it's a PC replacement then customers are primed to spend more on it than if it's "just" a tablet. Tablets can replace PCs for sure but not because they provide all the functionality and performance, no instead it's because - like you it seems - people don't use all the capacity of their PCs. However, MS wouldn't want to suggest that any tablet might be a PC replacement for their customers, only this one ... blah, blah.

tl;dr it's just a marketing angle

That wasn't my argument, the statement you are attributing to me is obviously false since my banana doesn't run Photoshop and it's not a PC.

My statement is in response to the claim 'Surface is not a PC because it won't have Photoshop on it'; I do not think that is a compelling argument. My statement isn't trying to go all the way to say that WinRT is a Desktop replacement, it's merely that single argument shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that it isn't.

That WinRT itself won't have Photoshop on it is probably already false if the platform succeeds at all (there is already a reduced version of Adobe Photoshop for iPad, Adobe would make a less-reduced version for RT if the demand is there and the hardware supports it). Even assuming it is, lack of Adobe Photoshop doesn't automatically make something not a viable desktop replacement for 99.9% of people.

It looks like they are pushing Surface as something to be used with a keyboard (at least more so that iPad). That seems like a reasonable thing to call out in marketing as why this device might be able to replace the desktop for some users when an iPad fell short.

Any new version of anything is going to leave out some percentage of the users unless it is a strict superset of the old functionality. Apple Maps are totally useless to anyone who only used Google Maps for public transit. It's totally ridiculous to make the claim that Apple Maps isn't a viable replacement for Google Maps based solely on the fact that for a specific fairly small set of users it isn't a viable option; Apple Maps is still a viable replacement for the vast majority of users.

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