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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

It's not an alternative. At least not for a lot of companies. I work at a games studio and we exclusively use Windows - PS4, Xbox One, Wii U sdks and tools only work on Windows and only with Visual Studio(well, PS4 and Xbox One), and it's extremely unlikely that you would get them to work under Wine. So now our company will have to pay a fee to Microsoft to continue using windows, instead of a single flat payment when we bought our hardware.

Also - yes I know they are saying they will support Windows 10 for the lifetime of the device it was bought with,but I doubt it will work like this for enterprise users.

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If you're interested in attempting to get your software to work on other OSes through Wine, my company would be thrilled to talk to you. That's exactly what we do :)

ReactOS re-implements the WinNT series (XP+) OS kernel (you can compare it with UNIX vs. Linux) and WINE provides the user mode layer.

Visual Studio 2010 and the dotNet Framework work fine in WINE: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio... . VS run as early as 2003 in ReactOS: http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/wordpress/wp-con...

As ReactOS also supports the Windows graphic card driver from NVidia, AMD and Intel - it's for sure an upcoming alternative to Windows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS . Beside that more and more Indie-game-developers support Mac & Linux (PR via Humble Bundle), and beside Indie: GOG and Steam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(hardware_platfor... ) are going strong too.

Visual studio 2010 and dotNet surely works fine under wine. But there are lots of small cornerstones in the tools and software companies use that does not work so great.

If there was an real free alternative to windows where all the specialized software worked i am dead sure companies would start to use it. But at this moment there is no such alternative.

Ask yourself, what's better to have: a showstopper bug in a closed software or in a free open source software?

Bugs are often easy to locate and fix, if one can reproduce it. A small donation usually helps open projects.

If I am working with a latest, super secret revision of PS4 sdk that I can't even legally talk about, how would I ask developers of Wine for help if that SDK doesn't work with their software? I can't.

But Microsoft and Sony will be both legally bound to help, in certain cases they could even pay for delays if their software is at fault. I would much prefer to have a showstopper bug in closed software, thank you.

I'm pretty sure that Sony wouldn't like Microsoft to find out about their super secret PS4 sdk, as after all, they are direct competitors. So you can't seek Microsoft's help for something that happens with Sony's super secret PS4 sdk.

Or am I missing something?

Why would you ask microsoft for help if it where sonys software that was failing??

Of course it would be better with open source software. But what difference does it makes? There are no viable free/open alternatives to lots of commercial software out there and it will probably stay that way for the rest of our lifes.

I bet 1000sek that you are not able to setup an game development studio focusing on ps4 games with only free/open software for example.

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