Quoting: Purple Library GuyIn your face, Three-Circle Empire!

(That said, these days I think they use the mouse almost entirely as a trademark, which is still totally intact. But still)

They do, but it doesn't impact usage of the public domain character as much as popular opinion might have led you to believe. Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a great write-up on Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse, the copyrights and the trademarks and what you can do with him: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

Fair warning that this is only interesting to a vanishingly small audience.

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QuoteWhat games are you waiting and hoping will move from Unsupported to Verified one day?

Most of the Steam games I play (by playtime) are still not playable on Linux. It's a short list, to be honest, but they are:

• Rainbow Six Siege


• Halo: MCC (supposedly has EAC support, I've never gotten it to work on Arch or Fedora)


• I tried to play Back 4 Blood a few times, I guess

I play them with friends. On Windows...

I also have a friend that wants me to play Fortnite. Note that this game is not in my "wished for" list.

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Hell yeah.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeI had a boxed copy, back in the day, of Corel Linux. Even came with a little rubber penguin.

Well, now I want one.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeMS Write was also available for the Atari ST (I think that's what it was called before they changed it to Word). I don't think it was ever available for the Amiga though.

Ha, had to look that up, as the Machintosh wasn't available in 1983.. Word was available on Xenix first. Classic Mac got it in 1985, Atari ST got it in 1988, OS/2 in 1989 and Windows (also 1989). The wikipedia article states that you can run Word before 2013 on Linux via Wine.

Microsoft pissed me off back in '97 after I bought 'Home Essentials' because I needed a word processor (with aspirations of becoming a writer). Paid $100 bucks for it (which was a ton of money for my crappy job at the time) and then a month later they released Office '97, with no upgrade path...

These days, I think I'll start doing my writing with Atari Works. :P

Looks like I misread "Word for Mac was released in 1985. Word for Mac was the first graphical version of Microsoft Word." as meaning, "Word was released for Mac first, and in 1983". Don't ask me how!

I do all my writing in Neovim...what else could fit the bill?

Quoting: tuubiAmiga users didn't need MS Write. We had the clearly superior WordPerfect. :P

Typed a bunch of my school essays on my Amiga 500 and printed them out with a very noisy Star LC-10 dot matrix printer.

WordPerfect is still around under Corel's management. It had its latest release only three years ago.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeConspiracy Mode; Have you ever wondered if one of the main reasons Office and it's ilk are moving to cloud based systems is due to Linux finally getting to the point where it can run stand alone Office? I'm pretty sure the latest version runs fine there now... (I still don't know why macOS got a port of Office, and Linux never did. You'd think MS would want Office on all the platforms they could to make more money... but then again, they figure they can force people to also buy Windows... greedy Mofos).

Funny you should mention that. Microsoft Word has had an official version for Macintosh since initial release in 1983. It predates even Windows; it was MS-DOS back then. Microsoft Excel was released for Macintosh two years before a Windows version appeared. So you could say one of the reasons is Linux didn't actually exist back then.

This was a few years after Microsoft abandoned their UNIX OS, XENIX.

I've gotten Microsoft Office to work under CrossOver but Word was the only one that worked decently. Powerpoint was very crash-happy. Excel was fine, but I didn't use it much. I wonder if the Affinity Suite will be usable and stable in Wine before Microsoft Office is...

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Quoting: ShabbyXIt's not at all like running programs through wine. It's a Linux system running Linux apps. It may use a container for better security or compatibility, what's wrong with that? Containers basically just use "namespaces" to isolate apps, and that's a Linux kernel feature.

I'm not a systems engineer or anything; this is just a layman observation.

Is Waydroid a more apt comparison? Imagine if your Linux system could only run Android apps through Waydroid. Google refers to "Linux" in their own documentation as something separate from ChrmoeOS. I've never run a ChromeOS system before, so I can only rely on what I've read.

But this explanation makes sense to me:

Quoting: mad_mesaThe general purpose GNU/Linux container is yes. Although once set up applications installed within it function exactly like other containerized application solutions on other Linux distributions from a users perspective, being able to launch from the ChromeOS panel, and appearing within ChromeOS's window manager. Not really that different from using Flatpaks on other immutable distributions where essentially an application loads in a standardized container environment.

The only real difference is that Google wants containers normal users interact with to be fully self contained. So none of the overlay sharing advantage you get when using a bunch of flatpaks, but I don't think Google expects normal ChromeOS users will be running a bunch of different containers. Most systems will just have a few, namely the pre-installed Android and Chrome containers, plus a small number of systems will add Steam or another major application.

Right, so native applications for ChromeOS can run on Linux, because native applications for ChromeOS are written for Linux, meant to be used in containers.

Well, I guess ChromeOS is a Linux distribution then.

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Quoting: CatKillerChromeOS has been able to run Linux applications in a container for around five years.

I know it can run Linux programs through a container, but this is kind of like Linux only being able to run programs in Wine. Like, there being no "native" Linux layer to write programs for. Which is so weird!

My understanding was that the Linux container thing was only for developers, and not for normal Chromebook users.

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Quoting: CatKillerNope. Until last year ChromeOS the UI and ChromeOS the browser were exactly the same binary. The change last year to separate them was to make ChromeOS more Linux-like.

They dabbled with having web-apps-but-packaged-differently for a while but dropped that (as Google tends to do) a few years ago in favour of just-web-apps.

This is mind-boggling. And makes me all kinds of confused. I skimmed the Ars article at the time and figured it could only be good.

Is the Steam program for ChromeOS just some kind of weirdly packaged webapp pretending not to be a webapp? Can it not run normal binaries? What about CrossOver? On the one hand, so long as web environment integrity is not a thing, that's great for compatibility for all OSes. Rising tides and all that.

But why would you purposely GIMP your OS like that?? It's one thing to be web-first, but web-only is something else...

(with apologies to the current GIMP maintainers)

Quoting: CatKillerThe thing that ChromeOS can do that desktop Linux can't (but which Windows can) is run Android applications. But people generally don't think of Android (or Windows) as a desktop Linux OS.

I remember there being something that could do that on Linux. Waydroid?

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI'm willing to accept this if programs built for ChromeOS work on Linux distributions like Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. Is that the case?

That way round is trivial: ChromeOS uses web apps. The other way round is harder, but ChromeOS has been able to run Linux applications in a container for around five years. Work is ongoing to make Steam and Steam games on ChromeOS a thing.

Well, sure, web applications work on everything. The New Java. I'm sure that's what's at least partially motivating Adobe to port Photoshop to the Web in some limited form.

I've never owned a Chromebook—surely there are native programs on there not accessible from the web? I know CrossOver has its own ChromeOS version. I know the main point is the web, but since you can install Steam and play Steam games, that's at least one program you can use.

But the way you phrased it makes me think native ChromeOS programs don't actually work on Linux

If Adobe comes out with its entire suite for ChromeOS (namely After Effects) but it doesn't work on Linux, I would not consider ChromeOS a Linux distribution, because it being "based on Linux" would mean nothing for the effective market share of Linux.

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