Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: denyasisSome of our specialty programs we occasionally use are Windows only. I do some of our annual training. It's a 1Gb PowerPoint with embedded media, animations, everything made by a co-worker at work. It needs to be updated. Think that'll load on open office? (Spoiler: it crashes).

I seriously do not understand why Linux can seamlessly run ridiculously complex Windows games with absurdly demanding graphics requirements, and can't run the latest Office or Adobe stuff. Like really, WTF? Why can't Wine do this?

WINE can run the latest Microsoft Office. I run it through Crossover, though it's a bit dodgy and unstable. I was able to use it for half a year without any issues. The hardest part about getting Microsoft Office working, by the way, was finding the bloody download for it. It's impossible to find on any browser on GNU/Linux; I had to use a Windows computer using Microsoft Edge. That was the only way.

As for Adobe, I know of people who use cracked versions of CS6 applications and before and vouch for the experience. The reason Adobe CC applications don't work isn't, as far as I know, because of some complex win32 libraries WINE has yet to implement properly; it's because of the DRM.

WINE doesn't have a position on "DRM", but as copy protection is more or less the same thing, this is what they have to say on the matter:

QuoteIn an effort to make copy protection more effective (i.e. resistant to cracks), the methods used by many copy protection products have become complex, difficult to understand (obfuscated), and hard to debug. In some cases Wine would need to be altered to allow for almost rootkit-like functionality of programs to get some of these copy protection schemes to work. To support copy protection Wine developers have to contend with undocumented interfaces, code obfuscation, and maintaining compatibility with *nix security models.

Wine cannot and will not break the functionality of these copy protection products. Wine's goal is to be compatible with Windows software, including copy protection. Although some would advocate the use of illegally modified or "cracked" games, Wine does not support, advocate, or even view this as a solution. The use of cracks is considered off topic on the forums, IRC channels, etc and will not be tolerated (summarily dismissed and deleted).

Full article here.

A lot of DRM doesn't work through WINE for these reasons.

The other reason, as I understand it, is because Vulkan offers most of the same featureset as Direct X > 12 and performant Direct X to Vulkan compatibility layers exist, that's most of the work already done. The most complex part of games is usually the graphics API calls. That's why a good portion of the remaining issues with games are codecs, anticheat, and DRM. Other software, like Adobe Creative Suite, depends on other core functionality that WINE hasn't implemented. I'm guessing this is why Affinity Creative Suite doesn't work through WINE...although it certainly could be the DRM as well.

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Quoting: win8linux

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualAdobe Creative Suite is not available on GNU/Linux.

FWIW Adobe is starting to explore having their Creative Cloud suite on the web, including barebones variants of Photoshop and Illustrator. It is quite likely that over time, these will become more fully fledged options and the rest of CC will follow. As much as I'm not a fan of everything moving over to the cloud, the trend will make Linux a more viable option in the mainstream.

After Effects is painful enough on fairly beefy native hardware, without a monstrosity that Parabola keeps out of their repositories because it was too large and complex to verify it was fully free software (Chromium) between it. Premiere Pro, for similar reasons, I don't see happening for a long, long time. Photoshop and Illustrator, I can see.

inDesign...the web is going to need a lot more optimization before I can start laying out books in a webapp.

Photoshop is in the best state of all of the Adobe applications, really. You've got web-based solutions like Photopea already, and Affinity Photo has great support for .PSD (except for editable text, which may or may not be a deal-breaker).

But, if they somehow manage to work it out, that would certainly be great for me. Especially if I don't have to have so many Adobe background processes...

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: CSharpI have to disagree with the sentiment though. I think the bigger issue Linux has is that it tries to cater to the mainstream too much. Most people I talk with would not buy a laptop with Linux even if I glued it to their faces.

There is no alternative. You cannot keep appealing to the same set of users, that isn't big enough to grow and attract more vendors.

In my opinion, the problem isn't that GNU/Linux distributions try to cater to mainstream users; the problem is that they're bad at it. By which I mean there are simply too many things that are janky or outright worse than on mainstream desktop operating systems; OBS, Anki, Audacity, all open source applications, are a categorically worse experience on GNU/Linux. And those are the open source ones!

Another user brought up Revolution OS (great documentary, by the way), where Linus says that users use programs, not operating systems. And this is completely true. For the mainstream user, if they can't use Microsoft Office on GNU/Linux, it's game over. Libreoffice simply cannot guarantee .docx compatibility because, even if it's an open standard, it's quite complex and it's still a moving target. Maybe other office suites are better. Is that user going to try 5 of them until they find something that works well enough?

Adobe Creative Suite is not available on GNU/Linux. No other application can guarantee .PSD/.AEP/.INDD compatibility, even if there are better alternatives, like Affinity Creative Suite (which also isn't on GNU/Linux). The problem, of course, is a reliance on an application-specific format (a moving target, never intended to be exchanged, quite complex) just like Microsoft Office instead of an exchange format like Open Raster.

And these are the popular applications—people I know are entrenched in much less popular Windows-only applications that would also make a different OS a deal-breaker.

Honestly, I see a darker future than that. Here are the headlines from 2035's newspapers (most countries have stopped publishing newspapers in print by this point and you can only get them online, and you still can't cancel without ringing up and being put on hold for 2 hours):

QuoteMicrosoft makes brave new move. Takes a page from Google and starts selling Microbooks.

These laptops run on a locked down version of Fuchsia, and after the customer pays with Google Pay, Apple Pay, or Microsoft Pay, they can gain access to Windows 365 and run a computer in the cloud! Great option for those on a budget. Microsoft also offers the same experience with Soft Desk, a tower PC option. ASUS, Acer, and other manufacturers have come out with similar CAAS (Computing-as-a-Service) hardware clients with their own branding.

Traditional computing systems are falling out of favor and are left to the hobbyist market to assemble themselves. To install Windows, Microsoft requires a security peripheral be installed and present at all times to guarantee a genuine experience.

Personally, and I try to be optimistic, I think the core problem isn't the applications, although that is a part of it. People can get over that. They do with macOS software. The real problem is a lack of interoperability between applications in the same field. The film industry has this with .AAF exchange format files, though not working in that field, I couldn't tell you how well it works. If there were a reliable, open exchange format for Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe inDesign, and Adobe After Effects, I would have absolutely no reason not to use 100% free software for my personal life and work. It would certainly allow for a more even playing field for underdogs like Affinity Serif.

As it stands, After Effects only supports AAF import on Windows, and recently removed the ability to import AAF from macOS versions.

Chromebooks have won the battle for some users by taking all these workflows to the web, where Linux shines, but there are some workflows that will never be able to be taken to the web...at least not for a long time. I mean, I guess there is Photopea...

I think the battle is in quality exchange formats that every application is pressured to support, not in porting over proprietary applications to GNU/Linux.

Of course, for those niche Windows-only workflows and software, some people will still have to have it around. But that's a far better position to be in; it's the one macOS is in now (minus hobbyist gaming; they're doing pretty well with mobile gaming).

I don't mean to be harsh; just realistic.

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This game was strangely addicting... it's not the sort of game I'd normally find myself playing, but somehow, I was playing it hours into the next day without even realizing it. And I never would have heard about it if it wasn't for this post and @eldaking singing its praises.

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Quoting: dpanterAt what point is money no longer simply money?
Being associated with crypto-whatever is apparently okay in the eyes of the Blender Foundation, so one has to wonder where the line gets drawn. I'm not judging either party but crypto is a divisive subject.

If Facebook's money is good enough...

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It's good to see that more popular client-side anticheat systems are finally running on GNU/Linux, but this is not my biggest blocker. My menace is instead DRM.

The biggest area that I am still disappointed with WINE/Proton in is Visual Novels. I haven't yet come across a visual novel on Steam that doesn't work, but Steam doesn't have a lot of Visual Novels. More importantly, most of the visual novels do not have the option to read the story in Japanese. And most crucially, I've not been able to get Textractor to work through WINE on most games (aside from Higurashi? which actually crashes when I try to insert a hook now), which makes looking up words significantly harder.

I experimented briefly with trying to get Textractor to run through the same Proton version as the one running the Visual Novel, but I just couldn't figure it out and gave up. I suspect that the reason it doesn't work is some kind of obfuscation due to DRM. I tend to use Gazou-OCR, which has worked great so far (much better than KanjiTOMO ever did for me, for instance), but it's annoying to use on a GNOME desktop and often inserts bizarre spacing, making lookup more of a chore in Yomichan.

There is perhaps some irony that the only way to get Textractor working is to run the visual novel through WINE, and running it natively on GNU/Linux won't work.

The only visual novel experience that has been great on GNU/Linux is DLSite games. They give you a serial code, you start the game, you put it in, and it just works. Textractor inserts hooks without any trouble. The worst experience has to be DMM, which unfortunately has the biggest library of Japanese VNs. To play a game, you have to download a separate Soft-Denchi (software battery) runtime, which is purely DRM designed to watch you from the time you boot into the operating system. You're able to install it, but WINE is not able to successfully setup the UCManSVC service. So, when you open the game, it doesn't prompt you to login to DMM; it just crashes. So nothing from DMM works on GNU/Linux. They also have an even more invasive form of DRM which requires internet access to play the games.

Perhaps the worst part about all of this is that, after checking with some local Kopimists, I found that the cracked versions of these games work perfectly well on GNU/Linux. At least DMM lets you know whether the game requires DRM to function before you purchase it, unlike Steam. DLSite also tells you whether PlayDRM (the DRM that works with GNU/Linux) is required for a game, although not all games require it. I have yet to find a DMM game that does not require either invasive form of DRM.

Finally, buying a VN on disc may not work either. The most common form of DRM, AlphaROM, does not work with GNU/Linux. After spending several hours messing with aaru and mdf/mds in an attempt to copy the disc, DRM and all, and get it to work virtually, I found that visiting the SETTEC site and inputting a code that came with the game let me download a "profile" that I could put in the game directory to run the game. So, while it doesn't work on GNU/Linux, SETTEC (developers of AlphaROM) give you a way out. No guarantee as to how long this activation method will continue to work.

And then there are, of course, visual novels like Rewrite which require Japan's version of Windows; I doubt these will work on GNU/Linux. Changing your locale on Windows won't even bypass this because they don't want anyone outside of Japan to play the game; you need to download Japan's version of Windows from the outset.

So, my advice to anyone who wants to play Japanese visual novels on GNU/Linux is to buy from DLSite, maybe Steam if it has a Japanese version and you don't mind using Gazou OCR for lookups (or know the language well enough already), and be careful about buying physical.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualChromeOS is a good example of how usable GNU/Linux can be with the right motivation. Android is another example.

My wife has a Chromebook. I actually think it's a pretty bad example.

I've never used the operating system or one of the myriad devices, so I couldn't say. I also haven't used an Android device before.

These are just opinions I've heard repeated often—though I've never been a fan of Google's user interfaces. My question is: are there any GNU/Linux distributions with a better user interface and experience?

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: BeamboomThose who just want a consumer box to do their gaming on - why on earth should they install Linux to begin with

Lots of reasons, including it being free and open source? Duh.

... A regular consumer, regular gamer? Someone who just want a box to do their gaming on, they would choose Linux over a Playstation (or whatever) because they can access the source code???
Get outta here, man. You don't even believe that yourself. Had reality been like that we'd been dominating the desktops across the globe 2 decades ago. :D

Everything related to open source and what it stands for is for the tech interested. Simply put. "free and open source code" means nothing outside the tech community. Zero. Nobody buys a smart TV based on the OS being open sourced. They buy the TV with the features they want. Windows and MacOS are not on 99%+ of all desktops because "people" in general wants open source products.

Free software benefits everybody, even those who aren't programmers. With free software, the developers aren't in the same position of power as they are with proprietary software, so any of the changes they make can be undone by any other user. This benefits the average user who doesn't have any knowledge of programming because they get better software that doesn't attempt to exploit them. It's not about customization or even necessarily choice; it's about the freedom to choose software that respects the user.

That's something everybody can benefit from. Distributions like Linux Mint and Ubuntu cater to these users, of which there may not be an overwhelming amount, but is most assuredly not zero.

ChromeOS is a good example of how usable GNU/Linux can be with the right motivation. Android is another example.

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Quoting: metalinuxI politely disagree with the APT developers on this change. In my opinion, a new user to Linux coming from Windows wouldn't be in the terminal in the first place and even if they do have to use the terminal for something, the warnings in the output clearly stated:

[...]

With the user having to type "Yes, do as I say", so even accidentally entering the "Y" key will not execute the command.

Therefore, APT has done everything it can to inform the user that a major change will occur in their system. The impetus is now on the user. Like with anything in life, you should read and understand something to the best of your ability before accepting the terms and conditions.

The unfortunate reality is that using Linux without using the terminal simply isn't possible in some instances. This is made even more difficult by the majority of guides only providing instructions for bash and not a graphical application. Many new-to-Linux users will find themselves in the terminal, following these instructions, because they can't figure out how to do the same thing with a graphical application. New Linux users ending up in the terminal is not only common; it's an inevitability.

I disagree that Apt has done everything it can. I have issues with the way this warning is presented. The formatting of Apt makes it difficult to parse because everything is clumped tightly together, with no bolding, italicizing, or color usage at all. This would be okay if what you needed to type was "Yes, remove these essential packages", but what you need to type is much vaguer, and if it's the only thing you read, it should be much more obvious.

Personally, I might have limited the changes to these, because I think these are genuine UX issues.

Quoting: metalinuxI think the focus should be on guiding a new user to the appropriate documentation/resources, so they can learn why if they enter "Yes, do as I say", it could break their system.

Regardless of size, making changes to the wider ecosystem of Linux due to any YouTuber or "influencer" reaction, is not the direction we want to be going in. I hope this change by the APT devs can be reverted, but the decision is ultimately theirs of course.

Most users of Ubuntu-based distributions are not going to read documentation (and Ubuntu's documentation is quite old now, anyway), because the audience they target are not expected to. This would be different on Debian, I assume, so my opinion is that this particular change should have been made downstream to Ubuntu's version of Apt. The UX issues should have been fixed upstream, but removing the ability altogether and not indicating how this can be bypassed is probably not a change that should have made it into mainline Debian, because Debian doesn't target the same users as Ubuntu-based distributions tend to.

I agree that changes should be based on merit and discussion, not clout, which is what happened in this instance: https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/merge_requests/196

Though perhaps, based on this commit message, the maintainers aren't that happy about making this change: https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/merge_requests/198

Regardless, passing --allow-remove--essential isn't too big a stumbling block for those who know what they're doing.

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This is a positive development. The old warning, while it should have been enough to indicate something was wrong, was vague. Passing a less verbose and clearer option is, in fact, better for people who know what they're doing because they don't need to type as much.

Linus Sebastian approached Linux under the assumption that it was polished, late at night, with limited time. What is more likely to a new user? For the first command you execute in a terminal, Apt forces you to type out a line of text that encourages you to read about what Apt is and how it's used, or that installing—for example—a browser will remove your desktop environment, display manager, display server, and graphical drivers? "Yes, do as I say" could very well be interpreted as meaning, "yes, I know how Apt works."

The new user is not keenly aware of the system. They do not know what xorg or gdm are, let alone what dependency entanglement is. The only frame of reference for what an operating system is for most people is macOS and Windows. And there is no scenario where installing something on those systems will uninstall any other program, let alone essential packages. Keep in mind that this is the first thing that Linus did upon installing Pop!_OS. This is not a gentle introduction.

I don't think it occurred to Linus that installing a new package without updating the local database could result in breakage, because this is not how installation works on any other system—on Windows and macOS (for the most part), packages are not dependent on each other, which means this situation is impossible on those systems to begin with. The solution to this problem was simply, "sudo apt update", but it's not something you know unless you're familiar with package managers on Linux already. The guide Linus followed also wasn't wrong, because graphical storefronts on Linux are notorious for being slow and buggy. This very well could have been the solution to another user's issue. Perhaps it was simply assumed knowledge that the user should execute "sudo apt update" first.

I find Apt hard to parse, especially after seeing how well-formatted Pacman is, so I don't tend to read much of the output, either. Some of the suggestions when discussing this issue on the tracker improved Apt's formatting, so the next time I use a Debian-based system, I'll hopefully have an easier time with it.

I have to disagree with Linus's comment that "the terminal is a crutch", simply because POSIX shells are the only part of Linux that is consistent across multiple different distributions..for the most part. Yes, more developers should develop graphical applications for Linux. No, there aren't enough developers interested in doing that, maintaining them, and many of them do not know what makes good UI.

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