Tiles wrote: Sun Feb 25, 2024 8:49 ampekbro wrote: Sat Feb 24, 2024 9:43 pm I've been waiting for 30 yrs for linux to become practical for me. I continue to wait...
*The issue for me is 100 % about the availability of commercial SW.
You may have noticed that your post is now simply sinking here. It does not fit to The Truth™ about Linux. As you can see, the Linux enthusiasts here are in cheering mode again. Not that I don't begrudge them, party on!
But it does not help. The lack of software remains the lack of software. You can get used to even the most awkward UI concepts. But when there is no software then you cannot get used to it at all. People uses Software. Not the OS. The OS is just the vehicle to get the software working. You don't turn on Debian to make music. You turn on Bitwig or Reaper to make music. And even these are just vehicles. The instruments and effects and recordings is what makes the music then.
I already did my best to explain why there is so few Windows/Mac software at Linux. Most software devs and companies are simply not willing to bend to a concept that makes them much more work and doesn't pay at the end of the day.
I am one of these devs. I still develop for Linux. I offer such a software where the enthusiasts then can point at, and can proudly tell everybody, see, there is the software. All there! A hail to Linux! But man, i cannot count how often i was at the point to simply quit. I already gave an example of yet another three weeks of wasted lifetime. The Truth™ does not give me this three weeks of my life back. Friends, stop throwing me stones into my way. Stop dancing around, and stop cheering it even. Fix your crap! I have to repeat, Linus knew all the trouble points before 10 ( yes i learn. Not that it even matters if two, eight or ten years. It's about the content) years already.
Fun fact, the traditional distributions clearly shows how the concept of The Truth™ doesn't work since many years. The Linux distros market share is flatlining at around +-2-3% since over 25 years. They did not benefit by a single user from Windows going down from over 90% market share to 75% in the last years. That was Mac.
Android showed how it can work. Google has the money and the knowledge. And one of the first things they did was to introduce Google Play. The software. With ChromeOS they try the same now. And ChromeOS has already a significant market share at the laptop. But ChromeOS has already a problem again at the desktop. The problem is called Software ...
And when even Google struggles, then you know that Linux at the desktop will remain where it is.
SIGH. Do I take the low road or the high road in my response. He may be full of crap, but he’s got more stamina than me. Ok, here we go……Tiles wrote: Sun Feb 25, 2024 8:49 ampekbro wrote: Sat Feb 24, 2024 9:43 pm I've been waiting for 30 yrs for linux to become practical for me. I continue to wait...
*The issue for me is 100 % about the availability of commercial SW.
You may have noticed that your post is now simply sinking here. It does not fit to The Truth™ about Linux. As you can see, the Linux enthusiasts here are in cheering mode again. Not that I don't begrudge them, party on!
But it does not help. The lack of software remains the lack of software. You can get used to even the most awkward UI concepts. But when there is no software then you cannot get used to it at all. People uses Software. Not the OS. The OS is just the vehicle to get the software working. You don't turn on Debian to make music. You turn on Bitwig or Reaper to make music. And even these are just vehicles. The instruments and effects and recordings is what makes the music then.
I already did my best to explain why there is so few Windows/Mac software at Linux. Most software devs and companies are simply not willing to bend to a concept that makes them much more work and doesn't pay at the end of the day.
I am one of these devs. I still develop for Linux. I offer such a software where the enthusiasts then can point at, and can proudly tell everybody, see, there is the software. All there! A hail to Linux! But man, i cannot count how often i was at the point to simply quit. I already gave an example of yet another three weeks of wasted lifetime. The Truth™ does not give me this three weeks of my life back. Friends, stop throwing me stones into my way. Stop dancing around, and stop cheering it even. Fix your crap! I have to repeat, Linus knew all the trouble points before 10 ( yes i learn. Not that it even matters if two, eight or ten years. It's about the content) years already.
Fun fact, the traditional distributions clearly shows how the concept of The Truth™ doesn't work since many years. The Linux distros market share is flatlining at around +-2-3% since over 25 years. They did not benefit by a single user from Windows going down from over 90% market share to 75% in the last years. That was Mac.
Android showed how it can work. Google has the money and the knowledge. And one of the first things they did was to introduce Google Play. The software. With ChromeOS they try the same now. And ChromeOS has already a significant market share at the laptop. But ChromeOS has already a problem again at the desktop. The problem is called Software ...
And when even Google struggles, then you know that Linux at the desktop will remain where it is.
Now, you are moving the goalposts. I demonstrated the solution for dependency hell on linux. I explained how it works. More information is there on the internet for anyone to read on the subject, and confirm the information. And now that I’ve explained it, you are changing your attack to lack of software. I call it as I see it, and I so no other explanation for your behavior, than that you are anti-Linux. Anyone can see from your behavior that this is the case. The question is why? Why do you even care what we choose to do with our systems? Why are you bound and determined to try to fight with us? The OP wanted to know if we, Linux users, are paranoid. I submit that if there is a reason to be paranoid, it is because of people like you. You post that you are the one declaring the (trademarked) Truth, yet when we explain in actual specifics how you are incorrect, you change to another point of attack.
Very well. So be it. Before I continue, I want to remind readers that I have explained that dependency hell on Linux has been resolved through the use of immutability, sandboxing, containerization, and technologies such as Flatbox, Appimages, Snaps, and toolbx and distrobox. I encourage anyone who is interested in looking further into these solutions to understand exactly how dependency hell has been resolved on Linux.
Now, for the Troll’s sake, who now is claiming that the issue for him is not dependency hell after all, but is the lack of software, on to the next goalpost.
I’ll start with this: it’s true. There IS less linux-native software. There. Do you feel better? You, who claims to be a Linux developer, must absolutely hate your miserable life since you have to get up every day and use and write for this horrible operating system. Maybe that’s why you attack Linux users. Do you despise the relentless waking hours of your life slogging away at something that works differently than you’d like it to? Do you feel that you have all the answers and no one is listening to your obviously superior solutions? It must feel disheartening to have people who think differently than you refute your perceived superiority, but it must be done.
Yes! Linux has less software than Windows. Yes, Linux has less software than Apple. But let’s look at things from another lens. Linux has A LOT more, and higher quality software than it has ever had in the past. And the amount of software is continually growing—possibly at a faster pace than other oses.
Hundreds of corporations (including Apple and Microsoft (yes, you heard correctly), Intel, AMD, Nvidia, IBM, Valve, Amazon, and many, many, more…) are now heavily vested in Open Source development.
Microsoft has chosen the “If you can’t beat’em join’em” route and incorporated a sub layer of Linux into its own operating system, for the purpose of encouraging developers (the majority of which prefer to develop on Linux) to stay on Windows instead.
In almost every industry, operating systems based on the Linux kernel dominate: from the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, astronomy and physics, automotive, manufacturing, the cloud and the internet, the medical industry, the IoT, mobile communications, and many, many more. Linux even dominates the music manufacturing industry! Android is a Linux, and has one of the largest software repositories in the world. Chrome is another Linux distribution, and it dominates the education system in the United States. It too has a huge repository of software.
It’s sad that the media doesn’t accurately count operating systems based on kernels, because if that were to be done, people would be shocked to learn that the linux kernel (and thus Linux itself) is the most used of anywhere in the whole world!
But I digress. For the sake of this conversation we are talking about linux on the desktop. So what is really out there for Linux users to run on their desktops? Well, to start with, because of the aforementioned (in previous messages) containerization technologies, no distro is destined to remain an island anymore. Any software package that has been developed for any of the 600+ desktop distributions is now able to run seamlessly on any distro of your choice. How many repos is that? How much software? The site, Repology has much to say about this:
https://repology.org/
Now, there is no question that there is a tremendous amount of duplication between repositories, but based on the available information, 100,000 unique packages could easily be a conservative number that could be argued.
There are several really cool emulation layers for Android available with touchscreen capabilities on linux that can run Android apps seamlessly. I use a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Gen 5 2-in-1 laptop there’s a mouthful!). Although it isn’t the latest model anymore, it still works great. I use it as much as a tablet as I do a laptop.
My favorite program, Waydroid, allows me to do this. I have seamlessly integrated any application from the Google store and any other Android repository (like FDroid) into my machine. These apps can be controlled by keyboard and mouse for those who don’t have a touchscreen device like me. By the way, there were 3.48 million apps in the google playstore as of 2023–all of which run on Linux and integrate seamlessly into the desktop.
In addition, I have probably every childhood computer game or arcade game available to me through the numerous system emulators available for linux. For the fun of it, I bought a Raspberry Pi and installed over 22,000 games onto its mini-sd card. I had double the amount of ROMs available, but I ran out of space. To this day, I’ve never tried more than a fraction of the games I have on that device, and I never bothered installing the other half of the ROMs archive. I got bored and moved onto other things.
The games archive covered everything from the Commodore Pet, to the Commodore Amiga (and everything in between, like the Vic-20, and the Commodore 64). All of the Atari models, all of the Nintendo models, any Sega or Playstation game up to the Playstation 3 are able to run on linux. Oddball systems and handhelds are emulated as well, such as Colecovision, Fairchild, etc. These emulators can run pretty much any computer or console game that has been developed in the last 40 years.
In addition, there are DOS tools available. An entirely clean-room DOS clone, FreeDOS has been developed to allow DOS programs of any type to run natively on Linux. DOSBox is a tool designed especially for games. It allows these old programs to run natively on Linux—including the games.
While on the topic of DOS, let’s not forget that we have WINE, yabridge, WINEASIO, and a host of other tools that allow Linux users to run nearly any application that Windows put out. There are fewer programs that don’t work than there are of those that do—granted some may not work perfectly, or might have screen glitches or other problems. But by far, the majority of them work—from Windows 3.0 to Windows 11, and everything in between.
While we are on the subject of Windows, I cannot neglect to mention everything that runs on Steam. Commercial Windows games!
“If you go to protondb.com you can see that 75% of the top one-thousand most popular Steam games are also playable within Linux. This means there's a good chance most of your favorite Steam titles are probably playable on Linux already, making Linux adoption even easier than before.”
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/80-pe ... n%20before.
I don’t know if you are aware or not, but you can even load the Windows version of Steam and run those games through WINE as well.
For musicians, I’d encourage anyone curious to browse all of the pages of the following link to see examples of Windows plugins and software tgat runs on Linux. Be warned—there are over 30 pages of examples.
viewtopic.php?t=503359
I could go on and on. I could mention that Linux can run almost any available OS through virtualization, including MacOS and Windows 11, which would allow me to run anything at all that these operating systems provide. Granted, it wouldn’t be seamless like everything else I mentioned. I would still be able to have things show up as a single clickable icon, but you’d have to wait 30 seconds for it to load.
So, to summarize, you are correct—we don’t have as much native software, but that is changing and improving daily. It would be nice, but in the meantime , we’ll just have to content ourselves with the ability to run 99% of every software package written in the world for the last 50 years, which likely number in the millions.
Checkmate.
I eagerly await to see in what way you’ll move the goalposts next time in your quest to disuade the world from using that horrible OS called Linux.
