[TimJYoung]

"If by real you mean the kind of proprietary {ad,spy,toolbar}-ware encrusted "real" desktop software that Windows has become notorious for then I think we may be better off without it."

You're ignoring a huge amount of business software that is created for, and runs on, Windows. That's like judging Android or iOS based upon the consumer crapware that gets sold/given away in their app stores, as opposed to the many business apps that are used to automate and improve all sorts of tasks on mobile devices.

I keep seeing this pattern repeated over and over again: someone (this has been me, several times) mentions on HN that Linux needs a better way to allow for binaries to be dropped on a system and run without requiring re-compilation or overly-complicated containers/sandboxes, and the answers invariably end up being "don't want it, don't care". But, the reality is that there are a very large number of people that would jump to Linux in a heartbeat if they could target the OS for distribution in that fashion. It just seems like a bunch of ideology run amok with zero thought given to the actual needs of professional developers/companies. And, there's a lot of evidence that this is one of the primary things holding back Linux adoption on the desktop.

The rest of your reply was very informative, thanks.

[dpwm]

> You're ignoring a huge amount of business software that is created for, and runs on, Windows. That's like judging Android or iOS based upon the consumer crapware that gets sold/given away in their app stores, as opposed to the many business apps that are used to automate and improve all sorts of tasks on mobile devices.

Thanks for this. Indeed I was responding a bit flippantly to the whole "real" desktop software, as if there isn't any on Linux. I appreciate now it probably wasn't meant in that way, and so that aspect of my response was flippant and unhelpful.

Indeed, it seems for every example we find of serious expensive proprietary software that runs on Linux, there is another that doesn't.

We have Maya running on Linux, and Softimage. Both sold by Autodesk (albeit acquired). And yet other Autodesk products, like 3dsmax and Autocad, do not have Linux support. Asking about this on their forums appears to result in a rather curt response to read the system requirements where it says "Windows."

These are tools that people learn and take with them between jobs, and I can well imagine that these are people that could work on desktop Linux without too many problems as long as those tools moved with them. Replying "but blender can do that!" is completely ignoring the reality that people have invested significant time into these tools and know them well. Whilst blender is an amazing piece of free software, it's by no means an industry standard. In the way that Gimp is quite phenomenal, it seems many professionals find it lacks features that Photoshop has.

I don't think the "web browser" response cuts it in other areas either, even if a lot of the less technically demanding software is going cloud-based.

> It just seems like a bunch of ideology run amok with zero thought given to the actual needs of professional developers/companies. And, there's a lot of evidence that this is one of the primary things holding back Linux adoption on the desktop.

I think you're right, and I'm probably in that category. I've also seen what bad vendors can do to an ecosystem though. The windows ecosystem is still full of dodgy vendors.

I'm quite convinced that package-once-with-sandboxing will happen, and I will admit that Flatpak is probably in a prime position for that to happen. I think they've probably got the most correct direction of all the attempts in the space, it just doesn't seem to be there yet.

From a commercial vendor point of view, it's also not a problem if the user's home directory is bind mounted and over a year ago there was a bug with the sand-boxing that let malicious vendors install software that could run as root. Let's not forget that most Windows apps don't go anywhere near a sandbox in the first place and their installers need system-wide access. There's plenty of low-hanging fruit still in this space.

Things have definitely got better in recent years. One of the biggest things to improve this is that 32-bit x86 is dying off. There were a number of vendors that did the "we can just build 32-bit, like windows" without realising or caring about the horrors of multi-arch dependency hunting that they were inflicting on the sysadmin.

So thank you for your comment. It made me realise that I was probably being quite flippant about software which does fulfil a niche need and does it well, and that you only need one piece of such software to tie someone to an operating system they may otherwise have no affinity for.

[TimJYoung]

Thanks for the thoughtful comments, they are very much appreciated.

The thing that a lot of Linux developers don't seem to get about Windows is that its binary distribution model is an opportunity/productivity multiplier, and it all hinges on three major points:

1) Backward-compatibility is real, and, contrary to what most people say about MS/Windows, this is very pro-consumer. Just chucking code at people and saying "but, you can just re-compile it" ignores a lot of realities, including the fact that even developers don't want to be forced to recompile binaries that they are not, themselves, working on as their actual work.

2) You can deploy 32-bit binaries on 64-bit systems and they work just fine. It really made the switch to 64-bit versions of Windows a non-event, whereas this is another issue that developers need to worry about when targeting Linux. And, there are a lot of applications that simply don't benefit from being 64-bit because they don't need, or can't use, the increased address space, so forcing developers to specifically target 64-bit is just another unnecessary hurdle.

3) You can actually create binaries for Windows that don't require any dependencies other than what is available in the OS. This means that you can create binaries that work on tablets, laptops, desktops, and servers without recompilation. This also ties in to your comment about the installers, but the reality is that you really only need admin access for an installer to put things into the "Program Files" folder tree, or to install services. Apart from that, most professional software doesn't touch anything other than the user-specific folders (if Windows doesn't delete them first ;-) ).

I don't think that this point can be overstated: if you create a neutral OS platform where desktop developers can deploy their software with minimal fuss and no gatekeepers, you will win the desktop space, period. More than anything else, desktop developers want to make money, and an open OS that does its thing and stays out of the way is the ticket to that money. But, in order to do this, a lot of current Linux developers will need to get used to sharing Linux with commercial vendors and proprietary software, and I think that's still a hard sell. And, unfortunately, a large part of that mindset is wedded to this bizarre idea that desktop developers like Windows because of Windows. Desktop developers like Windows because a) that's where the users are, and b) they can make money without being forced or required to expose their source code. If the same can be done with Linux, then Linux will have no problem taking the OS space away from MS completely.

Linux is stuck in "server/appliance mode" right now, and it's a shame because if there was ever a time for Linux to take over the desktop, it's now. As you say, web applications are just not a suitable replacement for all desktop applications. MS keeps trying to lock down how development is done on Windows and, if they succeed, then everything that I stated above will go away and there will be a lot of developers looking for a new home. Any OS that starts out with "you can only use our development tools/languages, and no others", is going to whither away and die. It happened to Apple once, it appears to be happening to Apple again, and MS has apparently decided that it should emulate Apple. The whole reason why Windows became popular in the first place was because there were a ton of development tools/compilers/languages that could be used to produce binaries for Windows, and Windows gave zero preference to any of them. This was carried over from MS-DOS. And, none of this precluded any vendor from going ahead and providing/selling their source code along with the product. Linux developers have just got to let go of trying to control how people use the OS, and just try to make it as amenable to as many usage/deployment scenarios as possible.