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After three months on Linux, I don’t miss Windows at all (www.theverge.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 40 points 4 months ago (51 children)

There’s ridiculously little difference between Windows, OS X and GNOME nowadays. Once you realise that most of your Steam library works and you’ve hated Office for at least ten years anyway, that leaves browsers, which are exactly the same. Most users don’t want to fiddle with settings, installers and drivers, they’ll just accept what the machine comes out of the box with.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago* (6 children)

    There is more to it though. The one feature i miss from windows is casting.
    I dont mean chromecast, i got that working. I mean wireless casting to a tv or projector. The windows + k feature.
    Ive yet to get that working in linux...
    Besides that, im a happy linux person

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Everyone’s got something they’d miss. For me it’s Affinity (though that’s on the way, it sounds like) and Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s insane, but MSFS is the 800-pound gorilla; it’s not just visuals, but almost all the new stuff (like Beyond ATC) is targeting MSFS.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Affinity works using WINE. I think there also exists a repo where they packaged it into .appimage

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    In theory yes. Not in practice though; unstable and slow.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (21 children)

    Life is more than browsers you know...

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  • [+] 2 points 4 months ago (20 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Really not how most of the software works. I install ton of apps locally like games, Libre office, ect. Running all in browser is a pipe dream. Also extremely memory and CPU inefficient

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    It really is. WebASM is miles beyond what you're probably thinking of in terms of browser based performance, and most companies these days do not have local applications installed for their office workers. Office 365 is by far the most popular version of office, and it's entirely browser based. Most in-house corporate IT work from the last decade is electron wrappers of internal company websites acting as simple interfaces for actual heavy lifting.

    While there's definitely some apps that are a bit too heavy for WebASM (or just javascript/.net for the above examples) this list is vanishingly short these days. I'd say blender and other 3d rendering would be inefficient just because WebASM has weird interactions with anything other than OpenGL and Vulkan, But even Unreal 5 can export to WebASM and do it fairly well (as well as OpenGL can perform, that poor outdated thing).

    Heck just go to itch.io or any website that has ported over games to WebGL/WebASM. You can run Half-life directly on your browser these days. Half Life of all games. That's more demanding than anything not 3d that you'd run in an office.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    I know what web assembly is. It's not a golden one-for-all solution you try to paint it to be. There's a reason why you won't see any modern AAA games in Wasm except ancient stuff like half life or Quake 3. It's just not fast enough and not memory efficient enough.

    While there’s definitely some apps that are a bit too heavy for WebASM (or just javascript/.net for the above examples) this list is vanishingly short these days.

    Jesus no. It's obvious you don't play games. Unreal engine can export to Wasm but noone does this. Everyone develops games natively with DirectX 12 api in mind (and very rarely Vulkan like in case of Doom or Red dead redemption 2) You're just blatantly wrong with this.

    What's web assembly is good for is what's in the God damn name: Web apps. You can squeeze in office into it, because office is ultra lightweight use case, that back in the day ran on 486dx4 with 16Megs of ram. It now runs on 3ghz CPU and requires hundreds of megs of ram, this is insanely wasteful. We can afford these resources, but it's still wasteful as hell.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago*

    Office 365 also refers to the desktop apps as well as the web versions, has done for many years now. Though I suppose it's all copilot 365 now.

    Source: Am office worker where we use office 365, and we all use the native system software, with the browser versions as for quick editing when elsewhere.

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago (15 children)

    Counter-example: secure encryption. You can't do that in a browser.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (12 children)

    You're all over this thread posting bad takes. Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser. There's absolutely nothing stopping you from using any encryption algorithms within a browser whatsoever. I don't even understand what you could possibly mean. There are so many ways to achieve it.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago* (11 children)

    There are numerous ways to place decryption backdoors into a website's JavaScript. How would you make sure that there is no MITM when trying to safely encrypt (e.g.) an e-mail in your browser?

    Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser.

    Talking about "bad takes", aren't we? There is no way to ensure that your end-to-end encryption is not decrypted on the fly when done by a website (= a potential attacker).

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (10 children)

    Who said anything about a website? You said browser. You can run fully-local resources in a browser, such as browser extensions, locally hosted tools, even just running in a .html file on your local disk somewhere. Javascript also isn't the only option available to solve this problem.

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  • [–] -4 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    Not sure if you're just trolling at this point.

    You said:

    Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser.

    No, you can't. I explained why.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    ...and I just explained to you how you can?

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Ok, I'll bite:

    You can run fully-local resources in a browser, such as browser extensions, locally hosted tools, even just running in a .html file on your local disk somewhere.

    How would you do that without violating essential security measurements?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (6 children)
    1. Create or download an implementation of your preferred encryption algorithm for Javascript (or use some WebAssembly alternative). e.g. https://github.com/ricmoo/aes-js
    2. Run the implementation on your local computer and open it in a browser.

    Hope this helps.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    You are aware that WASM requires JS, right?
    I mean, yes, running the application itself would be secure, but that's not in the browser. You cannot trust your browser. Ever.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

    You are aware that WASM requires JS, right?

    I think you're mistaken, there. WASM is often used alongside Javascript, but beyond the one-liner to fetch and load it, there's actually nothing which inherently requires JS beyond that.

    Can you explain why you feel that locally running Javascript is more insecure than using, say, locally running Python code, for encryption?

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

    WASM is often used alongside Javascript, but there’s actually nothing which inherently requires it.

    There is no established way to load WASM in your browser without JavaScript code that does it for you, so there actually is.

    Can you explain why you feel that locally running Javascript is more insecure than using, say, locally running Python code, for encryption?

    A web browser is the most vulnerable software on your computer.

    To stick with the one example I brought, namely GnuPG encrypted e-mails: Running GnuPG locally on my machine to encrypt/decrypt/verify an e-mail before pasting the result into (e.g.) my e-mail client is reasonably secure. GnuPG has been audited thoroughly enough, so it's (relatively) safe to assume that no bad actor will read and/or modify the e-mail on the way. I am not aware of any JavaScript alternative with a similar security record.

    I think we're derailing a bit though. My original comment was:

    You can’t do that (= secure encryption) in a browser.

    Locally and in a browser are, in real life, mostly different things and I assume you know that. GnuPG in webmail software without having used it locally first, which is what I was hinting at, just isn't secure.

    edit: Bed time, might continue this tomorrow after work if I'll find some Lemmy time... good night for now!

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    There is no established way to load WASM in your browser without JavaScript code that does it for you, so there actually is.

    I thought you meant like you had to use Javascript to marshal between the WASM module and the user interaction. What you really meant is that you're objecting to, basically, a load call. One line of Javascript code to load and run the WASM module. What possible security risk could that pose?

    And again, I've not heard an adequate explanation as to how locally-running JavaScript encryption code would be any less secure than, for example, running a Python script in the terminal.

    Locally and in a browser are, in real life, mostly different things and I assume you know that.

    I think you're basically admitting that you meant that verifiably secure encryption using a website is impossible (other than e.g. TLS), which I would agree with, but that's not what you wrote. Browser extensions are used all the time to handle all sorts of secure encryption in high risk scenarios, such as for password managers. That is a perfectly valid example of encryption within a browser - and it was the first one I mentioned.

    Please just admit you were wrong, or that you meant to say "website" rather than "browser". It's okay, trust me, people respect you more when you can admit that sort of thing, it makes you look strong and capable of taking criticism.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    and various Linux distros have gotten so good at this now. You can install something like Bazzite, PikaOS, hell even CachyOS with their recent update of switching from Octopi to Shelly and you can be up and running within a matter of minutes without having to worry about drivers or fiddling around with settings. PikaOS for example is probably one of the smoothest linux installs I've ever tried. easily within 15minutes I can have steam open and downloading games. within 30 I can be playing. and that's without downloading drivers or playing around with settings.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (20 children)

    that leaves browsers,

    That leaves audio production (with a bunch of Windows-only plugins), video production, photo editing, CAD.....

    Sure, you can re-learn your entire stack and get by, but that's a far shot from "ridiculously little difference". Dropping familiar complex piece of software like Ableton is a hard sell for folks (and it's OK).

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    I think once you're into concepts like a "stack", you're working with very niche specific software that most users will never touch. And absolutely, use what fulfills your needs. The vast majority of people I know that ever use a computer, just use it as google chrome. Web browsers work great in Linux. Depending on your needs, a lot of creative software works great on Linux too.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    Your situation is legit, and I honestly wish these things were better because I wish all things were better, but I do feel like these are specialized programs that "most people" never touch in their entire lives.

    But yes, for people who have a technical or creative career based on a proprietary tech stack, the story is more complicated.

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  • [+] 3 points 4 months ago (16 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    Most likely your software will work via bottles or wine

    No, for the examples above it will not. Quite a lot of professional software will not run under wine (and a lot of hobbyists use professional software) - games work particularly well because they mostly do their own thing and depend less on Windows-specific APIs. And if you use a VM via Winboat then you're just using Windows in the background, which is a workaround, but kinda defeats OP's argument that there's "no difference".

    To be clear: I'm daily driving Linux and I've not booted into Windows for more than a year. But it's just wrong to say that they are on par with each other for a lot of usecases.

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  • [–] -3 points 4 months ago (14 children)

    If you need an emulator (yeah, "Wine Is Not an Emulator" yadda yadda, it still makes your software think you run a different OS) to run much of your most important software, you chose the wrong operating system.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (13 children)

    If it works completely fine with Wine - in many cases, better than under Windows - why do you care if there's a translation layer? Seems like a weird hill to die on. Do you also feel like running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit architecture means you chose the wrong architecture?

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  • [–] -4 points 4 months ago (12 children)

    If you use a Windows "translation layer" for your software anyway, why would you choose Linux as the host platform in the first place?

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (11 children)

    There are so many reasons. Here's just a few off the top of my head:

    • Windows isn't free, Linux is.
    • Windows isn't an open platform, Linux is.
    • Linux doesn't track your activity. Windows does.
    • Linux doesn't come bundled with a bunch of shovelware crap. Windows does.
    • Linux doesn't push cloud products onto you. Windows does.
    • Linux doesn't use your hardware to force-feed ads to you. Windows does.
    • Linux is infinitely more customizable than Windows.
    • Linux lets you choose when, how, and if you download/install updates. Windows does not.
    • Windows constantly pushes/forces AI slop products onto users. Linux does not.
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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    There are converters that do wonders for a lot of VST plugins but some critical ones (Kontakt for example) are unfortunately stubborn. If I made music that didn’t use sample libraries I’d uninstall Windows today. I have got it on a very minimal partition at least.

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