What sends noobs running back to Windows?

[Arch_Enemy]

For Windows programs it's best to use.... Windows. It really is that simple.

Yeah. I don't even bother any more.

[michael louwe]

For Windows programs it's best to use.... Windows. It really is that simple.

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Free and open-source Linux can read Windows files, eg ntfs; and can run Windows programs, eg the non-free Crossover program. Only difference is that Codeweavers Inc has commercialized this high-tech capability of Linux to run Windows programs. How come no other Linux developers have created an alternative to Wine.? Collusion.?
....... I wish Codeweavers/Crossover had done the same with one of the popular Linux distros, eg make it user-friendly(= fully GUI-based) to the average users, trademark it, preinstall Crossover on it and sell it for about US$20 per Retail license, and offer Volume License discounts to the OEMs.

The point is, Codeweavers Inc has somewhat been using "false advertising" and/or "bait-and-switch" tactics on Linux users wrt the Wine program. Linux distros should inform their users better about Wine, especially potential converts and newbies, eg put up built-in alerts when users want to install Wine and PlayonLinux.

Red Hat Inc who sells Red Hat Enterprise Linux services also has Fedora and CentOS as her base development programs or Linux distro/OS. Red Hat did not purposely make Fedora or CentOS practically unusable for non-tech-geeks.

[Pjotr]

Just use a Windows virtual machine in VirtualBox in Linux, for that rare last Windows program you can't miss. That's what I do, for updating my TomTom navigation device.

[michael louwe]

Just use a Windows virtual machine in VirtualBox in Linux, for that rare last Windows program you can't miss. That's what I do, for updating my TomTom navigation device.

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Or just run back to Windows, especially for noobs.

[Moem]

When I was starting to use Mint, I wanted to keep using three Windows programs. Two of them work well enough on Wine; the third was a no-go, but the native alternative turned out to be... not just usable but better.
I guess I'm just lucky!

So, no virtual machine or dual boot for me. I have no need for them.

[gm10]

I use more Linux tools on Windows (via WSL) than I use Windows tools on Linux (via Wine), but no matter the numbers, personally I find it a great thing that these days this is easily possible in a transparent manner without having to resort to virtual machines and/or dual booting. And, of course, the amount of multi-platform code is growing so many tools can be used natively in both environments.

[catweazel]

So, no virtual machine or dual boot for me. I have no need for them.

I think that comes with experience. I also think that the initial weaning period is the toughest for newcomers. Much like smoking, some people can hack being Windwoes free for a day or two but then come the URGES!!! to fall back into old habits. Success is actually the opposite of will power; I call it "won't power"... "I won't use Windwoes!"

If I still didn't develop software to keep my pickled, old brain free from Alzheimer's, I too would have absolutely no need for Windwoes VMs. I only run them up occasionally now just to keep up with what's happening on the dark side

[Pjotr]

Well, it's a matter of selecting the best, or sometimes the only, tool for the job.... Apart from using MacOS, there's simply no alternative for updating my navigation device. I keep needing Windows for that, even if only once every couple of months.

The Windows virtual machine solution has several benefits: easy to restore to a snapshot, secure (because sandboxed within Linux), easily portable to other machines.

Wine and other Windows emulators make your shiny clean Linux partly vulnerable to Windows malware, and that's simply out of the question for me. Won't happen.

[MurphCID]

So, no virtual machine or dual boot for me. I have no need for them.

I think that comes with experience. I also think that the initial weaning period is the toughest for newcomers. Much like smoking, some people can hack being Windwoes free for a day or two but then come the URGES!!! to fall back into old habits. Success is actually the opposite of will power; I call it "won't power"... "I won't use Windwoes!"

If I still didn't develop software to keep my pickled, old brain free from Alzheimer's, I too would have absolutely no need for Windwoes VMs. I only run them up occasionally now just to keep up with what's happening on the dark side

I can't disagree with you here. Gaming is not so much an issue for me, it would be for my daughters who have to have the latest and greatest Ubisoft games, for me my needs are modest and can be handled by Steam quite well. As I have stated before, the only two things that keep me on windows is iTunes and Photoshop. Mostly iTunes since I have a huge music library. I used to be pretty decent at hacking away at Windows earlier versions, now I find I have less time, and less ability on Windows 10.

[MurphCID]

Well, it's a matter of selecting the best, or sometimes the only, tool for the job.... Apart from using MacOS, there's simply no alternative for updating my navigation device. I keep needing Windows for that, even if only once every couple of months.

The Windows virtual machine solution has several benefits: easy to restore to a snapshot, secure (because sandboxed within Linux), easily portable to other machines.

Wine and other Windows emulators make your shiny clean Linux partly vulnerable to Windows malware, and that's simply out of the question for me. Won't happen.

Great point on emulators.

[thx-1138]

...the amount of nonsense posted in this thread from time to time is beyond my imagination.
What's worse though, is that it is also passed as 'words of wisdom' from...'experienced' users.

The first i heard about the Wine program in 2016, it said that it could be used to run Windows programs on Linux. Hurray.!

Good. The first I heard about Wine and used such was in...2005. Presumably my view carries a certain weight?
It was a total hit or miss - pretty much as today. The reverse, linux apps under win, cygwin, worked way much better,
but required lots of compiling, and wasn't always successful either as lots of APIs could not be emulated. Best choice was VMWare.
qemu was quite geeky, and quite slow as well. Virtualbox didn't existed yet. The more advanced KVM didn't either.

....... After some digging/googling, I found out that Wine is the base development program for a non-free/commercial program called Crossover by Codeweavers Inc.

...well, ditto: that's 'free market' with it's...written-in-stone 'rules' for you,
that you are so keen of & constantly evangelize it around here every other day, like it's a political forum...
Feel free to vote with your wallet, buy their product & support it's development.
Why complain though? No one stops you from buying such.

Seems the Wine developers purposely made Wine practically unusable for non-tech-geeks, in order to get them to buy Crossover which really does allow newbies or "higher" to run most Windows programs on Linux and Macs, even modern ones. ...

That's pure assumption: maybe true, maybe false. In any case, not my job to criticize how the Wine / CrossOver devs earn their living.
I'm grateful that they give me for free (and as open source) whatever they decide to do so in the first place. So should anyone else.

...by the way: on the one hand you complain about...CodeWeavers, on the other hand you...almost demand their product.
Some people want both to eat the cake, and have their dish cleaned by others afterwards...
Why don't I see the same zealot for Microsoft?
They only added the ability to run linux binaries less than 2 yrs ago under WSL - took them some 25 yrs to star doing so?
Oh, and your beloved Google as well...just how many yrs did it took them to run linux binaries under the...linux-based ChromeOS?

From another thread...

.........
IBM should also acquire Codeweavers Inc's Crossover program that runs most Windows software on Linux.

Fairly certain that's exactly what their shareholders were discussing merely last night.

.
Free and open-source Linux can read Windows files, eg ntfs; and can run Windows programs, eg the non-free Crossover program. Only difference is that Codeweavers Inc has commercialized this high-tech capability of Linux to run Windows programs.

...even more nonsense - Linux has minimal in-kernel ntfs support.
Most of such abilities come from the ntfs-3g project - which is not living inside the kernel.
So, no, it is way far from being the...'only difference'.
And it is not due to one being...'high-tech' & 'commercialized' and the other one 'not'; that's just Microsoft with it's patents.
Oh, by the way...no ntfs-3g back in 2005 either.
Let alone that write support was still considered experimental / relatively unstable even afterwards.

How come no other Linux developers have created an alternative to Wine.? Collusion.?

Read above. Since Google is your...friend, i'm sure you can use it to further dig into mailing lists for Wine, ntfs-3g,
kernel development & above all, MS patents.

....... I wish Codeweavers/Crossover had done the same with one of the popular Linux distros, eg make it user-friendly(= fully GUI-based) to the average users, trademark it, preinstall Crossover on it and sell it for about US$20 per Retail license, and offer Volume License discounts to the OEMs.

I still don't understand what's so hard in pressing a "Transfer Money" button, and getting CrossOver up & running if that's what you wish.
Using a credit card is difficult & not...'newbie friendly' in 2018 where everyone uses a smartphone or something?
Now, if buying it will bring you the...joys of the Windows la-la-land, that I don't know of (i do keep my doubts).

The point is, Codeweavers Inc has somewhat been using "false advertising" and/or "bait-and-switch" tactics on Linux users wrt the Wine program. Linux distros should inform their users better about Wine, especially potential converts and newbies, eg put up built-in alerts when users want to install Wine and PlayonLinux.

Complain to their advertising department if you feel such is the case. I don't think they do any 'false advertising' myself.
Most likely it's you who got the wrong impression,
probably by reading stupid blogs that justify their existence by posting click-bait articles & earning $ by ads.
Considering all the above, you most likely have the wrong impression on many other things as well.

...wanting to run Win apps under Linux isn't a problem. Being a 'newbie' is also certainly not a problem.
Sweet-talking to them to pass off yourself as...'experienced' though, is. Feel free to continue, press enter to return...

[ajgringo619]

There will never be an OS that is one-size-fits-all, so I don't understand why users expect one. Linux Mint does everything I need, but not everything I want.

[BG405]

There will never be an OS that is one-size-fits-all, so I don't understand why users expect one.

I think you hit the nail on the head there.

[michael louwe]

Because I am an average home-user, non-power user and non-gamer, I have little problem staying with Linux and no need to run back to Windows.

...the amount of nonsense posted in this thread from time to time is beyond my imagination.
What's worse though, is that it is also passed as 'words of wisdom' from...'experienced' users. ...

...wanting to run Win apps under Linux isn't a problem. Being a 'newbie' is also certainly not a problem.
Sweet-talking to them to pass off yourself as...'experienced' though, is. Feel free to continue, press enter to return...

I don't think I claimed to be an experienced Linux user or a Linux pro or tech-geek. If I were I would already be running Wine smoothly and rattling off Terminal commands left and right like some of the Linux pros on this forum. I was just confirming the "drunk" Wine experience of noob "Cinamint" by also giving my Wine perspective as an average user and noob in 2016.
.

That's pure assumption: maybe true, maybe false. In any case, not my job to criticize how the Wine / CrossOver devs earn their living.
I'm grateful that they give me for free (and as open source) whatever they decide to do so in the first place. So should anyone else.

...by the way: on the one hand you complain about...CodeWeavers, on the other hand you...almost demand their product.
Some people want both to eat the cake, and have their dish cleaned by others afterwards...

That's pure assumption about what I want. Not true. I have paid good money to run Win 95, Win XP and Win 7, even though LM 15 & 16/Ubuntu 10.04 & 12.04 were free.
.

Complain to their advertising department if you feel such is the case. I don't think they do any 'false advertising' myself.
Most likely it's you who got the wrong impression,
probably by reading stupid blogs that justify their existence by posting click-bait articles & earning $ by ads.
Considering all the above, you most likely have the wrong impression on many other things as well.

I don't think my impression about Wine and Codeweavers Inc/Crossover is wrong ... search.php?keywords=%22wine+problem%22 - Search found 149 matches: "wine problem"
.

Some Linux tech-geeks may be Linux desktop's own worst enemy, by sending noobs and average users( and even other Linux tech-geeks) running back to Windows or elsewhere.

[rambo919]

Somehow no running all needed windows apps under a VM just won't work.... not even vaguely. I tried it... it's a PAIN at the best of times and mostly needless effort the rest (especially with vitrualbox and usb devices, sometimes it works sometimes it gives you the finger). And again, yes there usually are native alternatives most of the time but rarely in my experience have they not been bad to TERRIBLE in comparison mostly because GUI's are afterthoughts. Usually the only adequate alternatives are one's that are native to both win and lin anyway so not actually alternatives. It's not even a great mystery as to why, most devs dev for win, the mystery is the almost cult-like insistence on going perfectly native no matter what.... this team-sport thing will never stop disturbing me.

An odd thing that pops up now and then are linux versions of the SAME APP seem defective compared to windows versions, sometimes the windows version through wine actually runs better with less bugs.... that's disgusting really and usually due to either obsolete or mis-compiled packages. It makes having "faith in the system" rather difficult.

The funny thing is the way people (including my dogged self) keep pointing out obvious reasons for users to keep going back to windows and being "rebutted" by "don't be so un-adaptive" or "you just have to learn this un-intuitive method and grow to love it" or my fav "linux is for smart people" type responses. Sometimes there is even a subtle "maybe you and your type just don't belong here" type send off. No one ACTUALLY listens to ACTUAL feedback instead they just pour scorn and condescension or otherwise troll.... it's EXACTLY the kind of reaction the win10 lovers had from the beginning when people pointed out flaws and irritations in that system.... making an OS choice akin to choosing a team for some kind of childish game of kickball is STUPID.

Ironically I have many times gotten a "we don't do that kind of thing here" or "that's that other group's responsibility not ours" type response as soon as someone realizes he's lost the argument with no indication of that person him/her-self being capable of adaption he/she was JUST a moment before advocating..... almost everyone seems stuck in their little boxes and completely incapable of imagining software life without being in some kind of bubble.

[gm10]

Ironically I have many times gotten a "we don't do that kind of thing here" or "that's that other group's responsibility not ours" type response as soon as someone realizes he's lost the argument with no indication of that person him/her-self being capable of adaption he/she was JUST a moment before advocating..... almost everyone seems stuck in their little boxes and completely incapable of imagining software life without being in some kind of bubble.

That's the free and open source community for you and the major difference to commercial software development. When people volunteer their time to write free software, they'll only do it for the software they want to write. There is no accountability other than your own pride.

Or, if you were just talking to users, then that's not unusual behaviour, either. Some people, usually with low self-esteem, perceive criticism of their choices as criticism of themselves as people and react aggressively to that. You can see that in all venues of life. It's best to just ignore that - you gain nothing from convincing them, anyway.

[Pjotr]

Ironically I have many times gotten a "we don't do that kind of thing here" or "that's that other group's responsibility not ours" type response as soon as someone realizes he's lost the argument with no indication of that person him/her-self being capable of adaption he/she was JUST a moment before advocating..... almost everyone seems stuck in their little boxes and completely incapable of imagining software life without being in some kind of bubble.

That's the free and open source community for you and the major difference to commercial software development. When people volunteer their time to write free software, they'll only do it for the software they want to write. There is no accountability other than your own pride.

Well, major parts of the Linux ecosystem are being construed largely by people who are paid by their employers to contribute....

Take for example the kernel:
https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/

Key quote:

During the period of this most recent 2016 report, the top contributing companies to the Linux kernel were Intel (12.9 percent), Red Hat (8 percent), Linaro (4 percent), Samsung (3.9 percent), SUSE (3.2 percent), and IBM (2.7 percent).

Note that's not a list of *all* companies, but merely a list of the *top ones*.

Also consider web browsers Chromium and Chrome, which are largely coded by paid developers from Google.

Firefox:
https://g.co/kgs/6K7kYc

And look at the people who lead LibreOffice:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/ESC

But there are many other examples.

Sure, there are a lot of (usually small) projects that fit your description. But corporations and their employees contribute heavily to the development of the most important parts of Linux. Increasingly so, even.

[gm10]

Sure, there are a lot of (usually small) projects that fit your description. But corporations and their employees contribute heavily to the development of the most important parts of Linux. Increasingly so, even.

You are entirely correct, of course, but in my experience the big projects don't give you the "we don't do that kind of thing here" response that rambo919 was mentioning and that I was responding to.

But you are very correct, the Linux ecosystem is no hippie wonderland and has not been for a very long time (if it ever was). Big commercial interests drive much of its development these days, and rightly so. Nearly all of the core systems in Linux are at least partly developed by commercial entities.

[Moem]

The funny thing is the way people (including my dogged self) keep pointing out obvious reasons for users to keep going back to windows and being "rebutted" by "don't be so un-adaptive" or "you just have to learn this un-intuitive method and grow to love it" or my fav "linux is for smart people" type responses. Sometimes there is even a subtle "maybe you and your type just don't belong here" type send off.

We're mostly users here. What other kind of response were you expecting, or hoping for, instead?

[rambo919]

I have to admit you get those kinds of attitudes in niche commercial products too, usually the excuse for non-accommodation to problems is "this is the market standard" which is understandable since the help-desk is usually manned by drones.....

I am having to now use (ironically a windows program) a completely unintuitive (at least to me) "solution" for turning trial balances into XBRL Financial Statements and I am tearing my hair out in the struggle to understand the system from the ground up mostly because it assumes accounting software instead of manually (as in by hand) compiled sometimes by outdated standards which is 90% of our clients.

Sometimes the only difference between FOSS and retail is for one you get the same headaches for free and for the other you have the privilege of paying a small fortune for it.