How much do you still rely on windows and its related softwa

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diablo465 · Post by **diablo465** » Wed Feb 05, 2014 1:13 pm

After switching to Linux world, I have been trying hard to keep myself from proprietary software, in particular windows and its related software.

However, I feel it is still really hard to completely purge windows after linux becoming the host system. I still need to use windows to do many things by either virtualbox or windows host, such as:

1. Not being able to display properly in free substitutions, some forms created by word has to be filled by word.

2. the other software that does not have a decent alternatives (e.g., autocad) or some specialized software.

Such situation has led me to switching on virtualbox or another pc every single time I use linux-hosted machine.

Just wondering:

1. how much do you still rely on windows and its related software?

2. do you have a distaste for proprietary software?

Thanks in advance!

HungGarTiger · Post by **HungGarTiger** » Wed Feb 05, 2014 1:24 pm

Distaste for proprietary, ofcourse.

Everything else, WINE

nlsa8z6zoz7lyih3ap · Post by **nlsa8z6zoz7lyih3ap** » Wed Feb 05, 2014 4:00 pm

1. how much do you still rely on windows and its related software?

2. do you have a distaste for proprietary software?

Answers:

(1) (a) A Virtual windows-xp to prepare my tax return. ( The virtual machine use to be vmware-player, but I recently converted it to qemu-kvm.)
(b) Wine to run Quicken 2000.

(2) Yes.

fturco · Post by **fturco** » Thu Feb 06, 2014 8:34 am

Of course I dislike Windows and proprietary software. But unfortunately I need to use Skype, Windows version. I tried Skype for Linux, but it crashes and it's outdated. Thank you Microsoft!

EDIT: I forgot to say that I also use the Adobe Flash plugin for Firefox.

landdie · Post by **landdie** » Thu Feb 06, 2014 5:12 pm

Haven't had any sort of windows machine since 2000

Met with Linuxes in 1998 it was a match made in heaven.

Everything you need is available these days! You might need to hunt if you need some obscure CNC or CAD/CAM software or a soft modem for your antique SSB radio but at least you will find it which you certainly won't for Windows.

As for proprietary software............. wouldn't touch it with a barge pole especially given the latest revelations from Edward Snowdon!

By the way both my sons and my wife run Skype on Lubuntu/Ubuntu no probs at all. But given it's new owner I wouldn't let it near a machine you consider important! Works well on Gentoo hardened as well! Yep it's behind in development compared to Windows versions, of course it is Microsoft owns it, but that's just good because we are all beavering away to create a competitive open source alternative now!

jonathan183 · Post by **jonathan183** » Sat Feb 08, 2014 11:00 am

diablo465 wrote:Just wondering:

1. how much do you still rely on windows and its related software?

2. do you have a distaste for proprietary software?

At work I am forced to use Windows, software which would actually be needed is Autocad. I'm sure Autodesk used to make a Unix version of Autocad but it's a long time ago since I have seen it - it was about version 9 or 10 which has to be about 15 to 20 years ago! Libreoffice could be used for the features which are used, and Outlook could be replaced with alternatives. There are a couple of modelling packages for things like chemical engineering that seem to be difficult to find free or open source alternatives for. I'm guessing SAP would be a big switch as well ...

For me at home, I have XP on a desktop - XP is very rarely used, I also have Windows 7 on a laptop which is also rarely used. These only have Windows on them because the PC came with them, I would not buy Windows and install it on a PC. I did buy OpenSuSE 8 and 9 for the desktop, but since then have downloaded everything else - and donated a small amount to some free/open source projects.

In Linux I use Skype (very rarely otherwise would have sorted alternative sooner), flash-plugin, HP drive for a scanner, and driver for wireless cards when the opensource alternates do not work well/are not available. The desktop PC has an Nvidia card which I used to use their driver for but I switched to the nouveau driver for it a few years ago. Other than that I think everything else is free or at least open source.

If free/open source drivers are not available for hardware in future I will avoid buying it.

mrbassie · Post by **mrbassie** » Sun Feb 09, 2014 5:06 pm

I use the flash plugin however I'm looking forward to html5 eventually killing flash.
That's it basically. I haven't used windows or any other proprietary software (other than occasional use of skype) in the better part of four years.

Post by **NeddySeagoon** » Sun Feb 09, 2014 5:31 pm

diablo465,

Whats Windows? :)

I have not used it at home since 2002, unfortunately my employer is not so enlightened.

moisespedro · Post by **moisespedro** » Sun Feb 09, 2014 7:58 pm

The only thing I still use is pipelight, to watch Netflix
EDIT: and proprietary linux software: the adobe flash plugin

Greens · Post by **Greens** » Wed Feb 12, 2014 6:35 pm

None at all with the exception of some video games I run in Wine.

I never have the use to run windows-only software otherwise and don't keep Windows installed on any of my computers, even in a VM.

As for CAD, will really none of these ones that are available on Linux do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compariso ... gn_editors

sk3l · Post by **sk3l** » Wed Feb 12, 2014 8:16 pm

How much do I rely on Windows & its related software?

The answer is, more than I'd care to.

There are two primary things that keep me tethered to Microsoft.

1) My company's dev platform is .NET w/ SQL Server. I have entertained the thought of moving all of my development tools into Mono and then just building the .NET assemblies natively on Windows for deployment, but our main platform service uses some dirty tricks from code in the Microsoft namespace assemblies that AFAIK haven't been moved into Mono, and probably never will.

2) Supporting my wife/other loved ones in their Windows usage, thus meaning I have to kind of still know my way around that OS.

Other than that, I don't use anything Microsoft. Office suite, etc. has all been moved to OSS. I do my day to day dev in an KVM/QEMU VM, and will keep that around in any case if there are Windows-specific tools that I can't find a *nix version for.

jonathan183 · Post by **jonathan183** » Wed Feb 12, 2014 8:42 pm

Greens wrote:As for CAD, will really none of these ones that are available on Linux do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compariso ... gn_editors

It's been a while since I looked at alternatives @work they are hooked on WIndows.
Last time I looked ability to read/write .dwg was an issue with GPL/similar licensing, looks as though things may have moved on

wuzzerd · Post by **wuzzerd** » Wed Feb 12, 2014 10:49 pm

I bought a pc in 1995 with Windows on it. I must have spent 3 hours trying to get the look and feel right. Then I discovered the 1G drive had been set up as 1/2G. Out came the Red Hat disk. ( that was before <troll>systemd</troll>, of course. )

A couple of times I was paid to use quickbooks on windows machines. Knoppix was a must to clean out malware.

broken_chaos · Post by **broken_chaos** » Thu Feb 13, 2014 12:26 am

I'm an idealist where I can be, but a pragmatist ultimately.

I use Linux exclusively on some devices, but I do have a dual-boot machine that spends most of its time on Windows (due to lots and lots of gaming -- OpenGL, Linux, and Wine just aren't 'there' yet for high-end gaming). Proprietary software is to be avoided, but I won't inconvenience myself unduly in order to explicitly avoid it.

sera · Post by **sera** » Thu Feb 13, 2014 12:05 pm

Windows for CAD, OSX for for some business / office tools, rest mostly Linux.

Personally I don't mind proprietary software. Important is that the software is fit for the task. Linux (Gentoo) I consider the best general purpose OS available.

darklegion · Post by **darklegion** » Fri Feb 14, 2014 7:04 am

Only Windows programs I rely on are games with Wine, which sometimes even run better with Wine than the Linux native versions.

As far as proprietary software goes I used to use Opera and VMware, but eventually migrated to Firefox and Qemu-kvm. I'd probably still use Opera if not for the engine change but I'm happy to be on Firefox with some of its nice extensions. Even though performance wise it doesn't feel as good as Opera used to.

Philosophically, and to a lesser extent practically, I was never a fan of closed source software but I dealt with it when it was clearly the superior option. These cases are getting fewer and fewer thankfully. Even video drivers are starting to get good on the open source side, especially for AMD. Although part of that is the prop. drivers are so awful, so it's not too hard to look superior

Yamakuzure · Post by **Yamakuzure** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 5:48 pm

Linux only with all my work and private projects.

But I have a desktop computer with Windows 7 on it at home for these three purposes:

Play Mass Effect 1
Play Mass Effect 2
Play Mass Effect 3

Note: Before someone asks: I am working on a Laptop with 1st generation i7 dual core CPU and Intel Ironlake HD graphics. So running ME1 in wine is possible, but the best I get is ~5 fps on minimum settings in a 800x600 window. So nope. And just for three games I won't install (and maintain!) a linux distribution. Microsoft Update and nvidia Experience maintain all I need for themselves.

Code: Select all

 ~ $ glxinfo | grep OpenGL
OpenGL vendor string: Intel Open Source Technology Center
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ironlake Mobile 
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 10.0.3
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20

You can't have fun with those games when using this... Not if the competitor is a GTX 770

Fitzcarraldo · Post by **Fitzcarraldo** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 7:24 pm

My main laptop dual boots Gentoo and Windows 7. However, I almost never boot into Windows; I always do my work from Gentoo. For compatibility with my work colleagues it is essential that I use Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint (LibreOffice is good, but not 100% compatible in every case), which I do from Gentoo using Office 2007 under WINE. The only time I boot Windows is in order to run Windows Update and Windows Backup, which I do once every couple of months or so.

I also occasionally use Visio 5 Professional (which I bought in 1999) via WINE in Linux. That was the last version of Visio released before Microsoft bought the Visio company. I find it easier to use than native Linux applications such as Dia.

In the last four years there has only been one task where I had no choice but to use Windows instead of Linux: using Microsoft SharePoint. In order to open a Word file on the office's SharePoint repository, check-out the file directly into Word, edit it and check-in the file from Word directly to the SharePoint repository, I had to boot Windows. Although Firefox in Linux could access files in the SharePoint repository, it was not possible to go through the above process in Linux; I had to use Microsoft Internet Explorer and Word in Windows. Apart from that one task, I never needed to use Windows.

My desktop PC in the lounge runs Windows because the rest of the family insist on Windows. Although I use that PC from time to time to browse the Web, I don't rely on it.

i92guboj · Post by **i92guboj** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 7:33 pm

Nothing at all.

If it can't work in a system that's secure I'd rather not use it.

Yes, yes, I know, autocad et all...... you know what? If all the *nix users who buy Autocad licenses for Windows were to put that money into a pot to hire a handful of developers, then PenguinCAD (or something like that) would probably be a reality. There are a bunch of good math applications that are open source, and that could potentially be used as the foundations for such a thing, such as octave.

Post by **asturm** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 8:27 pm

Personally, I have been using Gentoo Linux exclusively for the better half of the last ten years. I have no use for proprietary software or drivers.

At work, it's not so clear. It's all Windows 7, workflow heavily relies on Excel with VBA macros (yuck) that I couldn't be bothered to port to LibreOffice (which also still lacks support in various functions) just to get the same dumb solutions duplicated. On the other hand, for most of it, that's the only dependency, so there's hope at some point we should be able to switch over to KDE desktops - hardware is already made sure to be no obstacle. Not exclusively, though: Colour proofing is in its early days and software for professional raw converting, editing and fine art printing just does not yet exist for Linux.

Anon-E-moose · Post by **Anon-E-moose** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 8:32 pm

I have my server/desktop running linux all the time.
I have another system that's off 99.9% of the time with win7 and XP on it (mostly for games that don't run well under wine)

I run a few qemu vm's, two are XP, one using normal graphics shared with linux, one that exclusively uses a radeon card.
Again mostly for games or the odd thing that linux just can't/won't do well.

How much do you still rely on windows and its related softwa

How much do you still rely on windows and its related softwa

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