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It's incredible the effort Windows 10/11 users will go to in order to reach a somewhat functional and reliable computing experience via third party modifications, yet Linux is somehow too much effort. Just look at the instructions on that page..

Every techie knows about Linux by now. Not everyone chooses to use Windows because they're foolish or don't know any better
why do they choose it?

i have a windows workstation because one CNC machine that we use needs it. only other reason i can see is gaming?

I have all 3 major OSs at home and, honestly, Windows 11 is stuff of nightmares to me

I've given some good reasons before: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=45858749

The "solutions" provided to me so far for my primary issue (using Ableton Suite DAW) has not worked. There is no practical solution that allows this software to function in a Linux environment successfully. I can open the app, but that's the extent of it. It's not usable.

> I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility.

> The responses I got were to switch to different software. No, no, and no. I paid a lot of money for Ableton Suite and poured many many hours into learning how to use it; it's the DAW I prefer to use, I don't want to switch.

> Having said this, I did try to dual boot recently with Linux Mint, and once again ran into headaches getting my Logitech mouse buttons to work.

Adobe products, for example. Or any of other of miriad of other products which have only Win/MacOS and no Linux support.

And, no, Wine cannot run anything.

You see, I don't need OS at all, I need applications. Some of these applications are "universal" (FireFox, for example), some has good equivalents, and some are unique to OS.

And, no, DarkTable, or RAW Therappe are not equivalent to Lightroom or Capture One. And no, there is no equivalent to foobar2000 among music players.

>And, no, Wine cannot run anything.

Wine may not be able to run the apps you need, but it can run plenty. The older the software gets the more wine becomes the only option to run it.

MPD + advanced clients pown foobar 2000 anytime. Also, Audacious, Strayberry...

Audacious with audacious-plugins could play anything (even video game music files) and it still has ProjectM plugins' support.

Nope, UI for mpd shows that there is 11093 albums in my collection, but first several screens of Albums is all sequences of `?`. Very useful. Number itself doesn't looks right, my estimation is at least half of this number, maybe less.

On the other hand same client shows only 6391 files, which is waaaay to small number if 1 file = 1 track. Ok, there is a lot of image + CUE albums, I wonder, is it 2 files or one?

So it is useless, unfortunately. foobar2000 allows me add folder / file set to playlist and start listening. With system "Artist/Year - Album" on the file system it is easy and convenient. Tags could be broken, but all mys music is here and I always know where to look for what I want to listen now.

When I've tried MPD last time (about 2 years ago, to be honest) it failed to play wv.iso format, and I have this abomination in my collection.

Also, it is not very good with broken tags, MP3 tags in local codepages (different for different albums!), etc.

You cannot imagine what can be seen in the wild when it is musical collection started in 1995!

Heck, I'm downloading mpd for windows right now and I'll try to add my collection into it. But I'm not holding my breath, all previous attempts to import my collection in any software failed for 15-20% of collection (different ones for different software).

You can run nearly any Windows app with winboat. Its not based on wine, it runs real windows in a container.
One reason is that Linux has no backwards compatibility and to maintain each piece of software in the repos, you need people. It is linear: more software requires more maintainers, otherwise the software stops to compile in a year or two.
Creative Cloud and DAWs. Those are my only reasons and basically the only reasons I ever hear from people. A Linux port of Photoshop would probably put a small dent in Windows' market share at this point.
Windows architecture is better. It is from the 1990s (ad was very advanced at the time), while Linux architecture is from the 1960s.
A foolish take, makes me believe you didn't really work in the real world. Because the entire global computer ecosystem is built on Windows-compatible software. Finance, accounting, medical, car diagnostics, and even HVAC software are built windows-compatible-only only.

Don't get me wrong, I use Xubuntu on my crappy old devices, Ubuntu on my secondary mini-pc, and switch between them with KVM while working. I tried to make Linux work for everything but missing industry software made it difficult.

Don’t bother. HN has a very hard anti-Microsoft bias, especially when it comes to Windows. At the same time will completely overlook many of the same warts or different warts that exist on macOS or Linux because they get a free pass for some reason.

Despite its flaws Windows still remains a very capable workhorse general purpose OS, and with WSL dev is a non issue. Hell, having actual Linux is better than the macOS Frankenstein Unix and homrbrew

I agree. You described my main pc. WSL + Ubuntu, VSCode with WSL plugin + Claude code. I can access Linux files and edit them with Windows while running local servers on different ports without dealing with XAMPP, Python for Windows, or similar messy Windows services. If I need to run any Debian software (so rare), I can run a VM if I am too lazy to turn on my other Linux system. All while I can use Windows-specific software on the side. All I am missing is the Gnome desktop, but who cares, I am already used to Windows since the 90s.
Some of us still rely on Windows applications that either don’t run on Linux, can’t run under Wine, or don’t have alternatives that meet our needs.
For some it's just fun. Changing things because we can. I was a huge tinkerer in the XP days, I'd test out every tweak and tool I could get my hands on and would reinstall the OS every couple months. I'd use Resource Hacker to change out the XP flag icons, put my initials on the start button, etc. It wasn't about making it more usable so much as it was just making it mine.

It makes me happy to see newer generations still doing the same stuff, granted its much more complex to do this work on Win11 vs XP.

"but he's sweet sometimes"

It's just an abusive relationship and eventually some of them break out of it.

Yeah, that effectively describes my experiences with desktop linux.
Linux isn’t hard, it’s just different. Better, but different. That’s too much effort for some.
Most of us are forced to use it because of corporate IT requirements.
In Linux such kind of hacking is impossible at all. You cannot make Qt4 to look like Qt3.
Windows 11 user here. I use zero third-party modifications. Some people are masochists.
Indeed, some people are :)

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