With the amount of money corporations and governments have spent on Microsoft — the last decade alone — they could have filled the gaps in linux and the annual cost for ITSM would be significantly cheaper. Instead they’ve spent more and have grown far more dependent on proprietary software, they don’t own or control, to manage their core business ops and data; the longer their dependence on SaaS, the more they’ll pay.
It’s an adoption problem. My company only supports windows because all our customers use windows. All our customers use windows because all their vendors only support windows.
move to web-based SW - platform-agnostic, so it’s pretty easy to support other OSes (oh, and you get mobile almost for free)
start submitting patches to get stuff working on macOS and Linux - once the barrier to supporting other OSes is low enough, they may let you officially support it
I get that there are solutions to the problem, but there’s no way a team of 10 can port 35 years of win32 dependence and keep the business solvent. Maybe incrementally, over the course of 10-15 years. We’re just now migrating off of .NET 4.8 because we use WCF so much.
Depending on the implementation, WCF can be really easy to adapt to new clients. If you wanted to support Linux, macOS, or web, you just implement the part of your service that make sense for those platforms.
I obviously don’t know your app at all, but it sounds like a 10 person dev team could probably build a new app in just a few months since the backend is already there. It wouldn’t have all of the features, but generally speaking it’s a lot easier to rebuild an app than refactor an existing one. Whether that would bring value is another concern entirely.
That’s why I put the (larger) there - if you are a small company maybe you can not keep up a separate office infrastructure from your deployment / test systems in case of SW development.
If you are a large enterprise and use Microsoft infrastructure, then either the people making the decisions in IT are getting a lot of bribes, or they are really really stupid :) Or both.
And I mean that absolutely without anger against Microsoft, and purely in terms of security nightmare and waste of office productivity because using a contemporary windows system wastes so much more time of any given user that each desk worker probably loses 20-70% productivity compared to a lean operating system (and that would include something like Windows 2000 / XP).
I have to fend off linux nerds with a bat. The bottom line is “that’s cool and all but there are a lot of things that I can’t do with linux and I’m not willing to make that big of a change”
And the main issue there tends to be anti-cheat, and that’s a chicken-and-egg problem:
game devs won’t support Linux/macOS because players don’t use Linux/macOS
players won’t use Linux/macOS because game devs don’t support it
The more people we can convince to use Linux as a daily driver, the more game devs will notice and the more likely they are to support Linux. We’ve seen a lot of game devs make an effort since the Steam Deck became a thing, and it’s always getting better.
It’s totally fine to dual boot, but spending some amount of time gaming on Linux (where possible) helps send the message that Linux support is wanted and is profitable.
Most games with anti-cheat refuse to run on Linux even if the anti-cheat itself supports it. And some anti-cheats just don’t work on Linux anyway, I believe the ones that do only support it by just not running when they detect they’re on Linux. If you’re interested you can check which games are supported here: https://areweanticheatyet.com/ but bear in mind it could change at any time (for example Rockstar broke GTAV a few weeks ago)
Pretty much every multiplayer online game will at best lose its shit and not run, and at worst, ban you instantaneously if you try to access it with Linux
This is very true. I remember back in the day I tossed my old drive full of viruses and windows and I started using Linux. That was 1998? No, it was definitely 2000 already. That was a really easy erase. I guess you could also just reuse the same drive. But that one has the click of death, so no.
Nothing that cannot be fixed by a Linux install.
For personal computing, sure. For enterprise environment, eh not really.
With the amount of money corporations and governments have spent on Microsoft — the last decade alone — they could have filled the gaps in linux and the annual cost for ITSM would be significantly cheaper. Instead they’ve spent more and have grown far more dependent on proprietary software, they don’t own or control, to manage their core business ops and data; the longer their dependence on SaaS, the more they’ll pay.
Yep, Imagine how good the software would be oif we had all the governments and enterprise paying into open source instead of Microsofts pocket.
Can you imagine a world where public money was only spent for the public good? What a world!
The only (larger) enterprises that insist “we depend on Windows” are those with shitty corporate IT :)
It’s an adoption problem. My company only supports windows because all our customers use windows. All our customers use windows because all their vendors only support windows.
Potential solutions:
I get that there are solutions to the problem, but there’s no way a team of 10 can port 35 years of win32 dependence and keep the business solvent. Maybe incrementally, over the course of 10-15 years. We’re just now migrating off of .NET 4.8 because we use WCF so much.
Depending on the implementation, WCF can be really easy to adapt to new clients. If you wanted to support Linux, macOS, or web, you just implement the part of your service that make sense for those platforms.
I obviously don’t know your app at all, but it sounds like a 10 person dev team could probably build a new app in just a few months since the backend is already there. It wouldn’t have all of the features, but generally speaking it’s a lot easier to rebuild an app than refactor an existing one. Whether that would bring value is another concern entirely.
That’s why I put the (larger) there - if you are a small company maybe you can not keep up a separate office infrastructure from your deployment / test systems in case of SW development. If you are a large enterprise and use Microsoft infrastructure, then either the people making the decisions in IT are getting a lot of bribes, or they are really really stupid :) Or both.
And I mean that absolutely without anger against Microsoft, and purely in terms of security nightmare and waste of office productivity because using a contemporary windows system wastes so much more time of any given user that each desk worker probably loses 20-70% productivity compared to a lean operating system (and that would include something like Windows 2000 / XP).
And several governments from various countries and at various levels (municipal, state, federal)
there’s
Even worse: governments using Windows are absolutely giving the US services direct access to all their confidential files & communication.
Or if you’re into online gaming.
I have to fend off linux nerds with a bat. The bottom line is “that’s cool and all but there are a lot of things that I can’t do with linux and I’m not willing to make that big of a change”
And the main issue there tends to be anti-cheat, and that’s a chicken-and-egg problem:
The more people we can convince to use Linux as a daily driver, the more game devs will notice and the more likely they are to support Linux. We’ve seen a lot of game devs make an effort since the Steam Deck became a thing, and it’s always getting better.
It’s totally fine to dual boot, but spending some amount of time gaming on Linux (where possible) helps send the message that Linux support is wanted and is profitable.
What are the issues? Genuine question.
Not the person you replied to but they’re probably talking about anti-cheat
I heard there were issues with those, but not sure on the specifics
Most games with anti-cheat refuse to run on Linux even if the anti-cheat itself supports it. And some anti-cheats just don’t work on Linux anyway, I believe the ones that do only support it by just not running when they detect they’re on Linux. If you’re interested you can check which games are supported here: https://areweanticheatyet.com/ but bear in mind it could change at any time (for example Rockstar broke GTAV a few weeks ago)
This is great, thanks for that link!
Pretty much every multiplayer online game will at best lose its shit and not run, and at worst, ban you instantaneously if you try to access it with Linux
What are the issues? Genuine question.
This is very true. I remember back in the day I tossed my old drive full of viruses and windows and I started using Linux. That was 1998? No, it was definitely 2000 already. That was a really easy erase. I guess you could also just reuse the same drive. But that one has the click of death, so no.