this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Windows is basically malware now. My wife is forced to use W11 for work and she fucking hates it with a passion (and that’s the pared down IT version).
I pulled out my old gaming laptop that had been unplugged for quite a while and found it somehow updated itself to W11. I immediately wiped the computer and installed Nobara as the main OS. No regrets, no issues, and no half-assed bullshit.
Windows on the ASUS ROG Ally is absolute dog shit. It would constantly reboot to install unwanted updates that offered zero value on a handheld (let alone anything).
Nothing I own will ever run Windows.
Windows isn’t popular. It’s forced onto tons of prebuilt computers and most people wouldn’t know what to use instead. Fuck Windows. Rant over.
If someone can please make Autodesk stuff install and run under Wine, not saying Autodesk to deploy their stuff natively for Linux, I'd be gone with the blink of an eye. And I bet a lot of professionals too.
The best would be if the open source alternatives got better and more popular, like Blender did for 3D stuff.
Probably won't happen under capitalism. It's way too expensive (time consuming) to write good software/make good products.
gestures broadly at the entire FOSS ecosystem
What?
(sorry for the long answer)
Besides the vendor-lock-in and "enshitification" things (which are also a direct consequence of capitalism) just compare the Microsoft Office Suite against LibreOffice. It's not even close.
Don't get me wrong it works good enough for typical use-cases but the difference in depth, quality and polish is huge. Same with Photoshop vs Gimp, After Effects and other Adobe stuff.
Tons of software doesn't even have proper Open Source equivalents because they are so nieche (compared to office software or VLC for example).
Unity (vs Godot), IDA Pro (vs Ghidra), EnCase, SolidWorks, etc.
Check out how Mozilla Firefox makes its money. They are over 80% funded by Google and make all kinds of shitty decision. Not because they are bad people but somebody has to pay development because good software doesn't just happen because a hand full of junior devs have some free time.
Look at the shitty Ubuntu decisions, also done because somebody needs to pay for development.
Look at audacity, redis, FluentAssertions, OpenOffice, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, MySql, IdentityServer4 and many more OpenSource projects that went commercial or changed their license because it was unsustainable.
You can of course always fork, but the forked project than has the same issues. Development works as long there are skilled people motivated to practically donate their free time in exchange for nothing. That already greatly limits the people that even can work on open source and if their situation changes history repeats.
It's not even OpenSource only. Look at YouTube creators especially science educators. A lot of them with great content and talent explaining various topics. But also trying to sell you stuff like squarespace, Brilliant and NordVPN because it would be unsustainable otherwise.
So yes great (by that I mean big polished good quality "unenshitified") FOSS won't happen under capitalism because writing software is time-consuming.
Why do you think people pirate commercial software like AutoCAD, Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, MS Office, SketchUp, SolidWorks, etc.? Because they are polished in a way no open source project could be, because hundreds of engineers worked for decades on those.
All that said, FOSS is great. I use and rely on a tons of OpenSource software, self-host a lot of services, regularly contribute to quite a few projects and also am the maintainer of some libraries other people use (even commercially) and I still stand by what I wrote before:
Open Source can't be as polished and high quality as big commercial software because it doesn't have the funds to do that. Five motivated people are not enough to write an After Effects competitor.
Adding to this, but I’m also not aware of many great Product Managers, UX designers or UX writers contributing to FOSS. Many devs have worked with shitty PM’s and like to dismiss their value, but a great one can make a massive difference in the quality of a product.
Same with the extensive UX design and UX testing that goes into making great products.
Maya and Motionbuilder run on Linux, but that happened before they were hoovered up by the monster. Autodesk just ignores that part of their portfolio. I know a few people who work/have worked on the Maya team and they're talented, passionate devs, but management just doesn't give a fuck about Media & Entertainment when Autocad and Revit are making so much money.
Windows is freemium now. It serves as a vehicle to sell other MS shit.
At least I don't need to pay for freeware. Last I checked, the cost of Windows was included in my laptop and I didn't get the option to not install an OS even though I fully intended to install Linux on it.
I've used Windows my whole life at home. Last year I realized I kind of hate gaming at a desk since I'm at one all day for work, so I bought a used Steam Deck. Literally have not touched Windows since. I probably don't need a home computer anymore and if I need one in the future, I'm confident it won't be running Windows.
I have one too and love that thing! Even as a programmer, I find the only time I use a computer is during work time. Otherwise I’m mostly on my Steam Deck.
What's Nobara? I've never heard of that OS.
Adding on to the other comment, Nobara is maintained by Glorious Egroll, the same guy that also develops the popular Proton-GE compatibility tool which adds some extra fixes on top of Valve's Proton.
(Proton is the compatibility tool Steam uses to make Windows games run on Linux, in case you're unfamiliar)
Oh I recognise that name. Tbf it might just be because its a fantastic moniker.
Gamer-focused derivative of Fedora Linux.
Oh, I think I might hop over to that when I switch over the OS on my gaming PC.
You could also try bazzite, it is based on fedora atomic desktops
Rant on, bruddah! I am also in the "must use it for work" group, and I despise my work laptop with the fury of 1000 suns. In my personal work and prior to this new job, I was staying on Win 10 for Inventor, AutoCAD, FL Studio (and a bunch of VST synths I bought), and DaVinci Resolve Studio. My experience with my work laptop has spurred my nearly-complete jump to Linux.
FL Studio has been replaced by Bitwig, new learning curve and loss of the VSTs just being the cost I have to eat. I almost have DRS running in perfectly in Aurora Linux. And my two Win 10 machines will just go into an isolated network until I can figure out workarounds/replacements for the Autodesk garbage.
Reaper is another good DAW that runs natively.
Blender has great video editing capabilities. There's also KDenLive and a few other native video editors.
CAD is harder unless you're okay with switching to a parametric design flow with FreeCAD.
I collaborate with other people who are also on DRS. Before I had teammates on DRS, I tried using Blender, Openshot, Shotcut, KDenLive. Those NLEs are just not there yet.
I actually started my solid modeling/parametric journey on FreeCAD, and I prefer the parametric workflow. I switched to Inventor when FreeCAD kept crashing when the object tree was ~60 primitives even on my monstrous workstation. I would love to go back to FreeCAD, because fuck AutoDesk in its ear, so hopefully they get the stability + complexity under control.
Anecdotal, but I got a few VSTs working on Ardour with yabridge, if it helps.