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Cake day: August 22nd, 2024

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  • I think (aka speculate) that the fact that Windows is the largest OS plays into the fact that Linux-Mac compatibility isn’t more developed.

    I bet some 90% of desktop software is available on Windows (even many core KDE are on Windows!) so targeting them brings most Apple apps onto Linux “for free”. Especially since Apple’s insistence on trying to make Metal a thing hurts gaming support, which is a big driver behind Linux compatibility development.

    The few applications that MacOS has over both Linux and Windows are usually so embedded into the Apple ecosystem that you’re not getting much by porting them anyway. iTunes? The App Store? Garage Band? Probably doesn’t help that many of those apps also use Apple’s own UI framework which isn’t really portable.

    However, stuff not designed to live in Apple land like Teams for Mac or Adobe CC might be more possible. But still far too few applications to necessitate the effort to bring them over.


  • Pop is the only one that really ever makes any reference to windows in its marketing. I’m more talking about distros like Zorin which are targeting public sector orgs and windows users by bundling windows compatibility apps and features into the ISO.

    The other examples definitely do also target “new users” which of course means Windows users too, but they aren’t explicitly tying their distros to Windows software compatibility the same way some are.




  • MacOS still ships x86 builds, and most software either provides binaries for both platforms or some kind of universal/hybrid binary. Still a few years before that becomes an issue.

    At some point an ARM->x86 translation layer is going to be needed too, regardless. It’s not long until ARM becomes popular enough to make it necessary to translate both ways.


  • merthyr1831@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlWhat happened to elementary OS?
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    11 days ago

    Yup. Same issue will plague all Windows-alternative distros. Unless serious work is done to fix Microsoft 365 and Adobe creative cloud, there’s genuinely little benefit trying to claim Linux is an alternative for all but a minority of people.

    That, or we can work on improving the alternatives to those apps. GIMP, Inkscape, and OnlyOffice are on a spectrum of laughably bad to just-about-comparable to their proprietary counterparts.

    I don’t think it’s an insurmountable issue: I think there’s more we could do to bring Apple software to Linux (using a BSD-based kernel means a lot less complexity!) and with it the few applications that currently don’t play well with WINE.











  • DRM in this context (as mentioned by the other comment) is the interface between the userspace graphics drivers (Mesa, Nouveau, Nvidia etc.) and your graphics devices. It handles pretty much everything for rendering from displays to power management and memory synchronization, in a cooperative way that stops crashes due to race conditions, memory corruption etc.