this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
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There’s ridiculously little difference between Windows, OS X and GNOME nowadays. Once you realise that most of your Steam library works and you’ve hated Office for at least ten years anyway, that leaves browsers, which are exactly the same. Most users don’t want to fiddle with settings, installers and drivers, they’ll just accept what the machine comes out of the box with.
There is more to it though. The one feature i miss from windows is casting.
I dont mean chromecast, i got that working. I mean wireless casting to a tv or projector. The windows + k feature.
Ive yet to get that working in linux...
Besides that, im a happy linux person
Everyone’s got something they’d miss. For me it’s Affinity (though that’s on the way, it sounds like) and Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s insane, but MSFS is the 800-pound gorilla; it’s not just visuals, but almost all the new stuff (like Beyond ATC) is targeting MSFS.
Affinity works using WINE. I think there also exists a repo where they packaged it into .appimage
In theory yes. Not in practice though; unstable and slow.
I imagine if you play MSFS you have a beefy PC to handle Affinity through WINE
Sure, but that doesn’t fix the many crashes and hangs. Most of the GPU effects in the adjustment layers grinds everything to a halt. It’s not really all that usable in practice, IMHO.
When my college classes went online because of the pandemic, I'd sit in my parents basement and cast my homework to their TV. Those were the days.
Life is more than browsers you know...
Most software can effectively run in a browser at this point, and the bit that can't can be self hosted on a server and then cast to your browser.
Really not how most of the software works. I install ton of apps locally like games, Libre office, ect. Running all in browser is a pipe dream. Also extremely memory and CPU inefficient
It really is. WebASM is miles beyond what you're probably thinking of in terms of browser based performance, and most companies these days do not have local applications installed for their office workers. Office 365 is by far the most popular version of office, and it's entirely browser based. Most in-house corporate IT work from the last decade is electron wrappers of internal company websites acting as simple interfaces for actual heavy lifting.
While there's definitely some apps that are a bit too heavy for WebASM (or just javascript/.net for the above examples) this list is vanishingly short these days. I'd say blender and other 3d rendering would be inefficient just because WebASM has weird interactions with anything other than OpenGL and Vulkan, But even Unreal 5 can export to WebASM and do it fairly well (as well as OpenGL can perform, that poor outdated thing).
Heck just go to itch.io or any website that has ported over games to WebGL/WebASM. You can run Half-life directly on your browser these days. Half Life of all games. That's more demanding than anything not 3d that you'd run in an office.
I know what web assembly is. It's not a golden one-for-all solution you try to paint it to be. There's a reason why you won't see any modern AAA games in Wasm except ancient stuff like half life or Quake 3. It's just not fast enough and not memory efficient enough.
Jesus no. It's obvious you don't play games. Unreal engine can export to Wasm but noone does this. Everyone develops games natively with DirectX 12 api in mind (and very rarely Vulkan like in case of Doom or Red dead redemption 2) You're just blatantly wrong with this.
What's web assembly is good for is what's in the God damn name: Web apps. You can squeeze in office into it, because office is ultra lightweight use case, that back in the day ran on 486dx4 with 16Megs of ram. It now runs on 3ghz CPU and requires hundreds of megs of ram, this is insanely wasteful. We can afford these resources, but it's still wasteful as hell.
Office 365 also refers to the desktop apps as well as the web versions, has done for many years now. Though I suppose it's all copilot 365 now.
Source: Am office worker where we use office 365, and we all use the native system software, with the browser versions as for quick editing when elsewhere.
and various Linux distros have gotten so good at this now. You can install something like Bazzite, PikaOS, hell even CachyOS with their recent update of switching from Octopi to Shelly and you can be up and running within a matter of minutes without having to worry about drivers or fiddling around with settings. PikaOS for example is probably one of the smoothest linux installs I've ever tried. easily within 15minutes I can have steam open and downloading games. within 30 I can be playing. and that's without downloading drivers or playing around with settings.
That leaves audio production (with a bunch of Windows-only plugins), video production, photo editing, CAD.....
Sure, you can re-learn your entire stack and get by, but that's a far shot from "ridiculously little difference". Dropping familiar complex piece of software like Ableton is a hard sell for folks (and it's OK).
I think once you're into concepts like a "stack", you're working with very niche specific software that most users will never touch. And absolutely, use what fulfills your needs. The vast majority of people I know that ever use a computer, just use it as google chrome. Web browsers work great in Linux. Depending on your needs, a lot of creative software works great on Linux too.
Your situation is legit, and I honestly wish these things were better because I wish all things were better, but I do feel like these are specialized programs that "most people" never touch in their entire lives.
But yes, for people who have a technical or creative career based on a proprietary tech stack, the story is more complicated.
Most likely your software will work via bottles or wine. If you have a desktop PC from the last decade and it cost more than $1k, you can also run a VM (or Winboat) specifically for your software with nearly 1:1 performance to bare metal (if you get the passthrough right.)
Which isn't a permanent solution, mind you, but if it's just one piece of software holding you back and you don't care to play with alternatives, then the solution isn't to keep Windows despite its terrible performance in 99% of things, it's to switch to windows and emulate or compatibility layer the 1% of software you might use that requires windows.
No, for the examples above it will not. Quite a lot of professional software will not run under wine - games work particularly well because they mostly do their own thing and depend less on Windows-specific APIs. And if you use a VM via Winboat then you're just using Windows in the background, which is a workaround, but kinda defeats OP's argument that there's "no difference".
There are converters that do wonders for a lot of VST plugins but some critical ones (Kontakt for example) are unfortunately stubborn. If I made music that didn’t use sample libraries I’d uninstall Windows today. I have got it on a very minimal partition at least.