this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
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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.
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".
If you need an emulator (yeah, "Wine Is Not an Emulator" yadda yadda, it still makes your software think you run a different OS) to run much of your most important software, you chose the wrong operating system.
If it works completely fine with Wine - in many cases, better than under Windows - why do you care if there's a translation layer? Seems like a weird hill to die on. Do you also feel like running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit architecture means you chose the wrong architecture?
If you use a Windows "translation layer" for your software anyway, why would you choose Linux as the host platform in the first place?
There are so many reasons. Here's just a few off the top of my head:
All of that is true for most other operating systems, some of which are even more customizable than some of today's Linux distributions. My question was "why Linux?", not "why not Windows?".
Question is a not relevant to the discussion, and might be an (possibly unintentional?) attempt at derailing the conversation. @bearboiblake@pawb.social answered the question more than adequately. Their point still holds: If needed, there are many ways to run Windows apps under other operating systems (including Linux). Choosing an OS between Linux - and it's various flavors, FreeBSD etc is outside the scope of the original discussion.
Oh -- in that case, because Linux is vastly more popular than any other alternative free operating system or system distribution, has infinitely more support options and software available than alternatives, and a much larger community/install base, meaning that if you have a problem or want some tool, it's far more likely to be available for Linux than any other free alternative.
Windows is more popular than Linux, so is macOS. Now is that a reason or not?
False.
Which tool does (e.g.) FreeBSD lack for you?
notice the word free
ok lol
Well, Docker is the archetypal example, though I'm sure there are plenty of others. I've never particularly cared to get into BSD, because I have no incentive to do so.
Please don't troll. Last warning before mute.
You should. It can't hurt to know alternatives, you know.
You just said "False". How tf am I meant to engage with that in any kind of productive way? It's like saying "no u".
Why would I care if you block me? It would be your loss, really -- I'm a very cool, nice, fun, friendly guy, you'd be missing out on some potentially great comments.
Why? Genuinely asking, I've never looked into it because I have no real incentive to try it. I've used NetBSD on a server before, and it was fine, but like, what reason would I have to move away from Linux? It works completely perfectly for all of my use cases.
Please, by all means, don't care. I, for one, care about whether strangers on the internet try to dunning-kruger me. Life's too short for that.
The same reason why weirdos want Windows users to move away from Windows, I guess. It is lovely to have options, and (given the continuing enshittification of much of Linux, with systemd spreading through the whole ecosystem like a virus, less customizability, more security fails, ...) BSD is quite an appalling option. It runs (almost) all Linux software, is notably more mature (it existed long before Linux and quite a few companies relied and worked on it for decades, making it enterprise-ready by design), has a very nice community (and me) and it runs on old hardware much longer than Linux does; ironically, that's what Linux users think they do better than Windows. Heh.
And the BSDs (I, personally, use OpenBSD on a few servers, only recently started trying NetBSD on a spare laptop) are only a subset of your free alternatives, with Solaris (illumos) and (e.g.) Haiku being two others. There will always be one system that does exactly what you want and how you want it.
I'm going to be honest, it feels like you might have some kinda superiority complex here... I'm sure BSDs are lovely and great and I'm really glad you enjoy using them, but Linux and BSD are both great options for people, and I'm glad they're both available.
I don't really care about the whole systemd conflict. All I care about is that I own my computer and I control all of the software that runs on it. If I wanted to, I could swap out systemd for initd or sysV or whatever but I don't want to because I'm very familiar with it at this point, it works fine.
If I need BSD for something, I will certainly be more than happy to reach for it. Actually, come to think of it, I do use BSD - OpenWRT is BSD based I believe, and I have a few Wi-Fi access points/routers running OpenWRT.
I couldn't care less which software other people use. It seemed strange to me to run an operating system that won't support the software I need natively, that's all.
So you understand the appeal of why someone would use FreeBSD, and you also understand that there's some software which is only available for Windows that people might still want to use, so... I don't really understand how that's particularly strange, but I hope you understand now that we've talked it out that it's pretty ordinary.
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.