Linux is a lot like a duck with teeth.
FREEDOM
Somehow, I just managed to get 20 year old Mac software running on my linux setup the other day, something impossible even on a modern Mac setup no doubt.
The funny thing is that the biggest practical benefit to most Linux users is not the access to do these things.
It is the secondary effects of not needing to restrict access in order to preserve lock-in and enshittification. It makes the whole user experience better because it is only doing wider you’ve asked it to do. For example, I apply updates more quickly on Linux than I ever did on Windows, even though my Linux DEs are way less pushy about it, because the process is an absolute breeze!
Look at each OS option like you were a product development team, and think “who are my stakeholders?”
The commercial products have long lists of what’s driving the product features and anti-features. Linux has the developers who want the code to be helpful and stay free, and the users who want it to do what it says on the tin, with the option to audit or modify the system’s code. But of course it’s still run by humans, so big personalities and bad actors and whatnot do affect things.
Linux is awesome. The upsides of my distro (Mint) are all better than all the downsides of Scumsoft’s Micro(penis is)soft.
oh just you watch me delete system files on my rooted android
And now your bank app doesn’t work.
it works quite well actually. even got tap to pay!
“I can’t run the application you need”
“I can’t digitally sign a pdf without a phd”
Or “when something doesn’t work you’re going to crawl through old forums hoping to find the solution”
Tried Linux again recently. No thanks. It’s come a long ways, but that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.
When that stops being as frequent of a problem, I’ll switch without looking back. Fedora KDE Plasma was pretty slick, and some things actually worked better than windows, but I cannot stand having to Google around to fix basic things as frequently as Linux wants from me. Not that Windows is perfect, but I don’t know. The problems feel easier to fix and are less… Outright broken?
And now here comes the Linux users telling me I’m wrong like they do every time I say this despite my experiences being very recent lol that’s another thing that will never change.
Just installed Fedora today. Can confirm, a Lemmy post and several wikis really helped me out.
I think that other distros are less like that, but experiencing breakage and having to search for solutions is a perennial problem.
I’ve had far more problems installing windows over the years than I’ve had with linux and linux has been the only OS I use at home for quite a while now.
More like “I will run literally anything besides things you shouldn’t run because of privacy concerns… Though you may need 3 hours to install it.”
“RAM shortage? What RAM shortage? I smell DDR3 somewhere in the room, use that, I will still run fine”
That app that infringes your rights is the one you need to earn a living.
Ok then use wine or dual boot
It won’t stop privacy concerns but at least it makes it more complicated for microslop to collect everything about you
Wine sometimes works. Windows in VM might be possible if you have beefy hardware. With dual boot is probably the best option if you can manage the intricacies.
Wine seems pretty good. Though I need to understand it more deeply before I can comment more on it
Linux needs to be a Canadian goose. Those cobra chickens are just fine when you let them do their thing and ignore all the shit left behind cause you’re not sure it’s important to the planet, but the moment you start to mess with it and you don’t know what you’re doing they will fuck you up!
“I can’t run multiplayer games that have anti cheat.”. A.k.a. games that most of my friends play
Except Linux can run them.
It’s the anti-cheat that is deciding to not let the game run.
EDIT: And its not even “games that have anti-cheat”, its “games that have anti-cheat that actively block Linux”.
I solved this by getting better friends
That was keeping me dual booting but marvel rivals and helldivers now work so I made the switch.
it’s a bit more complicated. Linux runs games with anti-cheats perfectly fine as long as the anti-cheat doesn’t require kernel-level access.
Basically, this allows to detect some cheats that would be undetected otherwise. But it also allows anti-cheats for absolutely unrestricted access to any user data. In other words, it’s a giant safety vulnerability, that you’re forsed to intall, that still doesn’t solve the cheating problem.
Not like the devs are actually interested to solve anything anyway, cheaters buy new accounts regularily, stimulating post-release sales.
I am not into competitive gaming but I’ll be damned if I understand why the the anti-cheat modules are built into the game instead of being an aditional package that is installed and verified through the tournament platform.
Marvel Rivals, Team Fortress 2, Halo Infinite, CS2, Back 4 Blood, Payday 2, DotA 2, ARK, SMITE, Xonotic, For Honor, Dead By Daylight… https://areweanticheatyet.com/
There’s a clear difference between “can’t” and “developers won’t fix it”.
In the case of BF 6 and fornite it’s “could run, but we actively don’t want you to”.
Windows malware not working on Linux is an often touted benefit.
Feel free to try and convince me otherwise but, games shouldn’t be accessing your kernel at all. That’s a major security issue. Also part of the reason why Linux has complete separation between kernel and OS
I play tons of multiplayer games with anti cheat. The ones that don’t run are the ones I wouldn’t even play on a Windows machine though
Ouch.
But it depends on the developer of said multiplayer games. For example, Arc Raiders uses BattleEye for anti-cheat and it runs fine on Linux.
and I took that personally
On Linux you can indeed install old apps. You will just need to spend few hours doing so… or use Flatpak I guess.
I use Debian GNU/Linux ftw.
The only old software I’ve installed worked fine but I also compiled it myself. Which was quick because of the comparatively small codebases.
One of the levels this joke works on is that ducks and dogs and fish and birds are all among the best adapter to their own niche.
Some people just need what Microslop, Apple or Google aree peddling, at some moments.
Another way the joke works is because Linux is still the best, for anyone with a choice. Lol.
The updates are unwelcome because currently the updates remove desirable functionality while adding unwanted functionality. If they removed the ads and AI, they might actually stop the bleeding.
A serious software company offers separate update channels for feature updates and security updates. But not Microsoft. They don’t offer the bread and the shit separately. You have to eat the whole shit sandwich.
I would love to try kde3.5 again. The desktop of my childhood. But trinity project takes long to make it happen.
Trinity Desktop is the closest you’ll get.
I can’t stop you from breaking the whole system when you try to configure something and you do it wrong 😅
There are increasingly many guard rails, like a warning when you do “rm -rf .” in many systems, for example. It’s just that they are only guard rails, not walls. You can ignore them.
That’s the burden of assuming the operator is a person capable of understanding the consequences of their actions.
tbf you can do that on windows too, but there’s fewer ways to do it, and fewer ways to fix it, so someone else will have fucked up the same way previously and posted about it online somewhere, and system restore points are enabled by default 😅
looks at the camera
“When will you learn!!! When will you learn that YOUR ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES!!!”
Uncle Ben taught me the hard way, through his nephew, Peter. I was still a kid, but I knew: big power, big responsibility.
Uncle Ben taught me to add 2 cups of water to 1 cup of rice and microwave for 15 minutes.
Uncle Ben taught me how to grow mushrooms
operator is a person capable of understanding the consequences of their actions.
the hottest thing you can say in 2026 💦
If you’re capable of that you should be capable to use something like Snapper.
that would require the forethought to use it 😅
next time 😅
Linux really doesn’t get bragging rights for “install[ing] old applications”. Linux ironically has been somewhat better for me than Windows for running older Windows applications thanks to WINE, but when it comes to installing old Linux applications, even when I wasn’t on a rolling release distro, it’s been a total crapshoot.
If, for example, there’s a native Linux game that hasn’t been updated in a few years, my experience buying it has generally been hoping the Linux version works, it doesn’t, and I’m stuck running it through WINE.
PCSX2 1.6.0, which used wxWidgets, released May 2020, and even five years after that, opening it on Linux shows you a frozen, unusable window that you have to manually kill. (citing PCSX2 because it’s a use case of mine as a contributor.) IIIRC, on Windows, you can straight-up go back to versions from like 2010 and still have them work.
Which reminds me. Hotline Miami has a native Linux build, yet I had to install a few more libs to get it to work. The funniest part is that this was a GOG installer, so it should have had the libs built in. If I downloaded the Windows installer and used it with Wine, I wouldn’t have ran into this problem.
Another problem is with some but not all Unity games. I don’t remember what the other one was, but HuniePop’s Linux build would be skipping frames, and the Windows build would run just as intended.
It’s then I learned to stick to Windows versions of games even if they got a Linux version. Besides, I can send these installers to actual Windows devices.
The linux way to handle it is with a
chroot. Used to do this back in the day to get 32bit libraries on a 64bit distro that didn’t include 32bit libraries.chrootis the basis for modern containerization technologies. These days, I usually use it for bleeding edge application builds that don’t have a build for my distro, yet. Distrobox makes it pretty simple. With distrobox, you can install the application you need in the OS that supports the application you want, then just map the binary into your OS.See here: https://distrobox.it/useful_tips/#export-to-the-host
Just fyi containers use
pivot_rootnotchrootI’m aware. I said, “basis”, not “uses”.
Isn’t that functionally what a flatpak is?
Same concept. Flatpak is based on bubblewrap, which was based off another tool that was based on chroot.
Edit: Looks like Flatpak is working towards adopting a different (newer) feature that allows some containerization features at the user level, without requiring chroot super user level.
The reason this is a problem is that devs think they need to save 10MB of RAM by dynamically linking libc instead of statically compiling it or just including the blob with the game.
Puritans on Linux are a real menace. Every time someone calls an OS install image of 3-4gb “bloated” I want to scream uncontrollably. Not statically linking stuff is part of this cultural issue.
Flatpak might solves these issues in the long run. Of course the same people therefore hate it, because it’s “bloated” and “convoluted”.
<rant> How dare we have different versions of the same lib! Where will we end up, like MS Windows? Where I can boot up apps as old as myself? Outrageous! Not my precious mibibytes!). </rant>
Yeah, ten apps on the machine should be enough for anybody.
The core principal of GNU from which every other principal is derived is “I shouldn’t need an ancient unmaintained printer driver that only works on windows 95 to use my god damned printer. I should have the source code so I can adapt it to work with my smart toaster”
If an app is open source then I’ve almost never encountered a situation where I can’t build a working version. Its happened to me once that I remember. A synthesia clone called linthesia. Would not compile for love nor money and the provided binary was built for ubuntu 12 or something.
Linux was probably ready for the 64-bit appocalypse even before Apple for this exact reason. Anything open source will just run, on anything, because some hobbiest has wanted to use it on their favourite platform at some point. And if not, you’d be surprised how not hard it is to checkout the sourcecode from github and make your own port. Difficult, but far from impossible.
Steam games do not distribute source code, which means they break, and when they break the community can’t fix them. They can’t statically link glibc because that would put them in violation of the GPL (as far as I’m aware anyway). They are fundamentally second class citizens on linux because they refuse to embrace its culture. FOSS apps basically never die while there’s someone to maintain them.
Its like when American companies come to Europe and realise the workers have rights and then get a reputation as scuzzballs for trying to rules lawyer those rights.
This shit is the exact reason Linux doesn’t just have ridiculously bad backwards compatibility but has also alienated literally everyone who isn’t a developer, and why the most stable ABI on Linux is god damn Win32 through Wine. Hell, for the same reason fundamentally important things like accessibility tools keep breaking, something where the only correct answer to is this blogpost. FOSS is awesome and all, but not if it demands from you to become a developer and continuesly invest hundreds of hours just so things won’t break. We should be able to habe both, free software AND good compatibility.
What you describe is in no way a strength, it’s Linux’ core problem. Something we have to overcome ASAP.
It isn’t a core problem, it’s a filter, and a damn good one. Keeps the bad behavior out of Linux. Thats why people keep turning to it for lack of enshittification. Stable ABIs are what lead to corpo-capital interests infecting every single piece of technology and chaining us to their systems via vendor lock-in.
I wish the Windows users who are sick of Windows would stop moving to Linux and trying to change it into Windows. Yes, move to Linux if you want, but use Linux.
What, you don’t like role-playing software development & distribution as if we were still in the 90s?? 🥺🥺 /j
But srs, most of Linux’s biggest technical problems are either caused by cultural legacy or blocked by it. The distribution model being one of the most pungent examples.
Fortunately we do have a steady influx of new people incl. those who demand shit to god damn work, finally shifting this notion.
For the time being we still have to resort to using the Windows version and Wine for old software though… But I already had the situation where the (unmaintained but working) app also had a Flatpak which was last updated many years ago and it just worked, which made me incredibly happy and hopeful. ❤️
Good thing there’s a battle-proven response if people don’t like this because it’s “not what Linux is supposed to be” or some other nonsense: If you don’t like it just fork it yourself. 😚
I really think its just not that common. There are ways to do this for the few and not pollute the OS for the many. Steam does it for their use case. If it were a more common of a need, then I would expect distro maintainers to take care of it. The same way they did for 32bit libraries back in the day. When is the last time you had to install a 32bit distro along side your 64bit distro so you could run 32bit applications? Sometimes I need a bleeding edge build of an application. I run a stable distro. So build the application myself or install a quick chroot These days there is distrobox that makes it even easier. There are solutions. Easy from my perspective. That’s why I think, if this was such a common need, distro maintainers would provide a simple solution (automatically done for you).
This hasn’t been a problem for a decade or two, but I see drive costs inflate immensely, I wonder how it will impact how “bloat” is processed. Not everyone has infinite access to storage. BTRFS and other fs dedup features may be an acceptable work around, but I don’t know flatpacks structure enough to know if they can benefit from it.
Linux version of Rocket League still works but you can’t connect to the servers. They stopped supporting Linux when Epic bought them in 2019. So going on 7 years and the Linux version still works fine. Just as a counterpoint.
usually the solution is recompiling it, LD_PRELOADing older libraries or using chroot. Since linus never breaks userspace this can actually provide 100% compatibility.
Yeah, I found quite a few games that I had to go in and specify it re-download and use Proton because the Linux native build was borked.
In a lot of cases devs will export for Linux but not test it.
