Comment by jazzyjackson
3 months ago
You're forgetting business critical software outside of office that's windows only or windows/macos.
Stuff like Quickbooks, AutoCAD/Autodesk, off the top of my head
3 months ago
You're forgetting business critical software outside of office that's windows only or windows/macos.
Stuff like Quickbooks, AutoCAD/Autodesk, off the top of my head
I've never worked at Autodesk, and I don't use CAD. But I see they have a Web version of AutoCAD. I assume there are a bunch of Autodesk employees on Hackernews who can correct me, and I know there's probably a boat load of issue for a huge legacy project like that. But how long until AutoCAD web is just AutoCAD? Or some competitor a'la Figma is in the web?
It will _never_ get to that point unless they port the original codebase to WASM or something. Or another product comes around that's so market upsetting that it takes the crown. The same can be said for Adobe products.
QuickBooks Desktop only exists in an Enterprise edition anymore (which is expensive), if you want to run still-supported versions of it. Intuit is pushing everyone hard to QuickBooks Online.
Moving to cloud, or very rare for the general public to be aware of them.
Well, I wasn't trying to dispute that general home uses can get by on Linux, just that industry is a large user base that isn't going to switch because the software they depend on is tied to an OS. QuickBooks is used by a lot of people, and their web product is not an alternative to the desktop app
If it isn't it will be, as non-subscription software is phased out by big companies.
All of which are very easily replaceable. That list is laughable for an example of lock in.
I used to run AutoCAD on a 80286 with a maths co-pro with 1 MB RAM. It has changed somewhat since!
Who gives a shit about QB? - you could just run it in a VM and it probably runs under Wine. You can also just switch accounting vendor - there are quite a few. Double book keeping is a good 600 years old and can be considered pretty open source these days.
You may even do some real good to your business (if you think you need QB) by going old school and really getting to grips with the numbers. Buy three huge ledgers and label them: "Sales" "Purchase" and "Nominal" or "General". Also grab an exercise book to act as a cash book and a couple of notebooks to document the system. Now, you will need to do docs too so you will need a drawing board to design your forms ...
Now CAD is not the most common business software in use by anyone which is probably why you went for AutoCAD (which you have heard of), rather than, say, Solidworks or Catia. Autodesk is a vendor and not a stuff.
I love how you suggested I go back to bookkeeping by hand if I want to buck the Microsoft/Intuit monopoly. I'm talking about tracking accounts receivable on thousands of invoices with individual parts that ship separately. There's very few options out there, and if I want it to "just work" with live account balances of my bank forget about it
QB Desktop doesn't run reliably under WINE; it doesn't run reliably under Windows 11 for Arm, either.
Intuit doesn't even want you to run QB desktop, they want you to use QB web.
The alternatives not only exist, they're often pushed by the very same developers who made the original which is, supposedly, untouchable.
Fascinating. I believe you, but what sort of stuff doesn't work? Video games and their graphics manage to work under Wine/forks and those are quite complicated APIs to not-emulate.