alt Hacker NewsThe rule of thumb is if you can use Linux and you don't have a very weird niche application that only runs on Windows, then you should migrate to Linux. There are plenty of good entry-level distributions and all sorts of applications too. Sooner or later, Windows will be abandonware with all the BS they will integrate, from always online to AI scanning all your files, so be proactive. I think even macOS is better than Windows in the current day, and you don't need a fortune too. The other day I found a mid-2012 MacBook Pro for $15 at the thrift store, installed 16GiB RAM and an SSD that I both had around, and installed the latest Sequoia with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, and voila, works just like new!
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> Sooner or later, Windows will be abandonware with all the BS they will integrate, from always online to AI scanning all your files
I really hope this is correct. If there were any justice in the world....
But, oh my aching head, the IT industry seems to be fill of people barely holding on, hoping and preying nobody calls their bluff.
To these people, who hold a death grip on middle management, "nobody gets fired for buying microsoft" is a real thing
Quality be dammed, job security rules the roost
The problem is that some of these niche Windows-only applications rely on drivers that are only available for Windows. In which case, migrating to Linux is challenging at best and impossible at worst.
Until that day, there unfortunately ARE niche applications. Fieldworks Language Explorer (aka FLEx) is software developed by SIL Inc for doing linguistic fieldwork (dictionaries, text, grammars, parsing...) in minority languages. There's nothing like it. There was a Linux version, but they ran out of funding; I've used it, but reportedly there are major bugs.
FLEx won't run under Wine, but I'll be trying this WinBoat to see if it works.
(You may have heard of SIL's fonts, which they also make freely available. The fonts work for a huge variety of scripts, including the Nasta'liq Arabic style that other fonts don't touch, and Burmese, which from a writing standpoint is truly crazy.)