Thanks for this. Indeed I was responding a bit flippantly to the whole "real" desktop software, as if there isn't any on Linux. I appreciate now it probably wasn't meant in that way, and so that aspect of my response was flippant and unhelpful.
Indeed, it seems for every example we find of serious expensive proprietary software that runs on Linux, there is another that doesn't.
We have Maya running on Linux, and Softimage. Both sold by Autodesk (albeit acquired). And yet other Autodesk products, like 3dsmax and Autocad, do not have Linux support. Asking about this on their forums appears to result in a rather curt response to read the system requirements where it says "Windows."
These are tools that people learn and take with them between jobs, and I can well imagine that these are people that could work on desktop Linux without too many problems as long as those tools moved with them. Replying "but blender can do that!" is completely ignoring the reality that people have invested significant time into these tools and know them well. Whilst blender is an amazing piece of free software, it's by no means an industry standard. In the way that Gimp is quite phenomenal, it seems many professionals find it lacks features that Photoshop has.
I don't think the "web browser" response cuts it in other areas either, even if a lot of the less technically demanding software is going cloud-based.
> It just seems like a bunch of ideology run amok with zero thought given to the actual needs of professional developers/companies. And, there's a lot of evidence that this is one of the primary things holding back Linux adoption on the desktop.
I think you're right, and I'm probably in that category. I've also seen what bad vendors can do to an ecosystem though. The windows ecosystem is still full of dodgy vendors.
I'm quite convinced that package-once-with-sandboxing will happen, and I will admit that Flatpak is probably in a prime position for that to happen. I think they've probably got the most correct direction of all the attempts in the space, it just doesn't seem to be there yet.
From a commercial vendor point of view, it's also not a problem if the user's home directory is bind mounted and over a year ago there was a bug with the sand-boxing that let malicious vendors install software that could run as root. Let's not forget that most Windows apps don't go anywhere near a sandbox in the first place and their installers need system-wide access. There's plenty of low-hanging fruit still in this space.
Things have definitely got better in recent years. One of the biggest things to improve this is that 32-bit x86 is dying off. There were a number of vendors that did the "we can just build 32-bit, like windows" without realising or caring about the horrors of multi-arch dependency hunting that they were inflicting on the sysadmin.
So thank you for your comment. It made me realise that I was probably being quite flippant about software which does fulfil a niche need and does it well, and that you only need one piece of such software to tie someone to an operating system they may otherwise have no affinity for.
