Re: Dear gods...
For a lot of engineering and creative outfits, Linux is simply not an option, currently. All the major CAD packages had migrated to Windows, what, 20 years ago? And they're not going anywhere for a good long time...
The reasons why CAD packages migrated from *nix to Windows was that 1) Windows was powerful enough, 2) Windows was cheaper, 3) *nix as a graphical workstation was becoming very out of date and unusable, and 4) Windows grew a reputation for supporting software for a long time (amazingly you can still just about run Windows 3 software, on Win10 32 bit).
Then there's the usual MS Office dependency problem. It's still way better than what is available on *nix. There's also MS Project, Active Directory; the list goes on. There's a ton of software out there that 99% of the world's computer users haven't even heard of, never mind use. Yet without that software, 99% of what gets made wouldn't exist.
As far as I can see there's no real prospect for large engineering outfits to migrate away from Windows unless a seriously significant percentage of applications are ported elsewhere first. One wonders, ported to what?
MS themselves have done something interesting, in putting SQL Server onto Linux. The way they've done it is interesting; rather than re-write SQL Server for *nix, they've done a Windows system call shim for Linux. With a lot of effort on MS's part, the same shim could be developed further so that any Windows application or library could run unmodified on top of Linux. It's a lower level thing than Wine, and if MS actually did do it, would come with a bunch of guarantees that it worked. Wine, whilst it is admirable, is always going to struggle to be completely right. Anyway I can't see MS actually making something like that into a universal Windows App runtime for Linux.
But the Linux desktop is something of a stability nightmare too. Which distribution? Which desktop? Which package manager? And if you need kernel level driver support for licence dongles, which kernel version? It doesn't even do sound properly. Linux anarchy is very off-putting.
How about Apple MACs? Well clearly Apple has no interest in pursuing the desktop market, it no longer gives a damn about the creative types.
Ported to Web Apps? I don't think that's an option. Google Docs is a nasty horrible pile of ghastly Javascript, and is something of a toy (a slow one at that) compared to a properly sorted desktop application. The idea of implementing a major CAD package as a Web app is laughably unworkable at present.
I genuinely fear for the future for creative people. It's going to become expensive and difficult to host and support the types of software tools that creative people use, and now even MS is looking like walking away from them and their needs.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
