What are some things that Linux can't do, but Windows can?

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Adobe lightroom (with its multi-device editing and catalogue management - even when only using its cloud for smart previews).
Hardware support for music. NI Maschine is a non-starter. Most other devices are, at best, a 'hope it works' but are most definitely unsupported.
Music software. You can hack your way into getting a lot of your paid modules to work, but it is certainly not supported.
Wine is 'fun'(?), but it's a game of whack-a-mole chasing windows' tail and will never allow everything to run. Either way it's not 'supported.
Businesses any any size tend to eschew SW/HW that doesn't have formal support. (things like RHEL are most definitely supported as servers and orgs certainly leverage it).
I keep installing Linux hoping I can get a sufficient amount stuff to work "well enough" to move on from windows but it's just not to be (yet). Hope it changes, but it'll require buy-in from commercial product developers. I hope as Linux continues to grow a foothold in desktop installs, a critical mass will be reached, commercial devs take notice and it'll be easier to switch.
For now, I'm stuck with Windows and WSL. (But I am not happy with Windows' direction).
- This commenter used "NI Maschine" as though everbody'd know what "NI" stood for...
  iirc, it stands for Native Instruments, and iirc, the "Maschine" is either hardware or hardware+software.
  The ONLY Linux distro which may do what theyre wanting, is UbuntuStudio.
  I happen to agree that it is a damn "whack-a-mole" "game" for us in Linux, and I"ve been experiencing that since 1996 ( when only Slackware mostly-worked ),
  but .. if ever the spyware in MS's products gets made illegal, then .. Linux'd be the only lifeboat left?
  ( don't tell me that Apple isn't every-bit as much into privacy-molestation as the other Big Tech corpos are: they aren't a real alternative )
  _ /\ _
  
  Interestingly, a friend of mine just sent me this https://www.musicradar.com/news/linux-studio.
  I will try to help him out with it - it's promising, as he does not have the hardware/workflow obstacles that I have, but he's also not as technically minded. I actually really hope becomes workable for him.
  Update - it's ultimately a non-starter, I'm afraid. A nightmare in trying to integrate unsupported HW (Line 6, etc - forgot about those ones...)
  Frustrating. Naively, I keep trying and bashing my head into that wall...
  
  Ah yes - Native Instruments. It's both HW and SW. I should have been more clear. No joy on Ubuntu - the issue is the HW driver. The HW is simply unsupported. (someone wrote a driver to partially allow midi mode on an older version of the HW, but it's completely hobbled and, I fear, makes my point more loudly than I could if it didn't exist. FWIW, only the older Native Instruments installers will run under wine - the new ones leverage certain features of windows that apparently will never be supported by wine, so I have little confidence in wine-based solutions for anything I need to depend on going forward.
  Apple makes great computers, but... I can't stand them. You're in a walled proprietary garden and it drives me bonkers. I also have similar suspicions wrt their privacy practices.
  Windows, for me, works well enough (I can get it to do everything I need) but I have grave concerns about privacy and a really, really don't like their AI direction. It's the opposite of what I want in a computer.
  I've considered going full Linux as hypervisor with Windows as guest, but it's really not that easy to actually use beyond a theoretical proof of concept once you start managing large sound libraries.
  Would like to get back to Linux as daily driver as I did years ago and actually do run it on a few old laptops. (I wish there was a better email client - the only one that seems to successfully support oauth2 is thunderbird, and it's more than a bit unwieldy for large mailboxes (especially with its circa 1997 design aesthetic...)
  Anyway - I really, really want to find a way to make a leap to Linux (again) but it's currently not feasible, no matter how hard I bang my head against that particular wall...
- What wasn't working that you couldn't use Linux? If it was wine then I totally understand and it sounds like you're a media editor or something in which case you're stuck with Mac or Windows. I personally just always dual boot and run Linux 99% of the time and only open windows when I really need it, which is almost never.
  
  Well, the question was essentially along the lines of "What works better on Windows than on Linux" so I figured it was fair game to answer based on my experience.
  I do hope that situation improves (it is - but there still are meaningful gaps for my purposes).
- These aren't Linux issues that Windows does better. It's just companies that decided their software shouldn't run on Linux.
  
  Well, then Windows is better at getting third party producers to support it. Same problem, same result, different wording.
  
  Sure, but there's a big difference between the support existing within the Linux architecture and it not. Almost every issue in the parent comment could be fixed without any input from Linux developers at all.
  But fundamentally Linux and open source are ethically orthogonal to for-profit software. The fact that big software companies don't prioritize Linux is in some ways a feature, and is why we actually have the proliferation of high-quality open source alternatives. I doubt Blender or GIMP would exist if the proprietary leaders in their fields offered Linux versions from the beginning, especially if they were free.
  There are people in the thread talking about how all Linux needs is for big software companies to ditch Microsoft and get with Linux, but that would never happen as they're imagining. Big for-profit tech would always put itself into a walled garden. What needs to happen is that the few big unassailable tech stacks that keep people chained to the proprietary products need real open replacements -- namely GIMP needs to get its redesign finished and figure out the last few features it needs for professional parity, and we need a real AutoCAD competitor. I think we already have good DAWs and professional audio through JACK/Pipewire, and there's probably a couple others that I'm forgetting... But if Photoshop and AutoCAD alone were not viewed as unreplaceable, that would be a massive boost in the number of people who could use Linux for their jobs.
  
  That's how business works. What company is going to dedicate a bunch of resources to make 1% of their market happy?
  
  Personally, I hope the market share grows sufficiently that commercial enterprises start to develop for it. With the direction windows is going we need alternatives more than ever.
  
  I 100% agree, but it's a catch 22. No one develops for Linux because it doesn't have a market share, and it doesn't have a market share because no one develops for it.
  
  Exactly! But I really, really hope that the growing share in India and other places starts to catalyze commercial development.
  Immutable packages like flatpak (or whatever is your format of choice) makes the software side way, way easier. It'll take a bit more convincing to get HW makers to dive in though.
  It's no joke making supported software let alone HW for multiple flavours sites of kernel, architecture.
  It's a lot better than 25 years ago when I used as a daily driver, but we're just not quite there yet. I keep trying!
  
  3.8%
  Also redhat.
  
  I'll give you the 3.8 as total userbase, but I'm willing to bet that it's only about 1% that are exclusive to Linux and don't use a Windows machine at all.
  
  Right. I mean, macs used to be the bees' knees.

543 comments