Sanya Whines about Linux and Wine

[SanyaWaffles]

So... I see a lot of users migrating to Linux, or have already done so, due to Windows 11 being at best spyware riddled, and at worst, unusable slop.

I've considered the plunge into using Linux as a daily driver. There's a few things that are holding me back.

1.) My art program is Macromedia Flash 8 (or Adobe Animate 2023 in imperial units) and doesn't work well with Wine

I was able to get Macromedia Flash 8 to install on Wine but I could not get the Wintab driver support to work at all. It just registered it as a mouse. I have both a Wacom Intuos Pro and an XP Pen Artist 13 Pro and neither of them work with Wine at all, even with native Linux drivers available for both.

I sometimes get people going "just use [FOSS equivalent here]. I've tried Inkscape, Synfig, and even Krita and none scratch the itch to Adobe Animate/Macromedia Flash's vector tools. For me it's an accessibility thing. As shit as Adobe is as a company, I find Animate to be the only program I can comfortably draw in, either Macromedia Flash 8 or Adobe Animate.

I know it seems counterintuitive to try to use Animate/Flash this way, but truthfully if I can't have access to this art program, I might as well give up drawing for good at this point.

2.) I listen to a lot of emulated video game music and I don't know any music program on Linux that can play it

This one is less frustrating as I could use multiple programs, but I'm not really sure about what's the best program for these sorts of things.

3. I'm in the middle of two GZDoom related productions. I don't wanna have to rebuild my whole toolchain, especially targeting Windows still.

This one surprisingly gets a lot of people frustrated at me when I tell them that. It's like the equivilent of buying a new car in the middle of a road trip because your current one works but is a brand you despise and might die at any moment.

As much as I'd like to switch... it's neigh impossible for these reasons.

In short, I have no idea what to do. I've entertained the idea of dual booting, but people give me mixed reports on Windows allowing that nowadays, as well as I'd hate to have to reboot my computer into Linux or Windows depending on what I need to do in the moment.

In the past I've been called by someone a Windows/Microsoft bootlicker for not switching for these reasons. I wish I was joking/taking the piss/whatnot.

---

I guess my question is: am I stuck on Windows or am I missing some vital information that could help me along.

[MartinHowe]

So... I see a lot of users migrating to Linux, or have already done so, due to Windows 11 being at best spyware riddled, and at worst, unusable slop.

Fixed it for ya

I made the switch when Windows 7 went EOL and was fortunate enough to have prior UNIX experience for 20 years. The things that kept me back until a couple of years ago were Paint.Net (using Pinta now) and UDB (works, somewhat jankily, on Linux natively now).

For music playback, it would be helpful to know what the types of these files are; however, the best all round player is VLC Media Player; it can play most things and is in the software store or most Linux distros.

For vector graphics, sorry I have no idea

I had to rebuild my toolchain too; but it was much easier since bash, as a scripting language, is light years better than ... cmd But it did take some time.

[axredneck]

2.) I listen to a lot of emulated video game music and I don't know any music program on Linux that can play it

Try Deadbeef.
(I currently use Foobar2000 + Wine for this stuff, but i used Deadbeef before.)

[Blzut3]

In short, I have no idea what to do. I've entertained the idea of dual booting, but people give me mixed reports on Windows allowing that nowadays, as well as I'd hate to have to reboot my computer into Linux or Windows depending on what I need to do in the moment.

Whoever is giving mixed reports is just a doomsayer. The closest that happened is 1) Windows RT devices were locked down. These are the Windows 8/8.1 ARM devices. The newer Windows 10/11 ARM devices as far as I know are not (although they have other issues that need to be worked through before running alternate operating systems on them is actually a good experience). 2) Microsoft recently started requiring that prebuilt computers ship with secure boot set so that by default 3rd party operating systems can't be loaded. This is a toggle in the UEFI setup. Conceivably a vendor could be dumb and not provide that toggle, but that'd be the vendor's choice. 3) Prebuilt computers are now shipped with full disk encryption turned on which can get in the way of repartitioning. You can, however, just turn encryption off in Windows.

This doesn't stop people certain people from extrapolating rumors and not adjusting their opinions when they don't pan out. Could this conceivably change in the future, sure, but as of now the biggest hurdle is you might need to flip a switch in the UEFI setup. Since you're already running Linux so you can definitely dual boot if you want.

With that said, with your specific problem you'd probably get what you need by just running Windows in a virtual machine on Linux. You can pass through USB devices to the VM so you'd be able to install the Wacom driver. Probably far more convenient than restarting the computer to run one program.

[Graf Zahl]

With that said, with your specific problem you'd probably get what you need by just running Windows in a virtual machine on Linux.

Has performance of that improved in recent years? I had to use such a setup at work a few years ago and it made Windows unbearably slow even on a reasonably performant system.

So... I see a lot of users migrating to Linux, or have already done so, due to Windows 11 being at best spyware riddled, and at worst, unusable slop.

Fixed it for ya

Whatever. For me Linux has never been more than a piece of unusable slop. To each their own.
What I find most sad is that this thread mirrors discussions I remember from 15 years back, outlining exactly the same problems with Linux - with no solution in sight.

[SanyaWaffles]

So... I see a lot of users migrating to Linux, or have already done so, due to Windows 11 being at best spyware riddled, and at worst, unusable slop.

Fixed it for ya

Whatever. For me Linux has never been more than a piece of unusable slop. To each their own.

I'm not a mod here, so if I overstep my bounds here, apologies- but I have to put my foot down.

Don't do this back and forth "Linux slop, Windows slop". I don't care to hear it.

As much as Windows has deteriorated and Linux still has its hurdles, I'd appreciate the Windows vs Linux discourse be kept to a minimum on this thread because my focus here is trying to find solutions to dual booting Linux and use it more rather than low key insults.

I should really have not titled it the way I did :<

To be frank: any time I try to embrace Linux it devolves into "Windows Bad" rather than what makes Linux good or stand out on its own. Don't do that.

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Back to the topic at hand. I did recently reinstall Windows 11 - the LTSC variety - and before that, dual booted Linux Mint.

I was genuinely surprised that Wine recognized my tablet at all, and not only that, the only thing that didn't work was pressure. However, it was a bit choppy with my tablet pen.

That said, I didn't uninstall Linux right away. I am enjoying it... when it does work.

The problem is probably with me, I stubbornly stick with a program that won't run natively in Linux.

So Windows 11 will remain my main, but I do hope out Linux will mature beyond this point, because I could get used to it.

[SanyaWaffles]

2.) I listen to a lot of emulated video game music and I don't know any music program on Linux that can play it

Try Deadbeef.
(I currently use Foobar2000 + Wine for this stuff, but i used Deadbeef before.)

This is what I ended up doing when I'm in that environment - the foobar2000 + wine thing - due to me listening to a lot of VGZ/VGM and other game emu music files, but I'll keep this in mind as well. Thank you.

[Blzut3]

Has performance of that improved in recent years? I had to use such a setup at work a few years ago and it made Windows unbearably slow even on a reasonably performant system.

It hard to answer without the specific use case since it depends entirely on what you're using it for and how much that use case involves hitting emulated devices. I personally can't say I've experienced a performance issue with the operating system itself and I imagine that the Adobe Animate would have no particular issue. So for SanyaWaffles specific use case it seems like it would be the perfect fit.

[Graf Zahl]

Has performance of that improved in recent years? I had to use such a setup at work a few years ago and it made Windows unbearably slow even on a reasonably performant system.

It hard to answer without the specific use case since it depends entirely on what you're using it for and how much that use case involves hitting emulated devices. I personally can't say I've experienced a performance issue with the operating system itself and I imagine that the Adobe Animate would have no particular issue. So for SanyaWaffles specific use case it seems like it would be the perfect fit.

For me, hard drive access was the biggest problem. Whenever large amounts of files needed to be read, performance completely tanked, as an example, a complete GZDoom compile, which on my Windows system back then took roughly 1.5 minutes, took 10 in the VM.

[Graf Zahl]

So Windows 11 will remain my main, but I do hope out Linux will mature beyond this point, because I could get used to it.

I've been using Windows 11 for 3 years now, with a few small tweaks it works just as well as older versions.

What I did was first to reactivate the old task bar (Google should be able to find some instructions - back then it was just changing one registry setting) and then installed a start menu replacement.
Since that, no problems whatsoever, just the same as my old Windows 8 system.

BTW, complaining about Windows telemetry sounds a bit weird these days when basically all professional software is doing that. To escape this you need to bury your smartphone and your tablet six feet deep and never touch them ever again (mobile devices send magnitudes more data than Windows and you have no means to control it), set up a system solely consisting of FOSS software and eschew all the convenience modern software provides - and preferably stay offline forever.
Linux would do that but you experienced yourself what a bumpy ride that can be - and if you run professional software in Wine you are mostly back to where Windows is anyway.

[Blzut3]

For me, hard drive access was the biggest problem. Whenever large amounts of files needed to be read, performance completely tanked, as an example, a complete GZDoom compile, which on my Windows system back then took roughly 1.5 minutes, took 10 in the VM.

I can't say the compiler performance on the VMWare Fusion VM that I'm using to run the DRD Team dev builds is notably slower, granted I haven't done a proper A/B test to quantify. I don't have any benchmarks but I would imagine if you pass through a physical disk (possible on some hypervisors including KVM on Linux and Hyper-V on Windows) instead of using a dynamic virtual disk I'd expect negligible overhead. But then you lose some convenience features like snapshots and of course having to carve out space ahead of time.

[Rachael]

For me, hard drive access was the biggest problem. Whenever large amounts of files needed to be read, performance completely tanked, as an example, a complete GZDoom compile, which on my Windows system back then took roughly 1.5 minutes, took 10 in the VM.

A correctly set up VM should be somewhat transparent in terms of performance - to have performance tank this badly suggests to me that not enough memory was allocated to the VM or that other problems may have arisen in its configuration.

Unfortunately Windows is a great deal more of a memory hog than Linux is, and always has been. That isn't to say Linux doesn't have its footprint, but when running a Windows VM inside of Linux it is generally safe to use more than half of your system's total available RAM; unfortunately whatever Windows does, it just needs it. Windows 10 will probably not run well with less than 8 GB of RAM, and Windows 11 likewise with less than 16 GB. There are things you can do to minimize what Windows loads, though, to reduce the amount of RAM that it tries to take.

On the subject of RAM, some Windows components have memory leaks. You will notice over time the longer your uptime, the more RAM the system needs to hold. So if you have to set it up with limited RAM, make sure to restart it often.

If you are using QEMU make sure also that you are using an accelerator other than TCG. It's good for what it does, but it is painfully slow for what you need. If the kernel supports KVM, it is quite preferable to activate that. VirtualBox and VMWare try to select better accelerators by default out-of-the-box, so this is less of a concern for those two, but obviously they both will still benefit if the kernel provides KVM services also.

The virtual CPU should also have more than 1 CPU core. Almost all virtualizers only expose 1 core by default; you have to manually configure it to use more.

If possible, accelerate your display as well. QEMU, VirtualBox, and VMWare all support direct forwarding of your OpenGL and Vulkan to the guest OS, though they need the correct drivers to use them. With QEMU this is particularly tricky to set up, also, so VirtualBox and VMWare will probably both work better to overcome this obstacle, but if you can figure out QEMU's way of doing it, then it will also work. Believe it or not, drawing the display costs a ton of CPU cycles when a GPU is not available, and that takes time away from compiling and whatever, especially with large amounts of scrolling text. (With XP and older it was possible to just alt-enter the console window and make it go fullscreen, this sped things up a ton since the guest OS no longer had to draw the letters on the screen, it could just forward that task to the virtual VGA card instead)

Then everything else that goes along with using virtual machines in general all still applies, whether using vmware, virtualbox, or qemu - make sure the guest drivers/additions are fully installed and operational.

Also, if possible, disable the horrifically unoptimized Windows Defender. On its own, it slows file access times by at least 200 milliseconds per file, sometimes more. That adds up very quickly, especially when utilizing a project with a lot of loose files (like a GZDoom repo).

Lastly, the golden rule of virtual machines is that your CPU's virtualization extensions must be enabled. Many motherboards disable this by default for pretty dumb reasons. So you will have to enter your system's UEFI setup program and turn it on.