So you have chosen to double down: here are arguments as promised then.
Let’s address this point and then go back up a bit.
First I’ll make an analogy.
PhotoLab supports X-Trans CMOS from Fujifilm since version 5, and in Elite versions only: it took them a lot of time to implement it.
Last year, all Fujifilm cameras combined (so, including other sensors than X-Trans) only amounted to 6% of the digital camera market.
Did DxO waste their time supporting an arcane RAW format from a very special sensor from a brand that only has “a few lousy procent” [sic] of the market?
If you say “yes” to that, then your viewpoint about operating system support is coherent, except that in this data Fujifilm only grew +0.2pts (+3.4%) between 2022 and 2024, whereas the Linux market share grew +2.7pts (+75%) to 6.3% in two years according to the annual PornHub stats (yeah I wanted another source than StatCounter), and if their stats are a mean of the whole year then they don’t represent the whole new users from the past few months: Zorin OS, one of the many “mainstream” distributions, announced last month that in less than a month their latest version got downloaded more than 780 000 times from Windows machines, an absolute record.
Do you “see and understand” now?
That being said, as promised, let’s rewind a bit.
It’s Torvalds, not Torwalds.
The official stats only go back to 2005, but if you’re just counting the kernel it had more than 42 000 individual contributors and almost 5 000 organizations contributing to it: it went way beyond the “student project” it once was.
The outcome? See for yourself : 100% of supercomputers, >70% of smartphones (because Android is Linux-based), >63% of web servers, most if not all “smart” devices (like your television, your Internet box, …), and more.
It doesn’t need much to fully bleed onto the desktop.
The software division of IBM and what was its consumer hardware division are completely different, so the loss of one didn’t impact the other, nor their investments into various standards such as the ones described earlier.
Again, when I described WebAssembly versions it only meant that they can run in a browser, whether the source is local or distant doesn’t change that fact.
You can open local files in your browser, you know?
A lot of desktop softwares nowadays are basically a browser with a web application bundled into it (like Visual Studio Code), and the WASM overhead compared to native code isn’t that big (it depends on the language).
It’s Torvalds, not Thorvalds.
As stated previously, MS Office and (part of?) Adobe suites are available online under Linux.
Recently, Microsoft Xbox stopped exclusivity of their games and published them on PlayStation too, because many divisions inside Microsoft don’t care that much where you run their products as long as you pay for them and run them: it’s not far-fetched to imagine a native Linux version of Office, even if as described above their web versions work very well for the special cases where they’re needed (mostly online collaborations anyway).
You should read Torvald’s biography, he didn’t have a “student-like dream”, he just started a project to learn about OSes and provide a free alternative to Unix to his fellow students, and he stayed with the project as it grew alongside him: if the project wasn’t worth it anymore he’d have retired.
The alternatives I suggest work for most people, for the administrations and state services in Europe that made the switch (more are planning to do it), and for the businesses that can use them.
If they don’t work for you, well… don’t use them, or contribute/invest in them?
Oh, a quick reply for another poster.
Darktable and RawTherapee have been mentioned in this thread already.
I’ve started to use both, and they both have their strengths: RawTherapee probably wins on the UI front though.
After checking them out both I don’t think there is a need for more software like these.
As for what I did for them? This week I helped them support the Sony A7V RAWs (only the lossless one for now), and after a quick file replacement I can already edit these RAWs in Darktable: meanwhile the support for this camera is only planned for “a bit later after January” in DxO applications.
You’re welcome.
Or both, when a company needs to sell “vendor-supported operating system” to a client (in web hosting for instance).
Companies need to pay smart people whether they have a Linux or a Microsoft infrastructure (often it’s a mix of both), a Linux infrastructure in itself doesn’t imply paying more people.
On the opposite, in my company we manage way more Linux servers than Windows servers and despite that the Linux team is smaller… go figure!
Now back to Stenis.
On the latest Steam Survey, 3.2% of Steam users are currently on Linux.
And you know what Steam users do? They PAY for games.
My public profile currently lists 2697 games (some of my games are hidden from the public list for “reasons”), so yeah I paid a bunch.
And indeed most of these games run on Linux now, some through native versions and others because Valve invested in compatibility layers.
This thread has many examples of current or former DxO clients who aren’t asking DxO to open-source their software and turn them “donationware” the Blender way (that would probably be stupid): no, we’re asking a Linux version to be able to continue to give them a share of our own money, while showing them the adoption trends and the other benefits they could gain by refactoring their UI (as the core components are already or can be turned platform-agnostic), so the point is that we are willing to pay for a version we can use and which would, in an ideal scenario, work better for everybody while requiring less work on their end in the long run.
Oh and by the way I mentioned Blender: in 2024 they got more than 3 Million euros of income through various donations (including corporate ones): the development fund by itself is currently at almost 250 000 € per month now, for a software that is completely free.
Another example would be KDE, one of the two major desktop environments in Linux: their yearly fundraiser just reached 300 000 €, almost six times what they got last year, for a software that is completely free and only used by a part of “a few lousy percent”: it proves that the new users are more than ready to pay (and also are receptive to the one-time popup the KDE developers added, to be fair).
Again this is not a way to ask DxO to switch to an open source model, but just a way to counter the “users of open source software are not willing to pay” argument.
Yes, and that reason is called inertia.
What we’re trying to show in this thread, with arguments, is that they should prepare for what’s coming because said inertia will bite them in the ass if a commercial competitor acts before them.
We’ll see! Again I’m favouring local webapps and not remote ones, but I also gave other native possibilities.
Oh, another user.
It’s not necessary anymore since 2003 when DKMS arrived to the kernel thanks to Dell, but generally distributions (from the Debian family, the Red Hat family, the Arch family, …) will handle dependencies on kernel upgrades and recompile silently what’s needed, if needed.
Nobody expects you to.
Are you trying to say that restricting the product audience will hurt it in the long run?
How fitting…
Other ones: VLC is mostly French, as well as ffmpeg (an audio/video library used by almost every video service).
Because you may be uncomfortable with the requirements of Windows 11 that, for many machines, requires a complete hardware upgrade (motherboard, CPU, memory) at a time where memory prices have quadrupled due to OpenAI buying 40% of the world’s supply at once.
Or you may be uncomfortable with the fact that Windows 11 is trying to make you use AI at all costs, or pushes broken updates because 30% of new Windows code is potentially broken AI-written code.
Or you may be uncomfortable with Recall, the Windows 11 tool that takes a screenshot of your screen every five seconds to fill a database for use by their AI Copilot.
Or you may want to have a local user on your machine, which Windows 11 actively fights against, instead of having to login on your machine using an online Microsoft account.
I could go on.
That’s right. Windows users shouldn’t have to use the command-line either, but many of them were forced to do that recently due to a bug in the task manager.