hckrnws

2008 to 2025 is an eternity in software.

Webapps, and the generation of people who built them (who very likely grew up in the era of desktop apps with activation keys), killed the conversation off. You share your identity with the webapp provider to get access to all but the simplest apps, and there's a tiered access model going from freemium to premium. In particular, freemium attempts to remove that "I just need it for one quick thing" friction.

That said, the reasons for piracy remain the same: friction and price. It goes both ways really. People pay for 365 because free Office suites dont quite do what they want and that introduces friction. People pirate Photoshop because its outrageously expensive relative to the value that it provides to the pirating user.

Seconding your ending statement there: I make good money, and I pay for a lot of software to make my little life spin along, and the little bit of theoretical piracy I consider doing, satirically of course, is far more to do with how onerous the procedure is to acquire the product legally than anything about it's costs.

Movies are a great example. If I can stream a given movie on any of the services I already purchase, obviously that's great and I'll do that. Failing that, I'd like to buy it on iTunes as I trust Apple a little more than most others in the space (YMMV). Failing that, if I can buy temporary access on Amazon Prime/YouTube/Whatever, sure. If however I'm essentially expected to fork out yet another $10-$20 on yet another subscription with yet another mediocre app that will slow my Apple TVs to a crawl, or worse, demand the right to shove ads in my face... no. Pass.

I also ditched Photoshop's $10/mo subscription after years because the quality of it just kept going down. I remember being so excited when the first update for the M1 Macs dropped, and Photoshop suddenly felt to use like it did in the 2010's; snappy, performant, efficient. And it took barely 3 years for Adobe to manage to bloat it up so it ran like shit again. So I dropped that and spent $50 on Affinity Photo and I couldn't be happier. Granted some things take a few more steps to do in Affinity, but those steps are all quick, snappy and responsive unlike seemingly every action in Photoshop.

It blows my mind how the software and larger entertainment industries refuse to learn the lessons of Steam. Steam isn't perfect, of course, it has it's issues here and there but it made great strides to reduce piracy not by locking the products down so hard and with such onerous software/rootkits/DRM but instead by just making the idea of buying and getting the game so obtusely convenient that pirating it is more work and why spend hours downloading questionable software and carefully going through an installation procedure when you could just wishlist it there, wait for it to go on sale, grab it for $10 and have it in the time it takes you to make a coffee?

> It blows my mind how the software and larger entertainment industries refuse to learn the lessons of Steam

IMO it’s because so many people in large companies want to avoid ownership and responsibility.

It’s like that old saying “nobody got fired for contracting IBM.”

Nobody gets fired for going with intrusive DRM. It’s good for the company!

My understanding of Valve is that it’s a small-ish high-ownership company.

Software has this (very convenient) problem of only selling tool chests, not just tools.

So if you just need one or two features of a program, then you still need to purchase...err, rent...the entire thing. Sometimes you even need to rent it for a full year.

Thankfully it seems LLM's are on track to solve this problem at least partially by being able to effectively code very narrow scope solutions. You can't prompt Claude to write Photoshop, but you can prompt it to write a program that scales images and applies a basic filter. (Yes, I know there are a gazillion free photo tools, this is just an accessible example).

> It blows my mind how the software and larger entertainment industries refuse to learn the lessons of Steam.

Apple includes a lot of free software with their paid devices, such as iWork, Mail, Garageband, etc.

Not sure but would say that people pirate Photoshop even more since it went full subscription model. From my experience, once I learned they're going this way I bought the last Lightroom available and have it on my DVD. Of course this has been quite a time ago and it will not work with new cameras' raw formats but I guess I will just buy older camera, not the bleeding edge one, if my camera breaks beyond repeair

My use case is: do some photos once every two months and make them better using lightroom. Paying monthly for it makes really no sense for me.

> People pirate Photoshop because its outrageously expensive relative to the value that it provides to the pirating user

Why would this be the case? Surely it's because pirating it is cheaper and there aren't any enforced consequences.

One time payment for affinity photo/designer and couldn't be happier not to deal with Adobe's subpar software and all that comes with it.

I've tried Affinity. Unfortunately a literal lifetime of photoshop has made it basically impossible to switch. It's like getting into a car and all the buttons are rearranged and behave different.

The jokes on me. I pirated photoshop way back in the day. Now I have no choice but to shell out a subscription.

That sounds good (it's what I'd do) but doesn't seem to be related to what I'm commenting on.

I like Affinity Photo a lot, and it's what I use, but Photoshop is definitely the more powerful program. Affinity still doesn't even have an auto-select.

Piracy is one of the reasons SaaS has much weaker adoption in South East Asia.

During the 8 and 16 bit home computing days, buying legit software in Portugal was almost impossible, even the boxes being sold at some stores were actually illegal copies, and it used to be common in the late 1990's that photocopy places near universities had catalogs with software to get copies from.

Eventually there was some crackdown from SPA in cooperation with the police forces, and most businesses nowadays run legit, however I will gladly bet than there are still plenty of business that do not, especially in small towns.

Also that we aren't the only country where it goes like that.

This article about software piracy in Italy in the 80s and 90s was linked here some time ago: https://genesistemple.com/a-swashbuckling-tale-of-italian-so... – seems to be very similar to your story in Portugal.

I don't think it was that extreme here in Germany, but I do recall my father coming home various times throughout the years with cases containing ~20-50 3.5" floppy disks for our Atari STs that were either completely unlabeled or with hand-written or home-printed labels. Always interesting finding out how to start each game and looking at the colourful intros.

Yep, exactly the same kind of stuff.

By the way there is a movie that touches this, but from movie industry side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_by_Erry

Back in the 8 bit days, the dream of each teenager was to get a double deck tape recorder, at least for those on Speccy side.

Years later on the Amiga, X-Copy was a must have.

There still is a relatively easy Windows10/11 activation crack - which Microsoft support has even been caught sharing with customers.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-sup...

Back in the late aughts, there was an article from someone at Microsoft talking about how they weren't that interested in going after people pirating Windows in the developing world, because they saw it as an opportunity for turning them into paying customers. Really - that piracy is expanding the Microsoft ecosystem, which back then was important because they viewed Linux on the desktop as a huge threat. (Is it the year of Desktop Linux yet?)

The ease with which Windows is cracked still is probably no accident, but nobody's talking about it. If you're running a business at some point your security folks are going to point out that using cracked software is how you invite attackers inside your security perimeter. (Seriously, down that path lies losing all of your bank accounts)

It's weird that anyone even bothers cracking Windows when you could just use it forever without activating it. Everything works except some personalization features--and even those limitations are easy to get around.

> (Is it the year of Desktop Linux yet?)

I know this is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment but I would argue that the year of the Linux desktop was in 2022 when the Steam deck, albeit a non-desktop machine, was released. It's a pretty popular console and really forwarded the idea of playing video games on Linux being seamless. The state of gaming on Linux is/was one of the main reason why so many people are/were holding out on Windows, and with a few exceptions of massive games like Fortnite, it's basically here. Adoption, however, is a different story.

I'm not entirely convinced about that. We'll see when a more generalized desktop distro comes along and gains traction with gamers. So far, Linux hasn't really made the jump from the Steam Deck to the desktop. I haven't seen a mass migration of gamers from Windows to Linux yet. As long as Windows offers even a marginally better experience, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon.

Additionally, there are still many types of software that either don't run on Linux or don't perform as well. I primarily use my PC for music production, and that pretty much rules out using Linux unless I'm willing to spend more time configuring things or risk potential compatibility issues.

I do wish I could switch to a Linux desktop without feeling like a second-class citizen in certain areas. I prefer writing web applications on Linux, but with WSL working well enough, I’m too lazy to dual boot just for that.

That said, I'm looking forward to installing Arch on my old laptop. I may be an adult with a full-time job, kids, and little free time, but I'm still a nerd at heart.

> As long as Windows offers even a marginally better experience, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon.

Judging by the direction Microsoft is going with Windows 11, I don’t think that will be too long :^)

For music production it’s more tricky. Personally, I’ve had some success with Bitwig (which just worked and picked up my old Novation Launchpad out of the box; I also think it works with Windows VSTs through Wine), but I admit that I’m not a pro by any means, and a more complicated setup might require some fiddling around. Hopefully this gets better with more adoption!

I guess we can finally admit:

There's never going to be a YoLoD

Desktops/notebooks are second class now

Only Canonical had a good focus on usability for the average Joe, and even then there were a lot of loose ends, especially due to the way Linux works

(see how things like udev work, or wpa_supplicant, or D-Bus work. There's loose coupling, frail interfaces, version mismatches galore and then if you get out of step stuff breaks)

Windows is only free if your time has no value

I’ve paid many $1000s of dollars in my time to the Linux gods.

Audio driver issues.

Graphics driver issues.

WiFi driver issues.

but I still like Linux more than windows.

I'd like to offer a counter-narrative. It might just be luck, but across seven machines (excluding Pis, other SBCs, Macs, Androids), I've only ever had one WiFi issue and one sleep-mode issue with Linux. (Which easily clocks in at fewer problems than on Windows.)

By my measure, Linux has saved $1000s of dollars of my time just in waiting for updates alone. (Not to mention the employment and community opportunities it made possible.)

I bet you haven’t used arch over a long period of time, using nvidia cards, and doing music production.

I’ve spent days fixing issues after updating my system.

Linux is great, but it has many pain points, as does windows.

I don’t really think either is strictly less finicky or painful than another as long as you’re willing to learn a bit.

If you’re not willing to learn a bit, windows is definitely was.

Linux will always be cooler though.

I feel like if you want an easy, mostly tinker-free Linux experience, you don't use something like Arch. You just install Ubuntu or Debian -- after doing your research and buying hardware that is well-supported -- and don't mess with things.

Nvidia and music yes, but not arch, because it is notorious for being very "DIY". I would have to do a lot more work if I used Arch, I agree

I share the same experience, but tbh, my almost every single laptop purchase was prefaced by hours or even days of searching the internet for other people's experience with Linux on a particular machine. Except the first one - and I got machine with broken ethernet, without having wifi at home. Have fun copying .deb packages over usb stick.

I was paying for my education, though.

I take this to extremes. When I was contracting I wouldn’t do anything Microsoft unless I was paid by the hour.

I believe the post you're replying to is making a joke, referencing a classic complaint/meme that "Linux is only free if your time has no value".

The thing that makes the joke funny is that it truly has reversed.

Fedora KDE spin has been a less painful experience than Windows 11 in every way, for me.

Indeed, and so has dartos' point. Not even hardware support is a sure thing on windows any longer. And I'm not talking exotic things, just your random enterprise HP laptop.

Are you saying HP is building laptops that ship with Windows that lack drivers provided by HP?

I've had two issues, with two Elitebooks, one 845g8 (amd) and one 840g8 (intel). These are ~2020 models IIRC, which I had at the end of 2020 for the amd and early 2021 for the intel.

They both shipped with Windows 10, which I didn't use for any length of time, since I daily drive Linux. I updated them both to the latest Windows 11 available at the time, with a fresh install, and installed all the drivers from HP.

With the AMD, fresh out of the box, there was some issue with the backlight. The screen would be very dim, even while set all the way up. I initially thought there was some hardware issue, but booting into the BIOS burned my eyes, so the hardware was fine. I didn't really use it for any length, so don't know how that install fared otherwise. After the reinstall, the backlight worked as expected. But, for around half a year, the webcam wouldn't be detected. It suddenly started working after some update or other. This machine can also not sleep for any length of time under Windows. It will usually reboot by itself after a while, and Windows has no idea why (event log says "unexpected shutdown"). Less often, though, it will just get stuck when attempting to wake up (fans full tilt, screen off). The hardware was otherwise in good working condition, since everything worked under Linux since day 1. Yes, including sleep and audio.

With the Intel, the backlight seemed fine initially. I also didn't spend much time with it as delivered and reinstalled it. First off, Windows didn't detect the touchpad, nor the trackpoint, nor the Wifi. I did have a mouse lying around which worked (fortunately I don't care for BT peripherals), but then would have had to jump through some hoops to convince it to not insist on connecting to some server. Fortunately, it was going to be domain-joined so it left me be. Then the fun started. With the HP usb-c dock, the external screen would usually not be recognized at 4k@60 unless I did a plug-unplug-replug at the right time. Sleep would also be unreliable, sometimes waking up to a blank screen and fans going full tilt, sometimes to a garbled image. The output thing has been fixed after a while by using the drivers from Intel's website, but Windows would helpfully update them every other day to the borked ones. In the end, the drivers supplied by Windows have caught up, but my other random Chinese dock still won't output 4k@60. Sleep also mostly works fine now. Never had any issue on Linux. The Chinese dock works fine on Linux, and also on Windows with the AMD laptop.

Judging by the state of bluetooth and compatibility with their own docks, that might literally be the case.

For those not twigging the reference:

<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski>.

That said, well played.

Between Windows, Linux, and macOS, I’ve probably been the most productive on Windows, even though it’s the least enjoyable for me and I wish I could use Linux exclusively for my work.

Linux, on the other hand, has been the least productive. Part of the problem is that it encourages users to tinker, but it also tends to break more easily—whether from tinkering itself or updates that mess with settings or drivers.

I’m not sure about the current state of support for multi-monitor setups with different pixel densities, but I remember struggling a lot with that in various desktop environments in the past.

Worse, Windows is free if your attention has no value. Being bombarded with ads and spied upon is worse than wasting my time.

I was part of BizSpark around 2014, for 5 years all my licenses were free as a way to help small businesses, and I truly mean all licenses, whatever you can think of I had a license for... They killed that project of course, when if fact it was an amazing way to tie small businesses and their clients to Microsoft stack tech.

Man, I miss BizSpark.

I was in high school in those days, so it was DreamSpark for me. They didn’t have regular Windows licenses but had free Windows Server, so of course I was running one on my laptop for a while.

For the first example, Microsoft might point a finger during a audit[1] but if the military had a license and just used a cracked version instead to bypass the activation prompt, I don't think they'd really make a fuss? If it turned out that they were only buying 50% of the licenses they should've been then sure, but if they were buying them and just not typing the license keys in, meh.

I seem to recall the network activation server for Windows let you activate unlimited clients on a key, although maybe I'm misremembering, or the person who configured it did something funny.

---

[1]: Does Microsoft even do first party license audits anymore? I'd imagine with so much of the licensing being a part of cloud spend that they don't care since you're already paying $20+ per month per head anyway for windows and office.

Yes they do audits all the time. They outsource them to one of the big accounting/audit firms though.

For the US Military pirating software while on deployment in Iraq, Microsoft would need to seek redress in Iraq's court system.

28 U.S. Code § 1498 [1] holds the federal government liable for copyright infringement (section b), but only in the US (c).

I don't know how much copyright enforcement Iraqi courts were doing during the occupation, and the US Military was operating with broad immunity from Iraqi law as well. There's no reason for Microsoft to make a fuss over this infringement, because they're not going to get compensated and the PR will be negative.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1498

When the company I worked for for 20 years was sold to a muuuch larger company, people from the new company were telling us how they just finished a big audit from MS and they did well and they were so happy they came out more or less clean. Not just relieved they made it through a trial that some douchebags imposed on them, actually pleased with themselves for pleaseing MS is what it almost felt like.

I was boggled that anyone would be happy about any part of that.

I had successfully avoided letting us ever rely on any MS services other than most people's desktops were Windows.

I can't even imagine so much as letting MS or anyone else even in the building to go through our shit to satisfy their desire to know if any of our machines were running any of their software. I'm sure it's part of some license agreement that you agree to be subject to audits or else you don't get to buy the stuff at all but still.

I can't imagine being pleased that some douchebags have audited me and said I was a good boy this year.

As a linux user it boggles me what people are willing to put up with and consider it not only normal but even valid.

I'm not full Stallman and I will use proprietary stuff when I have to, and deal with it's terms, but I never even slightly actually internalize the vendors ideas about what I should do.

I can't imagine not seeing the value in using the MS stack in the enterprise world.

What does value in the product have to do with audits?

It makes no sense to be happy about audits, even successfully passing them, regardless how much value you get out of whatever product they are attached to. The two things have no bearing on each other. By all means, value the product greatly.

This excusing is exactly what I was talking about. It's kind of disturbing and sick even to be so cooperative with a bully.

It's one thing to do what you gotta do and put up with what you gotta put up with, but to actually not see a problem and derive personal sense of worth from some shop owner going through your pockets to satisfy themselves that you didn't steal anything is just bizarre. You should not be happy that the shop owner said "looks like you didn't steal from me today".

I see value in avoiding it. Avoiding junk is commonsense no?

Not everyone is a Linux user, or willing to become one.

You can install Ubuntu on 100 Thinkpads and have that be the official OS of your company.

The tech folks will love it, but Mr Smith in accounting will be angry and confused. QuickBooks doesn't work, how will he get anything done ? He doesn't want an open source alternative. He wants QuickBooks.

This is absolutely on point. Every time Microsoft comes up, HN thinks you can just replace an orgs 30 year old stack with OSS. It's ridiculous and shows the narrow experience of this crowd with their small teams.

Linux still doesn't have a lot of one to one equivalents for Microsoft software. If Mr Smith in accounting likes using QuickBooks and Excel, you can't just tell him it's time to switch to libre office.

I definitely think Linux is better for personal usage, but I don't expect most companies to ever realistically roll it out to every desktop.

I still did not find a descent email client. What could be more personal than that?

I only use web clients aside from my phones.

Are you really in a situation where you need to read emails offline ?

I have multiple accounts.

> I was boggled that anyone would be happy about any part of that.

Would you be relieved to have passed an IRS tax audit? I know I would.

Yes, it is part of the license agreement to be audited, but there are two kinds of audits -- the one you can tell them to go pound sand, these are usually the ones from 3rd parties, and the ones that have the license agreement enforcement behind them.

> As a linux user it boggles me what people are willing to put up with and consider it not only normal but even valid.

Corporations are because of the the MS stack that still has no equal in AD DS, client management, etc. It has gotten easier with cloud licensing since you can't usually go above the license count you ordered.

"Would you be relieved to have passed an IRS tax audit? I know I would."

If only I had explicitly articulated a distinction vs "relieved to survive a trial imposed on them".