i’m working as a freelance software developer and evaluating if my next laptop will be a macbook pro or will be running fedora. For evaluation purposes I’m running fedora workstation on an external ssd on my mac book pro and I like it quite a lot. But some of the software I need (after corona), exists only for windows and mac - like clickshare for screen sharing in conference rooms.
So I’m searching for good workarounds for such situations, because changing my customers to support linux workstations is not always an option (and not high on their priority list if all of the other colleagues are using either mac os or windows). Are there any tools you use to handle such situations?
Please take a minute to go through the introductory posts in the #start-here category if you’ve not had a chance to do that yet.
This is a hard one: if people don’t develop software that supports Linux, it simply won’t work on Fedora (or any other Linux distribution). A lot of us work in Windows environments, so there are a few options:
we try to use Free/Open Source software as much as possible, and generally, these all work on Linux. Examples are: Gimp/Inkscape/…
if we must use proprietary tools, we try to use software that is available for Linux or tools that have web-interfaces like Office/Google Docs and the sort. Skype/Dropbox/Zoom/Spotify are all available, for example. Flatpaks from Flathub make this very easy.
if one must use a software that is Windows specific, we try to dual boot our systems, so we swap over to Windows when necessary.
Some Windows only tools work with “Wine”, but not all of them: https://www.winehq.org/ (I personally found dual booting to be a better experience than using Wine, but it’s a personal choice).
If something works on a Mac, it generally also works on Linux, since Mac is pretty much a Linux system .
Edit: for Clickshare specifically, seems like one can use it using the Google Cast extension with Chrome (which is available for Linux):
thanks for the suggestions. Dual boot is not an option for me, because normally if I present something in a meeting and so on. I’ll show something in my (linux) development environment. With Wine I had some good experiences too, so I’ll try to use it. I read that Crossover should be very convenient so I will try that too.
In my day to day business I have been using open source software or software which is available on linux already. But occasionally I have to use something like Clickshare. I think I’ll just switch to fedora for some time using my external ssd.
Using a VM is a lot more stable and compatible than Wine, Wine can be infuriating, by design it’s a guessing game (trying to emulate a closed source OS). You can download a Windows 7 virtual machine image directly from microsoft.com