this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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I think people are more likely to give up the security of not having constant admin access if they could get the same software they do now.
As I said in the wall of text above, going "oh, by the way, all your software won't work, but you will find alternatives" is a massive dealbreaker. It's one thing to bring people over to Linux, but trying to do that AND transition people to a full open source environment is a crazy overreach. A Linux distro focused on being Windows-like by offering closed software out of the box and better options for a click-and-play Windows compatibility layer would be way more appealing to many. You can work on their open source bona fides once they are inside the ecosystem.
How do you propose to do that?
Which part?
For closed source repositories of software that is currently available it's just a matter of having them included by default and actively prompting them on app managers as opposed to defaulting to hiding anything that isn't open source by default. Different distros come closer or further from this in the first place.
I imagine if you were going to go out of your way a bit further you'd restructure some of your splash pages and manager layouts to promote those based on popularity out of the gate.
There's an argument for a next step to be pre-packaging windows apps that can work under Wine directly in a package manager, but that's a bigger project and I genuinely don't think Wine is ready for that yet. Linux probably needs a better translation layer that works more reliably and comprehensively before that's an option. But hey, somebody should get on all of that, too.