Why aren't there more commercial applications available for Linux?

Why aren't there more commercial applications available for Linux?
Coming from a computer engineering background, I've used plenty of commercial electronic design software for Linux. It works great. You get the power of commercial software applications with tons of R&D behind it, integrated with the popular Unix development tools available by default on Linux.
But, correct me if I'm wrong, professional applications like photo editors, PCB designers, 3D/modeling cad software, audio production software, finance, etc. don't run on Linux.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Windows is used by almost 90% people. This means companies will primarily make software for it.
Linux is used by less than 4% people. This means it's not a top priority to distribute software to it.
MacOS is used by as many people as linux, and slightly more (probably around 50% more). It's second priority only because it and it's users mainly follow "pay for everything" mentality, unlike Linux which says "most things should be open source and preferably free" (doesn't apply to everyone, I also buy software and use Linux). Companies see that they have a greater chance of selling products to Windows and Apple PC users than Linux PC users. So they look at it this way:
>Windows users will bring us 80% profit
>Mac users will give us 19% profit
>Linux users will give us 1% profit, or less
It's true that linux is used by over a hundred million people, but the truth is companies are too lazy to ship products to them when the potential reward is small. Look at it this way, less than 15% windows users even use that kind of software (Photoshop, etc) and over half of them have pirated it (at least home users). If Linux users followed the same standard the company (example, Adobe) wouldn't earn much.

Though lots of software is now becoming available on linux, the main problem with older software is it would take too much to fix everything up and port it to linux as software was previously mainly shipped for windows only and it's much easier using legacy stuff and adding features on-the-go.

tl;dr
>it's not worth it, people who pay for software are a minority, and Linux users are a minority
>it would take too long to make older software compatible with linux and people are lazy to do so

>it would take too long to make older software compatible with linux and people are lazy to do so
It doesn't take much time with existing multi-platform libraries. Unless your code is shit.

Autodesk's code is really shit. The only reason Maya works on Linux is because it was designed to do so from before Autodesk bought it. 3dsmax on the other hand is entrenched in Win32

I can only speak to 3D and digital content creation tools, but many of them do in fact run on linux.
High-end VFX houses that do film work typically run linux workstations and renderfarms (I believe CentOS is the standard), so all the heavy hitters like Maya, Houdini, Clarisse, Nuke are there. Houdini and Maya are in fact UNIX native applications, first running on SGI workstations back in the day before being ported to Windows NT, and then eventually Linux.

It's kind of a unique situation though, because a good chunk of paying customers for high-end DCC apps run linux, so there is justification for a port. That's not usually the case.

Maya runs on linux
Blender is better than you think.

people want to be paid, no one wants overweigth nerds using their software for free because thye think it shoudl be even when it is not,

Zbrush Photoshop substance painter/designer.
These are some of, if not THE new bread and butter of most things anymore especially Zbrush.

>But, correct me if I'm wrong, professional applications like photo editors, PCB designers, 3D/modeling cad software, audio production software, finance, etc. don't run on Linux.
I don't know about the rest but I'm quite unfamiliar with this "no commercial applications available for Linux" thingy as an electrical engineer. My day starts with software that only run on Linux and my day ends with me grudgingly documenting them on Windows.

For example, Cadence Virtuoso is an IC design tool that I use and I can't think of how to use it on Windows. It relies a lot on UNIX style design. Multi-user environment, high performance computing benefits a lot from having an open source kernel and OS. Also things that are so simple in managing things are super complicated in Windows, simplest example I can think of is just rc files and user customization.

installbase

For sure. I'm not saying they run Linux exclusively.
Most places that don't do heavy vfx work run Windows/Mac OS. Though you can bet your ass the macs are being phased out at all studios. Where I work we've stopped buying them since even two years ago it was obvious that Apple doesn't care about the DCC market.

As an aside, I used Linux for the last decade before going back to Windows. It was too much of a hassle and now I can actually run Adobe apps, Zbrush, etc.

>Unless your code is shit.
And here's the culprit.

Commercial applications are largely garbage.
Their purpose is to bring money.
End user (the one paying for it) is interested in features and the "just werks" factor, not how pretty, extensible and easy to modify the code.

Especially the old (and expensive) software suits that existed for a long time are gruesome hodge-podge made by different teams over the years. It's like Xorg but even shittier.

I just wish they were native, I mean, I want to work when I sit down, not fuck around with windows BS, driver errors unknown crash issues etc.
ANNIVERSARY UPDATE JUST SNUCK ON YOUR COMPUTER AGAIN ALL IS LOST TIME TO RE-INSTALL EVERYTHING.
Finally got it configured to boot properly and it wouldn't communicate with the MS "authentication" server so it wouldn't accept my password... locked out.(I Always save externally so only down time, but still)
Linux based operating systems should be the De-facto Workstation at this point.
My next build, I'm going full retard with GPU pass threw so I can just hotwash windows in seconds when it fucks up.

OP here. I've used Virtuoso too. It may not have been clear from my post but IC design tools do NOT suffer from this problem, I've used lots on Unix and Linix

Then take out electronics entirely from the list, because there's the fact that Allegro exists. Literally the only passable PCB tool.

Altium, which is windows only, and the windows tools from Cadence are also used heavily in the industry.

Unstable ABI is why. Linus talked about this at a debian debcon years ago.

Linux ppl are idiots.

Autodesk is one of the few companies whose engineering talent is worse than Adobe's.

Altium is just annoying to use if you embrace the design framework Cadence tools set, which is why a lot of semiconductor companies use Allegro before anything else. Also it just offers way better customization and more importantly version management alternatives since any third party can write add ons to it using SKILL. Just the existence of SKILL makes any Cadence tool far superior.

By Windows tools they have do you mean things they bought from OrCAD? I can only laugh at the capabilities of OrCAD tools compared to Cadence. The reason they bought the company is to control the competition is my best guess.

Also I must add, I wasn't trying to say that there weren't Windows tools. I was trying to point out that there was no shortcoming on tools that you can use in electronics that run on Linux.

>no one wants overweigth nerds using their software for free because thye think it shoudl be even when it is not,

Nerds want free as in freedom. Lots of free software that cost money. Stallman even prefers if people sell free software

Wait...
>it wouldn't communicate with the MS "authentication" server so it wouldn't accept my password

Would you enter your password, hit enter, then have it just spin at the "welcome" screen for ages?

Because if so, holy fuck it makes me want to kill myself. I hate Windows.

You're agreeing with me. From the outset I said that the electronic design software I've used on Linux was great. The electronic design software I've used on Windows was pretty bad by comparison.
I just didn't understand why Linux hasn't penetrated other areas as well. I guess I was wrong about digital content creation though, looks like Linux has made some inroads there.

The commercial electronic design software on Linux isn't Free or free at all. It's the opposite, it's extremely expensive. Multiple tens of thousands of dollars per user per year. All the top companies use the software though because it's the best and most productive.

I'm selling mpv for $50 a pop.

youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8
5:32

Siemens NX, Autodesk Maya, Blender, VMWare, Xen etc all run on Linux

>Photo editors
You got a point there, Adobe didn't port their shit on Linux. However for drawing, Krita is actually pretty good and it's used in professional level
>PCB designs
Ktechlab, Siemens NX, logisim etc
>3D modelling/rendering
Maya, Blender
>CAD
Siemens NX
>Audio production
FL studio runs perfectly under WINE. FL Studio does not require GPU acceleration - where WINE sucks at. So you could say FL Studio works (without paid commercial support)
>Finance
This is a problem, Like photo editors.

However, for finance though, I used Minitab under WINE and haven't got any troubles with it. Also, MATLAB has financial toolbox