Oh of course, Linux is my everyday machine (I have 2 separate hard drives in my tower). I just haven’t taken the time to figure out Steam yet, and there are some pieces of work software that either work like shit on Linux or aren’t available at all (yes, I know Wine is a thing but it’s not perfect)
Work is what keeps me away from Linux. That and games. I know things have gotten a lot better for gaming on Linux and that’s great, it’s still limiting, quite bluntly. The games I want to play are not all available on Linux, and some have been more or less abandoned, so they may never work on Linux properly.
Work is the worst offender, since a lot of “business productivity” software seems to require Windows, since nobody in business runs anything other than Windows… Except if you’re running web services, then it’s usually Linux… Almost every app has a “cloud” component now that relies on something running Linux… But you can’t get the client software for Linux because fffffffuuuuuuuuuuu
Ugh, I feel you on the work thing. We use the Microsoft suite and although technically there are online versions of the software, it’s fucking terrible compared to the desktop version, especially Teams (and sometimes I just flat out can’t get Teams to work in the browser since it doesn’t play nice with Firefox). And no, I can’t just use Libre Office because it will fuck up any previous formatting of word docs, or in the case of Excel there will be functions that aren’t supported.
I’ve just accepted that I need to be my own IT support for anything Linux in most day to day applications. Calling or emailing customer service inevitably gets me the answer that Linux is not supported.
Yep, then all the specialty application that are made, especially for peripherals like scanners… Forget about it.
You might be able to get it to function at a basic level, but all the settings and customizable features are not going to exist, and you will also be up a creek workout a paddle if you need support, as you’ve correctly noted.
Linux is a wonderful operating system, and it does what it does very well. The fact is, all the business desktop application software companies stick to Windows because that’s what most people have, and most stay with Windows because business app developers don’t support anything else. The only time I’ve known of any users who had something different, it was almost always a Mac, and they always had parallels or some similar windows virtualization software installed because even their mac isn’t supported.
It still caused issues, but it mostly worked at least.
