A big one for me is Microsoft office (desktop), Libreoffice and other FOSS alternatives just simply don’t come close, and feature wise are 20 years behind. Especially since I basically mastered MS office 2007+'s drawing features, which the FOSS alternatives don’t replicate very well.
And of course Microsoft loves to push Office 365. I don’t pay for that and just use desktop office, but Microsoft prefers you don’t know that you can do this.
And I’m going to get shit on by Lemmy big time for this but while Linux is great and has made vast improvements in recent years, I still use Windows, not only because of MS office, but because a lot of games tend to only support Windows. I know that wine and proton exist but they’re not perfect and don’t feel quite the same as running native.
I wish an operating system existed with a hybridized Linux and clone NT kernel (using code from FOSS Wine and ReactOS of course) so that the numerous back catalog of NT software can run similar to as intended while also interacting with Linux programs better and using a shared environment. Since it would probably become vulnerable to viruses for windows as well, maybe? (my programming knowledge is extremely rusty) an antivirus similar to Windows defender is bundled with the operating system. Hopefully if someone makes such an operating system it can be a Windows killer and would switch immediately
MS Office isn’t better than LibreOffice and OnlyOffice, they all do the same task of making docs, spreadsheets, and presentations with very similar UI. It’s a no brainer to use the one that doesn’t bug you to use OneDrive.
Linux gaming has come a long way, especially with the introduction of things like Proton and popularisation of it by the Steam Deck. If you can play games on the Steam Deck, those games run on Linux :D
The main reasons (mind you, not only reasons) why people don’t just switch to Linux is:
- it’s different (humans naturally gravitate towards things they are familiar with)
- partly because Linux has a few things that are unintuitive to the average user (e.g. using terminal), but distros like Mint have mostly solved this issue
- Switching itself is really annoying (I would say I’m in this boat, but I’ve installed Linux on my old computers and will definitely do it again if I ever get a new computer)
I’m sorry but… 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?
3D CAD software. There are a few options out there (FreeCAD, LibreCAD, etc) and Blender is a thing that exists for more artistic 3D modeling. But they simply don’t hold a candle to the features and capabilities of the paid packages, which typically have costs in the 4-to-5-digit range. And I’m not talking the crazy high-end simulation options - those I understand, they’re hard - but basic modeling features.
Hell, I’d even settle for a CAD package that had some solid basic features and had a reasonable purchase cost. Unfortunately the few providers have the industry by the throat, and so your options are “free but terrible” and “you need a mortgage to use this”.
I’d love to see a user-friendly, easily-implemented FOSS alternative to the entire Android system.
The options that exist now often can’t get past all the defenses that Android and phone manufacturers put into systems to secure their own data collection/revenue. I have an older Motorola phone that I literally can’t install another operating system on.
We desperately need a stable, user-friendly, and hardware-adaptive replacement for Android. I don’t want that shit on my phones any longer.
Its sort of a thing. Pine phones use open source linux. I think the main problem is development of apps to run on a linux phone isn’t popular so its pretty bare bones as a system. Havent used one myself though.
FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don’t know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.
Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don’t, and I’m just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.
The workflow is much improved, as are the heuristics for user intention (yes, yes, the “crutches”) and to mitigate toponaming, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in Linux gaming (seriously OP, it’s WAY better these days), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD with Windows.
There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don’t care. :-)
Hmm, LibreOffice may not be the prettiest, but it works. For my own documents and presentations I use Typst nowadays. That’s a blazing fast modern typesetting alternative to LaTeX. That being said, I can’t stand WYSIWIG stuff but that might not be everybody’s cup of tea.
I mostly run into stubborn manufacturers like Roland that only release their musical instrument companion apps for Mac/Win and leave Linux Digital Audio Workstations hanging.
I’m with you on the “FOSS office alternatives are shit”, but unfortunately MS office is also shit. Google is the closest I have found to a good office suite but even that is becoming a bit chaotic and awkward. LyX is a promising word processor but also pretty awkward to use in its own way. I’ve got nothing, there.
As far as gaming, this sound less kind than intended but you deserve any shit you get for saying Linux gaming is bad these days. Apart from a few AAA games with anti-cheat where the devs just don’t want to, basically every game just works without any extra effort. Even obscure indie games. I can’t think of the last game I wanted to play that didn’t run on Linux, and often it is better under proton than Windows or native.
I made the jump recently, and although there are clear issues, I don’t see any reason to use windows as my primary gaming OS anymore. Some games still require some fiddling with proton versions, extra command line arguments, environment variables, etc. That is bad for the average user that just wants to click play and play. Also, I noticed that at least on my setup (alienware laptop with nvidia gpu), some games have clear performance issues compared to windows, mainly some UE games. But it’s not so bad to make me want to boot windows again.
And just some extra two cents: I’m still keeping a windows partition for those games that simply cannot run on linux, and it’s possible to keep your main library on the linux partition (I’m using btreefs) and use that same library on windows. You just have to install a driver on windows, and it works beautifully. Haven’t had any issues so far.
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Microsoft Access. I have one database that I need that’s written in Access, and although I suppose I could convert it to some other system it would be a chore and I’m not that driven to make the change.
I’ve moved almost everything else onto Linux.
Project scheduling programs. Primavera, Microsoft Project, Asta Powerproject. All of them are uniquely awful in their own way, and yet I still have to pay for them in order to work in my field.
Writer in Libre Office is fine if you install the correct fonts on Linux. Calc needs some work people that know how to use power pivot in excel use it all the time. So not having that makes the switch hard.
I dearly miss Playnite on Linux. Having Games from a lot of different sources, only Lutris supports more than Steam/Epic/GoG, and it’s missing a lot of features from Playnite and it’s plugins. Managing my Gamelibrary without it sucks.
Microsoft Exchange/outlook. It’s such a good email platform, not just because of legacy email/smtp, but all of the other collaborative features that show up in Outlook.
