Of course e.g. Photoshop is superior to Gimp - but Gimp is good enough for non-professional use. Just like LibreOffice. And Thunderbird.
Then they will be increasingly pulled over by MS. It's their choice, and they have to live with the consequences. The fun question is at which point they desire "their" software less than a working system - but don't worry, MS is going to figure it out.There, you're mistaken. There are many people who do run Photoshop, LightRoom, MSOffice (including Outlook) on their personal machines.
That's why, when you buy a laptop for Linux, it's not the worst idea to buy one with Linux pre-installed because that increases the chance that the manufacturer has considered that when designing the machine. That's how I did it (though I didn't keep the pre-installed distro). After all, Windows machines usually come with Windows pre-installed, too.Yes, it's better, but there's still quite a lot of hardware that people buy off the shelf, without thinking, that won't run (completely) under Linux.
The days of progress in the PC world are over, and we're now in damage control mode. However, I'd rather take up the fight with an OS that may have some rough edges here and there than with one where the manufacturer actively fights against me. I can win or at least draw the former, but the latter is a lost cause because Microsoft has infinitely more resources than I do for making that battle as miserable for me as they like.So in that case, we don't have a viable operating system at all anymore.
Though Wine isn't bad - especially under Linux Mint where you have an easy "click here" install via the Software Manager, and it actually works.Linux doesn't run many applications I want to run (except when jacking around with Wine).
And it is designed to sabotage repairs, Apple is actively lobbying against the right to repair, and after warranty, they tell you to buy a new computer for what should be a 150 bucks repair, working time included.MacOS runs only on Macs where you pay €800 for a NUC-like computer that goes for €500 in the Windows world.
It's fulfilling Microsoft's objectives rather well, I'd say. It's just that their objectives are increasingly out of sync with their customers'.And Windows is slowly becoming more junk.
Flatpak and done. If the application is so great that people are willing to pay for it, then so what if it takes an additional 500MB RAM? It's just that they have to offer actual value for the money.However... they won't, because there are 50 million Linux distributions
Maybe governments finally could wake up and understand "public money, public code", as well as the privacy problems with Windows. China is already heading for getting rid of Windows in government computers in favour of Linux, which in turn creates a market for Linux compatible hardware. South (!) Korea likewise. Europe is slow on the uptake as always because it's governed by people who print out emails, but that's a temporary problem, from a biological point of view. On the other hand, e.g. the French gendarmerie has already been with Gendbuntu for a long time now.