> Defeat that all the usual suspects suggested as alternatives to the apps I use on OSX or Windows just haven't made much progress. They're still borderline unusable or no viable alternatives exist.
I pretty much only use my home computer for entertainment purposes, so I haven't had these issues really. I will admit that I prefer to run foobar2000 and Firefox through WINE, but I've mostly been satisfied or happier with the Linux alternatives. There clearly is an issue with some professional applications (GIMP vs PS comes to mind); I'm just curious which ones you have in mind.
-- Logic Express: Not my job -- just a hobbyist. ardour is way too unstable and doesn't even compare to GarageBand in terms of features at this point.
-- OmniGraffle: Big part of my job. Better than Visio IMO. Dia is maybe on par with a 10 year old version of Visio at this point and I haven't seen any significant improvements in Dia in years.
-- iWork: My office needs are pretty simple so on features OpenOffice's feature set is good enough but it's always been buggy and clunky. Just stupid stuff like a dialog box drawing underneath and active window causing the program to appear to be frozen. Compatibility with MS Office formats is subpar even compared to iWork which isn't quite good enough for me not to keep MS Office installed.
-- Mail clients: I still prefer a desktop mail client and I haven't found anything I like on Linux. Evolution is clunky in the UI department. Thunderbird is clunky in the performance department. My IMAP store is kind of big (3GB-ish) so when I was using Linux I actually had to keep both Evolution and Thunderbird installed because one of the two handled big IMAP folders better than the other. (though at this point I can't remember which was which)
-- VPN clients: At this moment I have VPN profiles for Cisco IPSEC, L2TP, PPTP, and use both Cisco & Juniper SSL VPNs on a regular basis. It was too difficult to set them up. At some point Cisco offered a client that handled Cisco IPSEC but it would break every time I did a kernel update. L2TP/PPTP weren't a big problem though I had to fight to make split tunneling work properly. Juniper SSL VPN flat out did not work at the time though I've heard they released Linux support over the last 18 months or so?
There are a few other examples that would be pure personal preference. If I really had to I could use something else but basically I just don't want to. A more motivated person could probably overcome these issues.
I used to run Mac OS X, and there's still one or two things I miss about iTunes (album-shuffle in a generated playlist, for example) but Quod Libet fulfils my music playing needs nicely.
One thing I do miss is iPhoto. I'm stumbling along with F-spot at the moment, but so far as I can tell there are no decent photo-management tools available for Linux.
I pretty much only use my home computer for entertainment purposes, so I haven't had these issues really. I will admit that I prefer to run foobar2000 and Firefox through WINE, but I've mostly been satisfied or happier with the Linux alternatives. There clearly is an issue with some professional applications (GIMP vs PS comes to mind); I'm just curious which ones you have in mind.