Lack of support for GUI apps such as MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc. It was actually workable with wine a few years back, but that was before everything went to an auto-updating subscription model.
You can't also have Omnigraffle for Windows, yet nobody would say Windows doesn't work for that reason.
If computers no longer ran Excel, they would buy a dedicated Excel Machine to do it, and put it on their desk next to their computer.
You can make a similar argument about Premiere and After Effects, although the fact that Resolve runs on Linux is helping the situation a little.
The Autodesk products are another case.
I have a working Linux desktop and I also use spreadsheets in my day to day work.
People who need Excel don't refuse to use Linux because they take issue with its stance of not-having-Excel, they don't use Linux because it doesn't have Excel.
Bad example. I've brought LibreOffice to its knees after importing a CSV file: went to adjust a column width and it became non-responsive. And this was within the last year. They have done a lot of performance work on LibreOffice and I appreciate that, but it is a long way away from Excel for serious work.
My favorite snag was on a plot with the X-axis labeled with date text at an angle. I could have horribly aliased ugly fast text, or I could have nicely anti-aliased text that slowed moving around in the sheet to a crawl. But I couldn't have nice text on a spreadsheet I could still work in.
I've crashed Excel (2016 for Mac) trying to preview CSV I was about to import.
To Microsoft's credit, they eventually fixed it.
What still doesn't work (in Mac version) is ODBC driver for Postgresql (and maybe for other databases; it is shipped with MSSQL driver only). It will also crash Excel. So to work with psql data I have to export them into file and then import into Excel. I cannot have a query saved in the spreadsheet and just refresh it.
Most people don't use Excel for "serious work". Most people use Excel to make colorful grids of text and some calculated numbers that fit in a common corporate issue 8GB computer.
Anybody who had, as their day job, working with spreadsheets would never do it with Libre Office unless they weren't really using them with a lot of data and complexity, or (B) had a bit of a masochistic streak. (Or, I guess (C), were completely dedicated to open software - which is a fair reason I guess).
The two things that will permanently hold back Linux on the desktop (And, remember, I say this as someone who has only worked on Linux for 3+ years now) - is (A) The amazing number of inconsistencies on the desktop environment (Depending on the application, I have 3 separate ways I need to initiate a "copy" - Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Shift+C, Ctrl+Right-Click+Select copy.) and (B) The lack of most decent desktop software (Chrome, Slack excepted - they are pretty much flawless on Linux).
Bringing this back to the original thread - what I would love from Microsoft, is to make Linux a first-rate citizen on Windows. Right now it's 80% of the way their with WSL. Still missing a bunch of networking stuff, and still doesn't run cron/init and friends. But It's getting closer.
Then, we have the best of both worlds - I can do all my work in Linux, and still have access to the rich desktop environment of Windows. So - count me as one person who is really happy that Microsoft is putting effort into advancing their Linux offerings by submitting these Hyper-V support patches into the Linux Kernel.
However, I feel WSL means using Linux to enhance a product (Windows) while at the same time preventing the growth of that same system in its standalone fashion. Because WSL means you won't be using a lot of the usual Linux desktop stuff, you'll be a pure Windows user in a lot of statistical data, and you won't be helping to make Linux a better OS. Not to say that it can get worse once Microsoft starts releasing Windows-only Linux components for WSL, as (I think) started happening already.
Remember - I use Linux all day for a reason - it's the better tool for the job I do.
But - Linux is incredibly lacking in highly-polished commercial software. I miss the dozens of beautifully crafted packages on OS X, and their somewhat less crafted variants on Windows constantly. That final finish, and careful craftsmanship that occurs from making every button, every font, every round-rec flawless - is something that, for the most parts - is completely absent on Linux.
I am a contrarian when it comes to Microsoft and Linux - I genuinely believe that they are going to do the right thing (And I say this as a Former Netscape Employee who knows all to well their EEE pattern) - particularly if we get to use the full desktop experience in WSL - then we'll know they are really on the right path.
But - by and large, I'm guessing we agree way more than disagree on stuff.
I had a client that suffered an excel/windows ransomware attack. It started with a macro or something in an excel document that, for some reason, everybody seemed to open. My inbox was flooded with "do no open anything" emails. Then the CEO called me to check on the data I had stored on my systems. "Remember when I said I didn't use windows? Your data, at least the copy I have, is safe."
Vendor lock-in, OTOH, would be a valid criticism. But again, this is not that.
And the VMs are nicely contained, disk volumes can have copy-on-write snapshots, and the volumes can even be made immutable - you shut the VM down and, when you restart, it's back to its immutable state. This is becoming less than practical thanks to various self-updating things - you need to make them mutable, let the self-updates happen and then you can make them immutable again. Otherwise they'll self update a lot on every boot.
not the same but you have Office 365 that does a reasonable job for most documents out there.
On the other hand, not having Office is kind of a feature, it makes you learn better tools :)
I think this kind of attitude is why Linux on the desktop will probably never be mainstream.
It does not need to be mainstream to be useful.
Replace “Office” with Photoshop, Autodesk, Altium, etc. and it becomes very clear why this isn’t true. The Big Guys(tm) aren’t popular because they’re Windows and macOS programs; They’re popular because they do practically everything and no alternative comes close.
Sure, there is the bit about market dominance which leads to people learning just that tool which leads to further dominance (this is true of Photoshop especially). There’s also the bit about tools not getting better if no one uses them. But one would be hard pressed to find programs as capable as those mentioned earlier.
- in Excel, you can clear conditional formatting rules but you can't manage them. And text in text boxes turn into images that can't be edited, only moved.
- in Word, formulas turn to images. Complex tables break.
- Visio... well, there is no web app version of Visio.