I'll give you (some) software development tools. Still, things like Sublime Text, Visual Studio, and the entire Jet Brains lineup which give lie to the "especially" part of the developer orientated toolset.

But...

Gimp is far better than Photoshop and Illustrator?

Blender is far better than 3DS Max and Maya?

Libre Office is far better than Microsoft Office?

Darkroom is far better than Lightroom?

Honestly, I can't even think of an open source CAD one that can even compare favorably to SketchUp, let alone AutoCad.

If you have to, there are many tools available to do a job on Linux, with a backup of VMs and Wine. They are not, however, "far better".

Yeah. Making software to sell forces you to listen to the market (not the same thing as just listening to your existing customers) if you want to grow your sales.

Emacs is more powerful than IntelliJ, say, but it's vastly inferior in terms of learning curve and UX. There are some things I'd rather do in it than in IntelliJ, but it's not what I'm going to use for day to day Android dev, say. Or what I'd point newcomers at.

> Emacs is more powerful than IntelliJ, say

Depends how you define "powerful;" IntelliJ understands a lot more about your code than most Emacs plug-ins.

On the other hand, when it comes to categories like games, video game console emulators, office productivity applications, document publishing, etc., the open-source alternatives are generally way worse.

Open source video game console emulators are certainly not worse. If anything, the best by far emulator (Dolphin) is open source, but even beyond that almost every open source VGC emulator is also open source and those emulators tend to be the most long running ones (almost always because the developers of the closed source emulators lose interest). For some systems, you have only open source emulators.

There are several systems where your only option is Windows, unless the situation has changed drastically since I last looked into it. I remember Dreamcast, Saturn, DS, PSP, and PS2 being in this category, and also the options for N64/PSX not being very good, the last time I was interested. Of course, someone can respond to arguments about any program being missing with "well, I don't care about those," but you can't expect anyone to find that persuasive if they're not already converted.

Dreamcast: https://github.com/reicast/reicast-emulator

Saturn: https://yabause.org/

DS: https://desmume.org/

PSP: http://www.ppsspp.org/index.html

PS2: https://pcsx2.net/

All of these are open source, support Linux, and have good compatability.

The situation may have improved, but the last time I tried this Yabause was a joke and the non-Windows versions of Desmume and PCSX2 were like a year behind and clearly not the main priority for anyone.

I can't say I know much about Yabause, but Desmume and PCSX2 have worked quite well for me on Linux, no problems whatsoever. PCSX2 was last updated in December on Arch Linux, and Desmume is up to date with the latest stable release for all platforms.

With respect, you should be looking these things up for yourself before you make claims like the ones you've been making in this thread.

Why the hell do I have to "look up" personal experiences I had that made me dislike using Linux and OS X? It's great to hear some of my issues were out-of-date but come on. I tried using these non-Windows operating systems and eventually switched back because I didn't like the experience. An imperious series of posts telling me that I'm wrong because there has been an improvement and, anyway, shouldn't want to do what I want to do, is not exactly persuading me to feel differently.

Because you're posting in a public forum and spreading misinformation about the platform with your ignorance.

I see you haven't understood what I said. The specific examples I cited were real in the past. Even if those, specifically, are now solved, am I to believe this will never be an issue again? Because I think what's more likely is that non-Windows emulators will be behind by a few years in the future as well.

They're not behind, I doubt they've ever been behind, and if they get behind, it's a trivial matter to prod the package maintainer for an update. These emulators support Linux as a first class platform and hell, for several of them Windows is probably a second-class platform.

There are emulators on Linux in active development for all the systems you've mentioned, most even being available in Debian (and derivative) repositories.

I mean, great, but I don't want something that will maybe work in a few years when there's something that works well now.

>games

See pretty much every other reply in this thread for my take on this

>video game console emulators

Wrong, most emulators are open source, support Linux, and work great.

>office productivity applications

"way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience.

>document publishing

I don't know what this is supposed to be. LaTeX is pretty good, though.

> Wrong, most emulators are open source, support Linux, and work great.

As I said to the other guy, for a number of systems there's no emulator except the one on Windows.

> "way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience.

Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will look totally different if someone opens it in MSOffice.

>As I said to the other guy, for a number of systems there's no emulator except the one on Windows.

The only one that comes to mind is that one Wii U emulator. Xenia doesn't support Linux but it's open source and the lack of support more a reflection of its relative immaturity than not being possible (I'm certain a Linux port will come eventually, I was even working on it myself for a while).

>Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will look totally different if someone opens it in MSOffice.

If the formatting of a docx looks wrong in LibreOffice that's not really a big deal if you can still read the content, which is usually the case. Writing new documents should use ODF, which MSWord supports fine (often transparently, non-technical users will probably see a file with the same MSWord icon and no file extension).

> If the formatting of a docx looks wrong in LibreOffice that's not really a big deal if you can still read the content, which is usually the case.

You sound like someone who never collaborated on an Office file with someone from another company.

If a company wants to be taken seriously, and some of their work involves exchanging and collaborating on presentations, text documents or tabular files, you cannot not use MS Office.

Even Mac Office used to be really bad here, although I think the newest versions are significantly closer to the real thing.

I feel like this is kind of an extreme example of something I see a lot on HN: hackers who literally cannot imagine ways of using a computer that are outside of their experience.

In some contexts it is a big deal, though. I suppose the answer to that is that everyone who uses Word should learn to use Latex instead but that's not realistic.