The unholy Word/excel/powerpoint trinity is what is keeping my win10 alive at work.

More and more companies that I work with are shifting to google docs for better or for worse ...

> When are Adobe and Autodesk going to support Linux properly?

When there will be a business case. That means, when there will be people willing to purchase Linux versions of Adobe/Autodesk/whatever apps, but not their Windows or Mac versions.

Normally, when people need Adobe/whatever, they will purchase also whatever OS is needed to run them - if you are getting expensive pro apps, 130 EUR/OS license (pro/oem/before VAT) is a rounding error. To Adobe this signals, that the porting effort would be a wasted effort, which they can save and earn the same revenue anyway.

So it is more realistic that some competitor appears, fills that demand and grows somewhat, before established vendors notice.

> That means, when there will be people willing to purchase Linux versions of Adobe/Autodesk/whatever apps, but not their Windows or Mac versions.

I think this is becoming a real possibility.

The other day I realized that all of the commercial FPGA design tools I use, from Xilinx, Altera/Intel, and Lattice, are available for Linux as well as Windows.

And despite being fairly expensive if you need the versions that support larger FPGAs, they all provide a free version.

Naturally they target the enterprise distributions like RHEL, and there are quirks in general and some friction to using them on other distributions, but they actually work and they're supported.

Now, perhaps there's something about the people working on FPGAs that makes demand for Linux versions of those tools much higher, I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of installations for those tools was still mostly on Windows.

I think it's more likely there will be simple but competent web apps that fill those niches for most people before Adobe ports to linux.

Autodesk has many programs now that run on Linux. Maya has run on linux for over 15 years.

When Autodesk bought Alias|Wavefront, it was already running on Linux, with their customers running Linux. Killing it would damage their business, so they continue with the development.

Meanwhile their original product, 3ds max, is pretty locked into Windows.

3D Studio was written directly for Windows NT and isn't available on Mac OSX either. There is already Maya, Softimage XSI, Houdini and Modo on Linux. I'm not sure where the expectation comes from that 3D Studio would be ported to Linux. It isn't any sort of a standard for general 3d work, isn't used much by the computer animation or visual effects companies, and is more of an exception.

It is not an expectation of being ported to Linux, it is a statement of fact of being windows exclusive.

It was originally a DOS application, which was rewritten for Windows, and is used in game development.

The original comment was about Adobe and Autodesk 'supporting' linux properly. 3D Studio was originally written for DOS, but published by Autodesk, not written by them.

It doesn't make sense to say Autodesk doesn't 'properly support Linux' when they have software for Linux, and one program that isn't for Linux doesn't really have much demand on Linux in the first place.