For me personally it's image editing software. I need to be able to collaborate easily with graphic designers and manage my personal photography. Adobe's tools are the industry standard and what I need to collaborate with others.

That's the single thing holding me back. If I could have photoshop and lightroom on linux I'd switch in a heartbeat. Until then OS X will probably remain my main desktop.

I'm not a heavy GIMP user but it imports/exports PSD pretty well, right? I was a heavy Photoshop user from 1.x to 3.x and all the basic features are there ;-) Color curves, hue-saturation, feathered selections, 99% of what you need to get shit done is the same as Photoshop. Granted, digital art is not my day job. So I don't know what newfangled tools Photoshop has now. I hate layers in GIMP as much as I hated them in Photoshop, I'm oldschool ;-)

I know the feeling. I run Photoshop and Illustrator in VirtualBox but it would be such a great feeling to launch them right from dmenu one day.

My experiences . . .

Things like setting up dual monitors used to be such a major pain (for me) or hardware support like for a bluetooth dongle.

I had some problem with an intel chipset that kept crashing a laptop in 2005. I tried debian and suse varieties with no luck.

I have a newer laptop with #! that works well now but I can't do things like VPN into my job because the software needs windows or mac. Basically this laptop collects dust unless I want to do use linux specific software which is rare.

> Things like setting up dual monitors used to be such a major pain (for me) or hardware support like for a bluetooth dongle.

Dual monitors have got much easier over the last 3 or 4 years, at least on ATI. No clue about nVidia. .. and Intel graphics have always been rock solid on Linux.

Before I got my 30" screen, I had 3x 19" spread over 3 different ATI cards. It worked like a charm once I allowed Ubuntu to auto-install the ATI proprietary drivers.

> I had some problem with an intel chipset that kept crashing a laptop in 2005. I tried debian and suse varieties with no luck.

Ugh .. That sucks.. Not sure that would have had a (reasonable) workaround :)

> but I can't do things like VPN into my job because the software needs windows or mac.

Another, that sucks. I've had no problems with OpenVPN, Cisco IPSec, Cisco AnyConnect, Juniper NetworkConnect and probably a few others on Linux.. But I'm sure there's still hundreds of pieces of VPN software that don't have linux versions (or re-implementations)

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Sadly - 99.9% (plucked from thin air) of Linux issues are due to proprietary software/drivers/etc. Of these, a good majority are easily replaceable with cross platform solutions. Pity :(

My experience with nvidia is that it's just as easy as Windows these days. There's even a gui app that was probably inspired by Windows' monitor config.

This is most of the case for me but unfortunately our company isn't going to rewrite internal systems just for me ;-)

Not the OP, but my Canon MP550 printer is not recognized out of the box in Ubuntu. Never had any other issue.