[anaganisk]

Photoshop and Gimp are worlds apart. If you're not a power designer/user, GIMP is horrible to be part of your workflow. Depending on the user( mostly developers). Linux in its current state is a NO for the people who want AAA Games and Adobe/Affinity Toolset. And many of the apps you mentioned are Electron Apps which are what commenter mentions about. Dont get me wrong but usability/readability of linux way apps dont come anywhere near other OSs because they're primarily designed by developers not design teams. I dont blame them. But to be a mass desktop alternative, linux has some climbing to do.

[bscphil]

> Dont get me wrong but usability/readability of linux way apps dont come anywhere near other OSs because they're primarily designed by developers not design teams.

I think this claim harms your overall point (which I agree with). I can't think of any Linux programs (other than Calibre) which I have serious problems using. Furthermore, they tend to be extremely fast because they're very lightweight. The entire VLC package from my distribution is only 13 MB, and VLC is a rather large program by Linux desktop standards. Even Gimp is extremely simple and intuitive to use (to anyone who isn't a complete noob with graphics concepts), it's just extremely lacking in features and polish compared to Photoshop.

If you stick with the point that AAA games and Adobe are still a "no", you have a fine point. I've found that 99% of the games I want to play are actually available for Linux, these days, but that probably speaks more to my tastes than anything else.

[wayneftw]

Gimp is certainly not the best, which is why I use Pinta for simple workflows. If there's some feature missing from Pinta, I use Gimp.

> ...usability/readability of linux way apps dont come anywhere near other OSs...

As a web dev - almost all of the apps that I needed from Windows were on Linux and the usability is exactly the same.

Personally, I don't care if Linux is ever used by the masses though. I'd probably prefer if it wasn't. I also don't care if AAA games ever come to Linux. I keep Windows machines around for that. I also have Macs for doing stuff with Apple iThings.

There is no obsession within me to do everything on the same machine. I don't need my phone to do stuff that my desktop does. My laptop is used for meetings and has almost no software installed on it. My Windows machines are used for entertainment. My Linux machines are for work. For devs, if you really, really need Photoshop you can run it in a VM. I don't see the big deal with that - it was a selling point for Apple's Intel Macs for a long time.

So, outside of AAA games (which devs largely don't need for work) and Photoshop - what am I missing?