Though colanderman made some excellent replies, I have a few things to add. >What about Gimp and Inkscape? colanderman was right: Adobe products are That Much

Though colanderman made some excellent replies, I have a few things to add. >What about Gimp and Inkscape? colanderman was right: Adobe products are That Much Better. Gimp doesn't stand a chance. Nor does Inkscape. Not to mention the fact that I get .psd and .ai files from artists that I have to open. Gimp can sometimes, maybe, barely, open a .psd file correctly. If it's just got an image layer in it, sure, Gimp will work fine. But if they have 30 layers that include tons of complex filters? Almost no chance it will be exactly as Photoshop will render it. >I think VirtualDub is open-source and exists on Linux. If I want to spend 200x longer getting feedback on simple edits, then sure, I could use VirtualDub. I've used VirtualDub in scripts to hack videos in an automated way. It's not a replacement for an awesome video editor. Vegas uses DirectX to render a preview in real time. I can do edits and see a reasonable approximation of the result almost instantly. >it does what it's supposed to do for me. What are you doing? Things like expecting the defaults to be sane, which in OO they rarely are. I even have trouble with really basic things sometimes, like styled bullet lists, where something will just randomly get messed up. And the default bullet is this dot smaller than a period. What's up with that? Again, though, the killer is getting .docx files from people and having them be Completely Broken in OO. I tried working with OO for several years, but finally gave up in frustration. I'm sure I wasted more than 40 hours fighting with it, which would have paid for my Windows AND Office licenses several times over. >Eclipse, NetBeans, Emacs, KDevelop Eclipse is about the worst development environment I've ever been cursed to need to use (for Android development -- thank all that's holy they're officially supporting IntelliJ now). And none of the rest do nearly the job that Visual Studio does at being a really good, well-integrated development environment. Debugging an app? Oops, need to make a change. Edit and continue? Bing! Recompiled in place. Stepping... Aside from the fact that I'm developing software for Windows (in part), in C/C++, not Java. I know KDevelop can do that, but GDB just doesn't hold a candle to the Visual Studio debugger. I know, because I'm forced to use GDB on other platforms. Just like the Adobe products above: Visual Studio is That Much Better. >Linux has VLC, Totem, and Flash Just Works on Linux Mint. Answering the wrong question. Neither Netflix nor Amazon streaming works through Flash, VLC, or Totem. Also, IIRC Flash Linux either had its support pulled, or it was announced that would happen, so that's not going to help for long. The point is I have a Netflix account and an Amazon Prime account. I get thousands of movies that I can stream for free -- on Windows or Mac. Maybe you pirate your movies? Sorry, not my style. > Did you make the mistake of buying official Apple hardware? Not a mistake. I develop apps for iOS and Android. Actually my brother sold me my first iPad used, and gave me my second iPad, but I needed them regardless, despite not really being happy with the Apple walled garden. >generic MP3 players and Android phones do everything iJunk does Sorry, even though I'm with you philosophically, that's not correct. I play a lot of board games, and (until recently) almost all of the board game companies that make games for iPad have been ignoring Android. A few interesting board games have been coming out for Android recently, but it's still a fraction of what's available on iOS. I'm sure the broader game market is similar, though. My day-to-day phone is an Android, but I have and occasionally use iOS products (even when I'm not developing for them). So I'm cursed with needing to use iTunes from time to time. I also have generic MP3 players (well, I only buy ones that play OGG files, but you know what I mean), but those are gathering dust since my Android phone with 16G of RAM can hold enough music to keep me happy -- and it can stream from Google Music anything I've let Google know I own. I know ALL the apps you've referenced, and many more options besides. I've even used most of them. They all are severely lacking compared to what I use on Windows. It's golden handcuffs: I know I could leave, but I know I'd be worse off if I did. So I stay.