Sadly I had to abandon Linux as I had no way of getting the pen pressure for a tablet to work for Zbrush 2022. It's an essential part of my workflow and there's no Linux native version. Tried Wine and virtually every method possible but still couldn't get it to work. Dual booting for one piece of software seemed silly. Really unfortunate that this was my deal breaker as I was really enjoying the experience.

For music production you sadly only got Ardour and Reaper and I consider neither of them good enough to work professionally and fast workflow in writing sessions, else I’d be over to Linux already

It really depends on what programs professionals are using at their jobs though, and I imagine most will just use Windows on a separate work computer and not deal with the random issues with compatibility and troubleshooting

If you're talking about professional VFX tools, then they all have 1st party Linux support. And no, Adobe Premiere and After Effects don't fall into that category.

If its something more simple like Microsoft Word then you could probably get away with using it on linux though.

You can just use the PWA versions of Microsoft 365 Copilot App (formally known as Microsoft 365, formerly known as Office 365, formerly known as Microsoft Office). And better yet, LibreOffice is fully supported on Linux and arguably better than Microsoft 365 Copilot App.

Photoshop is perhaps the canonical example of software that does not run on Linux and is actually needed by “professionals”.

Photoshop does not run well enough on Wine that I would expect a pro to run it this way. And, if you are a print professional, there really are no Open Source tools that do what you need yet.

But outside of print, I think it is more about familiarity than capability even with regards to Adobe alternatives. And there are alternatives UI options for things like GIMP if the Adobe metaphor works better for you.

Inkscape seems to be attracting some actual professional use. Scribus seems close to getting there too. The furthest behind is GiMP.

That said, I am impressed with the development pace of GIMP now that version 3 has finally shipped. And it seems that proper CMYK support is on their near-term roadmap. I could see them shipping something functional next year. I would say similar things about non-destructive editing.

It will be interesting to see if attitudes change towards GIMP after these issues are addressed. The UI also takes a lot of heat. Now that there is a consistent cadence of releases (it seems), perhaps that will see steady evolution as well.

Yes, I am a design professional. Although I use Affinity rather than Adobe wherever I can, since i own the licence in perpetuity; but that isn't Linux compatible either. The only AI tool I use is content-aware selection for masking. I don't use genAI at all.

Since design software can include metadata in exported files, it's also wise to use legally registered software so that my clients aren't exposed to legal issues.

I've been looking at Linux for several years now, and this is the sole reason why I can't leave Windows behind yet, because as you say: random issues with compatibility and troubleshooting.

So it bothers me whenever I investigate this and people suggest clearly inadequate 'alternatives' like GIMP or tell me I should just switch anyway. Anybody that implies I could do my job with GIMP clearly isn't informed enough to actually answer my question.

Thank you very much for the nuanced and good faith explanation.

White collar professionals who spend their days developing and deploying software or working on compute infrastructure? Sure, some of them have been on Linux for decades. Although many big corpos love Windows and Microsoft products, so at best you're going to have a foot in both worlds if you work at one of these companies.

Some admin jobs that don't require bespoke software (ie very little beyond say an office suite) have started making the jump recently to save $$.

Basically every other white professional that needs to work on a computer with industry specific software like people in medical, engineers, business? Odds are they use windows since the software they use for their job is probably only built for Windows and maybe Mac if they're lucky. Very few employers are going to mass deploy Linux to run applications via Wine. These employers have support contracts for the major software products their employees use and they won't get support if they're not running software on its native OS.

I'm a profesional software developer and my employer doesn't let me use Linux.