Ask Slashdot: What Windows-Only Apps Would You Most Like To See On Linux?

An anonymous reader writes: With all the recent brouhaha about Windows 10 privacy violations and forced updates, I'm one of those that wants to thank Microsoft very gently, while taking it by the hand, and slamming the door behind it for good. Fortunately for me, I don't use any special software that is tied to Windows, except games, of course. One program I would really miss though is Total Commander file manager, which is basically my interface to the whole OS. So, I know there are Linux alternatives, but which one is the best? Also, I currently use PaleMoon fork of Firefox as my main browser, but there doesn't seem to be a Linux variant. What other software would you want to transplant to Linux, if any?

Comments

SolidWorks and Word

[blind biker]

I could do pretty much all my research on Linux, if it weren't for SolidWorks and the damned Word.
Regarding Word: I like LaTex a lot, and use it whenever I can, but I research in a multidisciplinary environment and am first author for articles submitted in such a multitude of journals, that Word is, sadly, unavoidable - there's plenty of journals that only accept Word docs.

And regarding SolidWorks: yes, I know there are other 3D CAD packages that can do similar things, but I am so proficient with SW that I am not going to switch to something else. There's a lot of time and money invested in my rapidity with SW.

Re:None of them

[armanox]

Except, of course, the large amount of proprietary software that does run on Linux just fine - Oracle software, Matlab, Steam, C-Forge IDE, shall I continue? There is nothing wrong with proprietary software - it should be the user's choice if they wish to use it.

Re:Photoshop

[orasio]

Gimp eventually did become decent feature-wise, but of course it can't replace Photoshop for people who want Photoshop. People learn to work with images, using photoshop, and they don't want to learn a different way of doing things. They shouldn't need to. If you need Photoshop, you should just use that.

For me, I never learned photoshop, I tried to, several times, but just couldn't do basic stuff. Gimp was very easy for me to learn, I use it only for very simple stuff, like resizing pictures, color management, basic compositing, sprites, logos for web development, that kind of thing.

Re:Photoshop

[damn_registrars]

I'm not sure what it is that you dislike so much about GIMP or why you find it so intolerable. Yeah, it is not a direct drop-in photoshop replacement for most people, but nothing can be.

I can tell you from my experience that I was once traveling with my wife - who is a graphic designer who uses the latest versions of every Adobe product - and we only had my laptop with. She needed to edit an image in a hurry so I told her to try GIMP (as her Adobe licenses are all Mac, which made them unusuable for me anyways). She didn't love it, but she was able to do what she needed in a short amount of time. I myself use GIMP all the time, but my needs as a scientist are much different from hers as a designer.

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

People say this a lot, but Photoshop's UI is just as clumsy and awkward as GIMP's. You're just too used to its weirdness to see that anymore.

Re:None of them

[mark-t]

People pay for Office because other people actually use Office at work, and at least 3/4 of the time, trying to port documents that are created in Office between it and Open/LibreOffice is only going to lead to gratuitous quantities of pain as formatting gets fucked all to hell.