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I’ll have to disagree with you. Open Office / Libre does at least as good of a job as MS Office and on a number of tasks, better. GIMP is able to handle 90% of Photoshop tasks. The only two applications that I have seen in Windows that I simply cant replicate in Linux is Project and Visio. Both have alternatives but they are not as good.

Open Office / Libre does at least as good of a job as MS Office and on a number of tasks, better.

I have OpenOffice installed alongside the MS Office on this very computer. However I rarely use OpenOffice (MS Office is faster, among other things.) I need MS Office because of business documentation that I generate and edit. The last thing in the world that I need is the complaint from several people that they can't open my documents, or that something is askew in them. I don't want to take that risk. MS Office 2010 Home & Business costs $199 online, and for a business this is not a concern at all. It's just one of costs of doing business. Saving on that would cost you more.

I used GIMP before, but today Paint.Net is sufficient for most of what I need. I am not a photographer.

I looked into Linux clones of Project some years ago, but they were totally inadequate, more like weekend hacks. Project is a complex beast, and it is probably worth its high price to people that need it. I don't do Project.

Visio could be replaced with Dia on Linux. I tried that, and it kind of worked. But Dia was crude. In the end it became another example of being penny wise and pound foolish.

The problem is that all good software, regardless of the OS, is very complex. This means that a large team of coders has to toil on it for months, if not years. This includes support and new versions. Very few F/OSS people are willing to do that. That's the reason why you can't have an equivalent of Quicken (or QuickBooks) on Linux - the effort to make one, even just the GUI, would be monumental; but then you also need Internet connections to thousands of banks... forget it. The F/OSS mantra is "scratching an itch" - which means that each developer does what he wants because he needs it. If his need is common enough the world gains another useful application. If the need is unique the world ignores it. F/OSS does not develop for an imaginary, synthetic audience (like all ISVs do.) Each F/OSS program has a well defined audience. This means that the application will be developed to fit the needs of only that audience, without much thinking about needs of other people who are not present. Design from requirements is unheard of; as result GIMP was hobbled by its strange interface for years - simply because the developers said "works for me, WONTFIX." If you look into Firefox's Bugzilla you will see many examples of developers sticking to their opinions even when hundreds of users tell them that they are wrong. Ubuntu/Unity is not far from that example either. MS/Metro is also falling into that category, for the same reasons. A big software house often thinks that users will take whatever is given to them.

Commercial developers (for any OS) usually have to actually listen to their customers, and the result is often better. I used some commercial software for Linux (Eagle CAD) and it was just fine. But few companies develop for Linux because the sales are tiny (about 1% of the volume) - so why to invest into the R&D? There are other reasons too; you need to use special libraries like Qt to write code that is portable. But that is a major decision that you have to make before you write the first line of code. And once that decision is made you are locked in. Even if tomorrow the Windows-only .NET 5.0 gives you direct interface to Kinect or brainwaves you can't do anything about it; you bet on a specific horse and you stay with that horse to the end. That's why it's so important to pick a winner early in the game.

I’ll have to disagree with you. Open Office / Libre does at least as good of a job as MS Office and on a number of tasks, better.

Have to disagree. There are a couple features in MS Office that I use on such a regular basis, I'd consider them indispensable (and I'm running on Office 97 and 2K!), and OO doesn't have an equivalent. Also, what the hell is with unifying the recent files list for all the OO apps?? If you're in Calc, the list shows all the recent files for all the OO apps. Shoot, I'm pissed because I can't turn the list length up past 10 in MS Office, so I sure don't want to waste 70% of the [limited] entries on docs created by other programs.