Linux

Foobar2000.

By far the best, most customizable local music player app ever. Plus it's ~~open source~~ free.

The only thing I need on Windows is the Adobe suite for my uni graphic design stuff. I could use GIMP, darktable, Krita, etc, but my lectures teach us how things work on the Adobe suite. I use FOSS when it is for personal stuff though.

wsl

SolidWorks, fusion360, codesys (plc programming) and many other enterprise grade software sadly only really work on Windows. They do however work okay through a VM but annoying to deal with.

Games now work surprisingly well on Linux so i have no problems there except Sims4 that my girlfriend plays seems to be windows only when bought through origin gamestore

And dont suggest frecad for cad work. Sadly It's seriously not even close to being competitive.

Anymore, Wine can run anything I care to run.

Sadly, a few. I'd love to know if anyone knows any excellent Linux-equivalents for these:

• MakeMKV^1^: For ripping DVDs & Blurays
• Bulk Rename Utility – For bulk-renaming files
• Exact Audio Copy – For accurately ripping audio CDs
• Logitech G Hub^2^: *For controlling peripherals' LED profiles & DPI presets
• Mp3tag^3^: The best fucking metadata editor ever made, that's what!
• Paint.NET: For raster image editing (more feature-complete than MS Paint but less complex than GIMP).
• Playnite^4^: Platform-agnostic game launcher/manager
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: Star Wars MMO that was better pre-7.0.
• Mod Organizer 2: A mod management software that is open-source but not available on Linux? Heresy, I say!

^1^ Technically, it does have a Linux version, but you have to compile it yourself, and I don't know shit about that kind of stuff. Lol.

^2^ I know OpenRGB exists, and it's good enough for my needs when it comes to LED management, but it doesn't seem to be able to control DPI presets like G Hub.

^3^ I tried it back in like 2016 in Ubuntu 4.x and it worked just fine in Wine, but I'm unsure if it still does as I haven't tried it since then really. Still, any Linux-native software that can do shit just as good is something I'd love to know about. :)

^4^ Yes, I know there are alternatives like GameHub, Lutris, etc. but frankly none of them seem to come close to Playnite in terms of UI, UX, and sheer functionality.

It's a requirement for my Business Comms course to use Word, to the point where the prof will walk around to ensure you have Word open. The online version is awful and often drops sentences when I type so I dont use it. I could never get the darn thing working over WINE or Cassowary, so I have a VM that basically just runs that.

Lots of firmware and driver updater programs seem to require Windows or Mac and I can't get them to run with wine. For example, I need Win to update the firmware on my car stereo and my 8bitdo game controllers. I also need it to run the tax software my CPA uses.

I use Foobar2000 for music. It is feature packed and so customizable. It's available as a snap using Wine (I think it's the only snap I have installed, in fact).

I really wish there were a Linux binary available but it has been Windows-only forever. The closest Linux player I've seen is Deadbeef, but Deadbeef's library plugin does not work at all like Foobar's (the later stays updated by monitoring the music folder and shows things by tags, not folder structure). Apparently the Deadbeef plugin is being updated to be more Foobar-like, but it isn't there yet.

For work I heavily rely on the Adobe creative suite (Photoshop and Premiere Pro specifically). I maintain Linux servers (and develop for them) and maintain Linux desktops at both home and for work, but the lack of any alternatives to Photoshop specifically has resulted in me still daily driving Windows (VMs really hamper workflow with regards to GPU passthrough and although I've successfully set up Looking Glass on my workstation in the past, running 2 gpus isn't practical). Yes I've tried the alternatives and while Premiere Pro has usable alternatives, Photoshop does not. GIMP is incredible given that it is FOSS but the UI and feature set is almost unusable (for me at least).

yes, but I don't use VMs or dual boot. I've been able to get everything I need working in Wine, which is a lot more seamless

Except for video games, all software I use daily is open source and cross platform by now, but when college demanded for me to use Adobe software, I would boot my Win 10 VM. I also boot that VM to test if the software im developing works well on Windows. I also run my Logitech mouse software in a VM with USB passthrough.

Besides games, I think the only Windows program I run with wine is a tool to extract the BGM from the official Touhou games.

Before I had a 3DS, I would use a Windows tool on my VM to decrypt my totally legally acquired ROMs

The only reason I have windows is to test apps that I write.

The apps are cross platform. I use it in Linux. But I also have users in Windows, so I just fire up a windows VM for testing releases. Thats it.

I use LTspice and some ham radio software. Everything runs on wine, so I don't bother with a VM.

I used to dual boot for some games back before wine worked well.

I have a copy of Microsoft Office 2013 on a Windows 11 VM.

Games work quite well in a VM, with GPU passthrough. I use a Windows VM for VR games. The non-game program here being the drivers for my VR headset, which only work on Windows. The games themselves would probably work fine on Linux, so that's not the issue, but without drivers it's a no go.

Current releases of AutoCAD, Revit and Solidworks.

Only for very specific terrible chip vendor software which I hate but have no choice but to use because certification reasons.

Some industry hardware stuff sadly ...

Datalogic DL.Code, Siemens TIA, etc.

If someone has a solution I'm all up for it.
Was some time ago, that I tried with wine, so maybe something has changed

Xbox app for game pass. But i would cancel that if i didnt also needed windows for Sunshine streaming. Linux REFUSES with everything its got, to make hardware acceleration work.

Oh and geforce now, which is still since release broken on linux when using hardware acceleration since colors close to black are just black. So darker games do not work.

excel for vba support

Visual Studio (Not VS Code), C# is fantastic these days cross-platform wise and a pretty solid general language

But the non-ms IDEs for it...are lacking...and MS just terminated MacOS support for VS (Not that it really mattered the macOS version was a bastardized version of VS anyways) so I don't think their flagship is coming (officially) to Linux anytime soon.

WSL2 is pretty good. j/k