Why do men get so heated up about software?
Who cares? I mean, seriously, who cares?
Certain activities are always done using certain types of SW and OSs. Companies have to work with other companies. They also have to employ people. That's how we get stuff done. Very often this means using the same software and using software that people are very familiar with.
In film, the studio and/or producers will put the various bits of software to be used into the contract. This so that a project in Avid's Media Composer or Premiere Pro can be further worked on in London, LA or NZ. The fact that I do not like either of those packages interests no one. The same applies to the audio side of things - ProTools or Reaper - nobody ever asks. They use whatever is the standard. And even before the film goes into production, the script must be written in Final Draft because everybody else will be using Final Draft.
Try working in a major newspaper or magazine - it's InDesign on Apples or nothing. End of story! And the pictures will all be tweaked in Photoshop. That is what the designers learned to use at university, that's what the IT dept. knows how to fix and incorporate into the network, so that's what gets used!
In an office, it's Word on a PC running Windows. And Mavis in Accounts cannot enter the books on a Linux machine because she uses Sage or Xero.
Even if the sun shines out of the Linux rectum, it is not a standard. It may be the greatest and bestest OS of all time - but key bits of standard software just are not available for that OS.
There have been all sorts of attempts at creating better OSs but they all fail in the end because the surrounding infrastructure just isn't there and therefore the developers and the money can no longer keep up with hardware developments. Some, like BeOS, were pretty decent and stable, but without a large number of users and software packages using that OS, they drift away over time.
What the people who get passionate about software fail to get (IMO) is that the most expensive pieces of equipment are the people. And in a company, everybody has to be singing from the same hymnsheet. So even if the SW package does cost £50 p.c.m., that rather pales into insignificance against the £3,000 to £4,000 or more that the person using it is costing!
Sure, there will be more specific needs, but even things like graphics, DTP, editing etc are well covered.
By the same hymnsheet, I meant that everybody in graphics or DTP, or video editing will be using standard SW that is just not available for Linux.
Yes, there are some rare exceptions of popular and industrially accepted packages that have gone out on a limb and ported to Linux, but the only ones I can think of are DaVinci-Resolve for video and Reaper for audio - and they are far from being the main standard SW in their fields (except DaVinci-Resolve is THE standard for colouring work for feature films, but not for editing).
In DTP, it is now all InDesign, with very few still using Corel and Quark Xpress and none of those are on Linux.
