Originally posted by: spikespiegal
Gee, maybe if the majority of Linux applications development were actually motivated by a real paycheck rather than the emotional desire to screw Micrsoft you'd see see better Apps on the Linux side. Beats trying to fake Windows apps into thinking they were running on Windows.
Which brings me to the question that if Windows sucks so bad according to the Linux community, and Windows application development is motived by greed and cohersion, why do you promote hacks like Wine?
Who said that Windows applications developers are motivated by 'greed and cohersion'? And why do you think that most Linux developers write programs because 'emotional desire to screw Micrsoft'?
So far it seems that you say these things because your a nut. Which looks pretty accurate at this moment.
What does this mean? It means that if not for the fact that I'm a programmer and a gamer, I would have my major applications already. Of course, I couldn't switch to KDE because they have severe NIH (not invented here) problems and have to write their own everything, but GNOME tends to use a lot of things I use by default. By getting other people to find apps that already run on Linux, they could more easily switch.
As for OSS applications being crossplatform.. Gaim/Seamonkey/etc etc. I think that this is a good thing for 'Linux' or at least the open source community.
Having Firefox and Thunderbird being used for stuff at work then made it a lot easier for me when I got that old win95 box replaced by a CentOS machine.
As far as modern games go... If your a Linux user that means that about 70% of the popular games aviable for Windows is aviable for Linux. Some using native binaries, some using Cedega. Beleive it or not some game makers actually support Cedega and help them get their stuff working on it well. For 'hardcore' gamers, of course, this is worthless since they'd pretty much want to play new games as soon as they come out.
As far as KDE goes.. There is a side project with them on making the entire KDE enviroment portable to Windows. If this ever realy works well it's going to be very interesting on the sort of impact it's going to have.
Some of the applications that KDE develops are actually very nice.
For instance I've been using Amarok and discovered it's tight relationship to K3b (which about right now it's one of the premier (read: fancy) cd and dvd mastering programs out there).
So combining these two applications, which is fairly seemless, I get a application that:
Automaticly scans selected directories (in my case located on a file server) that automaticly originizes them by Artist, Album, Song name (alphabetical or numerical order) as well as genre and all sorts of stuff like that.
Then generates basic playlists (accessable in m3u format) for all these things. Then it keeps tracks of the songs and periodicly updates it's records to incorporate any new things you may add to your collection.
Has fairly advanced abilities for creating and editing playlists through simple drag-n-drop interface as well as the ability to edit id3 tags, delete and rename files, and such.
Has the ability to pull down ablum cover art, lyric sheets, and artist bios, as well as other information. All from the internet with a click of the mouse. So I can read about different artists and see dates.. as well as get lyrics to sing along and all sorts of odds-n-ends like that.
When combined with K3b then you have the ability to drag and drop playlists and songs from either app. As well as other ways (such as right clicking on songs and such). Supports a wide veriaty of formats, ogg vorbis, mp3, etc etc. Pretty much whatever one of the audio backends for Amarok support (In my case I use gstreamer backend). You can burn them as data dvds/cdroms/ etc or music cdroms. You can edit them after you drag and drop and it has a nice little graph showing you how much data and minutes/seconds you have left as far as cdrom capacity goes.
So on and so forth.
Then there is Koffice. It has more features then pretty much any other office application suite out there and is fairly easy to use.
Kword: Wordproccessor.
Kspread: spreadsheet proccessor.
Kpresenter: 'presentation program'
Kexi: integrated database tool/database application creator.
Kivio: 'Visio'-style flow charts program
Karbon14: vector graphics
Krita: Painting application. (fairly advanced with 16bit per channel color support and support for HD editing via the OpenEXR format (from lucasfilms) in the upcoming 1.5 release, I beleive.. Not 100% sure)
KPlato: "An integrated project management and planning tool." whatever the hell that is.
Kchart: graphing/chart making tool
KFormula: formula making tool.
Kugar: helps making 'quality reports' or whatever the hell that is.
So there are a few KDE apps that I think are very impressive. NIH worked well for Koffice at least because O

rg is not the greatest thing in the world. Although file compatability isn't that great.
I actually like very much having 2 different enviroments aviable for 'linux' (which isn't realy accurate since KDE and Gnome run on more then just Linux kernel based systems. Although Linux is generally the best). There are plenty of people that wouldn't use Gnome even if you inflicted torture on them. And KDE desktop makes my eyes bleed. Some of the things they make are very cool though.
It should be interesting to see what it all looks and what the usability will be like after the QT 4 transition.
As far as Visual Studio goes... ya that's a biggy for a lot of people. That's what you get if you depend on something that is designed to lock you into (or at least support) a paticular platform or another. (and I am aware of applications written in VS that work great in Linux, but compiling them isn't fun. (as in usually sucks) and I expect that it's very geared towards Windows API in terms of development tools and support.)
Closest thing people have in Linux would be things like Kdevelop or Eclipse at the moment. At least in terms of free software. There are a few commercial enviroment, there are plenty that are geared specificly towards one language or whatnot and stuff like that. Anjuta and whatnot is under development.
Then you have Emacs.. which is now more of a IDE then a actuall text editor. Great if you know how to program lisp since Emacs is it's own development enviroment.
Of course I don't expect that to entice anybody who depends on Visual Studio heavily.