For widespread adoption you need both an OS that the everyday user can use and for the wider software industry to support that OS so that finding programs and being able to run them is simple.
For widespread adoption, we have Windows and MacOS.
So long as things remain as they are Windows will dominate and those with money may buy apple and then call themselves geeks.
When you cater to the lowest common denominator with backwards compatibility, you end up with Windows. Perhaps there are a few things you don't like about Windows and would like to change, but I assure you, a large fraction of the billion or so users don't want to change those.
The only thing you can change, is your own workflow. You asserted you could not find a tool for editing PDF files even when you were willing to pay, and I described how I routinely do that sort of stuff. For me, the annoying detail is the font matching, if the PDF used a font I don't have, because then I have to do
shenanigans. (If it is just a typo or such, I usually try and see if editing the PostScript version is possible.)
I am not telling you you are doing things
wrong, just like I never told my coworker they were doing things
wrong, because they too got work done; and if it works, it works. Reality wins over opinions every day. (Note that I described them as
capable; even though the "open sores" quips really annoyed me, I still think of them as a friend, and would not hesitate giving them a glowing recommendation if the situation ever arose.)
What I am telling you, is that you will not be
happy using Linux, unless you change your approach. Whether you want to, is up to you, and should not affect anyones opinion of your technical skills, because technical skills are not involved here, just
personal preferences.
I believe the core of the "happy Linux user" is in
Unix philosophy and modularism. When you encounter a problem, you always start by splitting it into sub-problems, until you find tools to deal with those sub-problems. Don't like your desktop environment? Switch to another; no need to change the distro, the DE is just a set of software like everything else. Don't like one thing or another? Change it, and submit a patch upstream, explaining what and why; but be prepared to engage a bit, in exchange. Want a new tool? Describe the problem, your idea for the tool, and how it would solve that kind of problems better than the existing solutions, and you can often attract a developer to help you implement it. Doing it
right is harder, because you'd need to think about stuff like internationalization and working across desktop environments, both of which require experience, and getting experienced developers to do stuff for you is much harder.
The rules by which the free/open source software works are completely different to the rules under which proprietary commercial software works. Both are based on competition and resource exchange ("payment"), but even the hard currency differs –– money in one; time, effort, and experience in another.
The "cost" that I personally dislike the most, is the clique-ism: when projects form a core set of developers who only interact with each other and select others, and those others always deal with "outsiders". I just don't want to play the kind of social games that are needed to effectively cut through that.
So, I do claim that there is nothing wrong in choosing to work within the Windows environment only, or only with proprietary software; it's a valid choice.
But claiming that it is the
logical or
necessary choice until the free/libre software environment becomes more similar to proprietary software, that is just short-sighted bullshit.
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