Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody knows what you're saying. There are many people who only use Windows because they need software that only runs on Windows. Switching to something else requires you to replace that software. That's a cost. But having an OS that you first pay money for and then have it show you ads is also a cost. Every time they do something like this, it increases the number of people for which the second cost now outweighs…
> Switching to something else requires you to replace that software. That's a cost. My point is that this is impossible. You can't buy the software you need at any cost. It does not exist. You can't even consider other platforms for this reason. > you can still contact your software vendors and ask them for a Linux version. Zero interest in that for on simple reason: There's nothing wrong with deploying and using the…
There are people who can. Most people don't use $50K worth of Windows-locked CAD software. 80% of people who use Microsoft Office can get by perfectly well with LibreOffice or Google Docs, despite the loud objections from the remaining 20%.
> Why would a company bifurcate their development effort to support multiple platforms when it isn't necessary.
Because it's profitable. There are already people who use other platforms. Typically software prices are the inverse of popularity; more specialized software costs more. How many users does it take at $50K/user to justify the porting cost? 50? 500? That is not a large number against platforms with millions of existing users.
And porting to three platforms costs about the same as two, because the differences between Unix-like systems are much smaller than the difference between Windows and Mac, and by that point you're already on a cross-platform framework like Qt and cross-platform database like postgres. So adding support for Mac justifies adding support for Linux, whether it did initially or not.
> Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea at all. But, frankly, we probably spend significantly less than 1% of our time fiddling around with files in Explorer. When I am spending 12 hours a day on SolidWorks I couldn't care less what happens with explorer.
The problem is the only thing they hear is money, and you need to be objecting to this more than anyone else for your own benefit.
Every time they do something like this they lose users at the margin, because the annoyance pushes those users above the switching cost. Those users are gone, because then the cost is to switch back. But every user they lose increases the level of ad spam the average remaining user will tolerate, because they know those users have higher switching costs and therefore a higher tolerance for ad spam before losing their business.
Which means the only way for you, as someone with very high switching costs, to avoid being inundated with ad spam in the near future, is to push the switching costs down for as many people as you can. Demand that all your professional software be supported on Linux, even if you aren't going to use it on Linux. Encourage the people who can switch more easily than you to do it. Because that's the point where they stop -- when the number of users they lose costs more than the profit from the ads.
If they stick you with ads and you don't like it but nobody does anything about it, tomorrow there will be even more ads.