Most of your arguments are reasonable however they are trending to become weak over time.
- Photoshop : your lifetime license is not really lifetime, CS2 servers got shut down recently, Adobe will shut down those servers sooner or later. While you may not find it true for you, for the non professional Gimp is generally good enough. Also the Mac version of Photoshop while having some kinks even for professional use is pretty comparable, you don't need Windows given you are already using a macOS.
- Enterprise Architect: If your argument is nobody is investing in Linux desktop modelling apps it can be argued nobody is investing in desktop modelling apps today period whether in Windows or Linux or Mac .
Modelling applications on the web/mobile like Miro(just raised $100M+) or draw.io or many others have gained a lot of traction. Sharing and collaborating on the model has lot more value than few advanced features, Yes today Enterprise Architect has more features, however that is not going to last and these apps have a lot of functionality already that average users will not find them lacking even today.
- MS Office: Sharepoint/o365 is almost as good as desktop office for most common use cases and getting better lot faster than upgrades to Excel. Yes Excel is used for those million row sheets with gazillion circular dependent formulas, and it works pretty darn well for all that people throw at it. Sharepoint is improving, the use cases it is poor at handling will become smaller and smaller that procurement departments will start questioning desktop license budgets for Office apps.
On the whole barring some exceptions like gaming, graphics etc there are only few new active investments for desktop apps that are not just electron apps of web.
OS is becoming irrelevant for productivity apps outside of these sectors and legacy reasons. It is not big tech does not know that, Apple is dropping dual boot in the next gen chip and it is not like windows or linux cannot support ARM, the pace of OS development has slowed considerably, Windows is only do to incremental updates to 10, the cost and effort of doing a major release is no longer worth the returns.
I got your point, but as a developer working on User Privacy products, I consider "software as a service" model personally unacceptable. I do not force anyone into my philosophy, but I will try to keep my offline software functional as long as possible, before maybe I find self-sufficient solution to replace it (like I did with migrating all Evernote documents into Nextcloud).
And again, I emphasized "software of that class" for a reason, because migrating "easy stuff" like productivity tools to Linux/Mac was not a hassle. I'm sure there's ton of new promising modeling solutions, but I can't stop using Enterprise Architect because of literal vendor lock. I use automation and I use code generation, which is implemented through .NET API (not .NET Core), which assumes Windows. However, I suppose, 99% of EA users don't worry it's Windows-only, for many enterprise-class solutions OS is just a wrapper for the software.
> [...] I consider "software as a service" model personally unacceptable. [...] I will try to keep my offline software functional as long as possible, before maybe I find self-sufficient solution to replace
I am not trying to convince you of anything, and you have the right to hold to your contradictions, but I find this at odds with most proprietary software, even more so if their execution environment isn't stable or 100% under control.
Regarding your specific needs, it also does sound a bit like the XY problem: you don't really need an app (unless locked-in by data you can't migrate), you just need the functionality it provides, though that may require some unlearning first. Oh and yeah, of course there aren't alternatives for everything.
But if you are really locked in and see the writing on the wall for your solution, you always have the option of creating your own migration path, or a stub application that does the bare minimum you need. Other might step in and help you, so it might be worth asking around first.
While your points are valid, this is not what the overwhelming majority of Windows users consider. People use Windows because it's what came installed in the computer and it runs the software they think they need. In their point of view it's not broken (because either they never experience the brokenness, or because they don't know what not broken looks like).
From my point of view, Linux is not broken at all. It runs the software I need (I'm comfortable with Gimp, I don't have spreadsheets that pass the limits of LibreOffice and I don't use EA). Lately, the move from X to Wayland has been introducing some brokenness - it's not as easy as it used to be to run X apps across the network - but I imagine all these will be eventually fixed.
Like you said, most users don't worry EA is Windows-only because most users don't worry about things like OS.
Out of curiosity, have you ever tried wps office? I found it to be more compatible with MS Office than Libreoffice and it works on Linux. Furthermore I'd like to know its limits, but only have relatively simple excel files and never used scripts within excel.
I used it couple of times, my wife's laptop came with pre-installed WPS. I definitely liked the product more than Libre Office, it is fast, could fit most of average user needs and compatible with MS Office.
My needs are far from average though, as I mentioned in the post. Not sure its spreadsheet editor would even recognize what's happening in my Excel files.
- Photoshop : your lifetime license is not really lifetime, CS2 servers got shut down recently, Adobe will shut down those servers sooner or later. While you may not find it true for you, for the non professional Gimp is generally good enough. Also the Mac version of Photoshop while having some kinks even for professional use is pretty comparable, you don't need Windows given you are already using a macOS.
- Enterprise Architect: If your argument is nobody is investing in Linux desktop modelling apps it can be argued nobody is investing in desktop modelling apps today period whether in Windows or Linux or Mac .
Modelling applications on the web/mobile like Miro(just raised $100M+) or draw.io or many others have gained a lot of traction. Sharing and collaborating on the model has lot more value than few advanced features, Yes today Enterprise Architect has more features, however that is not going to last and these apps have a lot of functionality already that average users will not find them lacking even today.
- MS Office: Sharepoint/o365 is almost as good as desktop office for most common use cases and getting better lot faster than upgrades to Excel. Yes Excel is used for those million row sheets with gazillion circular dependent formulas, and it works pretty darn well for all that people throw at it. Sharepoint is improving, the use cases it is poor at handling will become smaller and smaller that procurement departments will start questioning desktop license budgets for Office apps.
On the whole barring some exceptions like gaming, graphics etc there are only few new active investments for desktop apps that are not just electron apps of web.
OS is becoming irrelevant for productivity apps outside of these sectors and legacy reasons. It is not big tech does not know that, Apple is dropping dual boot in the next gen chip and it is not like windows or linux cannot support ARM, the pace of OS development has slowed considerably, Windows is only do to incremental updates to 10, the cost and effort of doing a major release is no longer worth the returns.