As I saw it, there are 4 things that lock people in the windows platform today.

- Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting better day by day;

- Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high end business printers only work on windows.

- Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully migrate to mac.

- Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements. But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.

Its the curse of the power user.

Don't forget general familiarity. I don't know about today, but Apple was once very big on giving large discounts to education specifically for the purpose of getting students familiar with their machines.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html#kids

My point is it's harder to switch from the system you know.

Out of those I think Gaming might be the biggest, and some games like League of Legends (all Riot games) need Vanguard, their anti-cheat which only works on Windows. So it's not easy for Valve but hopefully it will get there sometime.

The biggest reason I don't just migrate is because gaming. Most steam games could work on Linux but then if you want to play one that doesn't you have a problem. I'd rather just use Windows and never have a problem, because the game was designed for my platform.

That being said, for work I use macOS.

Another thing that I consider hard tonreplace from microsoft is Active directory. This thing is universal. And after tring alternatives its easy to see why. Is its probably the most complete tool I used for humans and device managers. But linix and mac had done a good job adapting to it in the last decade.

Excel is the biggest blocker for my dad, and why I keep losing the argument to get my parents to move to Linux or Mac.

Pretty much all their other stuff is stuff that either works fine on Linux or is just in the browser anyway, but the only thing that I don't really have a rebuttal to is when my dad points out that he uses the full-fat excel and a lot of the more modern features.

I would so rather they move to Linux, and just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't have it. Annoying since I'm still expected to play tech support for them and Microsoft's recovery tools do not work, and as far as I can tell have literally never worked for anyone in human history, and I'm not entirely convinced that the people at Microsoft have ever tested them.

You can run Photoshop and small Excel (fine for 90%) on Mac without an issue.

The real problem is more specific industry software - Revit, Solidworks and probably a thousand smaller ones.

>Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.

I was thinking about this compatibility problem the other day. Usually someone moving between office suites (MSFT Office, Google Drive, LibreOffice) complains stuff broke, then they give up / drop it / work around it. I was imagining an ideal path would be to document these cases of incompatibility as bugs/issues in LibreOffice. Describe the difference and how it should work, then LibreOffice fixes their software to better match. I don't know if this already happens. Personally I avoid all office software like the plague and try to work with plain text files and vim. I just hear about these issues enough that I'm mildly invested in the situation by now.

I tried to tell a friend about WYGIWYM stuff like LaTeX, groff, and Typst the other day. He seemed more interested in "figuring out" why stuff broke when changing between office software. I tried to tell him that MSFT doesn't follow their own spec and everyone else has to reverse engineer it, resulting in implementation differences. Plus MSFT's own implementation being proprietary so it can't be easily copied. I'm not sure the weight of the situation got across to him.