Quickbooks. That is about the only program I have to use that requires reverting back to windows.

Just a Q ... are you just using Acrobat to view/print PDFs? Or are you using it to make PDFs?

On the former, there are literally hundreds of alternatives. I like Okular and Foxit. As for creating, there are quite a few of those too. The only thing I've seen in Acrobat Professional, which I can't find in the Linux compatible programs is security signing.

You can check many of these (search in your Linux's software manager for the installations): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software

Regarding the "obsolete" program, is it an old one? E.g. was it meant to run on XP or before? If so you might find it works under Wine - in general the older a program is the better chance it runs under Wine.

This is the main reason I still have a Windows virtual machine

I know there's technically a Linux version of FamiTracker but it's missing many features, it's in alpha and it's been discontinued.

I read the "...probably can do without..." original posting too and was going to post to it. But I can't find it and I will add the the above:

YES - all written above by irneb is correct (except I don't know/use those other other packages).
Unless you are doing very fancy Acrobat work you really don't need it. Ghostscript, Ghostview, xpdf and OpenOffice combine to do probably 90% or more of all the average person would need in making PDF files. Add enscript to convert normal text (like programming source) files and bash to sequence the operations and you can do a mountain of PDF creating, viewing and printing. Add Python for more serious efforts. Each program from Ghostscript to here comes with Slackware (and most Distros) and like Linux itself, costs you nothing in monetary exchange.

Using the above and needing to Index my storage directories I cobbled together 2 Python scripts and 1 bash driver to create an IndexBook for each directory on a HardDrive (size whatever. mine go up to 4T). It creates a directory listing file of "As Found" files and begins. It creates a PDF for each file in text form and a contact sheet in PDF form for each 20 rasters found and binds all into 1 file. As it is doing its thing it also replaces blanks in names from Window$ with underbars before processing. Does some other "repairs" too. It enters the Directory, creates individual PDFs for each text type file, creates a thumbnail for each raster and combines up to 20 Raster thumbnails per raster contact sheet and then converts contact raster to PDF. After that it combines all PDFs into the IndexBook. When done it cleans up and leaves the directory just as it was with the addition of one file - The Index.
Page0001: Where the included are located. Full path.
Page0002: and more if needed Sorted across is the directory content.
Pages-NEXT: Sorted PDFs added. Thus if three PDFs of 100 pages each were added to Index, the Index would have at least 302 pages.

Personally - I really do not want to try that with Acrobat.

One other good use of "as is" Linux included software is to print from most anything to a .ps or .pdf file and use gv for the .ps and xpdf for the .pdf and look at what the page is going to look like. What you see is what the printer is going to print, unless you messed up the settings. Saves a ton of paper. Don't have to run back and forth to the printer either.

Norseman01

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Definitely! Even while I'm forced into Windows (due to Revit) I'll use something like Foxit for reading PDFs and PDFCreator (windows virtual printer driver including GhostScript as back-end engine) for "printing" to PDF.

I actually find Acrobat a lot too heavy, slow and complicated to use on everyday tasks.

AnyDVD
I use it to decode my BluRays (conversion to mkv, storage and mediacenter are already on Linux)

I ported my software to linux recently and let me tell you it was a royal pain. Many things that I took for granted and is built into windows I had to write myself like io completion ports, thread queues, asynchronous procedure calls, heap* functions, critical sections. And there are things like hard locking files that I can only wish for in linux because I it was built for soft locking and I cant expect all users to enable hard locking so I have to do without that feature that I took for granted in windows. Also I have only done porting the server part. The client side requires 10 times more (graphical) functions that I take for granted in windows so it is not yet fully ported.

Not possible. Heck every time I install a new linux and try to compile my software from source it is a royal pain to put all the pieces together to make it work the first time. This can never be automated.

Anyway my opinion is you can't become rich porting your software to linux or writing a porting software to linux. In my mind Linux==Free so I assume all linux users want is free (as in beer) software. So I don't see any linux users actually shelling out money for my software. I ported my software so I can run it on my servers all of which run linux.

There are several software houses that bring their proprietary software to Linux and make money with that, for example Autodesk with Maya. It has also shown over and over again that Linux users are the ones that are willing to pay more for their games that Windows or OS X users when it comes to "pay as much as you want" software bundles like the Indie Humble Bundle series.
Some software houses are even making their money solely with porting software to Linux and OS X, like Aspyr Media and Virtual Programming.
So reality is proving you wrong, many Linux users are indeed willing to pay for good software and not just a bunch of freeloaders. I better not tell how much money I invested in Linux games since Steam made them easily available on Linux.

Turbotax & Winamp.

I have yet to find a program in Linux that can manage music and especially playlists on portable players. My wife still uses a Sandisk MP3 player and I can manage it on Winamp very easily. Yes, many of the music apps will transfer files to and from but NONE that I have found will manage and transfer playlists. I hooked up my Samsung Galaxy Player (Android MTP) to Mint yesterday and Banshee went nuts and kept adding instances of the player - finally had to force close it.

I'd love to leave Windows behind and I do not mind paying for software that works...

Hi all. I would like to see the latest version of Flash available for Linux. As you all know, Flash will not support past 11. Games are also websites. Many of us take gaming seriously. I have been shut out of several tournament games because of inability to update Flash. Any advice? Thanks, dearcat.

I am happy to hear that my effort to port my program wasn't only for me. I only wish all these things like critical sections etc were already built into linux so it would make porting easier for everyone. So everyone doesn't have to rewrite them from scratch for their programs.

There is another thing I want to know. Coming from the windows world I am used to providing my software in binary format. One file that users can run to install their program painlessly. Is there anyway I can provide a single binary that will run and install on all distros. There is a bewildering number of distros and if I want a program either I have to look in the distro repository or I have to compile from source. Compiling from source is a pain that I would not wish on my users or on my worst enemies. I cant put my program in the distro repository because these repositories only accept "Free" programs. So I want to provide binaries but I don't know how to go about it with so many distros. Even now I have two systems one running linux mint and the other running windows 8. Now name any program and I can probably find a binary distribution on the publisher site for windows, but I would have to compile from source for linux. And if I try to compile from source I will enter dependency hell. First it would require some library or other, then that library will require something else or the other etc until I give up and use the windows system instead. Point click install run done. I want such simplicity in distributing for linux also. Any ideas for how to provide direct download binaries for linux?

Yeah, we need a bluray player in linux. Only non-DRM blurays are able to play in linux.

I would completely switch to Linux on all of my business computers if there were two programs ported. (I now have a ratio of 27 Windows machines to 2 Linux machines.)

The programs I need are;

Adobe Photoshop or comparable, because Gimp doesn't do CMYK.
ABBYY FineReader or comparable, because nothing I can find for Linux comes close.
Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking would be helpful too.

Outlook/AD/Lync integration. Its the only reason that I can't switch regular users to Linux. They have to have their Outlook integration.

And no, you cannot use Thunderbird, Pidgin and Samba to do everything that Outlook, Lync and AD do. Too much of them are closed source and have no fully compatible GNU counterparts. It is sad.

You will get the latest version of Flash if you use Chrome/Chromium. Some developers are also working on a plugin for Firefox that makes Chrome's Flash available for Firefox: https://github.com/i-rinat/freshplayerplugin
So far I got it to work on Youtube and other video-sites, but not for the single Flash game I am playing.

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