Dear sir/Mrs.
I propose Outlook.
Yehuda

For me, Linux has everything. For the good of Linux, i'd love to see specialty professional programs ported to Linux. Like those used by doctors, astro-physicists (a little far-fetched), mechanical engineers, architects. Here's one i'd really love to see for a present need: Avplan for pilots!!! Thanks.

It sounds good, batch processing apart (I'll try to build something in FPC, if needed). Thanks for your suggestion, I'll give it a try!

Where are all the stores selling Linux machines? .. Are there any on eBay? Yes, I know about System76 and a few others. Windows system builds and sellers are everywhere, but Linux machines are sadly lacking.

Beyond the programs and games ... Most people just want something that works, something that is easy to use and easy to maintain. Something that gets them on the internet (Facebook) quickly and easily. Also, I don't think all that many Windows users are into spending a great deal of money in - special purpose software. Artist / designers want and buy CAD, 3D and Photoshop programs. The average user will be more then happy with a free program, or something that doesn't cost them to much. Adobe Photoshop ($700 Normal) GIMP is fine for some people, but to complicated for others. There are freebies that are very good, like Paint Net, PhotoFiltre, ArtWeaver, Pixia and so on.

I've worked on many hundreds of (windows & Dos) computers over the years and a good many of those people (I worked for) couldn't fix / maintain their own machines. The Windows os come with its own tools to maintain the OS & computer, but those programs were useless in the hands of many. Some people were really good with their computers, while others were just hopeless. Find a program, unzip the program, install the program, answer all the install prompts and then configure the program .. No way. Just one example. Linux software installation systems are easier. People just don't realize that. Many of us found tailoring and configuring our systems to be productive and fun, while many others found any of that stuff to be a daunting task! Thousands of new top-notch programs could be written / ported to Linux, but I doubt it would help promote Linux. Why? Linux needs to come on new (hardware) computers. It needs to get into the market big-time and it needs to be far more popular in stores. It should be selling on desktops, chromebooks, notebooks and laptops everywhere. If there were hundreds of thousands of stores around the world building and selling machines with Linux, more people would be getting them. (Not that it hasn't been tried already) I haven't seen a decent (TV) computer commercial in years. They had them in the old days. Radio Shack, Commodore, Apple and so on. Why not now? Perhaps there should be a project to advertise the coolest computers in the World run Linux.

Yes, Linux is still improving things and gaming in linux is getting better everyday. It would be nice to see GOG Galaxy make its way over to Linux. Just awile ago I read that women (average age being mid-thirties) have overtaken and surpassed the number of young people who are gaming. Facebook games? I would love to see the Linux gaming community design a new game for Linux and install it onto a powerful computer, a very cool Linux distro and a super good looking desktop. Then make a comercial of the linux game running on the new system.

A few days ago a man (a family computer here) wanted me to put Windows XP on his HP laptop, but didn't have the XP install disk. If I tried to use another xp disk, the os would BSOD on boot. Without the original xp cd, I just couldn't do it. I didn't have time to do a streamlined xp install cd with all the extra (special) hardware drivers. So, I installed Linux Lite 2.6. He hasn't contacted me, so I don't know how they are doing with it?

The other day I brought in my CD (backup) collection from the car and discarded any bad disk. I recently purchased an FM transmitter that connects to my music player. I'm ripping all my Music CDs to music files (flac) and making backup copies of my CDs. I'm doing this in Linux. After ripping a few CDs, I decided I should have "just" a small graphical desktop cd player. One with a volume control, base, treble, < left & right > track movement buttons, pause, eject, time, track / song display and so on. I wasn't looking for anything as detained as CoolCD Studio, I was just looking to place a little CD player on my desktop. Like we do with clocks, weather monitors, System monitors and so on. I couldn't find one. There are almost no choices. I didn't want to use one of the bigger media players, just a small (Wigget?) CD player. I gave up looking ..Just saying.

Oh well, enough blabbing from me.

- Adobe PhotoShop, InDesign, Illustrator: I always need friends to convert them into pdfs for me, so that I can at least view them
- MS Office 2013 - or at least a good converter to LibreOffice

LibreOffice has (almost) the same functionality, but opening a .docx or a .xlsx can be exhausting. Also, the design of LibreOffice is not very appealing - I don't care about it, but new users might be "scared" of the old design ...

Photoshop, Illustrator, to name two.

You didn't look very hard. Audacious, XMMS, xine, and several others.

As to Linux distributions for ms-windows users, Zorin or Linux Mint might be a better choice.

To all those looking for a WYSIWYG html editor, I thoroughly recommend Blugriffon (http://bluegriffon.org/ It's HTML5 and CSS3, and in my opinion, is more powerful than most of the paid windows programs.

Microsoft power point: Open Office and Libre just do not work on a windows platform;
Some way by which we can avoid having to type: sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 576, in response to HTTP request timeout error each time at start up;
An excellent easy to read Guide to Linux for First Time Users;

Have a look at this article. There are a few methods in there, one of which should sort you out.
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/centos-...inux-mtu-size/

In general... I want programs that work well OFFLINE.

There are surprisingly few that sync and then go offline well.

The one program that requires me to rely on Windows is QUICKEN--it would be terrific to have a Linux version!

...in that case, wouldn't Linux be the solution to that?

I've noticed that more and more stuff is being pushed into "the cloud." To run the cloud costs money, and a significant chunk of it. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and other large companies have the money to run their web-based services. Linux, on the other hand, is pretty much run by volunteers, and definitely doesn't have the resources or desire to shove more stuff on the cloud. So Linux seems to be following the path that everything else followed before the advent of the cloud, that is, locally installed binaries that run regardless of your network connection, and using file stored on the physical machine that's sitting on/under your desk.

GIMP also come with its own scripting capability also, but I suspect it is likely to have a fairly steep learning curve.

Like what, batch resizing? Batch conversion? A simple one liner would handle such cases.