Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users of a specific industry is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.

You are right. But when I say “alternatives”, that’s not what I really mean. And there’s a reason I gave the example of Blender. That is because, if your company is using blender, they won’t be needing 3dsMax and other stuff.

waltz in some office and have people tolerate broken documents of some format

Of course not. I am talking about the whole office switching over to (or even starting off with) LibreOffice. Because it’s just that good.
Except that it’s about as slow as MS Office, if run on Windows. But from my exp, everything is slow on Windows, so the ppl not complaining about their Windows being slow, won’t complain about this and the ones complaining about Windows being slow will still do the same thing, except that they will be using LibreOffice.

how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows

Don’t worry, Microsoft is helping us out in this regard, by making Windows as problematic as Linux used to be, while Linux is becoming less so.

In my office exp, the ppl who ask someone to fix their Linux problems are also the ones who ask others to fix their Windows problems. Then the people who tend to fix those Windows problems tend to be doing so, not by understanding the problem, but by following some random tips passed onto them by people who worked there long ago (some of which actually understood what they were doing).
Then there’s the IT department having people who do nothing other than follow instructions and turn out to break stuff more often than not when pushing updates. In my last workplace, there had been more loss of productivity from the Windows computers being stuck for hours in a reboot loop, than from any Linux problems and that was when there were 60% Linux machines. In my current workplace, I do tend to have more Linux problems than Windows, but that is with a Linux to Windows ratio of 10:1.

Another anecdote with advanced Networking options. Doing anything out of the mainstream for networking stuff is way easier on Linux for me (coming from someone who did Windows for >15years before getting to Linux for 3years). In fact, it is after I had to do these kinds of configurations during work, is when I realised, how much better it is to have high quality terminal applications with man pages, rather than the mess of Windows System Settings.

And then comes the time when a multi billion dollar contract needs to be made to port a piece of software from Windows 95 to Windows 10 and make it work with new hardware. All because someone managed to save some money the last time, by not thinking about how stuff would work later on when Voodoo cards are no longer available and signed off on getting the software (which was to be used for over 50 years) as a binary blob, instead of getting the source. Short term gains, is all you have, when saving your stuff in non-open standards.

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Nowadays, most Linux “problems” I get on work is from people not understanding how to install new stuff. For example, setting up a new docker image; stuff requiring other dependencies; internet telling them to use apt and then me reminding them to use yum. All the stuff that comes with people predominantly having used Windows and having no idea about Linux.

But when making solutions, it doesn’t tend to be much harder to create stuff for Linux than for Windows. If you can’t expect someone to deploy stuff by copying files to the correct place, you will be making an installer/shell script either way.