Office - Libre/Open Office, LaTeX environment? Video/audio editing - KDEnLive, Audacity (neither is my area of interest though) Any programming IDE aside of the Visual Studio? Don't know much about others but it's likely not as abysmal as you might think. Plus I'm a seventeen year old maths and physics student, what kind of work that requires stuff other than: - Networking tools - Text Editor - Compiler / IDE - Web Browser - PDF/DVI/PS/DJVU/Oter reader - Data processing tools that are more capable than Excel should I be doing? By your logic 'real job' is being some sort of artist or designer. Keep with Mac or WIndows, but keep in mind that you (might) have an outdated view of things. Bit closed-minded to boot. Ten years ago no-one expected games or proprietary GPU drivers on Xnix, now they are getting more and more spotlight. Even Microsoft starts to go Open Source and released a lot of C# backend.