I earlier ranted:

“There is no excuse for people to be punishing themselves with Microsoft garbage.”

DrJ replied:

“There is, actually. The software on Linux is very limited when you try to do specialized things. There simply is no replacement for the richness of software available for Windows.”

I’m sure you already know this. You can run Windows unique executables with Wine or VMWare on top of Linux. VMWare does a pretty good job of insulating your hardware from any dirty tricks that Windows may want to play.