There isn't much out there that will run in native Linux.
Sadly that is where you and I differ. There isn't much I cannot do in Linux that I used to do in Windows and for the vast majority of things I would say Linux is "better".
Instead of Winzip/WinRar/7Zip I use "ark"
Instead of PaintShopPro I use "Gimp"
Instead of whatever it is they call Windows image viewer I use "Gwenview"
Instead of (the dreaded) Adobe PDF reader I use "okular"
Instead of Notepad++ I use any of a number of feature rich code editors.
I use "Code::Blocks" on Linux just as I did on Windows.
For Python I use "Pycharm" (never did Python on Windows so don't know what's offered there).
For browsing I use both "FireFox" and "Chrome" - that's exactly the same as Windows - I wouldn't touch Internet Exploder unless my life was dependent on it!
For virtual machines I use "VirtualBox", exactly the same as I did in Windows when I used to run Windows host, Linux guest. Now I've simply switched.
For diffing files I use "kdiff3" - exactly the same as I did in Windows.
For source control I use "SVN" or "Git" - just as I did in Windows - perhaps the one thing I miss from Windows is "Tortoise"?
On the whole I think you'll find that there is a Linux tool for almost any task you want to achieve. Actually if there's a problem with linux it's that for any task there are 10..100 different tools to choose from and often the real challenge is sorting the wheat from the chaff and knowing what the "gems" really are.
I may be wrong, and probably am.
You are by the way - many, many vendors have an IDE that is a decendent of some Java based IDE such as Eclipse or Netbeans and so they are OS agnostic. For ARM, for example (in part because of "OpenOCD") there are probably as many Linux development environments as there are for Windows (basically because dev environment developers themselves are probably Linux users too!).
Apart from Sony (my latest camera) and Atmel for AVR there aren't many things I encounter that say "must have Windows".
I suppose Windows will always exist because of Word/Excel/Powerpoint/etc- while there are Linux "equivalents" such as LibreOffice I can't say I've used them much and while they probably have equal facilities to "Office" the fact is that there is an army of robots brought up on Microsoft implementations and who need everything to be exactly where Microsoft put those things (even though they insist on mixing it all up with each incarnation of Office anyway!).
* Hopefully this split worked. Ross *
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