Works fine for me. But I rarely need it.

Depends on the printer.

Dia is available for Linux. As for flac, tell me when you find a program that does not support it!

That's one possibility. I prefer smplayer (mplayer+gui) since mplayer is faster than vlc.

Google Earth is available on Linux.

This [1]?

This [2]?
I certainly don't need it. If you do wine might be worth a try.

I guess the closest aproximation would be Eclipse. But there's no alternative on Linux that's actually on par with Visual Studio.

Fine: mplayer, vlc ...

Most likely some drive-specific tool that you wouldn't need anyway.
My rule of thumb: I consider any HDD broken that needs tinkering beyond the capabilities of hdparm.

Usually yes.

The program is available for Linux.

All I could find via Google was a trojan. It probably would work under wine, but I don't quite see the point.

There are several alternatives. The hard part is not switching the SW but convincing your contacts to use something else.


My way was not forcing anything at all (e.g. by intentionally uninstalling Windows SW). All I did was trying to get the tasks I did under Windows done under Linux as well.
Over the course of 8 months or so I gradually did more and more things under Linux until I one day realized that I hadn't booted Windows for half a year.


[1] http://www.w3.org/Math/Software/math...t_editors.html
[2] http://www.kaplan-software.de/