Re: This is probably worthy of an article on its own
Video editing, maybe for a light home user sure, but if it doesn't run Premier or Pro Tools that's the userbase it's going to stay with. Have you tried editing 4K video with 7.1 Dolby Surround on a Linux app? How was the video-audio latency? Was it less than 2ms? If not, get off my lawn. If there's one that's capable of it and can export to industry standard formats I'd love to know what it is.
Same for photo editing, Lightroom and Photoshop are in a different galaxy than anything available on Linux. Yes I've tried them all, I'm a semi-pro photographer. I don't *want* to pay rent on my software to Adobe, but the competition leaves me no choice.
Desktop publishing? Thought not.
And yes, the MS apps are very important. Obviously not to you, but to the millions of users around the world who use them for business, there are no alternatives. Office 365 is really good, but it doesn't cover all bases.
These are the "standard apps" that people are talking about when they use that phrase. They don't want alternatives, they want the ones they know how to use, the ones they know can do the job - because it's not about the OS. It's not even about the apps. It's about getting stuff done.