I've found that Linux applications aren't reliable enough for real work.
The Linux kernel is as close to flawless as you can get, as evidenced by its use in all of the supercomputers, but the applications are usually botched. I've tried desperately hard to switch over to Linux, but I can't get the work done properly.
The latest example is scanning pdf documents. I have a need to occasionally scan legal and financial documents. I bought a scanner that was 100% certified by the Linux SANE group, and I had a simple requirement: that the scanned documents must have the same size and aspect ratio as the original. That shouldn't be hard to do, but it turns out to be impossible in Linux. There are about half a dozen well regarded scanner/image processing Linux programs. Every single one of them messed up the scanned image in some way or another.
Several of the Linux document viewers totally fail if you give them a long, complex pdf document. My latest debacle was printing an eight-page financial form where I was forced to print it from the website. Using the Gnome built in Document Viewer application I got a page and a half of good print and garbage for the rest. (Solved, as you might suspect, by downloading it to Win 7 and using the Adobe software to print...)
The reason Linux applications don't work very well, in my humble opinion, is because of fragmentation. There's one Microsoft Word. There's one Adobe Acrobat. There's a hundred Linux word processing programs and a hundred Linux document viewers. How many people work on Acrobat? A lot. How many people work on Document Viewer? Probably five or six. Which one will probably be more reliable?