It doesn't work in all cases unfortunately. I know for example that my
employer and their clients are going to insist on non-free tools and
technologies because of corporate IT policies they established two decades
ago, and nothing I say or do is going to fix that!
Sadly, in the real world we have to make sacrifices to put food on the table.
But my career choice (i.e. writing Java middleware that runs on Linux boxes
in the cloud) has taken some of the sting out of having to use Windows or OSX
to host my dev tools. Virtualization also helps. At home at least I have a
choice :)
(As for college and university work, I remember getting through a BTEC ND and
a Computer Science degree by doing Windows-specific work on the
school-supplied machines and doing everything else on whichever flavour of
GNU/Linux I was running on my laptop)
