Yup. I use my computer to achieve things, whether extraordinary or mundane. I could run most of my software through WINE or some form of virtualization on Linux, but at the cost of jank. Why would I bother with inferior experience for sake of dogma? It's not even all my software either.
>Corporate compliance?
While compliance doesn't apply in my case, doing business dictates my computer be generally compatible with the other party's computer. So that means Windows and Office.
>Familiarity?
Yup. Windows is reliable, MacOS is limited and Linux just wastes my time.
1. Bigger battery life
2. Decent PDF reader such as STDU, music player such as foobar2000 - if running all of these under Wine the battery life is going to become even less
3. If the computer is not needed to be connected to the Internets even occationally, there is no better option than W7.
Frankly, I think that's more of a Linux problem than a Wine one. You're right that Linux is overall worse at power management than OSX or Windows, but Wine itself is extremely light on any OS it supports. On a resource-constrained machine (eg. >2gb RAM), I'd imagine that Wine would be less resource-intensive than native modern Windows would.
