I think my comments may have been interpreted more disparagingly than intended. I am an innate believer in the power of open source and the Linux development community to help free people from the shackles of vendor lock-in, but after 30 years of using various flavours Unix/Linux offerings, we’re still not there, and in many respects, this is down to the lack of business-oriented focus in the projects, rather than the more commonplace “scratch-that-personal-itch” approach.
To come back to my point about OCR, having to OCR printed documents is hardly a new or niche business requirement per se, it has been around for at least 30 years, in pretty much all of the companies I have worked in/for. As there has been a steady push by Linux vendors (be they RedHat, Canonical, or others) to convert businesses from Windows/macOS to Linux, I feel that the absence of a workable, business-oriented solution for areas such as this is still a pretty major obstacle to such a migration, unless there is indeed a product out there of which I am unaware.
Personally, I have nothing against paying for software for business use either, hence the suggestion to use MasterPDF, or Abbey Fine Reader, both of which have discrete licence fee payment models, and are not (yet) based on a subscription model.
There are other areas where Linux has lagged behind quite significantly in terms of functional offerings - for example, accessibility programs such as text to speech only became possible on the desktop relatively recently (I don’t know how good they are), and dictation software as far as I know is still not available - despite this also being a more general accessibility issue, and something used in a number of fairly major business sectors (medicine, law, to name but two).
The reason why I mainly use macOS now instead of one or more of the various Linux distros out there is because it is Unix-based, and the Linux distros still can’t meet my business requirements. I ran a whole small office on Linux desktop and server more than 15 years ago, but we kept two Macs at all times for those business-focussed requirements that couldn’t be met at the time (and still aren’t). The whole TCO argument of the time didn’t really stand up either, For me, that’s the real issue with regard to Linux in the workplace - the fact that there is a scarcity of business-focussed solutions other than web-based applications, collaboration, and email and desktop document processing.
Also, despite the alleged inclusive nature of open source software development projects, they often have quite a poor track record when it comes to accessibility - this is something that the other majors OS vendors have managed to address at least to a certain extent for a number of years now. If I were to hire a visually or other physically impaired person, I would struggle to find a suitable Linux desktop (suggestions welcome) that would allow us to provide a suitable IT workplace environment for them. In fact, I’d get better out-of-the-box support using Google Workspace, with the added advantage of the whole Android app sphere to boot.