Linux

It's installed on their PC. That's 98% of it. If Linux was pre-installed on everyone's PC we'd all be using Linux, and the normies would complain about how hard Windows is to use.

This type of questions seems too obvious and really childish, there's no way you don't know why people use windows despite it being trash. Either you're dumb or you're asking this questions for attention.

• It's preinstalled on their PC.
• All their Hardware is guaranteed to work.
• All their preferred Software is available and supported.
• A small but very loud minority of the FOSS advocates are absolute insufferable and people associate this negative experiences with Linux.
• There are thousands of Distros and it can be confusing.

Things have gotten way better on Desktop Linux but changing public perception takes a lot of time and effort.

• Familiarity
• More games/better gaming support
• Consistency with computers used at work/school or by friends/colleagues
• IT people can benefit from using the same systems as their users to provide better support
• Availability of proprietary software necessary to run specialized equipment
• Non-power users might not run into significant issues with Windows since it does basic tasks like web browsing, game playing, and movie watching just fine

Because "inferior" is just a perspective. In your pov Linux may be better, but for someone who wants a PC to play games, mainly games with anticheats, Linux is objectively worst.

Linux, Windows, MacOS, etc are just software. You must be able to use the software that best fits in your needs and that's it.

I wouldn't say its inferior, different? Sure but not inferior

Because it's reliable, capable, and comes preinstalled on everything. Linux is better in a lot of ways, but it's only really good for power users who can install it then can deal with the quirks or people who only use Facebook and need the stability. Everyone else will get confused by the differences to what they're used to, then when they try to install Microsoft Office or Photoshop, they'll just ask whoever installed it to "put it back to normal."

One word. Distros. If I want windows on a home computer, it’s windows. Maybe it’s Home or Professional, but it’s just fucking windows.

If I want linux at home, it’s Ubuntu or Debian or Arch or Slack or Cent or Mint or some other shit. Then I choose one and I want office and it’s not an option, so I google “office on linux” and it’s libreoffice or wayland or x.org or god forbid open office. Guess what I don’t want to do, explain that shit to my kids.

At work we have red hat and cent. If I’m spinning up private cloud computer it’s cent, if it’s public facing its red hat. No decisions to make. But then I have to research some arbitrary package and all the user guides are Debian based and like clockwork apt-get and rpm are inevitably different versions and installs to opt instead of /usr/local and just fuck.

Yea it’s come a long way, but home pcs need to operate brain dead simple point and click. Windows as successfully abstracted away every component of the concept of an operating system from 80% of end users, and 99% of the last 20% don’t want to deal with it off the clock.

Posts like this are why Linux users have a bad rep. I like Linux but a lot of tools I use are developed for windows, not Linux. I use Nvidia gpus (because I have to for CUDA) which are known to bug out on Linux.

It's preinstalled.

People use tools that work best for them. There really is nothing much more to it than that. An operating system is a tool, not a religion.

You get dragged back to Windows by a lot of employers and schools. Nobody has time to fight the system when everything depends on your Windows based outputs.

Microsoft specifically engages and sponsors technology in governments around the world for this reason. Their whole schtick is 'embrace'.

It JuSt WoRkS!!!!

This frustrates the shit out of me but I have a feeling it has everything to do with mindshare. Windows just has the majority of the mindshare and a lot of decisions about information technology are not necessarily made by technically savvy people. Even technically savvy people make poor choices. I had a director once tell me that he prefers proprietary software to open source because it gives him somebody to sue if the software fails. Obviously he is neither a lawyer nor much of a reader because the terms of use and conditions basically indemnify the software company.

Linux and BSD are superior in almost every way. You could literally run an entire organization on Linux Mint as the desktop. Even before Linux Mint was a thing, I had a contract job supporting a rollout of CentOS to the desktop at a small publishing company and this was back in 2005. This company did absolutely everything systems related on CentOS. If this company could do it 18 years ago on CentOS, I can only imagine it is going to be even easier today.

Windows on its own is inferior and MS preys on its users by extracting more data and pushing them more into price-increasing cloud-based subscription models where privacy, ownership and the term "Personal Computing" means nothing anymore, and where its cloud infrastructure (where all your stuff lives) also is a big juicy target for hackers all over the globe, so you should absolutely, if you can, move away from Windows to a neutral OS like Linux, where you remain in control over what you use and the security of your infrastructure (if it's too hard for you, pay someone to take care of it, instead of shoving your whole life and all of your company's business secrets into MS' cloud).

The couple of areas where Windows can be seen as "superior" on the desktop are also mostly not due to Microsoft, but due to other developers (only) developing their stuff for Windows due to its popularity. So if you use some proprietary applications or special hardware which only work on Windows, you've made yourself dependent upon that OS. And by staying on that OS, you're not changing anything. You should move to Linux and insist on developers to make their stuff work on Linux as well. Or else nothing changes and MS will continue to do what they want with their users. It's a downhill spiral and it started with Win8 or Win10. At some point, Windows will be so bad and Linux desktop will be so good that a change will happen automatically. But still, you should switch now to accelerate the inevitable process, and not support MS for much longer. The monarchy is dead, we live in a democracy now. (Well, most of us)

Yes, the change can be hard, especially if you've used a lot of proprietary Windows-only stuff. But it's necessary. The operating system is too important for it to be 100% controlled by a privacy-disrespecting, US intelligence service obedient company. Sure, Windows might still offer you a better experience for your specific workflows in some cases. But it's a poisoned apple, and more and more poison gets added over time. Just move away and stay away. Adjust your workflows. Make a statement. Every new Linux user is another argument in favor of the open operating system, and another reason for developers to start building for Linux as well. If you stay on Windows because, say, your career depends on you using some proprietary Windows-only stuff, then OK, use it as long as you have to. I'm not telling you to stop using what you HAVE to use. But if you stay on Windows even though you could just as well move to Linux (which most people can), you're not doing anyone any favors except that you're supporting the status quo and slowing down important progress.

And about the games using anti-cheat ... just skip those. You don't even want them on Windows. That's literal malware you're installing onto your system, just to play a video game. Sure, Windows itself also contains malware, so maybe users just don't care. Fair point. But I still can't recommend people harming the security and privacy of their systems so blatantly. Some of the anti-cheat stuff is actually compatible on Linux if the developers allowed it to be (technically it is compatible in most cases, but devs have to allow it specifically), but please just don't support such things. There are many great games out there to play besides games using anti-cheats. Just like there are many great Linux-friendly applications you probably don't know about yet besides those Windows-only proprietary apps. It is some initial work to adjust and make the new discoveries, but it's worth it. Even necessary, considering how user-hostile Microsoft/Windows has become.

Because it isn't inferior.

Ubuntu barely can run programs from 5 years ago, backwards compatibility is terrible. Red Hat was doing good but it just shit the bed. To have any degree of consistenty, you need to wrap all apps inside of a Docker and carry with you all the dependencies (but this leads you to obscure musl bugs in practice, because musl has different bugs than glibc).

For better or worse, Windows programs with dependency on kernel32.dll (at the C++ level) have remained consistently deployed since the early 1990s and rarely break. C# programs have had good measures of stability. DirectX9, DirectX10, DirectX11, and DirectX12 all had major changes to how the hardware works and yet all the hardware automatically functions on Windows. You can play Starcraft from 1998 without any problems despite it being a DirectX6 game.

Switch back over to Ubuntu land, and Wayland is... maybe working? Eventually? Good luck reaching back to programs using X.org dependencies or systemd.

Windows is definitely a better experience than Ubuntu. I think Red Hat has the right idea but IBM is seemingly killing all good will built up to Red Hat and CentOS. SUSE linux is probably our best bet moving forward as a platform that cares about binary stability.

Windows networking stack is also far superior for organizations. SAMBA on Linux works best if you have... a Windows Server instance holding the group-policies and ACLs on a centralized server. Yes, $1000 software works better than $0 software. Windows Server is expensive but its what organizations need to handle ~50 to ~1000 computers inside of a typical office building.

Good luck deploying basic security measures in an IT department with Linux. The only hope, in my experience, is to buy Windows Server, and then run SAMBA (and deal with SAMBA bugs as appropriate). I'm not sure if I ever got a Linux-as-Windows-server ever working well. Its not like Linux development community understands what an ACL is in practice.

Word works. Photoshop works. COD/BF/Fortnite work. Most people don't want to bother with Lutris install scrips to run the programs they've been running for years. You never need to use the command line, even if you need to dig deep into system settings for some reason. You don't need to look up what a cinnamon gnome is supposed to be before you can use your computer. You can even overclock your computer with the tools your GPU manufacturer provides! And you can use the Stream Deck! And your RGB works!

"But there are open source alternatives" no, there really aren't. The best Photoshop alternative is Photopea and that comes with the browser penalty. Comparing Illustrator to Inkscape is just silly. No Linux office suite comes close in compatibility with what Microsoft's tools (and therefore the rest of the world) produce. Cross platform tools like Discord are sometimes just... broken for a while because the AUR and the Discord server are out of sync. Why would you use the AUR? Well, because if a company has a Linux version of their program, it's written for Ubuntu, specifically 18.04 or 20.04 on amd64.

Also, work uses Windows. Why does work use Windows? Because configuring 1000 Windows computers is trivial and gets taught in community college. Configuring 1000 Macs is possible if you buy the right software. Configuring 1000 Linux desktops is just... well it can be done, but you'll have to build something yourself for every single policy rule or pay for the ENTERPRISE license.

Plus, you need some kind of antivirus for most jobs. "But there are no viruses for Linux!" yes there are. Even if there weren't, your company won't get various ISO certifications without some kind of antivirus installed on every machine. You can try to make everyone keep their AV on and up to date all the time (and get screwed over during the audit because people turned it off the moment you walked away) or you need some kind of remote management tool, which is ENTERPRISE software.

You can punch, main, and abuse command line toolchains, force them into shape until they perform something like the Windows equivalent. That's frustrating and painful and just a waste of most people's time for basic users. I hate Windows more than I appreciate my free time, that's my excuse, plus, I've already done the deep dive anyway, but I wouldn't recommend Linux to anyone who doesn't know what "NTFS" is.

Most proprietary software doesn't just work on Linux and if it works at all, it needs experts or long guides written by experts.

I use Linux every single day but I can't call Windows "inferior". The Windows 11 GUI looks like KDE developers puked all over Windows 10, but there are a LOT of small things Windows does right and no Linux distro has managed. Yes, Windows 11 looks like shit in many places, but no Linux distro comes close.

Windows is a billion dollar operation. I'm sure a Linux distro with that kind of funding would be incredible and a thousand times better, but no such distro exists. It's superior in almost every way for the people who just want to get shit done and don't care about things like "open source" and whatever the kernel is doing.

That said, Microsoft is pushing people. Windows 11 dropped support for tons of computers, Windows 10 is being dropped in a year and a half. Windows 11 is getting shitter by the day, bullying their user base into using MS Edge. Sadly, people will just switch to the other usable operating system (macOS) rather than mess with Linux.

It's a personal opinion, I find linux desktop 'inferior' in that it's much harder for me to use, less hardware and software is compatible, and things break more often.

University forces me to

Hardware manufacturers they see M$ and go crazy

Most people are literally insane

Windows products are really really good. All their office products are superior to pretty much anything there is out there. I have wsl installed on my machine for anything development related

Most people don't know about Linux, don't know how to install it, and don't know why they should even bother to switch.

Workplace policy leading to inherent familiarity with the system.

Plus most people aren't heavy users or particularly tech-savvy. Installing an OS from scratch is already too much to ask for most.