Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

No he wasn’t haha. The only thing he did was slide the company sideways via pre existing illegal monopoly. In fact, they lost most of their monopoly under his supervision . At no point did the quality of their products improve, and that’s evidenced with this year’s massive massive Windows outage, or Garmins mega ransomware, out a hundred other people who’ve been hacked via Windows.

If you’re running Windows for anything, it’s only a matter of when, not if.

I wonder if Windows is even their flagship app any more. I think people will give up Windows before they give up Excel. And they might not even notice a different OS, so long as it had the same file manager. In fact Excel is the last non-FOSS app that I still use, even if sporadically.

Don't forget gaming. Gaming on Linux is possible but Windows still has the advantage in both software and hardware support.

I particularly like the video series from LinusTechTips where they try to use Linux as their daily driver because it is very telling. They manage to do stuff, but it isn't great. I find it interesting because it is done from the point of view of computer enthusiasts but not IT professionals or programmers. The kind who know about the command line, but are not very comfortable with it and would rather do without.

I don't think calling gaming on linux "possible" gives it the justice it deserves, with the arrival of the Steam Deck and all the improvements Valve contributed to the upstream. The experience is practically _seamless_.

I agree though that linux _on desktop_ is pretty janky, or at least it always was for me, having tried daily driving numerous distros.