People who stick to Windows, why?

1. Office suite. There is reall nothing better than word/excel. I tried libre office a few times but meh..

2. Windows just works(TM). I got an Ubuntu certified laptop last year because I wanted Linux I had the following issues:

-trackpoint not working

-toucpad not working

-above two randomly stops working after sleep

-processor overheating

-5-6 hour of battery time(on windows it's still around 8-10 hour)

-ms exchange integration is bad

-libreoffice breaks nontrivial 400+ page word docs, editing is not possible

-some laptop specific function keys not working at all( volume, mute, monitor brightness)...

-laptop docker not recognized

-laptop resolution vs. my other monitors differs. I can read everything on my laptop or on my laptop, but cannot switch between the two. Wayland maybe could fix that but I don't have a weekend to figure it out...

- multiple monitors on X server..... Eh

Seriously I'm not in college anymore I don't have time for this shit. I want my new pc to work NOW.

While CLI stuff is great (I do it on the work Mac), it's not a compelling enough reason to ditch Windows.

Windows is pretty safe. It keeps me from messing up my computer, and I don't need the extra 'rooted' features.

It's also highly compatible. I don't work with back end or C. Android Studio ran better on Windows last I checked. There's a lot of tools that do better on Windows, like Photoshop.

Microsoft Office is also really sleek. I tried every alternative to Office since college and gave up by the time I did a startup and needed to make pitch decks fast. I've tried all the alternatives to Word, but when I had a job dealing with hundreds of pages of tables, it wouldn't run on anything else.

There's some nice UI features like snapping your window to the side, full screen, minimized. I can't get this right on Mac either and it beats the CLI tricks IMO. You can get around really efficiently knowing the right shortcuts.

And games. No other O/S does games as well. I know there are tricks to running anything, but but it doesn't beat how simple and easy it is to run some AAA game on Windows.

Correct font metrics. Like every button in the UI has enough room for the text and if it doesn't I should be able to file a bug and have it fixed.

The kneecapped scrollbars in Ubuntu drive me nuts. (Can't click on 'em unless I set my mouse sensitivity to 10 pixels per cm, but they don't seem to save any space in the layout really)

Then there was time my window manager got into a fight with Eclipse that positioned menu items off by a few pixels and I couldn't click on them.

Running headless with no X I think Linux is great, I use it that way all the time -- if I have a choice of an OS to ssh into I prefer Linux, but if I am going to run a web browser or PyCharm or something, the Windows experience is as good as MacOS and head-and-shoulders over Linux.

The issue I see is that Linux users think it is superior in every way because it is "free as in speech" and/or "free as in beer". The people who maintain it don't share my opinion of what is a feature and what is a bug but the people who maintain Windows mostly do share it.

(Answering this with the context of personal, not work, because work is a Macbook and there's no option to choose)

For me the only real reason is hardware compatibility. I've had a couple of laptops with some sort of Linux by now and there's always quirks that make me not able to rely on it as a daily driver. My current personal laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad 720s, and I dual boot Win10 and Manjaro. In every Linux flavor I tried on this, it consistently crashes whenever I close the lid to put it to standby/suspend and reopen it. Additionally, it randomly freezes when I drive the cpu too hard. This really makes it such that I only boot into the Linux side when I want to do hobby dev work; and use the Windows side for regular household stuff (email, pay bills, etc.).

Admittedly maybe it's my fault that I don't buy a laptop with better Linux compatibility, like one that comes built-in with Linux such as the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition.

> stick to Windows

and

> is there anything you can't develop on GNU

are not synonyms, you might be able to do everything on Linux and still use Windows for this or another reason.

I chose Linux when I could but they are not great in big organizations where uniformity and cross communication and compatibility are important.

I don't think the problem is ability to develop software. The problem is user experience.

Granted, Windows 10 is awful and should be a non-starter for anyone due to its privacy issues, but for those that don't care about that it's still easier to use than Linux.

To answer your first question I think it’s more a matter of Windows provide a good Desktop environment, commercial applications and others features which are not common in Linux. With WSL and VSCode Microsoft is chasing developers who are still using Linux or moved to MacOS long time ago and tell them that Windows 10 is also very good for any kind of modern development.

As for your second question well you cannot development Windows specific features such as DirectX. Also the supporting for games, although getting better and better, is still somehow not very much common as the playerbase is small. Also for graphics, CAD and video editing Linux is lacking several commercial support.

I can do what I need in Windows, and don't spend much time thinking about moving

I'm using both Linux and Windows, but what attracts me to Win10 is Direct3D 11 and graphics drivers. On Linux you either have to use OpenGL that feels ancient or Vulkan that is a bit too complex for average-sized projects. D3D11 is an excellent API that is both high-level enough to work with comfortably and modern enough to not feels like you are lagging behind. It's just pleasant to work with. Graphics driver support for Windows is excellent since it is driven by the demands of gaming industry.

Visual Studio IDE is an added bonus.

I have one specific piece of software I need to run (a security DVR camera viewer) and haven't found a replacement in linux.

I used to be full-time linux, and I would still have one linux-only PC (and another for gaming) if not for this specific problem.

FWIW I have messed with all the common and many of the uncommon linux security camera software, and none seem compatible with my particular DVR. I will eventually replace the system with another, but that's quite an annoyance.

Linux audio and video problems as well as a few intentional decisions by game developers have forced me to use Windows to play games with my friends.

Most commercial software is still exclusive to Windows/Mac. Very limited support for Linux. Honorable mention, WSL is a charming tool!

I can do all those things with linux. Why bother with macOS and it's lock in . I believe a lot of macOS users don't appreciate the competition.

Windows is stable and convenient, and ubuiquitous. It gets out of the way.I like it

I recently came back to windows after 10 years of ubuntu ( i had it dual boot setup all the time but never used it other than games).

The WSL 2 is smooth. So feels like best of both worlds now.

Playing games on linux is hard.

Excel. Still needs it until I can get a more technical position and I'll ditch good old windows. BTW people who develop games in Unity probably need to stay in windows as well.

For me, unless the apps on Windows (and Mac) like Autodesk, Adobe and some video editing software come to GNU/Linux or something equivalent, I will never use GNU/Linux.

Visual Studios! Unfortunately nothing comes close for C++ development on linux, CLion and QTCreator are a distant second.

I work with Azure and Visual Studio 2019 is still the best tool for that.

Trading softwares. But I use VPS and RDP.

For me, it's mostly compatibility. Until recently, Windows was required for remote access for my job.

Edit: looks like VS Code is available on Linux.

I'm working on some projects right now related to quasi-retrocomputing stuff and Windows is the target for some of them for a few reasons. The Windows kernel still offers some some nice API's that linux either doesn't have anymore or is in the slow process of gutting. Plus whe shopping for specialized hardware, I'm often stuck with linux kernel 2.x drivers, and while I doubt the equivlent Windows drivers have been updated since then, I have more faith that they can run unchanged. Plus WSL offers me enough of what I'm missing for now. Also, admittedly I'm just more familiar with it.

Also my GPU does not play well on Linux. Games have performed much worse under Proton or even natively on Linux than they do on Windows.

Eventually I'd like to start trying some OS's outside the Unix-like and Windows family though. I've had my fill of Linux, Windows and *BSD.

since windows is on like... 96% od desktops, this question is quite nonsensical.