[pasabagi]

Who cares? Way more developers and users devote time to improving the Linux experience than Windows or Mac. That's the only way in which popularity really matters. And it shows - when I switch to Windows, my Laptop fans start up and everything feels as slow as a slug. Because at this point, Windows is just bad software - and that's because Microsoft has recognized that the Desktop/PC thing is a declining market - and have reallocated resources accordingly.

[giobox]

I care - if you want a vibrant third party software ecosystem it helps if there’s a reasonable sized install base, especially when comparing to an install base that is often near enough a rounding error. This means my development OS has to find a reasonable audience beyond people like me. Vibrant doesn’t just mean “free” or open source either. For commercial software, there’s significantly less economic incentive to ship Linux support. It’s sadly a similar story with respect to hardware/peripheral support from time to time as well.

It’s nice when you can run things such as the Adobe suite without recourse to emulation/wine etc. I don’t just use my desktop OS for work.

[pasabagi]

I do see your point - I keep my big computer on windows for this reason, and for hardware support. However, I think the picture is more complicated than windows having a 'vibrant' ecosystem, and linux having no such thing.

My experience is that 90's-era flagship programs, like Adobe suite, Microsoft Office, and so on, generally don't have Linux support. However, for anything past that, Linux is simply way better. If you want something like a nice calendar app, a good music player, or a good calculator, or whatever, linux is way ahead.