I'd love to. Linux supports Quicken, AutoCAD, and Affinity right?
I'm almost positive that everyone still using Windows is doing so because they have some Windows-only workflow they don't want to give up. Everyone else has either moved to Linux or given up desktop computing altogether.
Can they do that without sending any telemetry without you having to resort to firewalls, domain control or other stuff not available to the average user?
No. But they can run Windows-only programs as well. Linux is objectively better that Windows in the privacy (and package management) department, but Wine just doesn’t cut it sometimes.
I tried a year ago to switch to Linux, with Windows in a VM, but it just wasn’t good enough for my liking. I wanted Windows program support but with the power of the Linux command line (such as building C and C++ programs from source). and WSL does that really well. I ended up switching back a few months ago…
Lastly, there’s the aspect of online school. Proctoring systems such as ProctorU and Examity mandate Windows or macOS.
WSL Doesn't support CPU performance counters (PMU) or systemd the last time I checked. It's fine for some things but it's more of a simulacrum of Linux.
It's not that crazy a statement if you have a virtual disk. Linux would cache that disk image and thus file system operations in Windows (which are known to be slower than in Linux) runs much faster because they're not getting stalled by slower hardware operations. It's worth remembering just how slow the old mechanical drives were -- the difference might not be as distinct (nor even exist at all) between virtualised and bare metal now that SSDs are the norm.
As for why file system operations are slower in Windows than on Linux, there's quite a lot of discussion around that from WSL. I don't really recall the internals of Windows fs operations but there is something about those syscalls generating events that trigger other processes (eg so you can attach a virus scanner) vs Linux's approach of optimising the syscall for performance. The Linux approach does have it's disadvantages in that often you'd want to write software that is triggered upon a file system event and there's no way to watch a nested directory. But overall I'd take the win with fast reads and writes.
I'm almost positive that everyone still using Windows is doing so because they have some Windows-only workflow they don't want to give up. Everyone else has either moved to Linux or given up desktop computing altogether.