I will never understand people that actually like windows. I used windows from like xp (technically before that but I didn't really use any of the older ones much) to about windows 7, then windows 11. I never liked it. I just used it because that was what was on my computer. And I didn't think about what other operating systems were out there. Thinking back to that time. I can honestly say. The experience wasn't good. It was just what I thought computers were.
I don't think windows 7 was good. Maybe it wasn't as shit as 10 and 11. Really. hearing people talk about it though, sounds like rose tented glasses to me more than anything.
If I had to quit linux today. And the options were a somehow modern windows 7, or mac. I would 100% go mac without even thinking about it. And I've never been an apple user in my life.
I started with MS DOS 6. Old versions of Windows were very resource-light compared to unix and unix-likes. Over time Windows became dominant to a level that meant 99.9% of desktop software including games really only targeted Windows; this extended to peripherals, imagine it's 2001 and you want to use a NetMD MiniDisc player, well SonicStage was the only option and it only worked in Windows. The people who complained about this were nutters, as the interface was simple and understandable, aside from a few sidesteps each version of Windows just seemed better than the last.
This all really started to change in 2007 with phones taking off. Computers aren't the default software or even web target anymore, many people do not even own a computer. And Windows was really just murdered with the release of Windows 8, it never recovered from trying to copy retarded phone/tablet interfaces, each release just seems worse than the last from that point.
But the result of that legacy is that much of modern computing uses Windows conventions in a way you don't appreciate much like the fish that doesn't know water exists. Back when I was a big Linux nerd the community would act smug as shit about not needing or liking file extensions, that seems to just not even be an argument anymore, everyone just appreciates having .aids at the end of a filename so you know what it is immediately. File sharing across a network similarly used to be a competitive landscape, now it's all Microsoft's SMB and the open source Samba clone, nevermind that the client side still works best in Windows file explorer. These days the modern linux user seems to soyface over Steam working fairly well in Linux but it still works a lot easier in Windows.
So I can understand why many people would want to have something custom engineered to be good at being a desktop environment that isn't Windows "you are the product" 11, personally I really don't think Linux is it. Completely retarded client-server architectures hamfisted into a desktop environment like with X/Wayland, PulseAudio, and others makes for a stupid fragile mess that likes to break if you smell it the wrong way. As a tangent I used to use a Linux VM for the odd task and probably 3 or 4 times a year the audio would just break and you'd have to use some arcane connotation of a command line operation to fix it, and good luck even googling to find that. Of course you can roll things differently and try to avoid some of this stuff (well good luck avoiding X on a desktop env) but you're just fixing one problem by introducing another.
So people like it because of the legacy, familiarity, and simplicity, even if they increasingly need to jump through hoops to disable bundled crapware that would make a Windows XP era OEM blush.
BTW MacOS really fumbled a lead in a way that's hard to overstate. Apple had a resource-light OS that was originally dominant in software to target a really, really high end market making all their hardware too expensive. They never recovered from that and while MacOS has a lot of advantages today you end up with a problem that gaming on a Mac is a joke and backwards software compatibility cannot be reliably expected beyond maybe 1 yearly OS release, after that each year that goes by it's more likely whatever software you have just stops working all of a sudden. Fine for constantly updated browsers or whatever but it's frustrating in ways that is really hard to describe unless you've lived it.
