I never bought into the ecosystem. My first laptop had os/2 warp, then I moved to slackware for years. After that onto FreeBSD when I became a sysadmin. I was turned onto Ubuntu by one of our developers (12.04) and then ended up on Debian when I started gaming. Played guild wars and bf1942 for years until ea used anticheat that was Linux compatible, but disabled it, then moved away from games with a community so toxic it requires software to stop cheaters. I even had an employer pay for a windows xp cert for me and thought it was the jankiest operating system I’d ever used. It was impossible to update everything, the command line was neutered and it t was so slow compared to everything else I used.

Currently I run proxmox and debian on home servers and cachyos on my laptop and gaming computer. I buy computers with no os, or build from scratch where I can and only choose games based on Linux compatibility. I don’t have a need for windows because I’ve never used it for anything besides software testing. I never understood how windows and a FreeBSD clone became the two biggest players in the market.

Windows is like McDonald’s. No one really likes it, but it’s ubiquitous, you know you’re not going to like it, and you’re going to regret it as soon as you bite into it, but you expect that, so you choking it down doesn’t seem so bad. It’s convenient and a lot of other people eat from there, so you try to convince yourself that it’s acceptable for dinner and eat it anyway.