> Somehow I doubt Android is what Linux Desktop evangelists imagined.
You must be confusing Android with a desktop OS. It's mobile so they don't fall into the desktop category at all. Which was exactly my point: they simply don't need a desktop OS anymore.
> Apparently that doesn't include Linux
That reads like you're looking at some statistics that show that 0% of desktop users run Linux. Care pointing to it?
> And yet Steam is a ridiculously huge money maker and people are buying more PC games than ever.
So? It's completely overshadowed by the console market, not even including mobile games here.
> Then why hasn't it happened? You think companies like paying licensing fees to Microsoft?
You're asking why it hasn't happened yet in reply to me using future tense.
But let's put aside that pretty much everything you said was deliberately besides the point. Why it hasn't happened yet is pretty simple. Companies weigh the cost of switching vs. The cost of just keep paying for Windows (so no changes, no initial setup cost, no training, ...). That's gonna be cheaper for quite some time but eventually everything will be in the cloud so there is less and less reason to keep up a huge and complicated windows domain network with software rollout and other brain damage. You might keep a basic AD in place for user management that the web services talk to but that's it. Funnily enough my current and previous employer is still on win 7 because of the frequent messups you read about regarding 10, and how even in a corporate environment it's near impossible to disable all telemetry. I'm curious what they'll do at 7's EOL.
As for the average home desktop user, you're not seriously expecting your mom to go ahead and download and install Ubuntu are you? As long as most OEMs still exclusively sell machines with Windows preinstalled, there really shouldn't be anything surprising about the fact that most people use Windows. We already see some of the larger ones offering machines with Linux though, and with the desktop keeping to lose relevance and everything moving to the web I wouldn't be surprised to see this getting more prevalent over the next decade if Microsoft doesn't get their act together regarding Windows. It currently looks like they're cutting costs in that department, normal users seem to get the beta versions now so they could cut down their QA.