2. Windows just works(TM). I got an Ubuntu certified laptop last year because I wanted Linux I had the following issues:
-trackpoint not working
-toucpad not working
-above two randomly stops working after sleep
-processor overheating
-5-6 hour of battery time(on windows it's still around 8-10 hour)
-ms exchange integration is bad
-libreoffice breaks nontrivial 400+ page word docs, editing is not possible
-some laptop specific function keys not working at all( volume, mute, monitor brightness)...
-laptop docker not recognized
-laptop resolution vs. my other monitors differs. I can read everything on my laptop or on my laptop, but cannot switch between the two. Wayland maybe could fix that but I don't have a weekend to figure it out...
- multiple monitors on X server..... Eh
Seriously I'm not in college anymore I don't have time for this shit. I want my new pc to work NOW.
Windows is pretty safe. It keeps me from messing up my computer, and I don't need the extra 'rooted' features.
It's also highly compatible. I don't work with back end or C. Android Studio ran better on Windows last I checked. There's a lot of tools that do better on Windows, like Photoshop.
Microsoft Office is also really sleek. I tried every alternative to Office since college and gave up by the time I did a startup and needed to make pitch decks fast. I've tried all the alternatives to Word, but when I had a job dealing with hundreds of pages of tables, it wouldn't run on anything else.
There's some nice UI features like snapping your window to the side, full screen, minimized. I can't get this right on Mac either and it beats the CLI tricks IMO. You can get around really efficiently knowing the right shortcuts.
And games. No other O/S does games as well. I know there are tricks to running anything, but but it doesn't beat how simple and easy it is to run some AAA game on Windows.
The kneecapped scrollbars in Ubuntu drive me nuts. (Can't click on 'em unless I set my mouse sensitivity to 10 pixels per cm, but they don't seem to save any space in the layout really)
Then there was time my window manager got into a fight with Eclipse that positioned menu items off by a few pixels and I couldn't click on them.
Running headless with no X I think Linux is great, I use it that way all the time -- if I have a choice of an OS to ssh into I prefer Linux, but if I am going to run a web browser or PyCharm or something, the Windows experience is as good as MacOS and head-and-shoulders over Linux.
The issue I see is that Linux users think it is superior in every way because it is "free as in speech" and/or "free as in beer". The people who maintain it don't share my opinion of what is a feature and what is a bug but the people who maintain Windows mostly do share it.
For me the only real reason is hardware compatibility. I've had a couple of laptops with some sort of Linux by now and there's always quirks that make me not able to rely on it as a daily driver. My current personal laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad 720s, and I dual boot Win10 and Manjaro. In every Linux flavor I tried on this, it consistently crashes whenever I close the lid to put it to standby/suspend and reopen it. Additionally, it randomly freezes when I drive the cpu too hard. This really makes it such that I only boot into the Linux side when I want to do hobby dev work; and use the Windows side for regular household stuff (email, pay bills, etc.).
Admittedly maybe it's my fault that I don't buy a laptop with better Linux compatibility, like one that comes built-in with Linux such as the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition.
and
> is there anything you can't develop on GNU
are not synonyms, you might be able to do everything on Linux and still use Windows for this or another reason.
I chose Linux when I could but they are not great in big organizations where uniformity and cross communication and compatibility are important.
Granted, Windows 10 is awful and should be a non-starter for anyone due to its privacy issues, but for those that don't care about that it's still easier to use than Linux.
As for your second question well you cannot development Windows specific features such as DirectX. Also the supporting for games, although getting better and better, is still somehow not very much common as the playerbase is small. Also for graphics, CAD and video editing Linux is lacking several commercial support.
Visual Studio IDE is an added bonus.
I used to be full-time linux, and I would still have one linux-only PC (and another for gaming) if not for this specific problem.
FWIW I have messed with all the common and many of the uncommon linux security camera software, and none seem compatible with my particular DVR. I will eventually replace the system with another, but that's quite an annoyance.
Windows is stable and convenient, and ubuiquitous. It gets out of the way.I like it
The WSL 2 is smooth. So feels like best of both worlds now.
Playing games on linux is hard.
Edit: looks like VS Code is available on Linux.
Also my GPU does not play well on Linux. Games have performed much worse under Proton or even natively on Linux than they do on Windows.
Eventually I'd like to start trying some OS's outside the Unix-like and Windows family though. I've had my fill of Linux, Windows and *BSD.