I've no doubt that significant proprietary software and games tie people to Windows. However, if a) those are not core to your desktop OS use, b) you care about privacy and your OS not doing a lot of external communication behind your back, and c) you're a member of this community, it's hard to understand why you wouldn't take something like Linux seriously as a daily driver.

Step one is admitting that all desktop operating systems suck - none of them are actually engineered, they've just been crafted over decades. Second is realizing that unless you don't give a damn about what is going behind your back on your own system, you will have to embrace some form of suck. Maybe the Windows and MacOS fans don't mind having to do things like trick Windows into not sending "telemetry" or using Little Snitch to block whatever daemons Apple wants communicating to their servers for every executable you run.

As much as I swear JWZ was right about the CADT development model, more often than not, if I learn the incantations I can deterministically make Linux do what I need it to do. And I'm no software development badass like many here. I hate that I have to know so much about something so clearly not well-engineered, but am glad that it's deterministic and there's no vendor hellbent on trying to keep me from configuring my system in the way I see fit. In the worst case if I can't figure it out from documentation, forums, whatever, I can look at source code. I'm not going to tell you "Linux is awesome!", but I will say that I think it's the least bad option.

Also, of the common choices out there, I find today's KDE to be quite usable and pleasant.