-The vast overwhelming majority of games are now effectively cross-platform. Work done mostly by valve benefits the entire ecosystem of linux-based OSes, and the sliver of incompatible games that still exist take vast resources to prevent from being made compatible, and thus can only be pulled off by well-resourced studios, most of whom Microsoft either has a deep relationship with or has bought.

-I'm glad we at least agree that computers running linux can be used for doing computation, as is true of any computer I would hope

-Most video decoding is effectively done on browsers, which are, with the exception of the garbage ones OS vendors keep trying to lock users into despite this being deeply unpopular, run on every platform. DRM is supported by most browsers with some opt-out consent options, and remaining incompatibility with streaming platforms is largely driven by those platforms being able to detect what operating system you're on and specifically trying to prevent playback on that basis. There is no popular codec I am aware of that isn't supported by FFMPEG, let alone by any free software whatsoever

-At this point are you just talking about platform adoption? People can encode stuff on whatever system they want. The only market forces are increasingly futile efforts to enforce platform control on the part of content aggregating corporations

-Is the thing about laptops referring to the fact that laptops are, through corporate deals, mostly sold with windows as a default operating system on them? There are now several whole OEMs that don't, but the last time I encountered a laptop for which a routine and standard linux install process ran into any issue whatsoever was like 2012, and it felt like a weird edge case then. Maybe I would have if I used fingerprint scanners or some other creepy spyware nonsense? I'm not even looking up laptops before I buy them. One time I had a boss who just bought the most expensive thing he could find at best buy on short notice. I heard it was kinda hard to get new Apple silicon models up and running for a while? For the most part, computers are just computers. It's weird that so much marketing pretends otherwise. The market for GPUs in laptops by and large does not care what operating system they are running, because people are buying the hardware for any of a number of general purposes for which one might use a general purpose computer. If you've done any statistical analysis to support these claims of "market forces", are you sure you're not claiming every laptop sold with windows installed by default in your models, despite that everyone running linux on a laptop also has to buy the laptop, but will probably only boot up windows if it forces them to by trying to prevent people from booting into a BIOS menu, and then only to do that?

This kind of fuckery will also affect statistics for things like counting browser agents, because every time Netflix does some fuckery to try to gate high-quality streams by OS, someone will write a script or a plugin to spoof the agent of another OS to get around it

I find it pretty futile to try to understand "market forces" in any sort of factual sense, because the metrics are nebulous, easy to manipulate, and everyone involved has lots of incentives to lie about all of them. But I still don't have any clue what this has to do with whether drivers work, since most people on every operating system just use the same stupid blob of drivers nvidia dutifully provides every platform for every GPU they make, as they have for the last 10 of the roughly 15 years I've had any reason to care about GPU drivers

I would hope that you consider that dismissive replies like this do little to encourage anyone to adopt linux, and instead make the community seem elitist and off putting.