Forget about web development. All profession-specific software except web and app programming still runs best on Windows. Engineering, simulation, city planning, accounting, complex management, supply chain optimization, media production, statistics. If you're getting paid for some output where computers play an extra-boost tool role, simply being a means to the job, the software you'd use will be on Windows.

If a piece of software is specialized enough that people maintain it for decades, if it has nice detailed and complicated GUIs to handle complex tasks, it will be on Windows. It will rely on Windows' stable API. Those software goes back to 80s and 90s. They have organically grown. Linux kernel requires thousands of developers to keep alive. Linux kernel is much simpler than profession-specific software. Windows Stable ABI allows much fewer people (low 100s) to maintain much more complex software than the kernel.

Even without the stable ABI, Linux is hostile to the closed source software unless that software is served via a TCP socket.

Web can challenge this with Web Assembly and some combination of edge / datacenter computing now. Still quite the way out for demanding things like local simulation and CAD/CAM. There should also be strong economic reasons to throw actually trillions (unlike AI and other SV bullshit balloons) worth of software and entire systems out, not just to spite MS.

It's nothing inherent about Windows (not even one-click .exe files), it's existing programs and drivers that only run on Windows, which of course only run on Windows because it was already popular.

For me it's MS Office. Sorry, but OpenOffice.org and the Google apps still don't come close. (And of course Office file formats are their own lock in, very analogously to the programs that run on Windows.)

The lockin is that you buy a new computer, and when you turn it on Windows is there. Like 1% of people have any concept that they could change that or how they would go about it. It doesn't suck enough yet for them to try changing it.

If you want to talk about why not macOS or Chrome, there are different reasons, but of the people buying PCs, that's why they're on Windows.

It's much less fiddly for games is the only reason for me.

Gaming support for Linux still isn’t 100% there like Windows. It’s still about a 50/50 chance a popular AAA or indie pc game supports Linux.

As an example: Claude Desktop (containing Claude CoWork) is not officially available on Linux, only Windows and macOS.

Adobe