Let me see if I can leverage this to help you understand why other people don't use Linux: WINE and Proton do a pretty incredible job of allowing Windows games to run on Linux, why isn't that good enough?
Now take whatever your response was, and replace "gaming" with "engineering", "audio production", "accounting", "video production", or whatever. You're viewing these things from a perspective of casual understanding and saying that Linux seems "good enough", but when you've got a deeper level of knowledge in something (gaming) you readily see the problems.
Have you tried Steam within the past 6-9 months with Proton?
Steam is bundling a version of wine that Just Works(tm) in the Linux Steam client. Valve is claiming responsibility for all the goofy workaround configuration that accompanies setting up wine for any given game.
Native Linux games are listed alongside emulated Windows only games. This includes dx11 support. In the past 3 months they apparently added DX12 support, but I haven't tried it.
dx9 games have better framerates in Linux than windows on open source drivers. (not Nvidia) dx10/11 games have comparable framerates. Can't comment on 12. Obviously opengl or vulkan games have no issues.
It does not help with multiplayer games that include draconian anticheat mechanisms. Nor does it help you with Ubisoft's or EA's stores, but fuck them.
Easy to say when the OS is more important to you than the games. But when games are more important than the OS it's a different matter. Most gamers just want to click on the game and have it run, they don't want to mess with WINE or proton or Lutris or playonlinux
I mean, maybe my experience would've been different with a different laptop, or maybe I could've put more effort in, but this is what stops Linux from being a daily driver for me. I don't want to spend all of that time just trying to find a distribution that works, followed by even more time trying to keep it working.
I disagree with Windows' direction more and more. I very much want to like Linux and use it as a daily driver -- I tried 6 popular distributions trying to get just one to work! -- but the reality of it stops me. If this is what someone who wants to use Linux experiences, how will it ever be able to catch on for regular desktop use?
(The best experience was with MX Linux. The hardware compatibility wasn't ideal; installing proprietary nvidia drivers broke the boot; power usage was kinda poor relative to Windows; but overall, I was able to at least use it.)
My mom got herself a new laptop while she was here to visit me, I installed Ubuntu on it, Wi-Fi kept crashing. It wasn't really stable.
Due to an unfortunate chain of events, her laptop spent another half a year with me, before she came back over to pick it up. I wiped it clean, reinstalled Ubuntu again, and now everything was working fine.
This was maybe a year or two ago.
For non-devs, it depends on how much MS infrastructure and solutions they've already adopted and have resources invested in. For a lot of companies, all that really matters is that they have hundreds or thousands of excel documents being passed around, and they can get better support and licensing through Windows.
Online versions of a lot of these reduce this to some degree, but most people would probably prefer to run Word and Excel natively than through an online app, even if they sync to shared storage and occasionally use those to view/edit something.
Add to that the fact that MS offers an end-to-end environment where you can buy something for whatever you find your needs are and find directions on how to integrate it, and there's really not much to compare.
However if the game in question makes use of the Windows Video decoding APIs results are currently very disappointing; the last time I tested it (which was earlier this month) I still couldn't actually play Obduction (the Myst like game) due to none of the puzzle explanations / video data that make up the story of the game running.
And for linux, forget any game that uses BattleEye for anti-cheat detection.
Unfortunately, it's not a 100% complete solution. For example, no-one seems to have gotten Crysis (the original - and best ;) - version) to work, due to some kind of DRM thing in Crysis itself. :(
The only reason I'm not on Linux full time is video game compatibility.
I suspect no retail PCs coming with Linux preinstalled, and general lack of knowledge that it even exists or what it is is just as big (if not more) of a contributor to it's lack of users for non techies as UX is.