On the side of deploying and managing workstations, I would take Windows every single time over MacOS or Linux. For real, some combination of Apple Business Manager and JAMF is supposed to go head-to-head against AD+GPO? On Linux--Centrify, or something from Red Hat, that might well be more costly than Windows licenses (guessing here)?
Much render farm/graphics work was once Mac territory but given Apple's ridiculous pricing and lack of server options besides stacked Mac Minis or support for NVidia stuff many have shifted away. Truly sad...
Currently, a WPF developer, since that was the technology chosen by the previous developer, and cannot stand working with Windows 10. People praise Visual Studios but under heavy development, crash often. It is not designed for coding/typing. Visual Studio Code is better at that and has only been around a short amount of time.
.NET / C# is useful but frameworks like Entity are layered bloat where standard SQL is so much faster and cleaner to utilize. Moving from Entity to standard SQL reduced start-up time by 10 seconds in one application. All the benefits the Entity has is only if the provider for your DB back-end has those ability coded with-in it.
I actually miss being an embedded and full-stack developer writing C, C++, go, typescript, JavaScript ... Even writing cross-platform QT5 applications in Linux and only using Mac or Windows to build and package the binaries is more pleasant.
A big part is that Linux / BSD is focused around development where Windows is a second had citizen. From the register which prevents simple backing up and restoring configuration settings fro application settings versus a config.ini file or such, which can be stored in git. Or the directory System32 = 64 bit DLLs versus SysWow64 = 32 bit DLLs. Inability to use very useful commands such as rsync and lsof or even piping through SSH. Or forced to keep useless applications around/running/installed such as XBOX or Cortana.
Example: `echo -e "#include <stdio.h>\nint main() { printf(\"Hello, world\"); return 0;}" > hello.c && gcc hello.c && ./a.out`
Even the desktop environment in Windows lacks usefulness and takes more steps then ones in Linux. Windows keeps on adding bloat to each new version. Why do I need to have the ability to run 16bit applications around if I'm never going to run 16bit applications?
These are some of the reasons I only deploy Linux VMs on Azure. Lean and only retains what you need with simple backup means and deployment.
At least with wsl2 I get the Linux goodness and decent docker support finally, hopefully it can roll out of insiders in into GA soon so everyone can get their hands on it.
Eh... outside of the broadcast motion graphics group, small personal/business farms, or educational institutions this is largely a majority Linux area.*
*I'm speaking from the perspective of public cloud farms and the feature film industry (for VFX and Anim). You can't escape Windows for select software and plugins, but if it's not a strict requirement by the software, then it's a business choice for other reasons (i.e. existing environment, staff, etc) because you will from a technical standpoint operate at a loss using Windows.
It's a bunch of actual people designing buildings that cost so much more than a Windows license doing Real Things that have some lingua franca interface that has no reason to go Linux and probably never will, because in that business they're too busy with actual priorities to ever even discuss how the status quo could change. There are 10,000 industries like this, and probably 10,000 people to each of those who simply don't care, because to them the computer is and will remain only a tool. That's the world of Windows we can't see.
Once you get beyond small teams doing the work, this starts to play in massively. Pretty much all medium+ sized studios have their artist pipeline on Linux, reserving Windows or macOS for tools like Adobe, ZBrush or Marvelous Designer that don't have a Linux build yet. And where I'm at, the operating system itself doesn't even matter to the artists. All they need to know is "this button opens terminal, this command puts me in the right show, this command launches the hub" and from there they're in our GUI pipeline. Their environment is the DCC, not the OS. For all intents and purposes it's completely abstracted away from them.
That's not to say there aren't those that take advantage, creating custom commands and utilities to share with others. But for the most part the fact that it's not Windows or macOS doesn't bother them.
Most of what I've written in the past 5+ years either targets or runs in linux/docker. It's been a challenge pulling the teams up to spead.
I still get the occasional question when something breaks. That said, it would be nice if more understood some of the underlying stuff... I've had to champion a lot of the changes myself.
There are also whole industries where Windows has a particularly strong influence, e.g. (from experience) some parts of finance, petroleum, television, and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop software cottage industry.
I guess it's also important to say, much as you might find a zealous love for UNIX inside many (computer) engineering-led organizations, similar loyalty to Windows exists in many more (locally under-represented) industries for reasons that are less likely to be understood around here.