To the tech savvy, there is essentially only one advantage to running Windows, and that is the ability to run Windows-only software. In all technical respects - control, performance, flexibility - it is inferior to the alternatives. Don't confuse vendor lockin with technology.
I find it dismaying that people on Hacker News willingly submit to incredibly user-hostile behavior from Microsoft and call it "the best of both worlds". Presumably a nontrivial proportion here are building the next generation of software products - and if we don't even respect ourselves, how likely is it that we will respect our users?
"I find it dismaying that people on Hacker News willingly submit to incredibly user-hostile behavior from Microsoft"
And I find it funny that the crowd that spends whole days implementing user-hostile features in yet another SaaS crapware has so much to say about Microsoft's bad behavior.
There is an additional reason: Some (many?) people simply prefer the Windows UI conventions (once you remove all the enshittifications post Windows 7).
I'm not aware of any particular UI convention that's in Windows that isn't available in, say Plasma. Day to day usage is extremely similar, and where they diverge it's usually because 1) Plasma has a feature that Windows doesn't, or 2) someone at Microsoft opted for senseless change for change's sake - a toy interface is layered over a functional one, often (but not always) grudgingly allowing access to the old behavior with extra steps, in a tacit admission of no-confidence. This behavior is pervasive - the "new control panel", the new context menu ("show more options" to get to the original, an extra click that yields a menu with many of the same options but in a different order with different icons), and best of all moving the "Start button" to the center - a change which more than any other exemplifies the silliness, because it 1) at best achieves nothing, and 2) flies in face of the original UI research based on Fitt's Law that informed 30 years of Windows UI tradition.
I honestly can't imagine anyone preferring all that. </rant>
I find it dismaying that people on Hacker News willingly submit to incredibly user-hostile behavior from Microsoft and call it "the best of both worlds". Presumably a nontrivial proportion here are building the next generation of software products - and if we don't even respect ourselves, how likely is it that we will respect our users?