As mentioned: gaming, most of enterprise dev, graphics/gpu/cad, desktop, certain classes of embedded. Broadly speaking, outside of hacker/web/creative culture, the default is windows.
Regardless of how evil gigantic companies can be, or what the ideal world should look like: from a pure usability perspective, windows is top of the list.
If I got 5$ every time a linux/mac enthousiasts has to tell me they just cannot run something, and proposing a myriad of workarounds to stick to their ideology, I could buy an apple vision pro and let it collect dust in the corner of my basement.
No disagreements on things not working right on Mac/Linux, it's definitely a frustration!
I would argue against the idea that it's the default for most enterprise dev. What you refer to as creative/web culture I would refer to as a newer generation of enterprise dev written in (I know) JS, TS, Electron etc. There is a lot of cross platform stuff out there, at least for clients, and Linux has taken up a lot of ground in the server market as well.
With CAD and GPU programming you have a point - proprietary drivers written for Windows has more technical sticking power.
I guess my feeling is that, especially with all the headlines saying European countries will move away from American software giants, Windows seems less attractive as a long term target for investing my time. Not to mention it's buggy and slow these days.
True, I hate windows like most people. I just also hate being unrealistic about it. Good thing about AI is you no longer really have to care about really understanding the OS, unless you are an admin.
Regardless of how evil gigantic companies can be, or what the ideal world should look like: from a pure usability perspective, windows is top of the list.
If I got 5$ every time a linux/mac enthousiasts has to tell me they just cannot run something, and proposing a myriad of workarounds to stick to their ideology, I could buy an apple vision pro and let it collect dust in the corner of my basement.