Power management on certain chips is simply better than anything Linux has to offer (AMD Zen+ mobile for instance)
Modular driver architecture with drivers that aren’t complete jank to manage and install. A lot of people see this as a pain point, but in reality it’s not such a bad thing, especially nowadays.
This is a given, but as lots of stuff runs on Windows (namely older games), you can only really make stuff for Windows on Windows. So if you need to develop Win32 software, you really have to use Visual Studio for proper development. Mingw cross compile exists, I know, but that’s never going to be as good.
Number 3 is keeping me on Windows. I make mods for old games and I need Visual C++. I almost got the compiler to run under Wine but who knows how it would behave if it did run.
For your third point, it’s way easier to cross-compile for a Linux target on Windows than the other way around, as you can just run the compiler in Docker or WSL, which is even easier now that Visual Studio has native Docker and WSL support. WSL is pretty good.
lots of stuff runs on Windows (namely older games)
We’ve long since passed the point where Linux (and MacOS), via Crossover, WINE, Proton, etc, have better support for old Windows apps/games than Windows does.
Number 3 is keeping me on Windows. I make mods for old games and I need Visual C++. I almost got the compiler to run under Wine but who knows how it would behave if it did run.
For your third point, it’s way easier to cross-compile for a Linux target on Windows than the other way around, as you can just run the compiler in Docker or WSL, which is even easier now that Visual Studio has native Docker and WSL support. WSL is pretty good.
We’ve long since passed the point where Linux (and MacOS), via Crossover, WINE, Proton, etc, have better support for old Windows apps/games than Windows does.