> Windows 10 is a total catastrophe for business and private use.
There is just no real competition, so business and private users don't have a say in it anyway. MacOS requires different hardware and only has to be a little bit better to compete with Windows, so it's progressively getting worse as well. Linux distros lack in other areas and are also heavily corporate driven and low quality, sure if you invest time in it you won't be able to tolerate Windows and MacOS, but you might need a lot of time, as usefulness and freedom of Linux only really exists for programmers. There is also pressure from iOS and Android, people do not care as much about desktop OSes, they live within their phones, and forgive desktop OSes a lot more crap because of that.
On the other hand maybe someone will see an opportunity for a high quality desktop Linux distro that addresses many problems of other OSes now that other OSes are getting so much worse.
We have voluntarily allowed much of our society to become dependent on IT facilities where a key element was provided by a de facto monopoly. We are now learning a hard lesson in why that is a bad idea.
The geeks among us may flee to Linux. The quirky or curious might try Apple (though they don't exactly have a stellar reputation for looking after their desktop OS either in recent years). But for "normal" people, if you buy a new PC today, you get Windows 10 and all the negative baggage that comes with it, and that's just how it is.
I have been convinced for some time that statutory regulation with real teeth is now the only way to protect normal people from the nasty, greedy parts of the tech industry.
I suspect the most plausible alternative -- and that doesn't mean actually plausible, just less wishful thinking than anything else -- is for popular sentiment to turn sharply against these practices and make it a liability for Microsoft to continue down its current path. We've seen a couple of issues recently in my area that went from the general population being ignorant or ambivalent about issues that really should concern them to quite suddenly becoming much better informed and demanding action.
However, it usually requires some very obvious catalyst for people to rally behind. It's not hard to imagine what that could be in this sort of scenario: a massive data leak resulting in huge inconvenience for lots of people, a bad Windows update bricking millions of laptops, a security vulnerability in phones or cars that leads to widespread damage and real people getting hurt or worse. It's sad that I suspect it would take such a damaging event to really wake people up to what's happening, though.
People use the monopoly because it's better than the alternatives. The monopoly is what they can afford to make things that work at least as well as they do.
There is just no real competition, so business and private users don't have a say in it anyway. MacOS requires different hardware and only has to be a little bit better to compete with Windows, so it's progressively getting worse as well. Linux distros lack in other areas and are also heavily corporate driven and low quality, sure if you invest time in it you won't be able to tolerate Windows and MacOS, but you might need a lot of time, as usefulness and freedom of Linux only really exists for programmers. There is also pressure from iOS and Android, people do not care as much about desktop OSes, they live within their phones, and forgive desktop OSes a lot more crap because of that.
On the other hand maybe someone will see an opportunity for a high quality desktop Linux distro that addresses many problems of other OSes now that other OSes are getting so much worse.