IMO, in the late 90s and early 2000s it wasn't as simple to get Linux working. There was a lot of tweaking involved and a lot of headaches to get your hardware

IMO, in the late 90s and early 2000s it wasn't as simple to get Linux working. There was a lot of tweaking involved and a lot of headaches to get your hardware to work properly. Device manufacturers supported Windows (and sometimes Mac), rarely Linux. Big software labels didn't see the incentive in building software for Linux, it was always for Windows and Mac. Once Ubuntu came out this situation changed, and many people began replacing Windows installs with Linux. Specially for under-powered computers that couldn't run the latest version of Windows. This, combined with the popularity of web apps helped Linux on the desktop be usable. But, at that point it was too late, the desktop can today pretty much be considered legacy and mainly used for specialized cases such as content creation and other ultra-high-performance use cases. Once you look at the post-desktop world, Linux is mainstream. The cloud, mobile, IoT devices. Linux has very large market-share in all of these.