I've never bothered to seriously use DirectX, I've always used some flavour of OpenGL (quite successfully on Windows). But speaking for other devs, a long time

I've never bothered to seriously use DirectX, I've always used some flavour of OpenGL (quite successfully on Windows). But speaking for other devs, a long time ago DirectX was indeed really crap. It took for example 16+ pages of code just to initialise. But in later iterations MS did a lot of work to clean it up and improve it and its performance, which is a large contributing factor as to why people started using it (along with of course having to deal with countless OpenGL extensions, which became a really tiring exercise). Again I'm with you, I dislike the modern Microsoft practice of tying specific DX versions to specific OS versions, in trying to force people to upgrade. Sadly the solution to the problem isn't either of OSX or Linux. Apple is too closed off and expensive in general, and Linux perhaps too abstract to be bothered with by the average gamer.