> If the games start to run on Linux, what's still keeping people on Windows? Let me tell you a story: In the late 1940s the US airforce had a serious problem

> If the games start to run on Linux, what's still keeping people on Windows? Let me tell you a story: In the late 1940s the US airforce had a serious problem: many pilots were dying in incidents caused by apparent pilot error. At one point this number reached 17 pilots a day. After ruling out training as a cause, they turned their attention to ergonomics. In the 1920s, they had conducted a study to determine the physical dimensions of the average pilot and standardized all cockpit layout based on said average. Naturally, they suspected that the average pilot had changed over the nearly-two-decades since and conducted another study. With over 140 measurements of over 4,000 pilots they expected to be able to create a new standard for cockpit dimensions and layout that would better fit the contemporary average pilot. And they probably would have done just that, if not for Lt. Gilbert S. Daniels. Daniels was a junior researcher assigned to taking the measurements. Due to his previous work on human body measurements, Daniels believed that designing for the average pilot was useless at best. Daniels created a picture of the average pilot the military wanted, which he defined as being in the middle 30% of values in each measurement, and then demonstrated that exactly 0 pilots in the study matched all 10 of the dimensions determined to be most relevant. Further, even when you chose only 3 such dimensions, fewer than 4% of pilots matched. The conclusion was that there was no such thing as the average pilot and if you designed around this fictional entity your cockpit wouldn't fit anybody. If you wanted to have pilots that fit the cockpit, you had to design cockpits that would adjust to fit individual pilots. The lesson? Linux Desktop evangelists seem to expect that people should love Linux Desktop because they worked so hard to make it usable for what they imagine is the average user, apparently completely ignorant that there is no such person. Desktops are personal devices that need to be able to accommodate the user's individual workflows. Does Windows excel at this? Well, not really and it has been getting worse, but Windows accommodates software in a way that Linux Desktop doesn't: it isn't hostile to commercial software, it works hard at maintaining compatibility with old software, and it allows for direct distribution from developer to user without middlemen gumming up the works. That enables third parties to help users fit their computer to their workflow. Linux Desktop is bad at all these things and though it is theoretically more adjustable, the reality is that trying to fit it to your usecases is an exercise in fighting this average user mentality and often involves dealing with a ludicrously complex intertwined system of mis-matched components at a very intimate level. That's what is keeping people on Windows.