Well, maybe I'm a minority for having a EE/physical science hobby, but also belong to the kind of people you are referring to. I'm pretty stuck to Windows as I

Well, maybe I'm a minority for having a EE/physical science hobby, but also belong to the kind of people you are referring to. I'm pretty stuck to Windows as I need it to drive my home lab. I need to run Windows to 1. Get data from a old optical spectrometer. It was designed for optical endpointing of plasma etching. And one will have a hard time finding anything that is not running Windows in a fab (except lithography). 2. Run a 28 years old piece of software to acquire timestamps from a HP 53310A modulation domain analyzer 3. Grab frames from an old xray detector 4. Work with two NI DAQ cards. Yes, they are supposed to work on Linux, but I always get weird errors on my Ubuntu work computer while they never failed me on my Windows laptop. 5. Use Autodesk Inventor to prepare files for 3D printer/machine shop. Siemens NX used to work on Linux, but apart from that, there is not a single piece of non-toy 3D CAD software that I'm aware of support Mac or Linux. 6. LTSpice simulations and Altium Designer layouting. Windows is the only first class citizen in many areas, software development and artistic work are two exceptions. And so far, it seems I can still always be one step ahead of MS in the anti-consumer war, so I'm not too worried.