Actually, it always felt that Linux has been ahead of Windows and Windows has been playing catch-up.

Two examples:
* Under Linux, as long as I've used it (in other words, since no later than 2000), mounting a disk image has always been easy. Windows didn't get that feature until Windows *8*.
* The Linux kernel would aggressively cache disk accesses, so files you recently accessed would remain in RAM, reducing load times drastically. Windows XP did not do this, making Linux significantly superior for workloads that often accessed the same files.
* Linux has a RAM-based filesystem (more technically, it uses the whole disk caching mechanism as the filesystem, just never writing it out to disk). I believe Windows *still* doesn't have this (without 3rd party tools).

On systems with no pointing device, or for users who can't see very well (and hence can't see where the "install" button is) or have poor hand-eye coordination, clicking is not easier than typing commands.

sure :D they can't see very well but can see what they wrote ... sure ...

Three things:
- You can enlarge fonts to ridiculously big sizes.
- If you spend enough time typing on a keyboard, you can know by heart where they keys are without having to look at them.
- By default, fonts on a terminal tend to be heavily contrasted (usually white on black).

I was on Ubuntu and Zorin, but I switched to Pop OS and the game gave me a Wine C++ runtime error. I tried a bunch of different things, but couldn't fix the issue. The Proton Steam does run the game fine without problems...but I'm trying to run the GOG version since I don't like Steam. No idea what to do. I'll try running it on the 32-bit Wine prefix, but I'm stuck at this point.

Hmm. Maybe give Winetricks a try; chances are it can get the runtime you're looking for from the database.

Given how many of the damned things there are, and how many are not compatible with each other, it may help to know which you need beforehand.

Well, I was actually more thinking about MS possibly just losing interest in an open-PC OS, and more concentrating on their closed tablet-like devices, game consoles and Azure/streaming.

It is interesting to note how less and less dependent even workplaces are on Microsoft. It used to be that you HAD to use Windows and MS Office and whatever, but I am now doing most of my work, even desktop office stuff, on Linux, Libre Office etc. Two MS products I still occasionally need are Skype and Teams... but nowadays even they work just fine on Linux. Even Outlook (e-mail and calendar) has mostly lost its meaning for me, I use other clients and tools for e-mail an calendar.

Now, I am unsure if there are still people to whom e.g. LibreOffice is not an option but they HAVE TO have MS Office Excel, Word, Powerpoint etc., but to me it would appear even corporate world is less and less dependent on having Windows. Well, ok, I guess companies pay for support that they receive for MS products, so there's that.

I doubt that since they would be shooting themselves in the foot. They can do both, no reason to let go of the market dominance they've built up for themselves. Windows is the option for gaming, so there will always be demand. Linux definitely has its uses, but no matter how much anybody argues, it is not the best option for gaming.

And from experience, I still know a lot of places and companies which are still on Windows 7. Microsoft even offered paid extended support for it exactly because so many companies had systems dependent on it and couldn't/can't/didn't want to upgrade. I don't see this changing in the near future and my guess would be that it's going to take 10+ years to change in a noticeable way.

Same with Office, I know tons of places that are working exclusively with Office. Even some schools still only accept inputs specifically in either docx or xlsx. My sister for example had a problem uploading her University work because they only accepted Word documents and she didn't have Office.

And overall, considering that there are many completely free alternatives, yet the monetized Windows still dominates the market, I think their position as the top dog is pretty safe for years to come.

I find that for a lot of documents, I can dance around potential Word incompatibilities by relying on a standard that is widely available across OSes: pdf. I just convert my LibreOffice document to a pdf document.

Of all the documents I've sent over the last decade, I vaguely recall that only one place gave me problems because the document I sent them was in pdf format and not in Word format (you have to be a special kind of stuck up bureaucrat to fuss over the fact that the document that was submitted to you was not in a specific file format even though you can read it, it happens, but its less common).

Of course, that mostly work if they just want a submission that they won't edit. If you need a lot of back-and-forth collaboration, then yes, its more complicated.