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jedishrfu said:There is competitive pressure to provide machines that work with other vendor equipment. MS provides that glue as an assortment of device drivers and will even take on the help service aspect for new user problems.
Also people will tend toward a fully functioning machine over one they still have to configure. Gaming favors windows and vice versa although it wasn’t always that way as early games preferred PC Dos as it gave them greater access to graphics card control.
I can’t say why people think Linux is harder. It’s true that it’s a windowing system on top of a command line collection of arcane commands but so is windows but they now hide it better using GUI based system control.
Historically, there were mainframe OSee that used card language and then transitioned to timesharing. Unix came out of that complexity and got extended with its xwindows as others were exploring windowing technology. All these required knowing what commands to start up xwindows and configuring your machine to accept and use xwindows effectively.
MS windows came out of MS work with IBM on OS/2 where they felt IBM was addressing its corporate clients and was making the system too complex and so they stealthily built Windows and undermined OS/2 development all the while borrowing OS/2 code for windows. It was a bad alliance from the start.
Aka Network Effect?