I believe that we're seeing a dawn of Windows. Most people I know use it for 3 reasons:
a) that's what they know
b) that's where the games are
c) that's what the PC came with
Windows 8 broke part a. Steam and Vulkan are breaking b. C is the biggest problem for the forseeable future, one that got much more important with the rise of laptops.
As for me, I had Win XP on my first PC, in 2004. It worked, games worked, no problems. We got it upgraded to Vista, had some hardware upgrades. It still works, even though it chuggs a lot slower these days.
My laptop, in 2013, came with Windows 8 on it. I hated that thing with passion. Windows 8.1 upgrade made it much more acceptable, and I didn't really think there were alternatives. My father showed me Ubuntu in a VM, but none of my games were on it, so I just accepted the fate. SuperKey+X and a handful of shortcuts was what I used instead of Start menu(I only when to Metro interface by misclicks
and the reader app. It had decent TTS integration).
Then 2015 brought along a "free" Windows 10 update. I finally tried it during winter break in 2016, hoping it would be back to things I respected. Vista for one, or Windows 7 which people praised, even though I've actually never had on my gear. Oh, boy this things was SLOOOOOOOOW. Seriously, I know that i3 and 4 GB RAM might not be that high end, but why would the system menus lag? This was unnacceptable, so I went back to Win8.
Before upgrading to Windows 10, I read a bit about it. for some reason, one of the articles mentioned a guy called RMS. I've been subscribed to his blog ever since. From Stallman, I ran into Distrowatch, where I lurked for 5 months, reading reviews and trying to understand what Linux was. I ran into Peppermint, and a bit as a detox after Win10 bloat, installed a lightweight system. And here I am, not going back.
I'm also NOT going to install windows to any of my grandpas&mas and grandmas who want to go digital, but I'm still not sure about the distribution they could work with. I'd put PeppermintOS for them, but the language barrier is too big(they don't speak English), and not enough parts of the OS are translated. Especially the settings screens are half translated and it's far from ideal. I'll probably give them Mint, or vanilla Ubuntu, as all they ever need is Firefox+LO+PDFviewer+photo viewer, none of which are hard to come by, and the automatic updates on Linux will significantly ease my maintenance time. I think they might even be taught to do that by themselves.
As for people my age(teens, early 20s), we'll see Windows start seriously loosing market share when Vulkan completely replaces DirectX. For now, going to Linux means giving up 75% of your games. When that's <30%, they'll switch. I can see that every time Windows update kicks into the middle of their session, they cringe. Step by step, they'll make the change happen.
And once it does, it will snowball.
