> Somehow I doubt Android is what Linux Desktop evangelists imagined.

You must be confusing Android with a desktop OS. It's mobile so they don't fall into the desktop category at all. Which was exactly my point: they simply don't need a desktop OS anymore.

> Apparently that doesn't include Linux

That reads like you're looking at some statistics that show that 0% of desktop users run Linux. Care pointing to it?

> And yet Steam is a ridiculously huge money maker and people are buying more PC games than ever.

So? It's completely overshadowed by the console market, not even including mobile games here.

> Then why hasn't it happened? You think companies like paying licensing fees to Microsoft?

You're asking why it hasn't happened yet in reply to me using future tense.

But let's put aside that pretty much everything you said was deliberately besides the point. Why it hasn't happened yet is pretty simple. Companies weigh the cost of switching vs. The cost of just keep paying for Windows (so no changes, no initial setup cost, no training, ...). That's gonna be cheaper for quite some time but eventually everything will be in the cloud so there is less and less reason to keep up a huge and complicated windows domain network with software rollout and other brain damage. You might keep a basic AD in place for user management that the web services talk to but that's it. Funnily enough my current and previous employer is still on win 7 because of the frequent messups you read about regarding 10, and how even in a corporate environment it's near impossible to disable all telemetry. I'm curious what they'll do at 7's EOL.

As for the average home desktop user, you're not seriously expecting your mom to go ahead and download and install Ubuntu are you? As long as most OEMs still exclusively sell machines with Windows preinstalled, there really shouldn't be anything surprising about the fact that most people use Windows. We already see some of the larger ones offering machines with Linux though, and with the desktop keeping to lose relevance and everything moving to the web I wouldn't be surprised to see this getting more prevalent over the next decade if Microsoft doesn't get their act together regarding Windows. It currently looks like they're cutting costs in that department, normal users seem to get the beta versions now so they could cut down their QA.

Alright, ignoring everything else, here's what you said:

> Seems to me that DirectX is the last remaining barrier to finally getting the majority of the Windows user base to migrate to Linux.

To which my point was simply "you are very wrong". As far as I can tell, you agree that there are a lot more barriers to moving to Linux from Windows than just DirectX (again, if that were true why haven't office workers moved? Oh yeah, lots of other reasons!).

So what exactly is the point you're trying to make?

The point I'm trying to make is that the desktop will continue to lose relevance, while web based apps become prevalent. To a point where it's not "this doesn't run on Linux" but rather "I'll use whatever is in reach" (since all you need is Chrome), which as of now happens to be Windows mostly. So it's shifting from Linux being unable to serve your needs to it simply not being the default, or not being what people are used to. Which is something that shouldn't be underestimated when trying to predict how things are going to play out in the long run.

Obviously there's gonna be special software in certain fields that's going to be around for quite a while, like the pharma example from this other reply, but even there the point was rather that upgrading from the XP version is too expensive....

And ultimately the question is at which point maintaining or even improving Windows becomes economically unfeasible. With Windows 10 being "the final Windows" there was already a big shift in paradigm. Microsoft is very busy expanding in the cloud/SaaS business, so it's not like they don't see how Windows might lose relevance over time. This in turn sends signals to software vendors who still make software that requires desktop machines.

> The point I'm trying to make is that the desktop will continue to lose relevance, while web based apps become prevalent. To a point where it's not "this doesn't run on Linux" but rather "I'll use whatever is in reach" (since all you need is Chrome), which as of now happens to be Windows mostly. So it's shifting from Linux being unable to serve your needs to it simply not being the default, or not being what people are used to. Which is something that shouldn't be underestimated when trying to predict how things are going to play out in the long run.

Ok, in this scenario, why would I choose Linux? Linux is literally irrelevant if "all you need is Chrome" (among the more dystopian futures I can imagine for computing, btw). Chrome is the platform then and everything is just a Chromebook. In this scenario no one reaches for Linux, they just buy some horrible proprietary locked down no-user-serviceable-parts thing like they do with phones and personal computing is declared dead.

I don't buy that that is true anyway. People have been predicting the death of desktop PCs for a long time too and it still hasn't happened. Cloud is just the latest in the thin-client/fat-client cycle of hyped up computer industry bullshit as far as I'm concerned.