Who takes the time to fill in the SO questions? Not the 9 out of 10 checked-out corporate devs that do the minimum to collect a paycheck. These are also the people that will tolerate anything central IT gives them, even if the mouse cursor takes 2 seconds to render on screen. I am not at all surprised that the group that cares about more than the job, the job that takes the time to respond to SO, is also the group that cares deeply about what they use for doing their job. So if 25% of them responds Linux, that probably corresponds to 2.5% actual usage. Not that important, BTW: SO selects exactly the kind of people whose opinion I want to hear about their tooling.
What's surprising here is how deep windows is sinking. They were at one point famous for their dev tools. The fact that WSL (i.e. it runs Linux stuff) is now considered one of their top selling points for developers is almost too incredible to believe.
Sure, there's the usual HN- and HN-adjacent bubble of not recognizing that like 80% of working developers are just showing up 8-5 or 8:30-5 (was actual 9-5 ever really a thing?) killing Jira tickets using Java or C# on their corporate Windows box on which they (gasp!) don't even have admin access, and I bet that does have some correlation with who bothers to respond to SO polls (mostly not those folks, that is).
What's surprising here is how deep windows is sinking. They were at one point famous for their dev tools. The fact that WSL (i.e. it runs Linux stuff) is now considered one of their top selling points for developers is almost too incredible to believe.