Do you have any easy automations in mind that would be broadly appealing and one really needs to go out of their way to implement on Windows / is impossible to do so?

I have a few things here and there, but it's more a scheduled script or two than anything more elaborate, and I don't think they were difficult to make and deploy.

> you can switch out your audio stack

Why would I want that? Isn't this more for someone doing live audio production (e.g. due to latency concerns)?

In general, the customizability angle is also another that doesn't resonate with me much. It's less that I want to customize my stuff, and more that I want my stuff to be to my liking from the get-go.

> if you're using IDEs, OSes don't really matter

Unless you are using Visual Studio that blews out every other IDE out of the water if you consider debugging and profiling experience.

> As in case for the desktop, you can switch out your audio stack, alter the display of any element and many other things. Using windows is borrowing some shoes while Linux can be your favorite slipper.

Ah yes, biggest Linux advantage - being a mud hut.

Are you saying that it is somehow complicated to press Build in the VS window?

> to Nvidia GPU passthrough working in Docker being harder running on Linux natively than what it was making it work on WLS

To be fair, assuming you're using WSL2, you're running docker on a VM, so it doesn't sound that crazy that it might be more work without the abstraction around the hardware that defines. If there were a built-in VM for your Linux distro, it might end up being easier to expose the GPU through that to things running on it than directly too. I can't say I've ever had any need to access a GPU from a container running on a VM then, so this is just conjecture.

> Plenty of Windows-based software is developed on Linux with Wine

The overwhelming majority of software written against MinGW (or worse, Cygwin) are bad/lazy ports of Linux-first software. Case in point: Git and Perl, both of which drag along an entire coreutils ecosystem (each, so you have two copies of `ls`) along with the main binaries.

First-class Windows programs that are used every day like Office, Chromium and its forks, the Adobe suite, and tons and tons of internal administrative programs for HR, inventory, and more are written on Windows, for Windows, using C# or C++ and 'boring', so-called enterprisey frameworks like WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI 2.

Anyone remotely serious about taking advantage of the large (albeit shrinking) market share of Windows users should at the very least fire up a VM to test their release binaries, rather than just 'use Wine'.

> I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices.

I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial.

> Inertia.

I think that's a tough case to make. Windows offers legitimate technical advantages for gaming and game development. Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge. There are real workflow benefits.

> Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows.

You know more about this than I do. That sounds kind of wild to me, like it could be a pretty awful work flow at times for no good reason. It looks like you don't have access to native debugging tools and Wine itself introduces potential compatibility risks. I would rather just develop on target, personally

It's also probably one of the most common explanations for why anyone's using it. It's 70% of the market, and even more if you focus on enterprise. Us Linux and Mac folks are weirdos.