The reason Windows still dominates is so so simple. People stay with what they are used to (esp what came with the computer) unless there is a very good reason to change, the gain must massively outweigh the effort.
Most people just think for example, there is only Office as productivity software, all computers get malware, what's an Operating System and I like that flashy MS advert. Most people aren't computer people.
They think changing will take learning and they don't have time for that, they think. It took them a long time to learn this computer stuff in the first place, so why change, when I'll be lost for ages again like when I first got a computer.
Not being able to download and run cak.exe from random website is confusing to them.
The view is, I'd rather stick with what I know and clean up the bogged down computer every so often, hell the number of people I know now that planned to just buy a new computer when it starts to go slowly is amazing.
The above is the main reason. If we want to get people to change then there has to be massive obvious/superficial advantages.
The first thing to do is probably target the PC gamer / modder market. They are basically low hanging fruit. They'd run anything that'd give them 2 extra FPS on the latest game.
To do this we should be getting very fast video drivers (hopefully Open Source) the proprietary NVIDIA driver is good but they don't seem keen to equal the Windows driver for performance. And I'm afraid it means "finishing" WINE for key apps (and heavily optimising it for games).
I know a lot of people object to WINE as it may stop people developing native Linux apps, and this is a fair criticism. But we must lower the barrier to switching, and this is I'm afraid the only way, people don't want to chuck all their old software to switch to Linux. And if market share grows, native apps will follow.
WINE could do with a "Sugar Daddy" to "finish" it. Come on Google, you put money in so it would run Photoshop, why not invest money in WINE even just to annoy MS!
