Comment Lack of advertising more then anything else (Score 5, Insightful) 1264
Most people do not know there is an alternative to windows or that it's as good as windows.
Other issues confusion and people trying to fix things that are not broken such as completely redoing gnome in gnome 3 or brain dead things like Unity in Ubuntu which cause Mint to over take it as the most downloaded distro.
Android is a good example of what can happen when people are exposed to an alternative OS.
It's now the number 1 smart phone OS and Windows phone is more or less a flop.