> What does Windows offer these devs that is missing in Linux?

A stable ABI. Then there are the specifics to the apps you're mentioning (i.e., decent color calibration support, memory management, display drivers).

We saw what happened with OS/2 supporting DOS/Win16 apps. Why bother with writing anything for OS/2 and lock yourself into a smaller market?

But this has been discussed to death on HN, if you search for it.

1. The perception that linux doesn't matter because it's not a big enough market (that's changing, largely due to valve) 2. The simple truth that it's way easier to wrest control of the machine on windows - for tasks like enforcing DRM and licensing - if y'all look underneath your seats, y'all get a free kernel-level anticheat! 3. WSL doesn't do display well - cli is fine, GUI apps still require some interaction/tricks like remote X or similar (afaik - this could be old knowledge, since I haven't been in windoze land for a long time - at least a year) 4. To be a viable choice for GUI toolkit (really, the thing that's hugely different), one either has to use something that abstracts the underlying api (and often ends up losing something, somewhere, out of a necessity for a standard api) or manually write code for two toolkits (eg native win32 and cocoa is probably already too much for a lot of places, and if they were going to go cross-platform, the easy money is in OSX, not linux - everything there is paid - I wasted around $300 just trying to make a mbp not suck before finally giving up). So either you adopt and learn a toolkit you can use everywhere (eg Qt) and accept the limitations, or you write your own, but that ties you to an OS unless you really had an aim to bother with other platforms, and... see (1)