Windows lets you run Linux apps at the same speed as raw metal Linux, but with good drivers for things like video cards, wifi, etc. Windows also gives you access to a more diverse selection of its own apps so you can get your day job done. As for Macs, you get nearly the same benefits as that but now you also get access to the best hardware money can buy, from the cpu right up. I'm sure Linux will be ported to Apple Silicon eventually, but one look at the history of Linux even on x86 laptops shows how it will suck with half-finished drivers, shitty UI and terrible touchpad semantics, etc. Linux will always be a third rate OS for desktops.
Yikes, do you mean Windows Subsystem for Linux? I really appreciate MS folks putting in the effort to try something new, but WSL is close to worthless. I tried it a while back and could not get basic services to work. And why would you want Windows OS around if you just want to run Linux?
All significant open source development today is done by folks who are not "scratching an itch" but cashing a paycheck, and the projects they release are things that would not have made them money anyway. The actual valuable stuff the trillion-dollar companies of today do is still overwhelmingly closed because secrecy is still a better way to engineer products that sell.
First, I really do appreciate what you are trying to say - that proprietary software is where the money is. It also could be that most of the time, there really isn't a reason to share source code. I've built lots of software for companies large and small. Most of that software is for automating some very specific business process, or making some machine configuration work that no one else in the known universe would ever want anyway. The only developers who that code has value to will work at or for that company. It's not that it is secret, it's just a snowflake. In many cases the budget was so small, that the application wasn't tooled to run anywhere else but on that customer's existing infrastructure, so it would take more time to make that code open-source ready. BTW, open source code generally (but not always) is much higher quality than what I see in most proprietary software because it is going to be reviewed by lots of others and there is often an expectation that that code work on multiple platforms.
Also, when you use absolutes, like "All significant open source development is done by folks ... cashing a paycheck" you are guaranteed to be wrong. It is also disingenuous to people who actually are out there scratching an itch... and to all those developers who started by scratching and itch and finding customers or companies to pay them to keep scratching that itch.
Linux took off because SCO was trying to get $500 per CPU for a Unix license on PCs that were selling for $1000 or in some cases less. Windows NT at the time was also priced similarly to SCO Unix. When Windows XP Pro came out at $250, commercial Unix was twice as expensive.
