No? Tiny? I'd love to know which games industry you think came before the games industry on Windows. Did a legion of Windows programmers appear overnight?
Audacity, Bitwig, QTractor and Ardour have made great strides - and that's merely stuff I know about. Userland software is quite beside the point I was making.
Closed-source single OS dominance without an open source alternative would mean much worse trouble than the trouble we are already in. To avoid this, you need OS programmers, many of whom never get to University.
The state of Linux is far more a hindrances for it's success as a learning tool than Windows ever was. I've been using Linux since '98, it's great for learning systems administration or networking. It's however lacking in most of the other areas of computing, those which yourself like many other apparently are quite ignorant of. I learned far more from windows than I ever did Linux, including advanced OS concepts.
That Microsoft is coercing people to use Windows is the favorite conspiracy among Linux evangelists. The reality is that Linux isn't and never was very approachable. You might not be able to dive into the source code of Windows, but at least your not stuck trying to understand yet another build system. At least there are decent learning material so you don't need read the source code or scavenge through mailings list trying to find something other than "why do you want to do that". Or a countless other examples like it.
I like Linux, I do. But you can't have your cake and it too. It's not as good as Windows if you want to have access to all areas of computing. Which is what you want when you teach computers to a wide verity of people.
Maybe you should be more concerned that most ARM devices doesn't have working graphics acceleration for Linux desktop systems.
Audacity, Bitwig, QTractor and Ardour have made great strides - and that's merely stuff I know about. Userland software is quite beside the point I was making.
Closed-source single OS dominance without an open source alternative would mean much worse trouble than the trouble we are already in. To avoid this, you need OS programmers, many of whom never get to University.