[gbl08ma]

The way I see it, "desktop-dependent workflows" overlap more and more with those "Windows-dependent workflows". Nowadays, most people don't need more than a web browser, and in that sense they do just fine with a tablet or phone (where iOS and Android dominate, and GNU/Linux is not really a viable option, at least not yet), or a Chromebook (yes, it's Linux, but it's mainly just Chrome).

Most people I know with a legitimate use for a desktop also have legitimate reasons to use Windows or macOS: gaming on Windows, content creation on Windows or macOS (graphics designing, video editing, ...), and MS Office lock-in. The only exception I can think of are developers, but even then, depending on the kind of development one is doing, using Windows or macOS may be the only choice.

[jk3faster]

I'm a software developer. I mainly work web and android. That,ofcourse, I can't do it on a smartphone and my Linux distro probably does it better than Windows. Installing and configuring CLIs and other development tools are much easier on Linux. I usually just install a linux distro as dual boot to my peers rather than figuring out how to get those stuff configured right on windows. There are ofcourse things like ASP.NET that are difficult to develop on linux because Visual Studio isn't available but fortunately, I'm able to choose my stack and avoid such cases most of the time. The windows-dependent workflows doesn't mean that doing those things with Linux is impossible. An inspiring story was published here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21504721 Where they switched from Windows/Pagemaker/Photoshop to Linux/Scribus/GIMP for the complete process of designing and publishing a commercial newspaper. For video editing, there is kdenlive, openshot and blender. GNU/Linux is definitely more than just a "web browser" OS and capable of doing most of the things that an average user does on windows.

[gbl08ma]

I, too, develop for Android and, like you say, we have the "luxury" of being able to do it on both Windows and Linux (and macOS as well, if I wanted). Even .NET development is more cross-platform than ever, with .NET Core. One of my points was precisely that developers were an exception in this regard, as our tooling is generally cross-platform. You can't say the same about people who do their work primarily using Adobe tools, for example. And even developers sometimes don't have this luxury: for example, if you do iOS development, to publish on the app store, at some point you must use a Mac to sign the app. Of course you can use stuff like Xamarin and use the Mac exclusively to sign, but this is often inconvenient compared to just using the officially endorsed stack. Overall, requiring a "traditional desktop operating system" to work is less and less the case for the general population.