WARNING: This post is slightly political.
First, a little backstory for those who don't know: Linux is a kernel that is used in almost every aspect of our lives, even if you can't see it. It was developed in the early 90's as a competitor to GNU (which is a whole other story so if you are really interested you go to Wikipedia and have fun there). From there, both projects were absorbed into each other and lead to a Cambrian-explosion of Linux based operating systems. Many have met their demise and almost all of them are free to download and modify.
But, there came a problem around the early 2000's when Windows was the big cheese and all the other proprietary operating systems bit the dust: How am I supposed to do anything in Linux if everything is made for Windows and OSx (later renamed macOS)? Well, with a little thing called a compatibility layer. Dubbed WINE, it allowed for the running of Windows .exe's (and other binaries) on Linux based operating systems.
Now, keep in mind, that most things to do with Linux are usually non-profit, including Linux itself. Money usually comes from donations and services to other companies, such as tech support. So that makes work done on these projects very slow and usually not as professional as is done with proprietary work. And this very much showed up in WINE, the "emulation" (I know its not emulating anything, don't kill me over this) was shoddy with newly released software, with Adobe being particularly bad to this day, and Microsoft actively fighting WINE in their own programs. However, the biggest problems did not come from those companies as open source alternatives gained notoriety amongst the Linux crowd. No, the biggest problems were from video games.
Video games need the latest versions of various libraries and engine plugins from other companies; most of them being closed source. So everything from Bink Video down to the Nvidia drivers caused problems with the developers of WINE. That is, until about 2 years ago...
Valve Software quietly announced a fork of WINE called Proton that would be dedicated for Steam games. It would allow for Linux gamers (which, according to Valve, number in at least 1 million) to play Windows games in a more professionally developed environment. It inherently had more stable, frequent updates to allow for a growing audience to purchase more types of games from the Steam store (thus increasing Valve's revenue).
And, indeed, in the past few years many other open source companies have upped their game in the market. Mozilla pushed 7 or 8 major updates to Firefox that allows for automatic tracking disabling and picture in picture mode for video players. Blender overhauled their GUI, remapped the hotkeys to allow for a quicker workflow, and have released upgrades to their physics simulators.
With every aspect of computer life now covered by Linux, and professional backing from Valve, it might become viable as an everyday operating system within the next decade or so. The number of Linux users have also never gone down, neither in population nor in proportion to other systems. Without counting Android or back-end servers, Linux use has seen a growth of over 1.5 percent of desktop use in the entire world. And although the "year of Linux" is a bit of a meme now, if the impressive rise in quality from Linux support continues into the future, there might be hope that the Microsoft tyranny that so many suffer from could be broken, especially given the outrageous cost of living that the world is finding itself in.
If you want to jump into this world and help Valve and others make the computing world a better, decentralized place, then PLEASE do your research first about Linux to see if you are REALLY willing to go through the work and effort. If you aren't today, then maybe check back every couple months to see the state of the union, so to speak, it may just surprise you.
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