What those EU governments are doing is out of interest for national security rather than hate for licensing. The US has changed drastically in the last decade and getting your sensitive data out of their infrastructure is a top priority.

The cost of change from Windows to Linux is pretty small for an individual. Most people have one or two machines and a handful of programs, none of which are critical to your continued existence.

In the corporate world, you need to be absolutely sure that everything will work flawlessly, which often means weeks or months of testing on top of all your regular IT duties, constant support tickets to obscure software vendors who may not have ever worked with Linux, and if some mission-critical piece of software breaks, then the company cannot operate until it is fixed…or you can continue to use Windows, even though it sucks more now.

I want Linux to have wider adoption in the desktop space, but it’s a catch 22. People aren’t going to move unless the software is guaranteed to work, and Linux-based software isn’t going to be made unless people are using it. This is why Proton was such a big deal. It offered a real option for gaming to move to the platform and now it’s viable and devs are starting to take linux into account.