Linux

Do you mean steam stats? I don't know of many others, and those are going to be enthusiasts of one form or another.

Along side what you mention, I work for a company with a lot of engineers from multiple disciplines. Linux is everywhere in our environment and has been growing. Most of our engineers either have a Linux laptop, use Linux virtual machines or submit jobs through Linux backed software stacks. Our products have tools built on Linux to the point that we used to maintain our own Linux distribution to make having all those tools on a system easy, though we've just moved to having scripts to install and setup everything. Almost all of those engineers also have a Windows laptop as their daily driver. The few who don't have Macs.

I don't doubt that organizations can move to all non-Windows, but the Windows Ecosystem of Exchange, Office and Active Directory/Entra is very hard to replace. Yes, you can absolutely cobble together alternatives. But, you then have a special snowflake of an IT infrastructure. Maintenance may be eased by the use of tools like Ansible, but even that will likely result in organization specific playbooks and scripts. But centralized management of a Linux environment isn't quite as standardized yet and so requires more planning and effort. And then there is the challenge of security.

Folks like to tout the inherent better security of Linux. As someone who works in Cybersecurity daily, I fully agree with that assessment. However, "better" isn't "perfect". You still need vulnerability management, monitoring and response tools. And this is an area where Linux lags behind Windows, mostly because of the effort put into it. Something as basic as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) on Linux is still a foreign concept to a lot of folks. And yes, it's absolutely necessary. I've personally worked cases involving compromise of Linux systems and Linux specific malware. And more than just XMRig clone #5374. It may be harder to move from user to root on Linux than moving to local admin on Windows (unless some jack-off decided that Linux doesn't need updates and DirtyCow still worked); but, there is still a lot of damage which can be done without root.

Overall, I'd say that the Linux ecosystem is evolving. It's already embedded in a lot of environments of all sizes, but it's usually a smaller part of a much larger Windows network. Hopefully, if enough large organizations start pushing away from Windows and towards Linux, there will be more investment and standardization. And, we've already seen some of that. Red Hat is a common distro of choice for large organizations because of that higher level of centralized control and standardization. Of course, a lot of the tools engineers want to use aren't on Red Hat, specifically because of that centralization (read: everything AI). So, it will be interesting to see where we land.

I wonder if the statistics are skewed as "one machine, one vote" rather than "one person, one vote." Because I know a few people (including myself, when I was younger) who would run like multiple Linux machines and start up random VMs to do a few things here and there.

I had an argument with my boss where he was trying to stop people checking out source code to company laptops because they could be lost. My retort was that the company uploaded all it's company documents, spreadsheets, and other data to the cloud including employee personal data, and that was far for likely to experience a data breach. Those breaches would result in legal issues for the company, rather than a slight embarrassment.

He was apoplectic. How dare I question company policy.

If you have your own company, you would naturally use the.boss@theBestCompanyEver.lol email for these kinds of purposes. Shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. On the other hand, nobody prohibits you from getting a domain and hosting your own email even if you don’t have a company. Sure, they probably have a long list of gmail users already, but the other people will have all sorts of random email addresses, so I don’t see what’s the problem. There are lots of valid reasons to use some other service besides gmail.

They do give out grants, which then existing organizations distribute to open-source devs.

For example, they give money to the NLnet foundation: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101135429
And then NLnet has given it to these projects: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html
Some of those you might know, like for example this project called "Lemmy".

Another example of what they do, which is somewhat different from what you had in mind, is that they give money to companies, if those companies open-source the developed software (and pay half the dev costs themselves), and ideally also cooperate with other companies.
You also have intermediate foundations for that, for example the Eclipse Foundation does a lot here: https://projects.eclipse.org/

europe does fun dspecific projects through grants. but they are individual projects and not really something like a full OS

Sure, my comment was not meant as "don't even bother", it was to criticise only the phrase "we ditched it".

I'm not sure if you've ever been in factories or down anything B2B but verified, tested, and universally supported is much much more valuable than one may initially expect. Absolutely no one wants to use a product or service whose existence or support may disappear in a few years or is equally unknown or untested. A government could decide to switch and then get backlash for having a new system that isn't fully or perfectly identical/interoperabile shoved down constituents throats and then deciding in just a few year that the adoption cost isn't worthwhile. The global economy is still running on code written in Fortran and B because it's so vital no one wants to risk changing something that's working.

Surely China can't be fine with the US poking around their government computers? Or are they?

I don't understand how another country can use another hostile country's closed operating system for sensitive material.