Windows isn’t trying to do what Linux does.

On the server end, Linux beat every competitor out there, including Windows Server, because it was free and development occurred along the lines of educated users making improvements. So, at first Linux was worse to use, but it was cheaper. Then, Linux was about as easy/stable as paid for versions, but it was cheaper. When it became easier to use to educated users and more stable and cheaper, all paid server OS’s died.

That said, I bring up educated users because Linux is only a kernel and Windows by itself does more than Linux does by itself. On the consumer end, no one has been able to threaten Windows without a DRM’d app store. Consumers won’t do bug fixes at the scale that enterprise users will. Consumers generally need more developed on the UI side to make the OS functional while you can run Linux in terminal mode. Most of Windows’ development went into this, making Windows easy/desirable for consumers. In contrast, most Linux development time went to making Linux more easy/desirable for enterprise users/servers.

This is really the first year that Linux for consumers is viable and a lot of that work packaging Linux for consumers came from Valve putting the various pieces of open source software together and sanding down the right edges. In contrast, Microsoft has been doing that for a generation.