Windows became popular with Windows 3.0 that came out 1990, And the Linux kernel came in 1991, but the first distro which is a better comparison came in 1993.
So Windows had a 3 year advantage.
But that wasn’t the more crucial thing, the real advantage was DOS compatibility, which everything legacy ran on. So with Windows people and companies could still run their old DOS programs, they could even run them better than in an old fashioned DOS system, because Windows was brilliant for multitasking DOS programs.