I was tired of Microsofts monopolistic shenanigans. So when Ubuntu 5.10 came out in 2005, and was extremely well done, it was time to switch to Linux. Because Linux was finally polished and functional enough to actually be at least as good as Windows.
Admittedly there were a period of dual booting for games. But that isn’t necessary today, as we now have thousands of games that work on Steam.
You can say that what it took for me, was for Linux to become good enough to use as a daily driver. I’d say today it’s a no-brainer.
When Gnome 2 was discontinued, it was a major pain in the ass though, KDE was buggy and Gnome shell was hell (IMO). So I can’t say I never looked back, because I did install Windows 7 in frustration. But that was a very short adventure, because Windows is simply so horrible when you get used to Linux. The idiocy of Windows is momentous, and the jumping through hoops fighting Microsoft stupid security features, that won’t even allow you a simple thing as changing your default text editor, becomes insanely tiresome and frustrating very quickly.
So it was back to Linux faster than you can say oops (almost).
Now the desktop has become less relevant to me, because I do almost everything through hotkeys. So I rarely navigate the desktop, so as long as I have a decent file manager, I’m 90% OK just having that.