The underpinning operating system is a 'necessary evil' as in: not having to spend time writing one... prepackaged windows is easy. buy licence , launch setup.exe ... done.
linux? not so ... what are you going to install ? red hat ? gentoo ? ubuntu ?
Any of the above - you'll be no worse off than Windows. Or, if you know something about Linux, you pick one specialized for embedded stuff, and are better off in many cases.
especially if one machine runs ubuntu , another red hat ... you will get a swift NO as an answer.
Maybe if you're the one guy with an oscilloscope in a corporation of five hundred bean counters... test and measurement is, as has been alluded to, a hodgepodge of embedded OSes, Unixes, and Windows versions last supported in the previous century. Any organization with a substantial number of sophisticated instruments will surely be able to deal with this situation, maybe even intelligently.
all this interoperability requirements would require testing and maintenance.... they simply don;t want to deal with it.
In my experience, UNIX-based stuff tends to be standards-based and pretty easily interoperable. Modern Windows isn't bad either, of course; this is an era of standards, but robust support for standard networking protocols is a traditional UNIX strength. It's really all about standards, regardless of OS: My somewhat elderly DOS-based HP 16500C from the early nineties can talk to my 2011 Mac and my 2009 Ubuntu-based laptop. (The latter via X11 even! Haven't got that to work on the Mac yet, but it can do telnet and FTP just fine.)
again , this may be fine for you. for an instrument maker it isn't. Can you imagine a test setup with a signal generator having ubuntu , a scope running red hat and a logic analyser with kde. That is another problem with linux distro's they all look different as the windowing system uses different icons graphics. on windows : not so.
I'm sorry, but this is just nonsensical on several levels. KDE is a desktop environment, generally contrasted with GNOME; Ubuntu and Red Hat are Linux distributions.
You're going to end up staring at one application interface most of the time, designed by the instrument maker. It's that interface that is going to affect my judgement of the machine, not what the dialog box looks like when I go to save data to a USB stick or whatever. Let's face it, for the kind of simple stuff you do on a computerized instrument, GUIs of Windows and Linux all work pretty much the same way. It strains credulity to imagine that someone able to operate an oscilloscope or logic analyzer will be baffled if the 'Save' button is a different color from what they are used to on their PC!