Why doesn't everyone use distributed operating systems?
This is part of an answer.  Others will probably be able to add other points.

A chess platform has to do a limited number of things, while an OS has to be able to do everything that OSes do, which is unlimited.  You need lots of utilities, lots of apps written, and to get those, lots of compilers and coders' tools, etc.  It's a much harder thing to get off the ground, and doing so is as much a social endeavor as a technical one.  It's quite interesting that Linux took off as it did, but there were other competing projects at the time such as FreeBSD and GNU (which was supposed to be an OS, and not just Linux's utility suite) that have fallen by the wayside.  This has a lot to do with choices that Linus Torvalds and others made early on in the process that gradually led to more and more people hacking on Linux and using it, I believe.  Some of the choices were reflected in the code itself, but some of them had to do with social factors.  Part of it is probably just chance, though.  It didn't happen overnight with Linux, either.  It took several years before it started to get popular enough that it might have had a chance to grow into the popularity it has now.

The point is that being better isn't enough.