I'm going to go meta with my comment and say that this article is a fantastic object lesson as to why linux faces extremely low odds of ever being adapted as a

I'm going to go meta with my comment and say that this article is a fantastic object lesson as to why linux faces extremely low odds of ever being adapted as a widespread replacement for windows or OS X. How many people (outside of your coworkers) do you know who would or could follow a path similar to the one laid out in this article? I'm speaking as someone who has dabbled with linux since 1998. At that time, and now, there is a huge, confused ball of conflict between linux distributions, various levels of customization to those distributions, and documentation available on the web. Here's a quick, recent example from my own experience. I decided I wanted to learn more about Emacs. I work in Windows at work, so I downloaded portacle. Great. Works great. Then you start watching youtube videos on how to customize Emacs, but most youtube videos are using Emacs in Linux. So you then have to find where portacle puts all the stuff that is in a completely different place than all the Emacs documentation and videos say it is. Great. And I haven't found anyone who talks about the benefits/costs and gotchas about whether to edit the init.el file, or the .emacs file, but now we're getting into the weeds. So after that frustrating rabbit hole, I think, "I'll just install a linux distro in a VM." Next thought: "Which distro should I get?" Search engines are no help when it comes to finding the "best" linux distro because all I can find is superficial opinion pieces on the matter. So back when I worked at an ISP in the early 00s, they used Debian, so I download Debian. Try to install emacs in Debian, and I start getting weird errors about some certain package not being current enough, and apparently someone isn't maintaining/updating the install script for Debian. That's three days lost getting to that conclusion. So I wipe that VM and download Ubuntu, because it seems to be the most widely used distro, and seems like a good distro for "normies" like me. Install emacs, no problem. Can customize by following youtube videos, no problem. Enjoying emacs now. All of this comes at a high price, however. I've been messing around with trying to use emacs for a few months now, on my side time at work and at home, and it's only been in the last couple of weeks that I've been able to use the package in a way in line with the available training materials. Normies have no kind of patience for this kind of ridiculousness. Techies justify these "rabbit holes" as enthralling and fun, and yeah, it feels good to finally figure some of this kind of stuff out, but overall, it's a massive distraction from actually USING the tools, rather than just futzing around, trying to get the damn tools to work in the first place.