People care about features and convenience. Getting stuff done and being entertained.
Seriously, talk to "normal people" and see for yourself.
So I'd bet people have been bitten enough by Android, Facebook, LinkedIn and Windows 10 that they're ripe to understand that their OS is worth 50$/yr.
- the forced upgrade to everyone who didn't agree with the upgrade,
- the telemetry
- the OEM "drivers" that display ads/change 404 pages/install a CA certificate/slow down an otherwise good the computer/install the OEM's wallpaper/break the trust between the customer and their computer.
For Android it's having coarse-grained permissions, the fact that "Ok Google" means the mic is on all the time, having Dropbox suggest to upload every time you take a picture. iOS is quite good but it's a closed garden, non-USB plugs, the impossibility of mounting the iPhone and just put mp3s on it, and requiring iTunes for music sync, which tries to push you to use their iTunes Store. It's all related to phones, but the point is, people do realize that they're providers don't care about them.
"people do realize that they're providers don't care about them"
Again, I can just suggest talking to average users. They don't even think about this sort of thing. They are annoyed if they can't get things done. If the app freezes, or drops the wifi connection etc. They don't care about permissions. They want their stuff to "just work".
You're reminding me that my parents (63 years old) and my sister might belong to a bubble made of 10% of the people. I'm highlighting that those 10% still make above 100 million people. There's definitely concern for privacy all across the board, but people won't switch to Linux because open-source software is ugly and dense today.
I'm not saying we'll sell a paid Linux to everyone. But good UX + respect for the user is still a huge market. The market will grow as the image of Linux improves and people will end up switching "because it just works better".
Someone needs to take some Linux and focus solely on the desktop environment. Make it more beautiful than OSX and Win10 and that may drive attention. That's an awful lot of work (not only the apps but getting the ecosystem to cooperate).
We've driven ourselves into the ground with our desire for free things. And we paid with our privacy, willingly or not. I think that reverting this trend will take a very long time now.
Second, people have paid enough with their privacy ("Ok Google, were you listening to me?") that they've started to understand that it's worth paying $50/yr for an OS.
Anyway I'm not a Linux expert, so I can't even tingle with a business plan. Someone needs to do that for me.
From 9Gag to HN, Windows 10 is a recurring meme of disrespect for the -cattle- consumer, in a world of Snowden and Facebook where we don't even own our computers. I say there's a demand (with money available) for a trustworthy OS in the PC world, and for a open-source in the Apple world.
Selling today's OSes might be impossible indeed. But a lot of people would switch to Linux even if it had fewer features, just because of Linux' values (which would be properly marketed around values of compatibility, open-source, reusability, privacy, cryptography, distributed services, ownership, offline work, etc). What about marketing the idea that Linux will bring pervasive effects in our democracy, like a global understanding that security systems can only be verified if they're open-source? What about the community value of VW and Tesla being required to open-source their security features, generating better security for them, for competitors and pull requests to upstream projects? We can make customers dream about a lot of values in addition to adhering to a great-UX Linux, and this value is not currently captured by neither Microsoft nor Apple. If only we had the money to kickstart a paid Linux...