I'm not so sure any more. The average home user probably does most of their stuff online these days, and you can see your friends' photos on Facebook or write a message in Google Mail or access your online banking or watch a show on Netflix just as well on pretty much any platform today.
What desktop applications do most home users really run now? Gaming, sure, for part of the market. Maybe some basic spreadsheets or word processing documents or accounting for organising household stuff or writing the odd letter that still needs sending on paper.
Other than that, you're probably into niche territory. There are a lot of niches, and no doubt some of them still rely on Windows desktop software or Windows drivers for related hardware, but they're niches because most people aren't that interested in them. And even then, for significant fields such as programming or graphics/creative work, many of the interesting developments in recent years have been on non-Windows platforms and it's the Windows software that tends to lag behind.
Remember, one popular switch already is from Windows to Linux, when home users dump the traditional PC entirely and just do things on their Android phones/tablets instead.
Each individual niche is tiny, but once you add up all the niches, it adds up to a significant part of the market. Windows has a huge "tail" of niche software on it, and just finding substitutes on Linux is a daunting task, to say nothing of actually getting back up to the same level of productivity as one had on Windows.
>Remember one popular switch already is from Windows to Linux, when home users dump the traditional PC entirely and just do things on their Android phones/tablets instead
Is that an actual trend? Yes, PC sales have slowed down. All that means is that the PC market has reached saturation. Pretty much every household already has one PC that meets their needs. I don't see any evidence to indicate that people are throwing away their computers and using their phones and tablets exclusively.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
> Is that an actual trend?
It points to a solution anyway. Have one family PC with Windows to run the one niche app you need, but don't put Windows on anything else. Even if the other devices are laptops and not tablets, it still works.
Perhaps, but certainly not all of the market, and (I'm guessing) probably not even most of it. It won't be everyone all the time, but surely there are numerous people using Windows PCs today who could switch quite easily to another platform and carry on using their online services without too much hassle.
Is that an actual trend?
I'm pretty sure it is. Over the past few years, we've watched access patterns on B2C sites shift steadily from mostly PC to mostly mobile, and Android dominates most segments of the mobile market today. I suspect that at this point the PC, smartphone and tablet markets are all close to saturation, but device lifecycles are longer in the PC market so people are getting access to more powerful and higher spec mobile devices sooner, which is making the shift more practical.
Not to detract from the point you're making, which is quite valid.
It was once possible to disable advertising about OneDrive, but Microsoft has reconfigured things so that's no longer possible without deep hacking (no user-level configuration options). There's an "Uninstall" option attached to the OneDrive client's listing in the Start menu, but if you choose the option, instead of uninstalling the OneDrive client, the system opens the Control Panel Programs & Features applet, where OneDrive is nowhere listed.
As time passes the advertising is becoming more aggressive and less controllable. On February 14th a commercial announcement related to Valentine's Day appeared, but I wasn't able to track it to its source. Just one example -- Microsoft is jealous of Google and they're becoming an imitation.
The deep issue here is that corporations have to decide how to most efficiently grow their companies. Do they pay attention to customers, or stockholders? At some point in the past (I think it was during the Reagan years) corporations turned their backs on customers and made stockholders the focus of their attention. And from a corporate perspective, it was a good choice, because customers are fickle and unpredictable, but stockholders only care about quarterly earnings reports -- no earnings and they walk.
Also, there's plenty of distros that look great out of the box.
That would make sense if the benefits were more than the costs. Which, for the average people, aren't.
Just the hassle of using a new interface, much less one that needs more admin work like Linux, is enough. And let's not go with compatibility with the various tasks people do.
(And no, most people don't just "browse and read email". They also want to be able to see all kinds of videos, they want to be able to do stuff with Office documents they receive, they want to transfer and/or edit their daughter's birthday videos, and so on...).