C'mon, that's complete bullshit. Linux is very hostile to the everyday user, you can't expect a large majority of users to have to fiddle as much as it's necessary to get a barely passable desktop experience on Linux. You buy a Windows or Mac computer and you're going in 10 minutes. There's no combination of distro or hardware where that's true for Linux.

I pretty much disagree here. Before she passed last year, I had my grandmother on linux for about 11 years. I had wine setup for the handful of old games (95 era) she liked, and made sure to update everything once or twice a year. Of course one time I waited too long. Archived her home dir, and installed the latest Ubuntu, restored her home dir, and she was up and running again.

She didn't have to know anything about linux to use it. The same is true for a lot of people. More so in a corporate environment with dedicated staff to handle the harder problems. Hell, most people in offices could get away with a Chromebook and Office 365 today.

Of course, general use laptops and proper linux support are not things that are very common. That part truly sucks. And, yeah, it's not pre-installed for the most part except for some boutique vendors and a couple Dell offerings.

Aside:

Have had a few looks at System 76 lately. May change out my mid-2014 rmbp next year. Unfortunately it's one of the last systems with NVidia, and the metal 2 support for the 750M doesn't work well at all. I'm also probably going to change my desktop to Linux in a few months. Hackintosh support is all but going away, and although I could change out my GTX 1080 with a next gen Navi for hackintosh, but I just don't want to support the mac platform anymore, and my 1080 has a lot of life left in it.

yeah sounds pretty straightforward /s

Again... with an office environment, with dedicated staff... the USERS don't really need to know all this stuff, just where to click to open their browser, etc.

Not sure that I agree with this. I know plenty of non-technical users who have been perfectly happy with a default Ubuntu (or similar) install.

It only really breaks if you want to customise it (or your hardware is badly supported).

I love Linux Mint and Antergos as much as the next guy but Microsoft built an entire platform/ecosystem around tight integration between a full range of enterprise products. I can't say I blame them, decades of significant effort is required to do that and it's not easy or there would be someone else who has done it. Not only is the incentive not there as you mentioned, but it's definitely not malevolence to avoid trying to support random desktop Linux distros which will likely not cooperate with their integration efforts (and likely take joy in being able to reject or impede MS's efforts), to the degree they can with Windows 10.

They have the right idea today, embrace server-side Linux with .Net Core, and soon, .Net 5. That's what Linux is primarily intended for, it's a server kernel and where the action is in regards to that ecosystem. There's a reason some of the code in X11 hasn't been touched in 20 years.