It's an issue of supply-chains and gap in the market. I can't buy a generally competitive Linux Mint (or anything similar) device in a shop anywhere in my country as far as I know. Whereas existing vocal demand are generally tinkerer types who often want the opposite of what we actually need. So I can see why it's a difficult market to bootstrap. Meanwhile, incumbent hardware vendors have competence and interest elsewhere and are probably getting decent incentives from Microsoft...

Valve's been bringing eberyone forward. I wish System76 et al to keep on their optimistic trajectory, for what that's worth. And Framework would be in a great position to spin out a dist or just offer a community install (fingers crossed Manjaro don't get them loljk).

Only if all you ever do is web browsing and do some light office work. As soon as you have to troubleshoot something or install some less popular software, you can't avoid it.

I would hazard a guess that this (+ gaming) is how most people use their personal computers. Most users live in their browsers.

I don’t know. I prefer to use the terminal wherever possible, so any “you can use Linux without the terminal” advice I’d give would just be me passing along stuff I heard on the internet. I’m not going to proactively offer that up.