these march hand in hand, and are probably the most potent factors. mix it in with extreme friction uninstalling windows and deconfiguring the other than windows settings, and this is a vendor lockout.

the consequent question seems to be, why are there not more POS "nux" installations on new hardware?

Everyone who tries to do that seems to invent their own distro, making fragmentation worse, and now they have to also be distro makers which probably doesn't help costs much.

If I wasn't a developer, and wasn't often using cheaper hardware, I might also be using completely stock windows. I'm not sure what the "killer app" would be aside from privacy concerns.

I wouldn't even think of coding a system app myself unless I worked for Canonical or Red Hat, whatever I make is almost guaranteed to not be the next big thing with a full paid team backing it, and I'm not a fan of "software for one person".

or provided an install ready hware configured item, with a runthis first disk, i.e. onboarding stream, so it is an enduser install?

there is a business near me doing these things and he keeps his home n bills paidfor.

Like, how many really neat technologies have been completely forgotten because nobody put it on the play store?

A lot of them would only have been a week of work. But I sure don't want to maintain it all by myself, the odds of it becoming a community project that mostly runs itself are low, and for personal use it's easier to just use whatever crappy solution is readily available.

We have all the tech for so many cool things, what we don't have is said tech packaged and maintained.