Companies that sell "enterprisy" laptops (like Dell and Lenovo) usually sell a few models with Linux. And while not a laptop I wouldn't be surprised if almost half of Desktop Linux users today have a Steam Deck.

I think that would not change the opinion much among the existing desktop userbase. That being said the younger generations are not by nature desktop users the way Gen-xers and millennials were. I think getting GNU/Linux as the default desktop for educational settings I think will have. Thankfully there is some traction being made on this front, particularly in places like France, Brazil & Argentina. Then again I guess it's not an either or, as having more vendors with preloaded Educational focused distributions & support would make such adoption more likely to successfully launch in such settings.

That's very true! I would've loved this option in my formative years back before developing all the bad habits lol

I must forget everything I know about computing. 🥋

How fucking DARE you. People should be forced to learn how to compile their OS, like Gentoo allows, and then have it crash and burn in front of everybody in social studies when you have to present your LibreOffice presentation about why Teddy Roosevelt was objectively the best president and spent a lot of time on making a slide with Abe the soyjack and Teddy the chad.

/s in case somebody needs it

For me the main issue is the time effort and the incompability with other people and my work that work with Microsoft products.

Some people clearly are! Some distros are clearly focused on getting a friendly interface for everything, and proton finally made Linux gaming possible, despite all the grumbling from “purists”

It's fine until you have to move more than a handful of files and discover it takes the better part of a day and slows your machine to a crawl.

File management under windows is really something else. Apparently there are third party tools that somewhat mitigate this.