The advertising seems to be local to the US because I've never seen it, but I expect users will ignore it just like they ignore it on TV, Google, Facebook, Twitter, on every roadside, at every mall and do on. Frankly advertising is everywhere, avoiding it doesn't seem to be a priority.
I think you summed it up. Computer Experts may want to switch to Linux, and likely already have. My mom, who is 40 years a novice, cares less about any of what you listed. Her skill set is small, and her interest in changing is miles below 0.
And there are 97% of the world like her and, 3% like you ;)
Microsoft has made sure users can't stop using cloud services, unless they spend a ton of effort every time a new update that re-enables them is released.
E.g. try to disable the web search in the Windows start menu.
>> And there are 97% of the world like her and, 3% like you ;)
If the 3% expert users switch away from Windows it will be the beginning of the end for Windows.
However, make the next Minecraft, Fortnite or Roblox work only (or considerably better) on Linux desktop[], and you will suddenly gain a lot more new users. Some of whom will stick around, since all their other apps work the same in the browser.
[] Whatever that term means, even the article makes a distinction between that and Chrome OS.
That said, I'm far from your typical desktop user. I'm vaguely Linux sysadmin adjacent, and I ran Linux as my primary OS for many years - until one day I noticed I was mostly booted into Windows for gaming and decided to reclaim that SSD space.
Gaming on Linux has come... leaps and bounds. It's actually extraordinary. Still many sharp edges, but the Steam Deck might in fact be the first spark of a revolution here. We'll see, I guess.
Jokes aside, totally right, and unfortunately, in my experience it's often a better experience to run the Windows port under Wine than it is to use the native version. e.g. the native version of Tyranny is just a black box for me, but the Wine version works pretty flawlessly.
I think userspace is just too unstable, and game companies probably don't want a forever-ongoing maintenance cost just to keep their old games running.
And lose lots of money in that process. :)
And what Linux OS should you target? Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, Arch, Android? Target KDE or Gnome? Or maybe XFCE? X Windows or Wayland? Use ALSA, Pipewire or Pulse Audio? Bionic or glibc?
Linux is an OS.
It doesn't matter which distro you pick, because they're all the same.
For example DaVinci Resolve is packaged for (now quite old) CentOS but runs just fine installed on Ubuntu, with absolutely no problems at all. The only thing that might catch out the unwary is that CentOS packages a couple of libraries as default which Ubuntu doesn't but if you're savvy enough to edit video you're savvy enough to catch this.
You can also run Resolve in a Docker container so it "sees" a CentOS environment no matter what, and it's transparent across any other distro. There's no real need to do this, although it makes running more than one version easy.
And doing so, they'd likely just target the particular Linux system they happen to have or like---whether Arch, or Android, or even Alpine. It might well work on other Linux systems (or even non-Linux), or it might not.
Maybe I'm off base here, but that's what I see (even casual) gamers do, especially younger ones: go to great lengths to get the game they want, to run. If that system which runs the game also supports their other hobbies, school or work, then that's what they will use.
Microsoft is making a lot of changes that will annoy the expert users. Stuff like a Settings app that has a single screen - e.g. one makes changes to his network setup, decides to increase the brightness of the screen - the Settings app navigates from network to screen and the user progress with network is lost.