In my experience, Linux is great for the type of user who would be well-suited with a Chromebook. Stick a browser, office suite and Zoom on it, and enable automatic updates, and they'll be good to go.
That’s not to say it can’t or doesn’t work for some people in the middle, but for this group it’s much more likely that there’s some kind of fly in the soup that’s preventing them from switching.
It’s where I’m at. I keep secondary/tertiary Linux boxes around and stay roughly apprised of the state of the Linux desktop but I don’t think I could ever use it as my “daily driver” unless I wrote my own desktop environment because nothing out there checks all of the right boxes.
> That’s not to say it can’t or doesn’t work for some people in the middle, but for this group it’s much more likely that there’s some kind of fly in the soup that’s preventing them from switching.
Generally agree with these points with some caveats when it comes to "extremes".
I think for middle to power users, as long as their apps and workflows have a happy path on Linux, their needs are served. That happy path necessarily has to exist either by default or provisioned by employers/OEMs, and excludes anything that requires more than a button push like the terminal.
This is just based on my own experience, I know several people ranging from paralegals working on RHEL without even knowing they're running Linux, to people in VFX who are technically skilled in their niche, but certainly aren't sys admins or tiling window manager users.
Then there are the ~dozen casual gamers with Steam Decks who are served well by KDE on their handhelds, a couple moved over to Linux to play games seemingly without issue.