Haha market cap, market share , they’re still all about selling stuff so dont really apply./ Market share is normally measured in share of revenue in most industries.
There are lots of webpages, tutorials, youtubes and stuff like that for these people already. I’m sure they can also pay companies like canonical for more dedicated support if that’s what they need.
If you want to welcome people, go ahead and do it, nothing stopping you. Create the webpage or forum or youtube channel, distribution, or write the book whatever is missing. Just make sure to moderate it to remove CLI based answers and block users like me.
“I” exist and I’m sure I’m never going to be part of your “we”. The current situation of linux home user base seems just fine to me without pandering to a load of windows users. I think you should work on your desired subculture and keep me out if it. Leave me out of it - i can stay over here under my bridge in linuxmemes wearing my new programming socks.
For the home market maybe you can look at valve and steamdeck or something as an example of an acessible linux sub-culture. Valve doesn’t maintain and support that for free though. It’d be interesting to know how many full time employees they have on steamdeck OS just for the one device (and maybe a few gaming perpherals) and one GUI. Then expand that to all esoteric hardware and all GUIs . . .
I guess chromeOS and a few forks of that is another similar example - i think that’s still linux kernel based - some limitations on hardware i think.
What I’d actually like to see is B2B growth (for user ) - but I don’t think linux will ever be bought by employers like mine - I know how the procurement department operates - and I can’t see that changing. There are plenty of people who don’t need my support trying business sales, redhat, canonical, suse etc and more power to them - but microsoft didn’t get big in B2B by being usable, nor by nor having “no CLI”, nor by having a supportive community to home users. They just packaged it in a way that ticked all the boxes for the corpo procurement types - though most B2B customers do need their own dedicated user support.
That’s not something that I’d think is any of my business to want or not want.
I can’t really answer the last question, I’d need to know a lot more about all thendifferent things these microsoft users are doing; what’re the alternatives; and, how disruptive might the transition be. On balance, given the uncertainties, I’d have to say probably not.
I mean if i stopped using Microsoft entirely (i.e. at work) I’d have to find a new job, probably one I’m less experienced at. And likely I’d end up working for a bigger bunch of scumbags. Likely no net gain and a load of botheration in the meanwhile.
Also i might miss the regular BSOD inspired tea breaks . . .