This was an issue, but at this point Microsoft is placing ads everywhere, negative news on my desktop, and update nags with changing buttons in every other start. Nothing about it is smooth or consistent anymore.

Seriously I've learned about the death of hundreds of people when I switched on my music PC (the only reason I have one windows machine is music software) - I haven't asked for this, and I removed news before, they just patched it back in

I don't think you appreciate what a hack job Windows really is. It's just that it's quite visible in the Linux world, but more obscured in the case of proprietary software.

Economics are becoming less and less important when it comes to switch to Linux. The risk of relying on US companies has gone through the roof lately.

I haven’t used desktop Linux in ages, but I’m a Linux server user as I think maybe everyone here. Is the solution to desktop that some well funded company just needs to fork Debian, build the common application deites like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, messaging apps, etc, and then build a proper App Store?

Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?

Windows and a Linux distro are not comparable in the extent of the software that they include/provide.

Id happily pay for a polished, commercial Linux distro, and I’d imagine governments will do too - either outsourced or with an internal team of civil servant sysadmins.