“the majority of people aren’t and aren’t really interested in in having to spend a great deal of time re-programing a niche system so that it will run the software they need.”
What software are you referring to? I have been running Ubuntu on a 10 year old laptop for several years and it has all the software one could possibly want. Plus, I don’t need to search the internet to find drivers for any device I can plug into it, try that with windows. Under Linux, plug it in and it works, no drama.
My Ubuntu was pretty much plug’n’play. I simply had to resize the screen settings (easy to do in “System Settings”) but I did need to download a very tiny fan control file. Finding the printer “driver” I needed was easy, since it was at the manufacturers website.
I was online within seconds, literally. I had gone online with the live disc and when I decided to install it, it even remembered the wi-fi password. That was pretty nifty.
Not a lot of top games for Linux but that is changing with Steam and hopefully other game companies will start making their games work with more than just Windows