> people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux?

I don't know, but Windows has becoming increasingly worse at everyday usage. I swear Linux has better suspend/sleep functionality now, doesn't sneaky restart randomly (yeah, just because you reopen an explorer window but none of my other, actually important programs will definitely make people notice), doesn't take a minute to react to an unlock attempt several times a day for no reason on even very performant hardware..

So yeah, I think many would be better off with Linux.