I think you and everyone commenting on this is seriously lacking any real understanding of real world users.

People like you blather on about a "polished environment", "fragmentation" and all that crap but you have never in your life built a product from scratch and sold it to the general public.

Here is the reality of the desktop user:

• They don't care about polish.
• They don't care about bling.
• They don't care about desktop fragmentation.
• They don't care about any of the things you guys keep on pissing on about.

You know what regular people care about? Donuts, sports, nascar, wrestling, time with family, a bit of fun and being able to pay the bills. These are desktop users and most people in tech look down on them. I don't. I love my Donut lovers. They are a beautiful pragmatic bunch. They aren't dull or dumb or anything like that. Every single one of them learned to use either a Mac or Windows as much as they needed to. When blackberries were a thing all of them learned that. When iOS and Android came about they learned that. They are a remarkable clever, smart and funny bunch and they will learn what they need to learn to keep going in life.

I have run 600+ user deployments of regular Linux desktop and you know what the general experience was? No one cared. No one noticed. The usual loud voices complained here and there about not having Outlook but that was solved by moving them to o365 (or whatever it is called now). Regular users can easily use and run Linux without any problem because they are smart enough to do so.

The problem that you and people like you don't seem to understand is that Linux and the free software world DOES NOT solve a technical problem nor even an economics problem. It solves a political problem. Linux and the free software ecosystem is SOLELY AND ABSOLUTELY about the GPL and the economics of sharing code and sharing freedom.

See, the problem is that our lovely desktop users want donuts and we here on planet Linux are peddling politics. Donut lovers don't care or want politics, that isn't what they are buying. And, THIS is why regular users don't want Linux, it has nothing to do with any of the nonsense you mentioned.

To add a turd to the punch bowl, the economics of the desktop is that there just isn't any money it. Donut lovers want to pay donut prices while us politics peddlers have to charge enterprise level pricing in order to pay the bills.

It's really that simple. No amount of polish, standardization, blah, blah, blah will change the fact that Linux is a political product not a Donut.