this is sad

My experience too and there was no price difference in laptops ( from those few available with linux pre-installed ) here and those with windows. Then there was a lack of applications compatible ( or just feature compatible ) to what is available on windows outside the standard applications ( email, browser, office simple editor and calculator etc ) as well as hardware incompatibilities and no easy way to do a simple firmware upgrade on the device from vendors and so on.

Those novice end users ( which includes developers ) that atleast switched to Fedora for a brief time to try linux and did not have a joyful experience in doing so left the linux ecosystem entirely ( the complaint from developers not being able to use Fedora was they spent more time setting up their development environment and use manage it than hacking and novice end user did not like the instability in the ui design in Gnome 2 and 3. ). Those end users did not try alternative desktop environment like the KDE version of Fedora ( The entire Fedora brand suffered at the cost of one desktop environment ) or other distributions like Ubuntu or Debian or Mint since from their perspective they had tried "Linux" and it did not work for them and they did just want to go back to the environment they where familiar with ( Windows,Apple ). Arguably it would be better for if those Desktop Environment would release their own release then users could stay with/away from GnomeOS and try kdeEOS, ChromeOS etc. as in those desktop environment brands would suffer the loss ( or success ) of end users directly themselves but it really does not matter since linux desktop will never materialize for novice end user ( outside potentially Android ) when the ecosystem remains so fragmented but only be usable for tinkeres and administrators which I think everyone is aware of except those that are developing desktop environment.