Comment by cosmic_cheese

This probably depends on the user. Someone leaning less technical might not catch on or care, but someone who’s even just technical enough to be able to get themselves in trouble probably will. The more technical one becomes, the more tuned into the details of their OS and the more likely it is for those details to become incorporated into their workflow. When those details change it’s then hard to miss.

So there’s some number of users who could probably just be switched over by PC vendors preinstalling Linux, but there’s other groups who’d benefit from something more truly Windows-like.

Aside from those groups, I think there’s a crowd that could be attracted by simply selling your distro as being like “Windows when it was still good, except this time you get to keep it forever”. I think there’s a decent number of people who’ve become fatigued with modern Windows but don’t care enough to switch who’d be pushed over the edge by a distro that’s a near perfect reproduction of XP, 7, etc. Nostalgia can be a powerful motivator.