Comment by username223

I may get there at some point -- I actually ran Linux on a PowerBook for a while during the dot-com boom -- but Mac OS X was Unix with tastefully-done office software, and Gnome/KDE were tasteless kludges. Now it seems all software is converging on the same bubbly, mediocre slop. Sadly, Apple still makes the best laptops by far, and trying to run Linux on them takes me to the bad old days of editing XF86Config files and failing to sleep when the lid closes.

But back to the article on hand... Windows has been shoddy since forever, and Windows-compatible laptops are mostly mediocre things that can also run Linux. I could absolutely see a lot of casual Windows users switching to Linux for email, web, and office tasks.