the point is that they will be locked into a walled garden with minimally-powerful hardware. Can such a device even really be considered a PC anymore?

My main laptop is an ancient chromebook that I jailbroke and put Linux on.

While they’re locked down, I wouldn’t really consider them to be a PC. But if you can unlock them…

Yes. Not because Linux PCs become so much more common, but because Windows PCs become much less common.

More and more people (normies) don’t own a desktop and only use tablets or phones. As the percentage of normies who own a desktop decreases, it will become more of just a nerd thing to have an actual desktop PC … and those kinds of people are much more likely to run Linux.

Honestly, I think Kubuntu is slept on as a beginner’s distro.

Yes, Ubuntu has its issues … but those sorts of issues are really not going to affect a newbie much. And it’s stable, easy to use, KDE defaults will be pretty familiar-feeling for Windows refugees, and it should be relatively easy to find help – 90% of the time, if you just type “how do I _____ in Linux?” into Google Duck Duck Go, the results you find will be perfectly applicable to Ubuntu. Want to install 3rd party software that’s not in their repos? In pretty much any software that offers a Linux version, the Ubuntu-compatible install method is the first one they list.

(Oh, and the installer is literally one click if you just let it do everything in automatic mode. No keyboard needed. The install image boots into a full GUI installer with mouse support, and if you want, all you have to do is click ‘automatic install’ and wait. Once it’s done and reboots, you’re in your new OS.)

Once you become an advanced enough user that you get annoyed by Snap packages or feel like you need more cutting-edge package updates … well, then you should also be advanced enough to do your own distro-hopping.

Ideally, you’d also first talk to the developers in charge of the project to see if your changes would be wanted in the first place.

(Or you’d start by reviewing existing bug reports and feature requests and addressing one of those.)

What I mean is, it’s generally better to not just throw code at them and hope they’ll like it. If you check first to see if they want it, you can save yourself from wasting effort on writing code that they’ll decline.