[Vivtek]

Oddly enough, I've had exactly the opposite experience. I'm locked into Windows due to industry standards (translation tools are all Windows-only, and the vast, vast majority of business documentation runs on Microsoft Office), but with my last machine, I installed Ubuntu as the host OS and run Windows 7 in a virtual machine - and love it.

I even have the opposite of your unbootability experience - towards the end of 2014 I rendered my Windows machine unbootable, without hope of recovery. I did manage to boot Linux from a USB drive and rescue my files. Late last year I did a similarly stupid thing with Linux - but I was able to reinstall the kernel without needing to reinstall everything, as Windows had required.

Although you're right about the average-person thing. I shudder to think about walking my mom through a kernel reinstall.