[Silhouette]

FWIW, I mostly operate in the world of small businesses, and in tech and creative sectors.

Anecdotally, the majority of the small businesses I deal with don't fit your characterisation there. For example, MS Office is far from universal in this market now. Online collaboration and document editing tools are displacing applications like Word and Project. We're being forced to switch to online management and accounting systems because of issues with interoperability and government regulation, which makes Excel much less useful. Outlook/Exchange is giving way to Google Mail and similar services. I'm not saying any of these is necessarily an improvement or has no downsides, but it's clearly the way the industry has been moving. The specialists doing things like CAD or DCC still need the 800lb gorilla software in many cases, but those are niche markets.

The biggest problem with Linux on the desktop today is no longer application support, IMHO, but rather the lack of off-the-shelf PCs you can buy that way, with proper tech support and so on. We tried buying one of the Dell laptops that was sold with Ubuntu preinstalled, and it was one of the most disappointing and troublesome purchases we've ever made, largely due to the abysmal support when basic hardware failures occurred. (Also, the hardware itself appears to be pretty poor quality.)

If you could buy decent laptops with Linux preinstalled from the usual big name brands or off the shelf at your local bricks-and-mortar store, I suspect a lot of people would barely notice the difference any more, because so many of their software needs are either very basic or using online systems now.