TL;DR - people want to get things done, so support them in doing that while waving your freedom flag, instead of being stuck in the past and appearing primitive. Also, support FLOSS (free/libre open source software) at least monetarily, if not with time and effort.

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This article didn't really motivate me to try to switch to Linux. In my reading, it was just a bit of fluff about looking at /var/log/syslog and searching for 'proper and relevant' error messages. That's definitely not enough for a non-tech-savvy common person.

There was a time when I used to think that software will improve in stability and quality over time, but I've realized that things are so complex, so diverse and driven by so many people that we've actually gone far away from "it just works" on _every_ _single_ _platform_ (this is about common people, not tech savvy people who can edit config files, look at system logs, debug applications, fix bugs, build from source, etc.). It doesn't matter if you like Windows more or OS X (macOS) more or Linux more - none of them are really great enough for common people to use without being annoyed or downright disrupted in accomplishing what they want to. It's only an ever changing ranking of who's doing worse at any point in time.

Coming to Linux, I find the following as deficiencies in the distributions and the applications that prevent people from adopting it on their computers more (this list is a generalization across most distributions, and I know some distributions may be vastly better than others):

1. Hardware drivers (video and network being important ones that people rely on) - this has improved tremendously in the last decade or so, but it still is kind of a coin toss when it comes to saying "ok, I have this laptop and I'm going to install Linux on it" and being confident that it would work.

2. Not including proprietary codecs and stuff that people actually want. Nobody wants to hunt down a codec pack or spend a lot of time just to watch a video they've downloaded. I'm not belittling the fight for free software and freedom, but we have to accept what people are tending toward even if we know they're probably on a destructive or unproductive path.

3. The UI - this is a huge deal, really. Most Linux distributions and applications still use some really ugly fonts and ugly looking GUI elements. It's as if we're still stuck in 1995 admiring Windows '95 as the best thing that's happened to GUIs. I see a similar issue with LibreOffice (which I use), where the UI is primitive looking and difficult to use (especially for those who come from using MS Office - standard menus or ribbon interface doesn't matter). Most people around the world who now own computers are starting to have nicer screens (at least closer to HD or HD). Things start looking even more uglier on those systems.

4. If you want 2016 to be "the year of desktop Linux" [1], you have to start by admitting that this cause was lost long ago and adapt to the better presentation, practices and behaviors seen in other OSes, however primitive, deficient or restrictive those may look to you from different perspectives. Copying ideas, polish and UI paradigms is not a bad thing because most people want to get their work done and not have to learn something new as a stepping stone to getting things done (recall the Windows 8.0 fiasco over the Start button not being there and people not knowing how to shutdown their systems?). There has been a lot of progress here as well over the years on the Linux side, but the polish is definitely not there (in a comparative sense) or comes at cost (not monetarily) that end users don't want to deal with.

5. The update coin toss - this is becoming quite common and a well noticed problem on Windows and OS X as well, but you never know what an update will do to your system and if you'd even be able to boot it up (this could be related to drivers too, but why would a common user even care about who's responsible for what and where the blame should lie if something no longer works?).

With all these complaints, what can we collectively do? Beyond corporate sponsorships, I believe tech people should donate more money and ideas to the FLOSS (free/libre open source software) ecosystem. Many people who have been working on these systems for decades or years are doing it from an ideological standpoint, and in my opinion, getting more people and resources to improve things does need more money to start with. Think of it as a recurring contribution to humanity, because we all know that even if Linux doesn't rule the desktop, it does rule mobile and servers - things that we all use in some form or the other everyday.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+year+of+desktop+linux