It doesn't have a big impact on anybody. Which is the point. The friction IS the impact.

The hype drives attention if you're targeting the people that don't already know. That's not what's happening, regardless of your impromptu Instagram IT advice anecdotal experience.

Hype driving attention also doesn't work if the product you're hyping doesn't do the thing it needs to do the way the people you're marketing it at need it to.

Acknowledging either of those things is not negativity or pessimism. If we're talking about pushing for open source software as a community then denying or ignoring the practical issues is not helpful. OSS isn't a religion where you proselitize, facts be damned. It's meant to be a project for an alternative way of handling software development. That video I linked is not an attack, or a bummer, it's a hopeful sign that contributors and developers often have more clarity on the situation and the work left to do than the user-level advocates and activist forum posters.

The time I point people at is the early Ubuntu drops when Linux was getting easy to intall, computers were simple to build and magazines would sometimes just pop up in stores with a Linux install CD in the cover. That's the time I remember more normies suddenly gaining awareness of Linux as an option.

But yeah, I don't have a problem with any of the stuff you said.

It's just all unrelated to Windows 10 end of support.

Steam OS and Bazzite are way more relevant than it. Because they fix problems for a subset of users who are mainly focused on gaming.

They don't do it fully, and not for all users, but yeah, that stuff will move Linux from 1.5% of the Steam survey to 3-5% eventually. That WILL move the needle to some extent.

Now if you did that for Adobe users, video editors, graphic designers, people who HAVE to use Microsoft Office, people who only play Fortnite, people with zero capacity to troubleshoot, people who rely on commercial software with no Linux ports in general, people who have Nvidia cards and want to use Game Mode, people who use other specialized hardware that isn't currently well supported...

...those things will move the needle.

"My ancient copy of Windows 10 I use as a Chromebook is no longer getting security patches" is, by itself, less of an event than any of those. That's my entire point.