WetGeek For Linux to compete in a meaningful way against Windows on the desktop, it needs to be Linux vs. Windows. Not 249 Linuxes vs. Windows, as it is today.
Torvalds discussed this when he was asked why Linux dominated the server market and bombed in the deskop market. He said that Linux would never succeed in the desktop market unless and until the Linux community develops the self-discipline to focus and a handful of distos and focus on quality rather than quantity. Torvalds was right about that, but I don't think that the Linux community, dominated as it is by enthusiasts, will develop that level of self-discipline.
Another factor: If you look at the market segments where Linux dominates (server, cloud, IoT) and compare them to the desktop market segment, you also see another factor at work. The server, cloud and IoT markets were developed by corporations, which made significant financial investments in the products and infrastructure serving those markets. That is also true in the consumer market, where Android dominates and ChromeOS has a market share equal to all other Linux distributions combined, and Ubuntu is, by far, the dominate player in the desktop market, largely due to Ubuntu's dominance in the corporate, education and enterprise submarkets.
If you look at the market segments where the emerging Linux architecture is being developed, it is in the server, cloud and IoT markets. Ubuntu Core, for example, is immutable, containerized, modular and based on Snap from top to bottom, Ubuntu Server is moving towards that architecture, as is Ubuntu Cloud.
The hard-core enthusiast community wants nothing to do with the emerging architecture, at least as far as I can tell from a few months spent on Reddit, but I think that the desktop is moving towards that architecture nonetheless.
