In a video someone discussed the average us household income. Someone commented that that number was actually inflated and it would be better to use median. I found the article the OP was referencing and pointed out that it was in fact the median and pointed out a median is a type of average. They argued for far far too long that average exclusively refers to mean, that median “isn’t even an expected value” and that they were right and I was wrong because they are an engineer who works with this all day long. I ended up getting ganged up by several different accounts, I eventually screenshotted the Wikipedia page for average and got them to all delete their posts.
I think the only thing that will really push adoption is if more systems ship with Linux preinstalled and those laptops are advertised primarily with linux. People aren’t going to go buy a usb drive, figure out how to download an image and how to download and install a flasher and how to use that flashing tool, not when google and apple actively hamstring computer literacy in schools. They probably won’t even click the “budget penguin thing” unless they already know what it is and have been sold the story of linux on that specific laptop.