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Ps. I'm also wondering... what would be the strong points of Linux over Windows? Is that enough to convince an enduser comfortably tucked into Windows?
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To be honest, I'm not sure there's a straight line to that goal. Going back into history, Windows came to the fore by first gaining control of the business market. People used computers at work, found them useful, and wanted one for home use. Familiarity with DOS/Windows at work meant it got installed at home.
Now that the issue is one of "comes with the hardware," at least part of our hope is the Linux inroads into the business market. Another item is the degree to which Windows fails. That's the sad part, because I don't rejoice in human suffering, but every time someone can't get Windows to work for them, that's one more vote for Linux. But even then, we have no case if what we offer isn't a whole lot better.
You and I are already convinced, and to us it's a silly question. Whiners, the truly lazy, will never be happy. They make the most noise, but don't represent the majority. Sadly, we get suckered into helping whiners by convincing them to try Linux, only to have them demand their Windows back next week. That a few of them have legitimate gripes does not help.
The bulk of my first approach to this issue was calling for the Linux community to slow the race to new features, at least in some areas. A primary example is the big hiccup we are experiencing over the "new and improved GVFS" -- it'll be a long time before that quits raising alarms. It's fine to innovate, but the constant "never quite finished and working properly" flavor of the entire Open Source field of endeavor is a real put-off.
The question I have to ask is: Do we not yet have something solid, something so useful and effective we can afford to devote some time and resources to maintaining it for a couple of years? Can we not find a waypoint worthy of support and put some effort into supporting it with backward compatibility and back-porting to it our new toys? I find the mere mention of backward compatibility is like heresy in Open Source.
Example of the good: I can get a current copy of Seamonkey to run on SUSE 7.3. Example of the bad: I can't get a single modern distro to run WP8 for Linux. People in the Windows world can appreciate the former, but they just don't understand how they can run WP8 for Windows on XP, which in the minds of many Win-users is still "current." WP8 for Linux is in our Dark Ages, just barely functional on anything after the introduction of XFree86 4.0. Yet I am not the only one who thinks OO.org hardly does word processing any better.
I think we abandon good stuff too quickly, and common users don't think they can trust Linux -- whatever "Linux" means to them -- to support them tomorrow. Assume for a minute we have a die-hard running SUSE 7.3. It's not too risky for the home user in terms of security threats, but would there be anyone here who even remembers how to work with it? I thought it was one of the better SUSE releases, and I realize there's no money in supporting something that old with such a tiny user base, but for someone who operates in the realm of "it came with the hardware," there's not even a volunteer support base for them. It's not a lack of knowledge, but a complete lack of interest at the most fundamental level of how we think.
Please forgive me if it seems I open old wounds, or a can of worms. I'm just thinking outloud.