You're right, but you're looking in the wrong place. People do not use the Windows Kernel, people use Windows.
I know. People don't use Linux. They use Debian Linux, or Gentoo Linux, or SuSE Linux. For mass adoption, we need to combine the forks, so that AutoCAD and a few other desktop/workstation apps will join us. The brand name is "Linux", and while we've had massive innovation based on the previous fragmentation of the Open Source community but that fragmentation comes with a huge cost in speed of response to the user. Linus may have an ego now, imagine him after he usurps Bill Gates... and places a real Unix-like operating system with the capacity to run a bank or airport-level mainframe on every desktop. With the reliability, security, and availability to dominate the TOP500 list.
Linux is capable of doing this like no other operating system, and doing it with serious quality for most users from cellphones to mainframes, and easy compatibility with competitors who need to run a different Unix-like architecture.
Linux dominates the smartphone. Linux dominates the server. Linux dominates the supercomputer.
Linux fails on the desktop for the exact same reason Blender has issues: the desktop/workstation space is saturated with incompatible forks and silly user-interface issues that lead to a frustrating user experience in the "I usually use a mouse" space.
The problem is not Linux, per se. The problem is Linux, as branded, has a million variants.
Don't be concerned whether Linux is ready for the desktop. Ask if Ubuntu is ready for the desktop. Which it is.
Ubuntu is ready for the desktop. So is SuSE, so is Debian, so is....
Ask if VHS is ready for Blockbuster.
Look, there was a time when renting a video at Blockbuster meant you'd see a VHS logo. If the cassette had a VHS logo and it was from your country, it would work. The movie would play on your VHS VCR. We've replaced the VHS versus Beta format wars with incompatible Linux binary package systems and Gnome/KDE, and "do I click on the right or left mouse key here?" in Blender.
The Linux name no longer means standardization. That's why I indicated that the Android platform is Linux in your pocket - and most people don't even know it because Google shields the users from the coathanger abortion of incompatible switches and upgrades and compilers and everything else in the Unix Hater's Handbook that the admins of the big stuff consider to be trivial and even virtues. But will annoy and confuse and make life hell for anyone who just needs it to work and whose expectation is a system that doesn't involve the command line at all.
Any time I search Google Images for Linux desktops and see the prominent terminal window open, it's a sign that the person who took the screenshot and is showing it off has absolutely no interest in supporting Linux as a real desktop operating system. While a computer without a terminal window is scary to me, a terminal window is scary to most people; the people at Xerox Parc knew it, Steve Jobs knew that in 1983, the world changed under his influence in 1984, and the next year, Bill Gates strapped granite countertops to an outhouse called DOS, and we still haven't taken the clue?
For Linux (or *BSD, etc) to be a viable desktop operating system, the user interface must be standardized. The binary distribution format must be standardized. The VHS cassette you rented from Autodesk must play in the VHS VCR. And the Play button must not be a square but a right-pointed triangle.
When you focus on Ubuntu, there is no more fragmentation, no more fosstards, no more optimizing the JPEG algorithms while mp3 files won't play.
Ubuntu is VHS-C. The VHS-C videocassette of a movie called Autodesk will run on my SVHS VCR. I got lucky and had an adapter kicking around.
The movie called Autodesk available at the Blockbuster at my place is only in VHS-C. I can use an adapter to run it in my SVHS VCR, but since it won't run natively, I'm screwed to a pain in the ass version that is lower resolution than my machine supports. I spent a lot of money on my video projector to have to play a low-res basic VHS version?
The Blockbuster up the street, on Debian Avenue, has an SVHS version of the Director's Cut of Autodesk, but it's hobbled so it requires my scan converter to play it only one frame every eleven seconds because of copyright issues.
I'll go to the Blockbuster on Apple Street, but that won't play in my VHS VCR, they only offer the tecnically-superior Betamax which costs twice as much, demands a DNA sample from my first-born son, and which requires me to ritually burn my VHS machine as a condition of membership. But hey, the picture's really good on my video projector.
And so we have another format war...
I actually cannot stand Ubuntu, or gnome, but I advocate its use for just this reason.
I run KDE on SuSE 15. If Autodesk released binaries at midnight tonight, could we both be using files with the same MD5s tomorrow?
No? Then the video store has a Windows section, a Mac section, an Ubuntu section, a SuSE section, a Debian section, a Gentoo section, a Red Hat section, a...
Pardon me for a second in my analogy, but how many copies of Porky's is this place supposed to keep on the shelf gathering dust?