Yeppers, and I'm one of the millions in that wider audience. Who are we? Windows junkies, who need a way to stay on Win7 or XP without virtual machines. We are mom and pop shops, under-10 employee shops, and we have no ability to follow some tech guru who sets up a server, no HR department to order and configure our machines.
No, we have to do it ourselves. At night. On weekends. And we don't want our son or brother or cousin to do it, lest they learn personal data we don't want to share.
So the bloat is needed, to make Linux run like Windows. And it does. Depends on the distro, with Linux Mint being the most friendly equipped with media pre-packaged, or Fedora 25 (but not before), or PC Linux OS, which at least until 2014, sought to give you everything.
There is still a learning curve, but it's just as long now, as moving to Win8. Win10 is not an option.
Hope this helps, cuz surely in the UK you can advise folks and make money on configuring them for Linux.
For in less than a day, even the most computer-ignorant person can learn how to surf in Linux alone, so can keep his Windows for other stuff. Later and gradually, learn Wine and how to install many Windows programs using it. But that's a discretionary usage. Big point, is you can keep XP, use it offline, and then when you want Linux, just boot from a stick, do your surfing or housecleaning which only Linux can do well, then reboot sans stick.
If I were younger, I'd make pre-configured Linux sticks and sell them in Amazon. There are sellers doing that, but they don't configure them rightly, so their market share is low. They should configure the sticks to play outta da box for XP users. Zorin OS claimed to do that, but it was awful.
Pick a distro you know will have a good OSD, configure it like Windows and provide the Windows-style options in the same format as XP, and then install that on a stick. Then sell the sticks.
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