That's a fair distinction. I suspect it would mostly mimic the way things played out with Android & ChromeOS. A corporation made the most polished and usable Linux distros ever, and it split down the exact lines you mentioned:
- The OSS Faithful, who mostly ignored it and didn't count it toward "The Year of the Linux Desktop"
- The normal folks, who use it without knowing anything about the underlying Linux baseline
This distinction is baked into the design of the OSS movement. The goal is to build usable computing that doesn't depend on a corporation (though alliances may be made at times when incentives align), and any corporate encroachment is fairly seen as antagonistic to those goals.
All that being said, none of this really serves Microsoft. They have a fantastic OS kernel and hardware support already (even if they throw crappy UX on top of it), and their chief differentiator is their long tradition of backwards compatibility. This locks enterprises and users into their ecosystem, and pushing a Linux distro would only give customers an opening to look elsewhere.
- The OSS Faithful, who mostly ignored it and didn't count it toward "The Year of the Linux Desktop" - The normal folks, who use it without knowing anything about the underlying Linux baseline
This distinction is baked into the design of the OSS movement. The goal is to build usable computing that doesn't depend on a corporation (though alliances may be made at times when incentives align), and any corporate encroachment is fairly seen as antagonistic to those goals.
All that being said, none of this really serves Microsoft. They have a fantastic OS kernel and hardware support already (even if they throw crappy UX on top of it), and their chief differentiator is their long tradition of backwards compatibility. This locks enterprises and users into their ecosystem, and pushing a Linux distro would only give customers an opening to look elsewhere.