OP, you say those folks only launch a chrome browser and so aren’t choosing Linux themselves. Fine. But looking at it from the system perspective, they’re inadvertently learning how to use Linux. How to make WiFi selection in that interface. How to deal with patches and upgrades and vulnerabilities and hacks. Sure, they’re basically only using the browser. But do they never download a file? Open it in the system file browser? Attach it back in the browser?
All of these user interactions are what define a person’s experience on a system. If you think of one of the main differences between iOS and Android, you’ll see how in iOS files are a second class citizen and apps are first class citizens. That means iOS defers to the app first and then considers a file as an independent entity. That’s a strategic decision that defines how generations of iOS users perceive the world around them. It’s what helped companies like Notion become the behemoths they are because everyone accepted that if you want to build a knowledge base, you can just start writing text in an app or browser and not consider files as the first point of contact for the knowledge base user.
By using Linux on a day to day basis, those users are slowly unlearning what they’ve come to understand is the default behavior of a system - most likely whatever Windows does.
Somewhere down the line they’ll crib and hate on windows enough to what something different. That might end up being Mac, but for a large swathe of people, it might end up being some Linux variant too.