Linux HAS gotten a lot more "non-nerdy" in the last few years though, and out of the box hardware support has greatly increased. Linux Mint is really approachable and could easily replace Windows systems in many cases, especially in office and home environments where only a limited number of applications will be run, and it would excel in home envrionments where the PC is mostly used for social media, web browsing, and other non intensive tasks because of the inherent security advantages of Linux vs Windows.
I think the problem is less that Linux is nerdy, and more that people (including nerds like me) are lazy.
Personally, I hate Linux because I absolutely hate having to type 90 characters into a terminal when I just want to double click an icon - and I usually only find out that clicking didn't run with the right -flags after trying it the normal way and scratching my head for awhile to see what failed. I also do not want to have to memorize the file path for every file and program in the computer.
My point is that some people like a text based interface, but the overwhelming 99.99% of people do not. Yes you get more control, but it's a far less efficient/usable interface.
Linux is never going to gain popularity until they can get the amount of mandatory terminal usage down from "multiple times an hour" to "never". In the very least, give us GUI users some kind of "open in terminal" right-click option. Until more devs figure that out, Microsoft can continue to let their worst engineers do "whatever they want" to Windows.
Apparently what they want is a try-hard reskin to make it look like something changed, when in fact they still haven't fixed a single underlying problem with the OS.
The Windows Devs can't let the average dum-dum change the GUI, because then their bosses might realize that in 10 years they still haven't been able to fugue out how make a functional settings menu.
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