Don't be so quick to discount stereotypes. Look at them as a sort of Bayesian prior - updated by individual encounters, but often not completely off the mark.
After 20+ years of "next year is the year of Linux on the desktop" (which is about Linux seriously challenging or even overtaking MS on desktop users, not just the "Linux works fine for me on my desktop" which was always the case for some outliers) and following Gnome and KDE closely, and efforts by Ubuntu etc and reactions, his observations sounds quite to the point.
