Your suggestion is good, but we're somewhat in a "what comes first,
the chicken or the egg" or a Catch-22 situation.

Linux software is, for the most part, free, so there's no supply of
cash from that to fund or stimulate hardware vendor participation.

Linux hardware is, for the most part, the same hardware used by
commercial operating systems whose user base is considerably larger
and more lucrative for the vendors, so they perceive Linux as a niche.

It would seem that some "killer app" that's Linux-only would be what's
needed to get vendors to stand up and take notice, but I doubt any
Linux-only app would remain so for long and we're back to square 1.

Ideas?