Unless we're talking about a fabrication, a stereotype is just another word for empirical observation.
It will not be true for absolutely all instances (almost nothing is except the laws of physics), but it's just supposed to tell what the most common observed case.
Without stereotypes (a.k.a. generalizations) there's no science and no discussion possible.
You can fault a stereotype for not being representative (if you have different observations or stats or explanation etc.), in which case it's a bad stereotype, but not for being a stereotype.
Those stereotypes are backed by HN posts about how the CLI is so great, how using a tiling window manager is so great, how using XFCE (a CDE clone) is all that is needed, that GNOME/KDE devs destroy the desktop because they care about UI/UX for non-technical users, that systemd is a desktop plague infecting servers,....
Apparently using one's mental faculties and empirical observations to make a generalization has gone out of fashion.
On the other hand, linking to some crappy research in a hastily peer "reviewed" journal, with 20 participants and no controls, that satisfies your biases and which you haven't even read except for the abstract is considered epitome of discussion.
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.
