linuxmemes

But once you leave Steam [...] it gets a lot worse

Heroic Games Launcher is pretty great for games from GOG and Epic. You can run games with Proton just fine.

the average person doesnt know how to mount a drive on windows or even what that is or why you would want to, they just need to be able to open a browser

Meanwhile my experience with automounting network drives with dolphin is

Open Dolphin > Add Network Folder > Enter creds > Check automount box > done

I haven't had to use the terminal for anything in years. There's some things I do in the terminal, but that's because I like it better, not because there isn't an intuitive way to do it.

The reason guides tell people to use the terminal is because it's the same across DEs, not because there aren't DEs that make it more intuitive.

Would I throw a random non techy friend on Linux? No, because it's not what they're used to. If they had no computer experience at all though I absolutely would.

The average person does not mount network drives themselves.

I would hazard a guess that for the truly average user, booting to a desktop with Firefox and LibreOffice installed is like 90% of what they need.

I once wanted to change my mouse scrolling direction on Windows. In KDE it's a toggle in the mouse settings and on Windows it's some dubious registry editing (apparently). I think there are about as many things that are easier on Linux than on Windows as there are things that are easier on Windows than on Linux (assuming you're using a modern distribution with a beginner-friendly, sensible configuration).

I mean, I was able to figure out how MS-DOS worked as a child just be flailing on the keyboard and reading the errors. It was "easy" because now I know it while Macintoshes may as well have been alien technology. A "mouse"?, moving windows?, you have to find programs and click on them instead of just typing?

You're just used to Windows annoyances and not used to Linux annoyances, that's all.

For example:

Installing and updating a program on Windows is a horror show compared to using a package manager. It expects average users to find, download and run executable files from the Internet and conditions them to approve elevation for anything that asks.

If Windows breaks, how do you troubleshoot it? Maybe Google knows, maybe rebooting fixes it, if not then possibly re-installing the entire OS. It's so bad that if you work with Windows clients you probably already have an image of a Windows install because troubleshooting is so much of a pain it's easier to just completely re-image the machine.

Don't even get me started on how often Microsoft changes the layout of administration tools and system menus or their tendency to change the name of various system components for no logical reason.

I don't think Linux is for everyone, but only because most everyone already has years of Windows experience and forgets all of the frustration and learning.

If you used Linux for just as long as you've used Windows, then editing fstab would seem as trivial a task as pinning an item to the ~~start bar~~ taskbar, or ~~launching a program~~ starting an app from the ~~system tray~~ ~~notification area~~ system tray.

KDE. It's working very well with Wayland. I've been using both on my daily driver for a year now and it's come a long way since then. It was still a bit rough in the beginning but now I can't see myself going back. It's pretty polished.

Xfce next major release will have Wayland support so no need to even change!