I think you don’t have any idea on what modern Linux desktop is doing. For most people, installing any sort of drivers on Linux is something of the past. If you use a beginner’s friendly distro like Linux Mint or PopOS stuff like Nvidea drivers will be taken care of or you’re guided through it. Mint offers Timeshift out of the box and guides you to set it up for easy restores may you break your system one day (or an update does).

In theory, the store has virtually every application your version supports and that you ever want to use. No hunting on the internet etc. With Flatpaks, even dependency issues (however rare nowadays) are essentially a thing of the past. The user doesn’t need to know what that means, they can just click install on their application store as they’re already familiar with on their mobile device.

Doing more “complicated” stuff and breaking it is just simply your fault then. I have worked end user customer support and repair for a few years and shit like that happens all the time on Windows. Very few clean or wholly functional Windows installations I have seen. The UAC just presents you “yes/no” and install whatever the fuck you want. People click yes on everything.

I have a little headphone amp that has always been a huge fight to get to work on Windows with its drivers, but on Linux I later realized, wait, it just worked. Since Windows 10 drivers have been much better on Windows too, credit where it is due.

Linux has made enormous strides the last couple of years of becoming more general user friendly. And it’s only getting better.

Does this mean it’s all roses and happiness? No, of course not. Once a driver doesn’t quite work and you don’t have the Mint driver utility to help you out it’s a bit of a pain. You don’t need the CLI on desktop at all nowadays, but guides on how to do things usually are, because it’s universal. Problem is, the CLI scares people. Linux DEs are not Windows. It’s simply not the same, however much Mint is friendly to it, or Zorin’s efforts, it’s still different. There’s no hardware compatibility guarantees on any system, if you’re not using a Tuxedo, System76 or Framework system. App compatibility and sometimes there’s no app available. Wine and Bottles work pretty well, but that’s a little more advanced.

It’s not a drop-in replacement. That’s just how it is.

In an enterprise and business environment it’s still tricky. For personal use for a user that will happily use a Chromebook, they can use a suitable Linux distro (that’s literally what ChromeOS is btw, it being able to run Android apps was added later, it’s not Android). Yeah, don’t install Arch or god forbid, Gentoo lmao (unless you wanna have a laugh). If they do email, web-browsing, etc, and they are okay with some change, then Mint will most likely serve them pretty well.

Also, Linux runs Chrome just fine? However much it pains me, I can even install Edge right from the store lol.