I agree with your comment....except for the part about a small learning curve. The learning curve is steep and difficult. You've got to be willing to jump in as an enthusiast and not a casual user. This is not the choice for the vast majority of normies (as you rightly conclude). The saving grace for Linux will be pre-installed systems with extremely polished UI's (like the Steam Deck).

I'm highly motivated to stay on Linux, but there's still a list of open issues for me (this is a year and a half after adoption....I'm just living with these limitations now, and there are a couple more I've added to my list of unsolvable problems since).

The author lost me when they showed the terminal command to install Nvidia drivers on Debian. Yes, it’s one sentence. That’s still extremely daunting to the vast majority of computer users. It undermines the author’s own thesis.

I think it's just a consequence of the variety of ways a Linux distro can present its options and settings. It's far easier—and arguably, safer—to share a command than to anticipate how to get to a certain option or setting.

Just as an aside, I had this exact same problem when a friend asked me to do something on my system. I ended up having to send them screenshots of what I'm looking at in order to direct me to where I need to be. All that trouble could have been avoided had they sent me a command to run on my terminal.

Is it better to have a utility that a user can just click? Yeah! Someone can write a utility program that can do just that, I guess. But then again, the problem now becomes how the user can make sure this utility program is in their system.

I guess it can be a bash script? The user can download the script and then make it usable. It's a few clicks in Dolphin and (Gnome) Files, probably the same in Thunar, but we're back to the same problem: the variety of ways a GUI can take to the same end.

I highly doubt that Linux users, at least the ones who value customization, will want to lose that customizability in order to make things easier for Windows refugees and pull more of them in.

Depending on your distro, that command likely has a GUI alternative. It just depends on the distro implementation, the disparity is a weakness of GUIs in general. instructions for windows won't match MacOS or others, and sometimes even older versions of windows

Why do we treat people as if they're too stupid for this. This is nauseating.