There has been some movement towards improvement in recent years, the popularity of the steam deck has been a HUGE help on this front in the past year or so, but it's a slow burn.
I have been touching linux for years. I successfully built someone else's code from source for the first time ever last year (it was retroarch, because the new version in the apt repos at the time I built the server had like no emulator cores available yet, so I had to go back one version)
It is definitely one of those things where you get back what you put into it, but yeah it's definitely confusing and frustrating how the linux system architecture is just Like That.
any real contender for "a Linux¹ most would want to use" would need, at minimum, these things:
- nothing big people want requires installing from source. sure, you can, but you should use a package manager instead
- one, simple, package manager². one you can just search for stuff in, like on most phones, and nearly anything you'd care to use turns up. one that doesn't require terminal. Flatpak keeps getting mentioned, maybe that should be the one.
- sound, and multiple monitor support, work on first boot (at least as often as on Windows).
- more of an artist thing, but pen tablet support should also work with a simple install or out of the box, and for more than just Wacom. (I hear Huion plays well with Debians already)
- settings and other basic stuff needs to be easy to handle with GUI or with right-click menus. installing a font should be simple and work system-wide. if I can't see a font on Krita after using your "font manager app", it's not doing its job at all.
the difference between distributions is largely just opinions about what software should be default, what infrastructure to use, and where those things should go
the difference between package managers is largely just about where to put the config files and dependencies for where the software you download is, and the infrastructure used to store and download those
it's not inherent to Linux itself
I bring this up because, if you go looking, you might be able to find, among the glob, one that fits your ideals. (and if not, we can have n+1 Linux distros)
but yes a big part of the problem is that the 'market demand' is low, because people who bounce off can always go to the other OSes. Chicken and egg. If you get enough to come over, attention moves. But that's not something you can ask of most people right now, until microsoft finally decides to make windows so unbearable that it's worth learning how a computer works just to be able to use Office Productivity Tools
