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.

more ranting below

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

it doesn't matter where fonts are installed on linux because you don't need to care — there's an "install" button right in the font viewer. this is kde's but i am assured that gnome has one too.

"there should be one package manager" ubuntu has been working on the snap store for like a decade. i could install it on arch if i wanted to, there's even a page on the snap website about it. i just have no need to

"there's too much fragmentation" almost everything is either a debian, a fedora, or an arch

who is compiling everything from source all the time? hell that's even the explicit mechanism for unpackaged software in arch and i don't actually have to do it directly because it's all automated

"hardware should work" who is this addressed to?? half the drivers you're using right now are already from someone reverse-engineering a thing that they had access to. windows has drivers for any hardware from day 1 because the guys who made the hardware also make windows drivers for it. yeah it sucks when something doesn't work but like, it's supremely weird to frame this as a complaint to the management as if "gee we should have more drivers" hadn't occurred to anyone already, as if that's not a huge chunk of the activity on the kernel. and based on the bizarre things i hear windows users having to do with their drivers, wacom tablets have worked better on linux than on windows for years

honestly most of the complaints i hear about linux come from linux users who do everything from the terminal because they like to, but occasionally sit back and go "the boffins over at linux inc should really make a better way to do this" when it's existed for twenty years

people don't bounce off linux because nginx searches too many places for its config, they bounce off linux because they encounter the long tail of hardware and software that was made only for windows. which is exactly why free software is an evangelical movement — because it's fucking ridiculous that all computing should be funneled through the control of a single for-profit megacorporation that drops a new black box every few years. and that is more evident now than ever, as they realize they can fill their black box with ads and nearly-forced logins and whatever, and you can't do anything about it

also, people constantly have problems with windows and macos?
"blue screen" didn't enter the popular mind because of linux¹

i'm sure this has already been said somewhere in the gnarled tree of reblogs, but i wanted to reblog this post anyway so two birds one stone &c; &c;