Well, sure — but I didn't spring forth fully-formed from my father's forehead knowing how to use Linux. As a matter of fact, until I switched I was a Mac user.
And FWIW both my liberal-arts brother and his liberal-arts wife are now using Linux. My sister-in-law discovered the command line within a week.
I won't deny that there are things which are painful in Linux. But are they more common than painful things in Windows? I had to get a Windows machine to do some work on, and it's utterly terrible. I don't just mean the 'this doesn't work the way I'm used to' stuff: that's to be expected. I mean things like randomly prompting me for a smartcard PIN over and over again, when Linux would ask but once. I mean things like wanting to download OS updates as one large file, rather than many small files — which can mean that it's impossible to update the OS on a small disk.
I've not used macOS enough in the last decade to really have a critique; every time I use it, I want to hurl the computer through a window, but I freely admit that may simply be down to unfamiliarity, which is no more a critique of macOS than it is of Linux. It is annoying that I can't use a tiling window manager, though.
Isn't that fact a huge tell-sign that perhaps you're not the kind of person for whom desktop Linux would be challenging?
You speak of 2000, but historically even people like ESR, Linus Torvalds, JWZ etc have found Linux bad at usability and ease of installation.
Of course people used to tinker to e.g. get 3D working, or with basic setups that don't need anything special driver-wise, won't notice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHGTs1NSB1s http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/linux-torvalds-on-linux-dist... https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8L... http://gensho.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2014/debconf14/... http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2005/06/that-was-in-fact-the-final-... https://www.jwz.org/doc/linuxvideo.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/linux.html