I used to operate under the assumption that I could sit down and use Linux if I needed to - and I started a job that required just that, and it was fine. I'm increasingly less certain of that, because things seem to change rapidly and it's very hard to find documentation that is clear and up-to-date. It's already hard enough to figure out how to do things like add a shortcut to Ubuntu's app launcher.

It's not harder, it's just different. As a counterpoint, I never figured out how sysvinit works and got by with guesswork and Stack Overflow answers. And I hated how logs were scattered all over the place. Nowadays you have systemctl(1) and journalctl(1) which are exceptionally well-documented in their manpages, and now services and logs work the same all the time across all distros.

(Not going to argue about journald's weird binary log format though. I don't get that. But at least it doesn't get in the way for me.)

Second, systemd troubleshooting and RDP servers are not common uses for Grandma, so even if valid points were made, most users aren't affected.

As to your other point—grandma has an iPad. To the extent Linux has relevance in the desktop, it’s for CS students, people setting up a lab of workstations, etc. Simple stuff like setting up a Remote Desktop is squarely within that use-case.

A random non-expert user would simply not be able to enable scaling properly (and stare at miniature windows).

Yes, I know KDE is better and GNOME is working on this. The fact is that hardware that has been around for years does not work out of the box or even with a 'blah fedora'.

Also, systemd can cause anyone problems - I'm not sure it can distinguish between you or Grandma.

There are no macOS or Windows subdistros. So, the only difference may be between different versions. Adding to that, Apple generally does not have the tendency to replace/rewrite macOS subsystems every few years, so it is much more likely that thing still work after a couple of years.

That's a pretty naive trust in Microsoft's branding/marketing team. Of course there are heaps of different Windows distributions. They don't necessarily differ as much as, say, Ubuntu vs Gentoo, but they do differ.

Something that was working up to a few months ago, the last time I used it.

According the Wayland FAQ [1] they have specifically avoided defining a remote API.

[Q]: Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

[A]: No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to achieve.

Which leaves you using Spice, or older solutions like X+VNC. Check out Apache's incubator project Guacamole [2] if you'd like a solution that can stream a Linux or Windows desktop to a browser via HTML 5; it supports SSH, Telnet, RDP and VNC. And despite supporting those older protocols it integrates with LDAP or CAS [3] for external authentication along with DUO for two-factor authentication.

[1] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8

[2] https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Authentication_Service

N.B.: I added the Q and A tags to the Wayland FAQ quotes for clarification which is why they're highlight differently from the copied text.