I think people had to learn Windows. They can learn Linux. The excuses are bs. Schools should teach unix/linux, and not proprietary systems. We should expect people to learn new things to be able to operate new tools. Thats ok to expect. This idea that the computer is a dumb terminal is far too prevelant thanks to phone and tablet proliferation, another tech corrupted at the outset to be user-hostile and spy on them.
Desktop linix and laptop linux are 99% of the way there. Yes, you will have to learn new commands and ways of doing things. Yes, some software you are used to won't work (wine be praised).
It's worth all the trouble though. Freedom isn't free, you have to actively persue it.
I look around and see way too much Stockholm Syndrome going on.
When was the last time you used Windows? Microsoft employees a small army of user experience designers to ensure it’s a great experience. It’s not perfect, but I can do everything I need to do using the GUI.
This isn’t a case of learning how to do the same thing differently. The GUI is objectively better for most consumer use cases. Linux, for better and worse, relies more heavily on CLI.
In windows it will come up by typing 'mouse' into start.
I'm not sure if Windows has finer grained control in the GUI or not, but TBH I've also never ran into anyone but a techie (and very few of them) who had mouse acceleration set to anything non-standard.
GNOME tweak tool has even more options, also from a GUI: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Tweaks
Perhaps they'd not know of gnome tweaks, though they could remember Power Tools from Windows....
Mouse acceleration is annoying (bordering on infuriating, imo) because it changes cursor movement from an easy 1:1 mapping of mouse movement->cursor movement by adding an additional dimension. You then not only have to keep in mind how far you're moving your mouse, but also how quickly you're moving it. I can't fathom why UI designers seem to think that it's so great that it should be present with no ability to disable it.
Things that other OS’es usually don’t even allow.
Edit: Another issue with Linux configs is that since nearly every setting can be changed through the CLI, and it’s usually a single liner at that, most online resources tend to provide the single liner that one can use to copy/paste into the CLI to achieve what they want, because the alternative is providing like 10 screenshots for 15 steps for someone to try and painstakingly replicate with their mouse or trackpad.
The most common example of this is that pretty much every application will give its installation instructions as:
sudo apt install thunderbird (On gnome).
When you can just as well go to the software center, search thunderbird, and hit install. Or go to thunderbird.com, download the package and double click/install.
However, the CLI method is clearly far superior and easier, yet it leads to complaints about having to “dip into the CLI”.
Radarr needs functionality that is more specialized than most apps so there's special instructions and edge cases on all three platforms. But the Linux version is significantly more complicated because Linux doesn't provide as many out of the box tools for installation that works across all distributions like Windows or Mac.
Oh, you’re doing an Apple to Oranges comparison between Linux manually installed on a machine vs Mac or Windows coming preloaded on the machine?
Because if you did an apples to apples comparison, any decent computer with Linux preinstalled will come with all the drivers installed as well. And when it comes to manually installing, installing drivers for Windows can also be a pain, and don’t even get started on trying to install Mac on a machine it didn’t come preinstalled on. Hackintoshes are hard to make work even for experts.
Is this no longer true?
To make a convincing case, you have to move beyond anecdote to actual statistical analysis and the numbers are still pretty overwhelming that many common things that many common people need to do can't be done without the CLI.
And even if you generate data that 60, 70, 80% of people would have no problems using linux, that's irrelevant in the case of a specific person who has a specific common need that linux falls over at.