Linux simply has too many rough edges still exposed to appeal to a lot of less technical users. Even in the best case scenario (super standard desktop with hardware well supported by FOSS drivers), there’s always some odd thing that requires one to pull out the terminal, usually because UI functionality was insufficient or failed to work as expected.

That does not bother me or probably most of us on HN much, but for most people it’s like periodically needing to muck around under the hood of their car. It’s too much, they just want to drive and take the vehicle in to get oil and brake changes every once in a fairly long while. Anything more is tedious overhead.

The situation with proprietary drivers still kinda stinks too. The distros I’ve seen handle it best are Ubuntu with the proprietary drivers control panel and pop!_OS which just sidesteps the issue altogether for Nvidia hardware by shipping an ISO with non-free Nvidia drivers included, but the rest just leave you with a package manager, terminal, and whatever you can scrounge up on the internet. Yeah it’s technically the responsibility of Nvidia, etc to fix that, but it’s negatively impacting adoption nonetheless.