I'm tech savvy, been in IT for nearly 40 years. Wrote my first program in Fortran on punched cards.

Linux is no easy switchover. It's problematic, regardless of the distro (I've tried many over the years).

My latest difficulty - went to install Debian and it hung multiple times trying to install wifi drivers.

Mint can't use my Logitech mouse until I researched it and discovered someone wrote an app to enable it. The most popular mouse on the planet doesn't work out of the box.

Typical user would be stumped by these problems.

I can go on for days about "Year of the Linux Desktop" (which I first heard in 2000). Can Linux work as a desktop? Definitely. And it can be pretty damn good, too, if your use-case aligns with it's capabilities. But if you're an end-user type, what do you do a year in and realize you need a specific app that just doesn't exist in Linux?

Is it a direct replacement for Windows? No. Because Windows has always been about general use - it trades performance for the ability to do a lot of varied things, it includes capabilities that not everyone needs.

Linux is the opposite, it's about performance for specific things. If you want a specific capability, it has to be added. This is the challenge these different distros attempt to meet: the question for all of them is which capabilities to include "out of the box" (see my mouse example - Debian handles it just fine).

This is also the power of Linux, and why it's so great for specific use-cases. Things like Proxmox, TrueNAS, etc, really benefit from this minimalism. No wasted cycles on a BITS service or all the other components Windows runs "just in case".