Yeah, but that's you jumping into the terminal and formatting commands off the top of your head.

That's very rarely required. Most normies will go online looking for help, find the command to solve their issue and copy-paste it over, both on Windows and Linux. Most tutorials for normies will even include step by step instructions to open whichever command line and what to type.

But again, if you're at that point something else went wrong and you're already out of your depth. In most basic OS installs that should never happen, including most widely used Linux distros. That really isn't the barrier to any sort of mass adoption.