To downplay these differences and claim that all distributions are the same is ignorant. Anyone who wants to get the most out of Linux should be aware of the wealth of options available.

That's the definition of not being user friendly. And it's not like shoes. Because trying on a pair of shoes takes minutes, at a store that generally has hundreds of shoes available. And shoes literally do one thing. Your average user does not have nor want to spend nights and weekends troubleshooting the distro they're 'trying out' to see if it works best, then to continue troubleshooting it down the road.

But I do like how you ignored a lot of what of what I said, because it didn't fit your response. Because unlike you apparently, I think of people besides myself. You also make wild assumptions about me. Should I show you my RHEL installation? CentOS? My Debian servers... I have dedicated hardware and VMs. And I also run Windows. Do I get to have an argument now... do I pass your weird gatekeeping threshold?

And that's still not addressing the circle jerk where far to many people put linux on some pedestal, worship it, and assume their better than everyone because "btw, I use arch". Like every distro isn't going to try to milk as much money out of it as they can if they think they can get away with it. Ubuntu is the most approachable distro (that I'm aware of) and often gets suggested, especially to new uses. Linux is not immune to the problems that plague MacOS or Windows.