Personally for me its compatibility and support. Too many of programs and hardware I use daily aren't compatible or even have a Linux version or have little to no support officially or not.

In Enterprise: manageability. It's hard to overstate how powerful Windows Group Policy is. Being able to configure every single aspect of the OS and virtually all major applications, Microsoft or otherwise, using a single application that can apply rules dynamically based on user, device, user or device groups, time of day, location, battery level, form factor, etc, etc. Nothing on Linux comes close, especially when simplicity is a factor, and until it does most large organisations won't touch it with a barge pole.

A multi-billion dollars marketing budget, anti-competitive practices and confidential agreements, blacklisting hardware vendors if they dare proposing an alternative, and of course a legal department the size of a small city to sue all competition out of existence.

Oh wait that's Microsoft/Google/Apple/Meta/Amazon.

Be preinstalled on laptops/desktops.

everything else is ready unless you use niche software. Most people just use a browser and word or a pdf editor.

note the distro MUST be an immutable up to date kde flatpak using one for normal people, however

Why would "Linux" want to get more users, whatever "Linux" is.

Consumerism.

People who convince themselves they "just aren't good with computers."

In the early 2000s, it was widely thought that everyone who grew up with them would be reasonably competent with them. We now have 20-30 year olds who are still stumped with basic computing concepts like how to reset a forgotten password. I literally ran into this a couple of months ago: Really? You haven't had to do this a dozen times in your life by now? How did you finish college (this person was highly educated)?

This most difficult one is probably the fact that 99% of people do not install their operating system.

The device they purchase needs to have a clean and elegant out of box experience like the Mac. Regular folk who are willing to stray from windows don't consider any computer that doesn't come off the shelf with sane defaults. Everything else is arcane to them.

We are not those people. I have to remind myself that not everyone likes to build their own systems.

I do have a friend who wants to buy a framework laptop with Fedora on it because that's what they use in the Laboratory he works in but he doesn't want to assemble it himself he just wants it to come like that.

I think we're getting there finally.

I feel like we've been having the same conversation for 20 years. Meanwhile the linux family of operating systems is now the most widely deployed in the world.

This question comes up every other week. I reject the premise that "more users" is a commonly held objective.

For most linux / OSS projects the objective is to be the best the project can be. Having an active community is usually part of that but "more users" is a low priority.

Stigma.

A very large number of people believe Linux is difficult to get into. There are a number of publisher that somehow think Linux users are all hackers that will cheat in their online games. There are a not-so-insignificant number of Linux users who like Linux to remain niche, and small, and exclusive, and difficult to get into, and scoff at the idea of a "general user".

I think part of the problem is that while Linux software is constantly getting more user friendly, the average user is getting less knowledgeable about computers at just as fast of a rate. People even understanding the concept of files and folders doesn't seem to be a given anymore.

I think the gap between what the average Linux user thinks is ease of use and what the average non Linux user thinks is ease of use is probably much larger and many devs seem to understand.

I think it would be beneficial to have a completely idiot proof installer that doesn't ask you about partitions or formatting or basically anything just point it towards a drive and it will set up a default installation.

More GUI based means of doing basic stuff. A casual who wants to access some photos from his laptop does not want to figure out how to manually configure samba shares by editing config files in their terminal based text editor.

I think codecs are a much bigger pain in the ass than is ideal. As I understand that there are legal reasons for this but the first time some casual goes to play a video and gets an error message their first thought may not be "let me search Google and figure out what this error message means" their first thought maybe "Linux sucks and can't play videos".

The permission structure that makes Linux so secure makes it a little annoying for casuals. For example, you actively and intentionally go to the default software store, navigate to the updates tab, update a package you've already installed and clearly want, and do so from the official OS repository... This requires that you enter your password to protect you from what exactly? It's not a big deal it takes one second to type my password, but how would you explain this to a casual in a way that makes sense? Your OS is protecting you from potentially rogue acts of official patches to your default text editor.

I think the folder structures are pretty big challenge for converts. On Windows you can find most of the files associated with any given program in your program files folder. On Mac there's an applications folder. On Linux... it's somewhere, don't worry about it. That's not really a fixable one it just is what it is.