My kids grew up on Gnome essentially, I can tell you Win11 is a lot more confusing to them, not just because because they grew up on Gnome, there is just so much more ... stuff. And notifications and flashy things and news and weather apps and they all want your attention. Gnome is much more iPadOS like (minus that horrible concoction called the App Store).

Sure, if you're all in on MS365 (like all schools here in the Netherlands), Windows may be somewhat more handy with its native apps and all your stuff there with a single log-in.

This is always said by people who either never touch the Linux desktop, or exclusively use their own custom Arch setup.

You can install Fedora Linux, Linux Mint or Manjaro, and it's more user friendly than Windows 11 and macOS.

Linux is stuck because it's made and maintained by people who love linux.

Look at popular unix based OS's - Android, MacOS, iOS..

Whats the first thing they do? Take the command line out back and shoot it. Whereas for linux users, their is this l33t h4cker festishization of only using a keyboard to do everything. All these distros have an extremely robust CLI under the hood, and an afterthought quasi GUI on the surface. Just good enough for grandma to check her email and watch youtube.

>> Linux is the only hope at this point for the future of computing.

Linux is the most obvious, but there are numerous flavors of BSD as well.

> and yet... still unusable by the mass majority of people.

That info is 20+ years out of date. Distros like Suse and Ubuntu made Linux "click, click, click, it's installed" more than two decades ago. i've watched complete non-techies switch to Mint Linux long-term, the only intervention from me (their resident techie) being showing them how to boot up the USB stick installer.

This isn't really true anymore with the advent of Flatpak & Flathub. It's just an app store like any other platform. Even the majority of games work without tweaking.

My wife (former Sales Person and Manager) has used Linux for many, many years and prefers it over Windows.

Not used does not mean not usable. Primary school aged children used MS-DOS without any documentation in 1990's. Pretty sure randomly selected people would be able to use modern Linux distro, when pre-installed just like windows are.