If only I had to do it once. But no, most updates (especially dist-upgrades) have me do that all over again time after time.

Also, the fact that I gave only one example doesn't necessarily mean there is only one. I could talk about having to troubleshoot grub in busybox because an update borked the config. I can imagine my father in front of the busybox shell all day long. He'll just buy another computer.

ok I get what you are saying, but your common use is most certainly not anywhere near "average" common usage.

Just try to configure a 4.0 surround sound setup. On windows it's just a couple of clicks. On Ubuntu it's at least a couple of ChatGPT questions involving a new software to install and obscure settings to define.

No, it's nowhere as complete and polished from a personal computer peripheral point of view.

That said, printing on my epson network printer required no download whatsoever, so I guess YMMV

If your computer id idling, they will find a way to fill that void. Trust them.

As much as I love Linux (I have been using it exclusively for the past 20+ years), I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t very computer-savvy. It requires a fair amount of maintenance. Graphics performance has improved dramatically, but it’s still miles behind macOS and Windows. It’s just not for the masses.

Ok, I'll bite. What on the desktop justify to use *any* memory? Tiny widgets that display the latest rss feed from msnbc ?

If the server logged a decent amount of data, then this is potentially a useful ad hoc experiment.

Maybe remove tariffs and have more good paying jobs, then Americans will be excited about buying a new phone, new laptop, and new car.

Anything article that isn't about AI is at least holding back the horde.

With the widespread introduction of the farm tractor, we saw an increase in productivity and a decrease in the need for labor in the fields, and a general increase in wages among farm workers. And we are at the point where expert systems and AI are assisting the operation of those tractors, harvesters, planters, and other farm equipment.

But when you look at the AI bubble that is driving PC component sales, and holding the US economy like a tightrope over a great chasm of recessions, one must ask: Who benefits and in what way? When someone is trying to convince you to buy into AI. Be it a startup or a major corporation. What ultimately do they want in return?
Money. But would an end-user pay for AI to the degree to support the approximately $38 billion spent on AI data centers this year?
Of course not. While it's hidden behind B2B transactions, the root of it is that the payoff for AI is mainly going to in advertisement and marketing.
These data centers are going to suck up all the components and electricity so that it can cold call you all day long, so that it can analyze your spending or browsing habits, send you convincing emails and texts that you respond to or click on, or simply organize a social media site to keep your child's eyeballs glued to it.
All the data collection and processing is done so that it can ultimately drill down on exactly how to sell you anything, and the owner of that data will be able to sell it 1000 times over.

Conclusion: AI means you will get more spam. Exponentially more spam. I think 100's or 1000's of times more is a realistic guess.

The richest 1% burn through their entire annual carbon share in just 10 days.

Ok. yes. That helps a lot. I think almost all of the items you listed have a GUI on most desktop environments for *nix, GNOME and KDE certainly. And that's part of the challenges with Linux, we say Linux but really mean KDE, GNOME, etc. Because if you had GNOME on Linux and GNOME on FreeBSD, they are more alike from the end-user's perspective than a system with KDE on either OS. And we can do maddening things like have mostly-KDE system with bits of GNOME installed because maybe we like a few of their apps but don't like their panels and widgets.

On GNOME there is a very basic user account dialog, you can edit your name, icon, set password, enable automatic logins. If you want to move your home directory or something, you'll be hitting the command-line. And it's quite easy to screw up, so have a recovery USB stick setup before hand.

Printers I always setup graphically on Linux. It'd been 20 years since I touched printcap or other lpr guts. Apple really did us a huge favor when they upstreamed CUPS. Way easier to setup a Linux box than Windows 11 (my wife's compute never seems to find our old Brother printer)

X11 and Fcitx5 (Wayland) make IME bother powerful and a bit of a complicated set of choices for the end-user to make. Ultimately you can have your input method very customized and working in just about every app, certainly everything that is using GTK or QT. But even old school stuff like xterm does indeed work (I use IME for emoji shortcuts in xterm & hexchat)

For both GNOME and KDE, there is an accessibly settings menu. You can turn on the screen reader and get most apps to do TTS when you focus on a window or GUI element. Using either the mouse or tab key to change focus. More detailed settings were hidden by the GNOME team, there is a gnome-tweaks utility to get at them but it's annoying they dropped a lot of "advanced options" from the main settings window.
Slackware Linux from the mid-1990's had screen reader and braille terminal support at the installer (I think BRLTTY), so the hobbyist teletype OSes have long been winning at accessibility.

For restoring the system to an earlier configuration, there isn't a good out of the box experience. If you have the foresight, you can easily install a program like Timeshift and have a GUI and even automate your snapshots. But I don't know of any distro that have any of this setup for you in advance. I think in part because there isn't an agreement on which backup software is "best" or how to have sane defaults that work for most people. I think as Linux starts moving to using Btrfs by default on the main distros, the answer will be obvious and cheap. Until then people are going to be using rsync or Restic with some GUI or shell script wrapper. Powerful and flexible, but unlikely to ever see any kind of backups made by 99% of Linux users.

Ubuntu added the ability to update, install, or blacklist graphics drivers and other proprietary drivers. Giving you fine-grained control. If you want to install the latest NVIDIA driver before your distro vendor has pulled it in, that's going to be a command-line affair and not well supported. But if you wait for Ubuntu, Fedora, etc to packaged it, it should offer an automatic update option several weeks after the vendor released. (not ideal, but trying to be honest here)

Overall, Linux and *BSD can function as a desktop OS. Now would most people prefer the experience the *nix desktop GUIs over macOS or Windows? Probably not, more a matter of preference now though than any significant superiority. But I think most days on any modern OS can be done entirely in a GUI. And there's a few things on Windows you still have to do with cmd line, if you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself in that situation.

are you trying to help or just be contrary...

I usually download Linux on my Raspberry Pi and install it on a new x86-64 laptop. The RPi is my random tasks computer that is hooked up to one of the ports on my living room TV. The RPi comes in handy because it has some I/O ports I can use to hook up experiments. And I have some emulators installed. And I have a wacky arcade joystick hacked together and plugged into it.

If I were to install Windows today, I'd have to download the disk images from Microsoft using Firefox on a Linux computer. I think theoretically it would work, but I have no idea if I'd hit any roadblocks along the way.

Both solid choices. Debian is also a nice option that I fall back to.

Zorin is for people who want to pay Zorin instead of Canonical for nice installer and some roadmap for long-term hardware and security support. With Canonical and Red Hat being the stronger choices for the latter.