Perhaps my views come from having used Linux across many distros since the release of Slackware 1.0. I’ve seen it grow into something that these days is in my opinion much better than that of commercial offerings. I use Fedora mostly these days on my desktop and laptop and have no challenges at all. I am not an average user though and I’m willing to concede that perhaps average users could have challenges. I feel like most of those challenges stem from Linux being fundamentally different from Windows.

However, the fact still remains that with so many distros and all of them potentially having different kernels and core libraries, etc, that is a software support nightmare than many commercial developers do not and cannot afford to support. The average user expects software, especially purchased software to work, but the developer of the application cannot ensure it will without testing it on hundreds of distros or trying to force the user to use a specific supported distro. It’s the reason Epic will not put Fortnite on the SteamDeck and it’s the reason most commercial developers avoid developing Linux versions. It’s too hard to support in the Linux ecosystem.

With that said… Flatpak and snap are helping to solve that issue because they can specify what libraries are required and Flatpak downloads the specific required libraries independent of what is already on the system. This means it should work as expected on any distro, but getting commercial developers to understand and make the choice to develop for a platform they see as such a problem is the real challenge.