As a long-time Linux user, I can appreciate that anecdote. I've a few home servers that are pretty stock Ubuntu with most of the default partitioning / setting

As a long-time Linux user, I can appreciate that anecdote. I've a few home servers that are pretty stock Ubuntu with most of the default partitioning / settings, because nowadays I 'just want stuff to work' rather than spend hours tweaking & optimising. After a few rounds of apt-get update & apt-get upgrade, the update process broke (with pages & pages of error messages), because /boot got full of all the myriad kernel point releases that had collected there and Ubuntu just left them hanging around. apt-get autoremove clears away all this old gunk and will let the update process work again. But a 'simple' (I don't mean that in a bad way) desktop user will not know what the problem is and will not be able to make sense of any of the errors. Even if they spot a 'disk full' somewhere in the output (do they even see the output with a GUI-based update?), it won't help. "Disk full? But it shows I've got gigabytes of space here in my documents folder?" It's these and all the other 'thousand paper cuts' that are still blocking every day desktop Linux use.