First, someone (RedHat?) needs to establish a partnership with an OEM so they can deliver an end product. "Some assembly required" in the software environment

First, someone (RedHat?) needs to establish a partnership with an OEM so they can deliver an end product. "Some assembly required" in the software environment is, almost by definition, a hobbyist project. End users shouldn't need to spend hours researching what hardware is compatible and hunting down drivers. And yes, that means that proprietary codecs and other essential packages will need to be included. Second, Linux systems have a bit of a jerry-rigged feel to them that needs to be addressed. Things like fd.o and the FHS are intended to help this, but don't go far enough. Compare this to FreeBSD, where every decision about which packages are used in the base install, what the filesystem hierarchy is, etc. is well documented and cohesive. Linux can't go mainstream until, say, a runit-based distro has no references to systemd in its documentation.