The article author touched on this as well. The single biggest hurdle that comes up when my sphere of influence talk about installing a linux distro is the amou

The article author touched on this as well. The single biggest hurdle that comes up when my sphere of influence talk about installing a linux distro is the amount of manual fussing and finicky driver work you "have to do". Whether that is the reality in today's distros compared to people trying distros out in years past (hello XUbuntu 7!) is to the side. Perception is reality, and no amount of my arguing has been able to change people's minds unless they are already a tinkerer or an anti-Microsoftie. A sibling comment talks about using xorg vs Wayland and the difference it makes in making the mouse work well or not. That is a perfect example of what holds Linux back from it's (hopefully soon) year of the Linux desktop. If a given Linux distro would target a consistent set of apps that are familiar to users/"noobs" out of the box (the list the author used is pretty representative) as well as some more visible attempts at automatic driver selection based on known hardware IDs, it would dramatically lower that friction and thus help combat the possibly unfair perception Linux currently runs into in the mind of plain users. I will say, Microsoft has been bungling things so epically with their windows update boondoggles that I'm starting to encounter users who seem more open to that Linux thing, at least if you pitched it with a distro that tried to have Windows-like look and feel, like the ZorrinOs/Lindows/KDEs of the world.