On the flipside, shortly after a discussion with my wife on how user friendly nixes had become, I attempted to convert one of my old Windows 10 boxes to Ubuntu, for the purposes of leveraging mdadm over whatever SW RAID Windows ships with.

I probably could have used Windows RAID tools, but I don't know what they are, and I'm pretty comfortable with the ease of use of mdadm.

Anyway, after downloading Ubuntu 16.04 and dding it to a thumb drive, I was off to the races. Two days later, I realized that "Failed to create a kernel channel" somehow relates to the USB settings, and I stumbled onto a stackoverflow post that had me add 'iommu=soft' to my boot parameters and finally, finally* I was installing software.

I'm not an expert, but I'm definitely not a novice, and while there might have been a short window in which Linux had hit peak compatibility, it seems that the numerous hoops I had to jump through to accommodate UEFI and USB BIOS settings may well indicate that the moment has passed. I hope it catches up again, because for non-technical people, installing an operating system is a really hard thing, and if it's non-trivial for any experienced users, it'll be monumentally hard for grandma.