> Open source yadda yadda.
This is it right here. I think this is the main differentiator. At the end of the day whether a person is happy on Linux depends on how much they care about software freedom. I'm willing to put up with the Linux jank because free software is really important to me and aligns with my values.
In the end, it gets not so bad. But GUI front ends for package managers, like [especially] GNOME Software are horrendous from my experience. Which is not so great of a look; of all the things that should be user-friendly it should be package management (IMHO). Package manager failures (conflicts, whatever) are handled horribly by GUI front-ends and even then usually require some expertise to fix, which is a pain. At least Fedora Silverblue nails the updates so that stuff usually doesn't break... but of all the things that were broken OOTB for me on my install... it was (duh!) GNOME Software.
But the GUIs are awful. The cli experience is awful, too, but better and we get used to it. They're never going to get used to it, and why would they want to? I don't know the answer; package management is a complicated problem. But maybe some sort of distributed app-store experience where the package manager also manages marketing for and forums about the apps. See, I really don't know - but having to go to a webpage and read a bunch of marketing material then download, or go to an app store and get descriptions, screenshots, and commentary by other users is somehow a subjectively better experience for non-tech types than "apt-cache search" or its GUI equivalents.
The manjaro gui tool also to you do snap/ flatpak. Those two are about as close as you'll get to a district independent package manager.
I think that holds true for anything honestly. I never cared much about how annoying it is to install EXEs on windows, visiting each website, clicking through another dialog etc. Neither did I care about the GUI.
Now that I'm using Linux on my personal devices however, I got to like package managers and tiling WMs.
But from a historical perspective, desktop Linux was only made possible by Nvidia and their closed driver. That's a sad fact. I've been on Linux "desktop" since 1995 or so. There are only two businesses that really gave much of a crap about Linux (other than Red Hat) and those were: id Software and Nvidia. ATI had total garbage for drivers for many many years. Practically up until AMD bought them. I built a HTPC back in 2005 around a passively-cooled ATI card trying to get it silent as possible. The idea was that I would use the Radeon driver on Linux and everything would just work. But it didn't. And I was stuck using Windows.
ATI shares part of the blame for why Linux never made it on the desktop. You can't have one of the two major video card vendors dropping the ball for so long and come out okay.
Intel Integrated graphics has been around for a long time now, it has open drivers and since its first release, it has been more than adequate for most non-gamers.
Maybe that's just me, but I don't really care that much about NVidia or ATI/AMD, and the state of their drives don't impact my ability to meaningfully use Linux on the desktop.
It is ultimately just way better than Windows. Windows 10 is just an embarrassment.