There are currently many "working out of the box" distros available. Mint, Solus, Manjaro, Ubuntu, KDE Neon, Fedora, MX, Elementary etc. to name a few.
Lately I've been using Mint-XFCE in a VM for some of my Linux needs and that's been much better performing than trying to virtualize the fancier desktop environments. But Pop_OS looks promising for next time I need a native linux environment.
And they also break on every GNOME release, often enough that I kinda' gave up on my favorite GNOME extension (Dash to Dock). Not that I blame the extension developers, but e.g. the review times on extensions.gnome.org are atrocious, and the build system is fiddly enough that I can't remember what I did to install it manually 6, 12 or 18 months earlier.
To configure your newly enabled extensions, you need to install the Gnome Extensions flatpack.
And to do that, you're off to the command line to add Flathub as a remote repo.
I don't know that the desktop icons extension requires any configuration, but based on the fact that you need an extension for it I'm guessing that there are similarly weird decisions being made elsewhere, and being able to change extension settings is going to be useful. And to get to that point you have a four stage install including a trip to the command line?
Why not ship Gnome Extensions by default with the OS? Is this like Steve Jobs with his "you're holding it wrong" remark, and people who want to put icons on the desktop are supposed to just stop wanting to do that?
I think the GNOME developers want to stop hearing about packaging issues for their apps, so they ask everyone to use the Flatpak versions. I have nothing against it, but there's no point as long as the distro-provided version still works.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/gnome-shell-inte...
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnome-shell-integr...
> You MUST install native connector for this extension to work.
It most certainly works out of the box for most general tasks.
Of course there are still limitations like a lack of some software (Photoshop...) and peripherals support, but these are becoming far more uncommon. I even find with Steam's proton implementation I can install and run most Windows games without a second thought.
Which begs the question why bother with Linux then.
As for privacy and control discussion, when most GNU/Linux users happen to mostly consume Electron and Web Apps, install applications via curl | sudo sh, there is hardly anything to discuss, other than cargo cult of a false sense of privacy and control.
Pity that all that security goes away the second an Electron app or Chrome is made use of.
You're making silly arguments based on your own strawmen.
Also, you used "begs the question" incorrectly. You mean "raises the question".
Also, because Windows is a steaming pile of donkey turd that shoves ads in your OS, reboots when you're trying to get work done, resets privacy and power management settings after many of its coerced updates, and has a spazzy and inconsistent UI that offers limited customization. Also closed source.
But really, reality is that Linux support for games is still caught in the cycle of too few customers to bother -> customers want better Linux support before moving over -> too few customers to bother...
So I can now have all the (my) benefits of Linux and enjoy gaming that otherwise I wouldn't.
Debian has been really good for just about everything since I moved to it many moons ago, and as of today is still my daily driver on all machines, but sometimes requires constant fiddling here and there, and I'm getting old; I stopped recompiling my kernels on PCs over 10 years ago, and a system that works just out of the box is too temping:) Not to criticize Debian, which has been great almost everywhere, but it gave some problems with some niche applications, for example music: a working LinVST installation is not easy to obtain, and it is tightly tied with the running kernel, which if has _rt extensions will help with low latency but sometimes doesn't let one compile with standard Wine libraries, and when one finds a good compromise, bang! VirtualBox stops working because now its kernel module doesn't build anymore. Grrrr!:) So I may take the chance to test some other options, and Arch might be a good candidate.
But of the ones above you mention that I’ve used in anger you’re absolutely right and that’s the very idea of them. To ‘just work’.
I prefer Tumbleweed though. Well tested rolling release (https://openbuildservice.org/), snapshots on update. With the opi package you can install: chrome, codecs, dotnet, msedge, msteams, plex, skype, signal, slack, teamviewer, vivaldi, vscode, vscodium, zoom and more. Brave is app i am missing so far, but having the newest version KDE and other software that required a PPA on Ubuntu is pretty nice.
And it feels much snappier installed on a SATA SSD than Mint from a NVME SSD on the same machine!
[edit: more info]