> My point is that I'm not sure even how I would "address" these issues that you are insisting Linux Desktop evangelist "stop excusing".
If any one person could do it, it'd have been Linus but he doesn't seem interested. It isn't anything a single individual can deal with because it's part of the community culture.
> Even taking the one concrete example you provided in this thread, Apple's App Store is incredibly popular -- in fact in the US it has a 56% marketshare [1] -- so why would a Linux OS moving toward what you prefer would increase adaption?
It's just one aspect of the problem. Apple's App Store has one thing going for it that Linux doesn't: there is one App Store. You get your application onto the App Store and everyone can use it. This is not true of Linux Repos. Besides which, the number you quoted is for mobile, not a desktop operating system.
Linux Desktop culture has this rhetoric of freedom and control, while simultaneously pushing an application distribution model that wants to manage everything in a very limited way. You can't install applications onto other disks, you can't have two versions of the same application (unless the maintainers have deemed it a worthy use case), and you can't keep old versions of applications around unless you want to keep your whole system back too.