Not long ago I upgraded an Ubuntu system to 21.04. It took me more than half an hour of looking around to realise that the "Ubuntu Software" screen everyone was referring to was a separate application that wasn't installed by default. Then I could look up the CLI command to install it via apt.

That sort of thing would be a small (though very irritating) waste of time for many of us on HN but it could have been a showstopper for other potential Ubuntu users who aren't technically inclined and just want a system that works.

Unfortunately in my experience that still sums up desktop Linux in a nutshell. You probably can fix just about anything if you know what you're doing. If you do, you get the benefits that come with running Linux, including avoiding the kind of controlling behaviours we see from Microsoft and Apple in their desktop platforms these days. But the reality is that most normal people won't know what they're doing to that degree and so can't fix the problems.

So continues the cycle where "normal people" don't use Linux and so there is no big market for commercial applications and so most commercial applications don't run on Linux and so "normal people" don't use Linux.