Even OpenSUSE, my favorite which isn't even mentioned in the article, is far from there. Even if you just install the defaults, let a few months pass and boot into it again, there's 3 million updates with tons of conflicts, not always resolvable. Every. Single. Time.

3 years ago I tried out a bunch of the pre-installed(!) KDE themes, and one left me with black text on a black background. It took me so much googling and swearing to find out what file I had to change or delete (don't recall which it was) to get back to something usable.

A distro that is made to be resilient and simple, that has wizards for everything, sensible defaults and sturdy guardrails, to the point Linux pros would turn up their nose, is certainly technically possible. I think it's a matter of hundreds of groups doing their own thing and being unable to come together to make it, because they can never agree how to implement $thing, nevermind hundreds of $things. Everybody knows better and in the end all go home empty-handed, left to roll their eyes at lusers using Windows or Apple. At least from the outside, that how it seems to me.

Prove me wrong, please. I beg of you.