As someone who's work gave me a brand new Dell XPS 15 with broken Wi-Fi drivers out of the box, I kindly disagree with this. Linux is an absolute shitshow unless you happen to have "well supported" hardware. I've had far more problems getting and keeping even Ubuntu stable (oddly, Arch has been the most stable so far) than Windows. Windows still sucks for a lot of reasons, but drivers are not one of them.
Windows is perfectly usable, unfortunately. Microsoft's packaging isn't terrible, and web browsers support it just fine, which makes it good enough for the majority of users. While I haven't used Windows in quite some time, I totally get why people still use it. It really does "just work" on most hardware.
The parent comment was on the right track, I think. The Linux desktop constantly sabotages itself, and things like the x11/Wayland rift, the Snap/Flatpak vs Native Packaging battle, and all of the new abstractions do not lend themselves well to usability. Pretty much every open source project has made this mistake at some point, but I think the most consistent party that works against it's community is GNOME. Not only do they ignore the feedback from their users (a problem so pathological it's a meme by now), but they don't ask for help when they make new changes. Inevitably, this leads to worse UI (like the GNOME 40+ dock, the worse GTK widgets, the ugliness that is Adwaita, etc.), which leads to Linux being seen as neckbeard software again.
If you enjoy Linux, I encourage you to use it; I use it too, and it's great for a lot of stuff. Everyone responsible for marketing Linux to a wider audience has failed though, and the effort to replace Windows with OSS is looking increasingly Sisyphean.
You can have Snap, Flatpaks and native packaging running side by side so... and Ubuntu has a unified interface for all of them (the "Software" application). So yeah, another non-problem for the end user.
The end user doesn't have to know what X11 and Wayland are. You don't need to know this to use most software. Just use what your distro provides.
Most of the complexity you mention is hidden from the end user.
As a developer, we've had to tell users to switch to X11 to use certain features that are unsupported on Wayland (related to screensharing), so I'd disagree that these things are hidden from end users. Wayland is fine for the everyday use case but there's a lot of software out there that is built on tools like xev and xprop that have been part of the ecosystem for decades.
Yep. Wayland is nice, and there are components in it that I like, but it gets destroyed by x11 in terms of feature-completeness. Even adding wlroots doesn't get close to the out-of-the-box capabilities x11 offered.
> things like the x11/Wayland rift, the Snap/Flatpak vs Native Packaging battle, and all of the new abstractions do not lend themselves well to usability
Which is why opiniated distributions exist, so that users get a coherent environment from people who made the choices for them.
