I have been using Linux for about 5 years and although I don’t consider that I know much, I know enough to fix my own problems and that’s usually enough for me.
Since Plasma 6 was announced I wanted to test something other than XFCE, Gnome or Plasma (or any DE) so I give it a try with ArcoLinuxD i3wm and is increible the amount of things I learn the ‘hard way’ because there was no GUI to do the things I want to do, or maybe I was too lazy to do it with the terminal since there is always the ‘easy way’.
Things that might be very easy for a lot of people, but I never take the time to learn, like mounting drives, running programs from startup, setting environment variables, creating desktop entries, and a lot of other things I didn’t even remember. I even learned to use things that used to give me a headache just looking at it, like Vim, xdg, the Archwiki (that is super useful) and the manpages.
It’s ironic because something that started as an experiment is now my daily drive, and now that Plasma 6 has been released, I don’t want to leave i3 behind.
Some distributions are easier than others. If you use Linux Mint you’ll be fine without a terminal.
User experience is never going to be Linux strong suit, it’s the ability to customize literally everything. I agree that the year of Linux is never going to happen but things have been improving.
My point is that Linux devs don’t want a good user experience. They just assume that if you’re using Linux that you’re a software engineer and already know everything.
Wrong. Linux advocators hold your hand and teach you how to install some stuff on debian, how to install some stuff on ubuntu, fedora, how to install centos…
They already did things for you. You are not expected to do “harder” stuff (like programming, configure software with an editor).
But this statement is mostly correct for BSDs, except OpenBSD experience is better, since they have X by default (yeah, NetBSD have X but they don’t have SSL certificates in base until 10.0 which is not released; FreeBSD needs you to install X yourselves.). But the general experience on BSDs are much better since their users are much willing to read man pages, unlike “Linux users”.