My kid (not even a teenager) uses Linux daily. And not in a coy “he’s using a chromebook” way. He’s using full-blown NixOS on a laptop I set up for him. Could he have set it up? No, but he’s a child. Has day to day use presented him with any difficulties whatsoever? Nope. He figured out gnome purely by instinct in a day. He goes between macos and windows and linux effortlessly, because he’s a reasonably intelligent human being.
But, yes, half the time the “linux is hard” crowd seem to be basing their evaluation on things you would rarely do on a mac or windows machine. These days, install Mint, Fedora, or, hell, even Nixos or Endeavor, choose the defaults, and you will very likely have a perfectly usable, intuitive system.
My kid (not even a teenager) uses Linux daily. And not in a coy “he’s using a chromebook” way. He’s using full-blown NixOS on a laptop I set up for him. Could he have set it up? No, but he’s a child. Has day to day use presented him with any difficulties whatsoever? Nope. He figured out gnome purely by instinct in a day. He goes between macos and windows and linux effortlessly, because he’s a reasonably intelligent human being.
But, yes, half the time the “linux is hard” crowd seem to be basing their evaluation on things you would rarely do on a mac or windows machine. These days, install Mint, Fedora, or, hell, even Nixos or Endeavor, choose the defaults, and you will very likely have a perfectly usable, intuitive system.