Linux is great for the average person, great for experts.
It's the "pro-sumer" people that struggle most often. They're the ones who know windows pretty well, know what apps they want to install, and have became used to the quirks of windows. They struggle to adapt.
Most people use their laptops for web browsing, YouTube, Spotify, and basic document editing. They'd be fine with Linux. They just don't use it because laptops are sold with Windows.
It's based on Ubuntu LTS, that's true. But Ubuntu backports device drivers to older (LTS) kernel versions, so the performance/hardware support is often similar/the same as using a newer kernel.
I believe they call this backporting of device drivers the "hardware enablement stack", but I may be misremembering.
PopOS uses this, but Mint I believe is a strange one. You can get a variant of Mint that enables the hardware enablement stack, but I don't think it's a feature of standard Mint.
Contrary to what many people thing, Gnome is extremely modular and customisable. It's just not really exposed in the base Desktop Environment itself.
You can do literally anything with the extension system. It's very powerful.
That does however mean that you can easily break things, which is why by default Gnome marks extensions as unsupported when a new Gnome versions come out, until the maintainer adds a text string inside the extension that flags their extension as being validated for the new version.
You can disable the version checks, of course, and just risk it. But usually I find you don't need to. By the time a new release comes out, the Gnome beta has been available for over a month, and the extensions have already been updated in advance.
You definitely get more in the US, but Europe isn't free from ads.
Windows still shoves OneDrive, office, and other things in your face in Europe. They still have featured news stories and the like. They still have recommendations in the start menu and such.
These are all ads, though we've been conditioned into thinking MS plastering OneDrive and OneDrive recommendations all over their OS isn't advertising. It very much is.
If you have an Android TV in Europe, 1/3 of the home screen by default is an ad banner, just like in the US. Etc.
We are not free from ads. We just have it slightly better than the US.
Because they're a lot less capable than these companies are telling us they are.
Don't get me wrong, you can frequently get some excellent results with them... but you can also get some really shit ones.
So not only does the bulk of this work require someone to do all the prompts, they also need to thoroughly check the work afterwards, meaning you're not really gaining much, if anything at all.
Sooner or later, the venture capital propping up AI will realise that these enormous savings from laying people off en-masse isn't going to materialise, and they'll want their money back. The market correction will be huge.
Let me get this straight - people buy a product advertised as having a feature, containing a part also advertised as having that feature, and then they disable it after purchase?
If you're talking about Fedora, no. One of the maintainers just proposed it and the media/commenters in the community went crazy without knowing the facts.
For most it absolutely is viable.
Linux is great for the average person, great for experts.
It's the "pro-sumer" people that struggle most often. They're the ones who know windows pretty well, know what apps they want to install, and have became used to the quirks of windows. They struggle to adapt.
Most people use their laptops for web browsing, YouTube, Spotify, and basic document editing. They'd be fine with Linux. They just don't use it because laptops are sold with Windows.