I would posit that perhaps your experience with linux was negatively impacted by a (or multiple) difficult distros. There are many distro's, of which I'd recommend endeavourOS, that work 'out of the box' and install things extremely quickly. I agree that the majority of distro's haven't reached 'general user viability' yet, but it's folly to continue to promote such anti-consumer operating systems and software(s) as those produced by companies like Microsoft and Apple.

These companies produce a nice front-facing software that has a generally unreliable and easily broken back end with multiple security holes that are often left unpatched and unnoticed until a nation state has the opportunity to use the zero day as an attack vector. In no way am I saying 'open source solves all' because even the AUR has serious issues with oversight, but the requirement for education of the userbase and promoting open source values is certainly more important than embracing anti-consumer companies and practices to the detriment of not only the current general user but several generations of users as well.

The internet is slowly getting more and more restricted and as it becomes so the only ones to benefit are technological oligopolies. We're in the era of tech-barons now, and it's vastly more unequal than when oil barons were in power and that's not something I'd ever expected to see in my lifetime and I doubt it was something our grandparents or great grandparents expected either.

Freedoms being eroded from virtual reality having the impact of eroding freedoms in reality as well