I feel like a Linux desktop requires too much tinkering

It depends which distro you're on and what their priority is. I'm told that Linux Mint is very friendly to users. Ubuntu is also financially invested in making their OS as streamlined as possible. PopOS too.

The more a distro is targeting a specific user experience, the less tinkering it has. You just generally only see those deliberate user experiences in the mobile space (android, steamdeck, etc.) where the user's expectations are well defined. A desktop could be used for anything, and most people don't even have a desktop these days, so there's not a lot of financial incentive to design a user experience there.

But at the end of the day, when someone says they "use Linux", they almost never mean that they interface directly with the Linux kernel, but that whoever maintains the distro they run happened to choose to Linux.