My brother is 12 and just like other people of his age he can’t use a computer properly because he is only familiar with mobile devices and dumbed-down computers
I recently dual-booted Fedora KDE and Windows 10 on his laptop. Showed him Discovery and told him, “This is the app store. Everything you’ll ever need is here, and if you can’t find something just tell me and I’ll add it there”. I also set up bottles telling him “Your non-steam games are here”. He installed Steam and other apps himself
I guess he is a better Linux user than Linus Sebastian since he installed Steam without breaking his OS…
The tech support questions and stuff like “Can you install this for me?” or “Is this a virus?” dropped to zero. He only asks me things like “What was the name of PowerPoint for Linux” once in a while
After a week I have hardly ever seen my brother use Windows. He says Fedora is “like iOS” and he absolutely loved it
I use Arch and he keeps telling me “Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff just use Fedora”. He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
I mean you could certainly have both but Linux treating its terminal as a first class interface is a big killer feature of Unix/Linux I think and why it’s still used in the server/dev world so much. Having a command line interface that’s not an afterthought, fully scriptable, and can be automated is very convenient whereas on Windows you have things like PowerShell where not every program you want to do things with in PowerShell has a way to interact with PowerShell, since in Windows you have the opposite problem of GUI being the only first class interface. I think I’d be worried that if you de-emphasized the terminal more you’d get the weird situation that happened to Windows and PowerShell whereas it’s usually not super hard to build your own GUI around an open source terminal program. A lot of people aren’t especially motivated to do that so some programs don’t have GUIs, but if you’re feeling like more programs need one then go for it.