It seems to me like your information is outdate & recommend trying out a recent Fedora or other modern mainstream distro. Hardly anything needs any tweaking to get working these days.
Hardly anything needs any tweaking to get working these days.
Modern Linux distros are much better at getting the OS and a lot of hardware up and running. Unfortunately, until the same can be said of applications, it's not going to be a viable alternative for many Windows users.
This chicken-and-egg problem is what is really keeping Linux off most desktops, and again rather unfortunately, it would probably need someone very well funded to start backing the effort to make it competitive enough to bootstrap a mass migration. Realistically, you'd probably need to create some Linux-based game-changer applications and/or to get emulation to the point where users can run applications written for other major platforms such as Windows or macOS to run as if native and without any legal problems. We're still a long way from either of those things being achieved without some sort of spectacular investment plus enough time for it to be turned into software.
The problem with Linux re: applications is that Linux communities are openly hostile to software being delivered directly to the user by a developer, and to proprietary software as a whole. That's the real problem. Applications will come if it becomes a sane platform to build and distribute applications for.
I don't see that as an unassailable problem, though. There is no reason someone shouldn't develop a solid desktop platform that is built on Linux, has a user-friendly UI, but instead of a typical Linux distro today where you just install everything from your distro's huge repo of FOSS, you install it directly (perhaps with some kind of handy UI to track what you have and facilitate updates) and/or get things from a potentially commercial "app store".
In fact, Google has already proved that this model can work, they just did it on mobile devices instead of traditional desktop/laptop PCs. Traditional Linux communities coexist quite happily with the Android ecosystem and largely independent of it, and I see no reason conflict would be necessary with a different style of Linux desktop either.
