A beginning user should be able to docker run official-image bash (or sh) without needing to learn about --entrypoint.

Systemd problems might not have mattered that much, except that GNOME has a similar attitude; they only care for a small subset of the Linux desktop users, and they have historically abandoned some ways of interacting the Desktop in the interest of supporting touchscreen devices and to try to attract less technically sophisticated users. If you don't fall in the demographic of what GNOME supports, you're sadly out of luck.

SankeyMATIC unlocks the capabilities of the D3 Sankey tool for anyone to use.

SankeyMATIC builds on the open source tool D3.js and its Sankey library, which are very powerful but require a fair amount of work & expertise to use.

I've already said this, but if you think the average desktop computer user thinks a sentence beginning "I just make a chroot..." makes any kind of sense, you haven't been paying attention to the level of intelligence of the general public.

Well, that user can safely stay with Windows. Hiding these things from me makes wish that.

Linux on the desktop won't take off until it is equally easy. Snap may be dumbed down, restricted and all the rest of it, but for ordinary users it's easier - and more secure - than the alternative.

Most users frankly don’t care how software is packaged. They don’t understand the difference between deb / rpm / flatpak / snap. They just want a button that installs Spotify so they can listen to their music.

In addition, PPAs are awful for software discovery. Average users have no idea what a PPA is, nor how to configure or install software from it. Part of the point of snap is to make software discovery easier. We can put new software in the “Editor’s Picks” in Ubuntu Software then people will discover and install it. Having software in a random PPA somewhere online is only usable by experts. Normal users have no visibility to it.

While you may have some objections due to your specific setup, please consider you’re not the usual use case. Most people install Ubuntu on a single drive, not separate /home, and not multiple disks. Most are quite happy with automatic updates - in line with how their phone is likely setup - both for debs (with unattended-upgrades) and snaps (via automatic refresh in snapd). Experts such as yourself are capable of managing your own system and are interested in twiddling knobs and adjusting settings everywhere. There are millions of Ubuntu users who are not like that. We should cater for the widest possible use case by default, and have the option to fiddle switches for experts, which is what we have.

if you’re just the casual web surfer type, learning about Internet terminology might not be of much real use to you

To make this “if you install me, you better also install X, Y, and Z!” problem easier, peerDependencies was introduced.

"Other office suites are focusing on the 'power user' which is a valuable market, for sure, but the real power and range for an open-source office suite alternative is the vast majority which is the 'rest of us. Sometimes we all forget how empowering open source is to the entire world."

However, distributing such Ruby apps to inexperienced end users or non-Ruby-programmer end users is problematic. If users have to install Ruby first, or if they have to use RubyGems, they can easily run into problems. Even if they already have Ruby installed, they can still run into problems, e.g. by having the wrong Ruby version installed. The point is, it's a very real problem that could harm your reputation.

I have concluded that all these systems are cumbersome and onerous in some ways, more concerned with design than functionality, and more concerned with ease-of-use than speed and efficiency.