The 89 years old man whom I switched to Linux 13 years ago and is still running it today does not use the command line. I run one for him every 2 years to make sure the upgrade process from one LTS release to another is clean (the upgrade itself goes through a GUI).
Same for the other 2 - 3 couples of elderlies I manage once in a blue moon.
The Macs I manage regularly require a reformat to free resources kept in use after an upgrade. I could not find any tool, even in CLI, to free said used up resources - and 27Gb of wasted space on a 120Gb SSD I can't replace easily is STUPID.
So no, Macs are not consumer friendly in my book. User friendly, sure - but not consumer friendly : on that one, they score the worst, even above entry level OEM machines with locked UEFI.
You have some unlucky experiences with Macs it seems, though I certainly don't deny they have bugs, and I have heard about problems with updates taking up unnecessary space (haven't encountered it myself).
However, my experiences with Linux are not bugs, they're not unusual or unlucky - they're by design (or lack therefore). Here's one that came up just today:
Yesterday I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 20.10. Today I found I can't SSH onto it. I checked settings, remote login is enabled. I turned it off and on just to be sure, no luck.
Turns out the upgrade had re-enabled the firewall and
there is no GUI for the firewall.
Let that sink in. There's a firewall, that's on by default, that
blocks features that you can turn on in the standard GUI, but there is no GUI for said firewall (unless it's hidden?). This OS has a settings screen where you can enable inbound SSH access (and VNC) but that inbound access is blocked by something you cannot turn off in the settings screen, essentially making that settings screen completely non-functional.
It even has a hint saying "
when this option is enabled remote users can connect using the Secure Shell command: ssh:[hostname]" which
is simply untrue. No user who is just using that GUI to do what it says it does will have success. It is designed in a way that cannot ever work.
The GUI for enabling inbound SSH and VNC access does not work. Not due to a bug, but by design. Somebody chose for it to not work.
Similarly, the lack of ability to tile wallpapers - that's not a bug, it's just not a function the GUI provides. The simultaneous existence of Snap and old-school versions of apps, which don't play nicely together - that's by design (how on earth does your 89 year old man know which version to install from the app store and what to do when it doesn't work nicely?).
Now you might say it's ironic that I'm complaining about not being able to set up SSH access without using the CLI and yeah, it is, but that's emblematic of the Linux experience. It just hasn't had the focus on making a nice to use GUI that MacOS and Windows have had. It doesn't have people rejecting updates because the GUI for this isn't good, and it shows.
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