It quite literally is a barrier to entry. That is what “barrier to entry” means. It is something that prevents potential users from giving the OS a serious shot. Literally my closest friend is an example of this. After a lot of convincing, I talked them into installing Linux Mint on a separate partition. I guided them through the process and asked them to use it as a daily OS for a week. They did so, and came back to me with essentially the same complaints I laid out in this post. They work as a digital artist, and needed to install Photoshop. They looked up guides, watched YouTube videos, but told me that they just couldn’t figure it out in a timely enough manner to allow them to get the work they needed to do finished. Could they have figured it out with more effort and time? Absolutely. But this is what I’m describing, something that in theory should be simple, is a lot more complicated for a user who is unfamiliar with the process. This doesn’t make most people motivated to just read through tutorials and forum posts and long processes for how to set up Wine, or what have you. It makes them want to just go with something that works without the headache. That isn’t entirely Linux’s fault, obviously Adobe refuses to create a native version. But to someone who has only used Windows, it’s technical, complicated process.

I don’t know if the goal being to increase the number of users who switch to Linux is a majority opinion or not. We would need to see a poll or some kind of data. I didn’t say it was a religion. You’re right, people that want it will find it. But let’s not pretend that there’s no incentive for it to grow. You don’t create something and make it publicly available without caring if anyone uses it, that isn’t how that works. At least not in the case of an OS. Linux growing and becoming more widely accessible is an objectively good thing. The bigger the community and userbase gets, the faster the barrier to entry comes down, the simpler it will be to do these things that Windows only users see as complex. If you’re going to say that this is all complaining and that this is just how it has to be, you’re following the mindset I’m criticizing. I think a big focus in Linux should be streamlining things like Wine, or other tools that require a lot of manual user setup.

Equating the desire to help as many users as possible have easy access to what we all believe is a superior OS, to “spreading the message like cancer” sounds a lot more like a zealous, religious doctrine than what I’m advocating for.