Terminal > Windows Registry.
Both OS are hard if you don’t know how to use them.
Both OS are easy if you know how to use them.
Linux’s problem is fragmentation. There’s not a single OS that many people are familiar with like Windows. Instead there’s hundreds of different distros that all function in a variety of different ways. Even if a person learns to do something on Mint or Ubuntu, they will be completely lost trying to do the same thing on Fedora or Arch.
hundreds of different distros
And out of those “hundreds” only a handful of them are actually popular and progressing innovation…
As someone who’s distro hopped across a wide verity of distros, the fundamentals are more less the same across all of them. Just go with a popular distro with good documentation and you’ll be fine. If you’ve learned enough from mint to feel comfortable tackling Arch Linux, then the documention (e.g. ArchWiki) will be your strongest asset.
Good documentation is great to have. Here’s the thing though. If you need documentation to use an OS… That just proves that it really is harder for people to use.
Mint and Windows both share the ability to pick it up and use it for the majority of what most people do. Arch is like the textbook example of having to learn a bunch in order to use Linux.
I think Arch is meant for people who want to learn the software - so that you can also choose, control, customize, diagnose, and fix the software!
That said, archwiki is still a great resource on other distros for when something does go wrong, or when it’s not obvious how to do something, particularly when messing with experimental or server stuff.
You forgot the entire point of Arch Linux, it was never meant for newbies, bud.
I’d argue that there’s like 4 ways that 90% of distros work like and even they are extremely similar to each other. You got Fedora, Debian, Arch, and whatever Gentoo users do when they are in the dark in the basement. The rest are niche and weird stuff that not even Linux hardcore fans know all about. Similarly there’s only two desktop things that matter, GTK or QT. Everything else is us nerds nick-picking.
Ok, there’s also nixOS and the new wave of atomic monolithic containerized whatever distros, but they are like, super new and the resulting system is indistinguishable for the end used from the other 4 main.
