My partner is a luddite and needs help setting up a new cell phone, and had been avoiding linux because he thought it was just for programmers. I put Ubuntu on his machine back in '10, and he hasn’t run into problems with it because he only uses Firefox and LibreOffice.

Nope, it’s gatekeeping. I installed Ubuntu on my partner’s machine instead of paying for windows, because he only uses webapps. Learning CLI isn’t required for browsing the web, and trying to force it only makes people think it’s useless for basic shit.

Why do people need to learn CLI to watch youtube and write emails? That’s all the average computer user does.