My wife uses Arch on her laptop - she doesn't really know what it is and doesn't really care. She does know that she has less down time than with Windows when updates happen. She uses Facebook (the internet sigh) very heavily, email (Evolution to an account on my office Exchange server) heavily plus a fair few other things - basic word processing and spreadsheets via LO.
I'm a KDE aficionado for good reason. I put a few large icons (KDE allows you to scale your icons really well) on the desktop, with a pretty wallpaper, that have easily understandable functions, that are locked in place. The ability to lock the desktop layout is a killer feature that I do not see available on Windows or Mac or most Linux WMs.
Obviously, it does help that I'm an IT Consultant but "For an average user, Linux can still be quite challenging to use as their main OS." No it doesn't need to be so. The KDE Plasma UI can be made very simple or unbelievably complex to suit the required UX.
I've installed Linux on family member's computers before just to get calls when an update broke the graphics driver.
Just try and let your wife install and update Arch herself, I'm sure she'd give up quickly.
That being said, most users just need some icons and a web browser, almost any OS works for that.
I'm a KDE aficionado for good reason. I put a few large icons (KDE allows you to scale your icons really well) on the desktop, with a pretty wallpaper, that have easily understandable functions, that are locked in place. The ability to lock the desktop layout is a killer feature that I do not see available on Windows or Mac or most Linux WMs.
Obviously, it does help that I'm an IT Consultant but "For an average user, Linux can still be quite challenging to use as their main OS." No it doesn't need to be so. The KDE Plasma UI can be made very simple or unbelievably complex to suit the required UX.