Except almost none of the things you've described are things that normal users have to do to solve normal user problems. For example, nobody edits windows config files anymore, that hasn't existed as a Windows thing for a long time. And I can't even remember the last time I had to mess with a .reg file. Maybe 8 years ago? And it wasn't required, I was fooling around with something, or trying to hack around a broken software key or something. Most of the things you've listed are sys admin tasks, but they aren't normal user tasks. Normal users don't even know what a log file is. Why would you list something like that?

And that's the point, the things you point out might be things that at some point somebody might optionally need to do to solve some obscure, once in a lifetime problem.

But on Linux systems, that's pretty much all you do. Pretty much anytime you need to do anything, you're in terminal, fucking around with permissions or sudoing or editing some unguessable .conf file somewhere or restarting a daemon. None of the examples I gave were for sysadmin activities. There are no servers that need to be monitored, no hardware performance that needs to be profiled, no network things that need to be configured and securely locked down. I gave you 61 page discussion on how to browse a network share, something that's been trivially solved in everything from OS X to my Smartphone for years -- and up to the last page people are saying that the suggestions in the how-to don't work. The collective wisdom of the crowds spent 61 pages of fixes, conf file tweaks, scripts and discussion to not be able to produce a universally working answer. This isn't an unusual "something broke and I can't access my network shares" this is the introduction how-to set it up!

That's absurd!

Or how about the 33 page discussion on how to install a piece of user-facing software? 33 pages! And it doesn't work universally for everybody. These are people who are all on the same distro! You have to be kidding me. That's completely, 100% unsatisfactory for something that's being put in front of users. The install instructions for any user-facing software should be at best a 5 line, GUI driven exercise for n00bs followed by a half dozen "thanks it worked!" posts.

I'm not trying to cherry pick here. I simply went through the ubuntu forums and picked the top-n items that looked like things a normal user would want to do. I didn't pick "Howto setup a Juniper Network Connect VPN" or "How to identify PCI Driver in use" or "Practical examples of the linux Find command" or "how to setup a secure ftp server" because that's not things users want to do.

It's not lack of familiarity. Even seasoned, decades long Linux users have to consult and decode poorly written man pages and decipher unguessable commandline options, spend hours hunting through forums to see if somebody happened to post a solution that works for the minor revision of whatever distro and software version of whatever thing it is they want to try to fix. You can't work your way through and "discover" how to do that stuff. Nobody's going to sit down to solve their monitor layout problem and just by poking through a few menus arrive at something like this 9 minute solution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwJl3ohmmqc&feature=youtu.be

You can get comfortable with apt-get or yum or whatever all you want. But if the one critical component you need to do some typical user-level task is entirely undiscoverable (so apt-get is useless), and configuring it requires 60+ pages of solution guesses, the OS has failed.

It's madness. And it's why you'll never see a city or state-wide Linux initiative work. Linux is a sysadmin OS, not a user OS. The moment a user needs to do something, they simply can't be doing this shit. Sysadmins don't mind spending two or three days figuring out the script to make the service daemons shutdown in the right order. Users don't give a shit.

Linux users don't become comfortable with their systems in the way Windows or OS X users do. They become comfortable with the brokenness of the system. Their expectations are light years apart. On Linux you become comfortable with the fact that, even if something isn't broken, any trivial task you want to do is going to require you to set the better part of a couple days aside to resolve.

For sysadmins, that's their job. For users, it isn't, and that's why these initiatives fail.