Linux

I 100% agree with you. I think atomic distros are great for people like my parents, where they just need a browser and maybe libreoffice, and it's valuable to have something that "just works" (now I need to just convince them to give linux it a try...)

If you start getting into coding or customization then it quickly becomes clunky to use and requires knowledge beyond what a beginner would have, especially because most guides will tell you to use the traditional package manager, but that won't work with immutable root.

Containers, installing software to /home, changing advanced settings is in my experience way too much for most people.

I hope though that this might be solvable in the future with flatpak. Maybe by creating some special category for "CLI tools" with less/no sandboxing but still installable and runnable from a normal user account, and shipping the whole dependency tree.