My kid (not even a teenager) uses Linux daily. And not in a coy "he's using a chromebook" way. He's using full-blown NixOS on a laptop I set up for him. Could he have set it up? No, but he's a child. Has day to day use presented him with any difficulties whatsoever? Nope. He figured out gnome purely by instinct in a day. He goes between macos and windows and linux effortlessly, because he's a reasonably intelligent human being.

But, yes, half the time the "linux is hard" crowd seem to be basing their evaluation on things you would rarely do on a mac or windows machine. These days, install Mint, Fedora, or, hell, even Nixos or Endeavor, choose the defaults, and you will very likely have a perfectly usable, intuitive system.

The real thing. https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon/

I wouldn't say it's something anyone can do (no graphical installer and updating is a bit manual) and it's all dependent on the Asahi folks, bless them, but it took me about 20 minutes, other than whipping up a machine-specific configuration.nix and home.nix (about 20 more minutes on either side of the installation). All of the instructions were clear, though I will warn that some of them are not well presented in that there are instructions that should be bullet points that are stuffed into paragraphs. Nothing remotely exotic though--that's all in the Asahi stuff that is wonderfully hidden from the view.