I think an issue is that people tend to think of Linux as meaning “all distributions.” So if something is compatible with X distro version yy.zz, the general idea is “it’s compatible with Linux.” This, in my experience, is one of the things that leads to mandatory command-line usage — it definitely is possible to get it to work under a different flavor of Linux, but it’s not necessarily easy if you’re uncomfortable with a command line.
Another is drivers — if it’s mainlined, it will Just Work, but if it’s not…well, it may work, but you might have to jump through hoops and get busy with the command line.
In short: if you view your distro the same way you view a particular Windows release, then I really don’t think you need the command line for desktop Linux. But you need to accept that some software isn’t “compatible,” in the above, user-friendly sense of the word.
There is no such operating system as Linux, but there are operating systems built on top of the kernel called Linux. In other words, Linux (a kernel) is not an alternative to Windows (an operating system), but a specific Linux-based OS could be.
IMO it would help if we stopped pretending that Linux is an operating system unto itself and started promoting the actual operating systems that are built on Linux. I see people in this thread arguing over whether “Linux” is user-friendly or not and it’s meaningless because they aren’t actually talking about Linux, but rather some unspecified thing that runs on top of Linux, and may not even be talking about the same thing.
