How would software support improve?

• Less fragmentation between multiple different ways to install software (Ubuntu-derived distributions currently have apt, flatpack and snap while some software is available in neither so I have to manually download a binary or even compile it myself)
• Better support for certain use cases like… I don’t know… fractional scaling which Windows has supported since Vista
• Simplified system settings. People make fun of Windows splitting settings between the “new” settings app and the old control center. On most Linux distributions, I may have to set some things multiple times for my window manager, my compositor and so on… again, scaling is the main culprit here but themeing has similar problems.

Basically fix the few things that work better in Windows, even for power users, ideally without sacrificing the flexibility that makes Linux so awesome.

Edit: bonus suggestion though this one is kind of tricky to do without sacrificing flexibility:

Less fragmentation between distributions. Recently I had some driver problem (can’t quite remember what) and googled a solution. I found a solution in a support forum for a different distribution than what I had. Looked good but in the end it didn’t help me because the config files were in completely different locations, default configs were different, packages had different names and they recommended using some UI tool to configure the device that wasn’t available on my distribution or at least I couldn’t find how to install it.

For myself, I’ll eventually figure that out. It takes me a few hours that I could spend on something productive but whatever, we’re geeks, we do shit like that. But now imagine my mom calls me about that problem. She probably won’t have the same distribution that I have because we have entirely different use cases. Good look troubleshooting that over the phone. With Windows, I can rely on 80% of all users having one of the latest two versions (so currently 10 or 11). The fix that works on my machine will probably work on theirs and most things I find online will apply to what they have. Same for macOS.

Edit 2: For context, I run Ubuntu and Debian on quite a lot of headless machines such as servers and embedded stuff. It works great and I wouldn’t want to miss it. But on desktop, I’m still in Windows and won’t leave for the foreseeable future. Every few months I try setting up some desktop linux and every time it takes less than a week to annoy me so much that I’d rather wipe the whole thing and install Windows than figure out how to fix that mess of two different display servers, five different desktop environments and two entirely incompatible GUI frameworks in a trenchcoat.