GUI alternatives are constantly improving and becoming more visually pleasing throughout distros, and besides, there's real scenarios where normal people HAVE to use Powershell or CMD to get stuff done on Windows. This is becoming less and less of a hurdle.

It wasn't always the case. Windows 3x gui had to be started from a dos prompt. But this anti cli sentiment swings both ways for all OS's.

The bigger issue I have though is a general unwillingness to learn how to do things beyond click icons for apps. Devices now are engineered to be as simple as possible. Which ya, for most people is fine. But these devices in turn are generally way more challenging to fix. So it encourages just buying a new one instead. Creating more ewaste for something that should be easier to fix, all because of software, or physical assembly.

I think you're right. For the average desktop user, it's more about being able to use the software they need, without a terminal.

I think that desktop in linux has advanced a lot in the last few years, and now I'm running my games on a KDE desktop, too! But I keep having to go to the terminal to do stuff I took for granted on other systems, like OS security updates.

noob

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.