Or at least willing to push whatever barely working bullshit they forgot to test.

It’s a portable gaming console with in-built gaming controls. What do you think it is?

Most people didn’t grew up with Windows or Mac, that was a blip in time, most people grew up with a phone. When it comes to PC they’re a blank slate, they will have as much familiarity with the idea of a Windows start menus as they are with Linux console. That is to say, they saw it in a movie.

Most people do know how to use a computer though.

That was kind of true for a brief period of time. And even then it wasn’t true entirely. Now most people encounter a computer when they enter the workforce. They know shit about shit, they never had to tinker with computers, most of them never had one outside of some chromebook that allowed them to render two web pages. In most cases they start from basically blank slate.

Most people do in fact associate a cog with settings.

Most people don’t know that it’s cog. Most people don’t know it’s a button. Most people don’t have concept of a button in mind. Most people entering workforce right this moment never used a mouse to press a cog button in their life. Unless they’re in IT or engineering.

Also, I’m not talking about fixing problems

This is usually when you kind of required to use console on Linux, that’s why I was talking about it.

But my broader point was against so called intuitive self-explanatory nature of the menu you have to click with your mouse.

In my latest experience, pointing someone coming from Windows or Mac towards Ubuntu or whatever Ubuntu-derrivative is the most popular now, brings worse experience than giving them Arch. All the problems with Ubuntu that will eventually arise will not be fun and basic. Have you ever tried to teach a noobie to install the correct NVidia drivers? Or teach someone how to upgrade their system-wide python version so their third-party ppa repo will correctly update (one that you just taught them how to add)?
I don’t know, maybe like 15 years ago that was different, but right now I can tell you from numerous experiences, Arch with KDE goes down way more smoothly than any Ubuntu or even Debian.
Unless there are zero problems and everything just works, and the user just uses the computer as an interface for Chrome, in which case it kind of doesn’t matter.

but not really a UX

What else could it be if not UX. Not being able to setup a shortcut for the keyboard layout change without a bunch of bullshit hoops is an eXperience I have as a User.

Any UI could be faulted for that then

Yes, it’s a metric by which we measure the experience. Sometimes things should and could be easily customisable, and if they aren’t, it’s a fault of the UI.

As for apps not written for it again, not something they have control over

If they’re making a window manager, they need to consider apps that user might run with this window manager. If for example a browser doesn’t render half of the internet correctly because they added an unexpected rendering conventions, it’s a shit browser. Same could be said about desktop environment.
Other DE expected to run apps, Gnome expects that you write your app with Gnome in mind, that’s a big difference.

If you don’t see the difference between a gaming console and a general purpose personal computer, I really don’t know what to tell you.

I agree on consistency. It does have vision and it is consistently implemented.
It has different problems. It doesn’t play well with apps written not for it, it doesn’t allow for a good deal of customisation, and full of bugs and questionable decisions. All the UI stuff is subjective, but bugs and unresponsiveness isn’t.

Hey, I do you one better, I worked professionally as a person teaching people to use various softwares, but it only taught me that we know even less about what people think and how people operate, than we thought we know.

i used to literally use it for work

I guessed that, and that was the point of my comment. It’s impossible to tell, do you and your fellow professionals like it better, or did you just got used to it so much and don’t want to learn a new one. It’s not impossible to imagine - because it happens frequently - that there is an app with measurably better UI, that people don’t want to adopt. I’m not saying Gimp is that, personally I think all of them are terrible, all in their own unique way, and I don’t know if it’s possible to make a good one for this application.
When I worked as a sysadmin, I saw this happening all the fucking time. Hundreds of people prefer doing something in 50 clicks instead of using a new app that allows doing the same in 10, because previous way is ingrained in their muscle memory, and they absolutely, positively convinced that the old way is strictly unmistakably better, and they would fight me with deadly force so they could retain their old ways.
After that, I really don’t believe in people’s objectivity when it comes to that. I don’t think people can tell what is “better UI”.

You kidding me? Gnome has the worst UX of them all. The UI is kind of OK, but the UX is fucked beyound repair.

I don’t know what majority of people think. To be fair, you also don’t know that. We can only guess

It’s not like you are or aren’t interacting with the OS, it’s more about how easily can you do it if you need one. The distinction is, is it a general purpose personal computer, or a single purpose device. You can use general purpose one to only run one app 99% of the time, but it’s a general purpose personal computer you’re using.
Like, if you use automatic terminal at a fast food restraunt, you actually are using a computer with probably Windows on it, which runs Chrome in headless mode, that runs a web app. But you wouldn’t call yourself a Windows user, even if you do it twice a day. Even if you know how to make the webapp crash and show you the desktop. That’s my point of distinction.

when majority of people saying “Photoshop has this, we should do this as well” are not actually saying GIMP should create a total carbon-copy

And I see with my own eyes how some people are saying exactly that. Sometimes they wrap it into something like “photoshop is intuitive industry standard that takes zero seconds to learn and everyone is born with perfect understanding of it, and everything that isn’t that is an affront to god and actively violates all my senses”. I’m paraphrasing a bit.

Now you’re just saying words.

Every editing software that I ever touched, no matter what it edits, images, video, audio, had me baffled about some of decisions, small and big. For my own sanity I just accepted it as a part of life, like a bad weather.

But that’s like you know, your opinion, man.
What Photoshop is, is a more feature-full app, that’s fore sure, but all the claims of it being better at workflow only come from people who learned it already. It might be true, but it also could be Stockholm syndrome, there is no way to evaluate that, really. 20 years ago I was shit at coding, now I can do in an hour what I was able to do in a month back then. That’s because C++ perfected its workflow, and for no other reasons.
I am not a graphical guy, I only use Gimp for a number of limited uses, but I used it a lot for that, and I’m very efficient in what I do with it. If I open Photoshop, it will take me 20 times more time to do the same. But I know for a fact it’s not because of some inherent beterness of one over the other.

What I mean, they don’t interact with the OS. They only interact with Steam app, and it basically doesn’t matter what it runs underneath. When we’re talking about users adopting Linux it doesn’t count.

That’s what I mean. You used photoshop professionally, you are used to its interface, you want everything to have the same interface so you don’t have to learn a new one. It’s normal, we all are like that. The problems start when you try to hide it behind words like “intuitive”, “industry standart”, and “good for everyone”

Oftentimes established workflow is already simple

Not in the example we’re talking about though. Photoshop isn’t simple, nothing in it is. And for the software that is, it doesn’t mean you can’t come up with the better UX. We shouldn’t discourage people from trying to invent something better just because it isn’t what we already have.