You’re failing to acknowledge that “these types of people exist” are largely a product of anti-educational resources like this particular LTT video. I’ve daily driven Ubuntu based oses for about 4 years solid now and never saw a warning like he saw. That is an extreme outlier, but his video presented it as common in the minds of probably a couple million people.

His specific instance was an outlier of what can happen yes, but it happened naturally during the creation of a video. While I can completely understand the annoyance - this was not faked for the video, and was something that happened. Calling it anti-educational is a rather conspiratorial take. Cutting it out would hide an issue that occurred! A rare issue may not be an issue for you when encountered, given your experience with Linux (we are on a linuxmemes community after all!), but can be problematic for the average Joe. Rather than being overly defensive and than waiving the issue because idiocy - improvements to avoid this from happening in the future are key in my view.

As for things being plug and play, Windows isn’t either. I’ve used all versions of that OS except 8 and 11 and I’ve had problems as bad or worse than anything on Linux plenty of times. Updates have trashed my ability to boot on a few occasions. Yet to hear folks like you tell it, windows just works but Linux is only usable if you’re willing to fix major problems all the time. That was probably true 15 years ago but it just flat out isn’t anymore. You’re not doing anyone any favors except Microsoft by continuing to spread the misinformation that windows is nearly flawless but Linux is unapproachable.

Thanks for putting words in my mouth: I haven’t even named Windows, let alone called it better! I have had my fair share of problems with Windows, but technical issues have been rather unmemorable. Most recently the text selection cursor would be the wrong color for whatever reason. I’ve had an update fail once - but it did not mess up the machine, and the built-in system restore got it working again automatically. The biggest problem I have with Windows is with Microsoft: ads, telemetry, and the fact that updates are pushed without consent.

For Ubuntu I have seen my colleague stuck on the login screen after updating graphics drivers trying to get hardware acceleration to work (Nvidia, who else…) - took well over a day to resolve after things went wrong (colleague was considering a reinstall!), had an update of packages on my RPi mess up timezones resulting in database issues (took me a week to find the responsible package, luckily a hotfix had been released. but had to recover my database from a backup.). I’ve actually seen this prompt when I was trying to reproduce results from a scientific paper that used an older package (ended up having to do that in a container.). The WiFi dongle was just a more minor issue but one that could occur for the average Joe that would have been a major roadblock for most people.

All these examples occurred within the last 6 or so years. I love Linux on my servers & RPi, and would NOT want to use Windows there. But issues do occur, even when doing otherwise ordinary things, and that has ruined my day a few too many times.