First you have to choose a distro which for non tech savvy person is already impossible
https://distrowatch.com/ - not a problem to pick one of most popular, takes literally 1-2 min of googling to get idea which distro is newbie-user-friendly
not mentioning the whole partitioning thing
Say what? Yo, u r drunk, go home. Every GUI installer now provides automatical partitioning where you don't even touch your HDD configuration.
(if you install it on old hardware instead good luck finding any less common drivers for it)
Pure bullshit, linux is one of this OS which have way better support to old hardware than winshit or o'sit X.
the installed distro must be new user friendly or the guy using it is fucked
My father sat to my laptop one day where i have installed Arch and he didn't had any problems with using it.
Note: Arch require configuration - Mint for example comes pre-configured for complete newbie out of box.
Linux at current state is i could say - at some point way more user friendly than windows due way more deeper and easier to understand manuals and wiki.
then you have to learn apt-get commands
"newbie-friendly" distro comes with pre-installed GUI package manager with nicely categorized apps and good descriptions.
Command lines learning comes when you want to get more knowledge of "how-to-geek-linux".
if you're using more advanced distro you must learn what architecture your system is else you'll fuck it up by installing wrong updates and etc.
Did you knew that only by following Arch wiki you can easiely set up fully functioning system without having problems with this?
Arch is considered as one of more advanced once but it teaches proper ways of "how to".
If i could compare Ubuntu vs Arch.... Arch is more user-friendly.
All you have to do with mac is buy it, power on and choose a few things from first startup, you're done.To be fair you have to learn how to use appstore too but it's much easier than most package managers imo. OS X might not be a very good OS but you're talking out of your ass when you say it's harder to use.
You forgot about well known "Error 1004 please try again later", almost impossible rollback of distro to fix hardware dependences, it's not like you buy an app and you own it, your hardware own it so in case of having same software on more machines, you need to buy it multiple times, requires internet-wise recovery to reinstall OS, you cannot use WiFi password protection such as WPA/WEP if you want to use internet-wise recovery option, Finder is a big pain in the ass, and.... like over9000 more problematic things which linux just doesn't have or learned from o'shit X failures and fixed them right away when users reported... years ago.
Oh, don't forget - o'shit X is a "wanna be BSD", it's also Unix type system but a worse copy of something what is really good - BSD.
Your knowledge about actuall linux market, software and drivers is really low.