Hi Kari,
I may have spoken a bit too soon on a couple things. Gave FerenOS a whirl today, and -- very much contrary to the apparent ease shown in those videos -- ran into the old familiar brick wall from so many previous Linux distro trials: it seemed obtuse to me; couldn't find much of anything there, couldn't do much. For me this always starts with the display, and the microscopic fonts and (exceedingly few) icons that they insist on defaulting to. I have to quickly find a way to switch to 1028 x 764, or I'm just dead in the water -- can't see a %#*!@*! thing. With some distros I determined that this setting could be found under "Devices" (not particularly intuitive), if I could even find where they had "Devices", and to set the necessary setting there. In the videos, Feren looked like it had some improved, streamlined setup for installing apps, with -- for instance -- a starting roster choice of 8 browsers, including Opera (which I like a lot) and Brave. But, after approving the desktop wallpaper, I did not manage to get past the mostly blank desktop screen. WHERE is everything else ? No idea, at least not without a detailed guide to follow.
Things went somewhat better with Zorin, so far. I'm typing this from a Live Zorin session, using the FireFox browser. At least there seems to be more that is accessible to explore here. Still pondering too many rather basic items, like screensavers and auto-logins, and avoiding "gotchas" like unwanted Screen Lock.
I understand that once upon a time there was an experiment called "Lindows" that never really got very far, apparently. I think they had the right general idea, though. Linux is never going to be a mainstream OS contender unless they take a radically better approach to accessibility. For that to happen, I think that developers need to start with the assumption that potential new adoptees start out from zilch, knowing NOTHING about Linux, and to craft an environment where former Windows users can hit the ground running. Otherwise, it's just going to be something for skilled and committed techies. With Windows, they had the necessary resources to insure that things mostly just worked, straight away, without undue tinkering: you did not have to jump through various hoops to acquire drivers, or pre-requisite packages; that stuff was pretty well automated. From what I've observed, Apple seems to have accomplished the same things with their (rather different) graphical UI. I think Linux needs to do this too.
Xy had a certain reputation for being a relatively tough learn. But even there we did have a menu'd Windows version, and that "training wheels" skin called A La Carte. These enabled a more easy adjustment for some.
Jordan