I experienced this myself recently. The Netflix metro app decided that something was wrong with the DRM path on my two-day old install of Windows 8.1. After much googling, I ended up having to re-install the OS. It was a very similar experience to when something breaks on a Linux install, except that I had less ability to go digging into the internals (not that that would be helpful for someone who doesn't know a lot about computers).
I think the primary difference with Linux is that developers are fairly content mucking about with things, so breakage that would be a showstopper for someone who is not intimately familiar with computers goes somewhat unnoticed. It's hard to step back and say "what would I do if I didn't know about <x,y,z>?" in daily life.
I've been intentionally writing KCM control modules for various traditional command line functionality recently, with the intent to get them in some early series 5 KDE release. Just proof of concepts, but so far I've gotten working ones for xrandr, wlrandr, and saned (ie, network scanners). They aren't usually very complicated, just a bunch of widgets. I intend to finish them with a qml rewrite, most of the work was before you could embed qml in widgets.
The point is, yeah, you shouldn't have to go to a terminal, but that requires the development of guis to overlay the complexity. I use my relatives as test beds for whatever breaks that requires a "control panel entry" to fix.
I think the primary difference with Linux is that developers are fairly content mucking about with things, so breakage that would be a showstopper for someone who is not intimately familiar with computers goes somewhat unnoticed. It's hard to step back and say "what would I do if I didn't know about <x,y,z>?" in daily life.