Installing an OS will always be a hurdle. Most people don't want to spend that much time thinking about how their computer works, they just want to turn it on and have it work. For more people to use Linux, it will have to be preinstalled.

After that, it needs to be stable. If the audio stops working, most people don't think "maybe I need to roll back my driver" or "maybe ALSA has muted my output channel for some reason", they just think "my computer is broken". These kind of problems have to go away, or at least be reduced to <1% of users.

Also, very few people are going to have any patience for any kind of difficulty related to "oh you have to add a different repository to your package manager to play common media formats" or w/e (e.g. AUR or Ubuntu Multiverse &etc). Normal people spend exactly 0 time considering what codecs they might need to install to listen to some music, or where they might need to get those codecs from, or whether those codecs are open or proprietary or freeware or whatever.