Without knowing what game you were having issues with I can’t provide much help. I would first recommend checking https://protondb.com/ to see the games status and if other people are running into issues. Most of the fixes are as simple as just switching what proton version you are using. (if someone recommends using a GloriousEggroll (GE) version of Proton then look into the app proton-up-qt, on your software center).

But I will admit many solutions on protondb are much more “involved”.

As far as non-steam suggestions. I would start with heroic games launcher. I have had a very easy time with playing games through HGL, either EpicGames or GoG.

Outside of that, lutris is good. If you go to their website then there are one click installs for a bunch of games. This is mostly how I play things like battle.net games.

Then on the technical side of things is bottles. But that is the much more “build it yourself” option.

Even debian will let you download a Deb, double-click it in the file browser, and install it.

If you are just doing word processing, browsing the web, and playing video games then absolutely. Yes.

There have been gui tools available to install packages, configure networking/wifi, and manipulate files. For a long time now. Especially with the integration of Flatpak and snaps into gui-based package managers (like pop shop) it has become quite simple for any “regular”, non-technical user to manage the basics and even the intermediates of any system (depending on the distro).

Where things will likely fall short is with troubleshooting. But to solve that we would need to build something like the windows troubleshooter. But with so applications owned by so many different groups it would be difficult/near impossible to write a troubleshooter to integrate them together.

Though I am also a bit of a hackerman so I probably also don’t realize how much I use the terminal for normal things.