Those and other big distros are better in that regard, but they're still not perfect. Depending on one's machine and needs, there can still be pain.

One recent example I experienced is jumping through hoops to get virtualization enabled in Fedora… it takes several steps that are not obvious at all. I understand not having it enabled by default since many won't need it, but there's no reason that can't just be a single CLI command that does it all.

Things like that can be unbelievably annoying and confusing on Windows or Macs, too. Even worse, they can just turn out to be impossible: the company can actively be preventing you from doing the thing that you want to do, refuses to give you enough access to your own system to do the thing you want to do, and/or sells permission to do what you want to do as an upgrade that you have to renew yearly.

These are things that don't happen in Linux. Doing what you want to do might be difficult (depending on how unusual it is), but there's no one actively trying to stop you from doing it for their own purposes (except systemd.)

Also, as an aside, a reason that Windows and Macs might have easy virtualization (I have no idea if they do) is because of how often they're running Linux VMs.

One needs to go a fair ways off the beaten path before they'll start running into trouble like that under macOS and Windows.

For macOS in particular, most trouble that more tinker-y users might encounter disappears if guardrails (immutable system image, etc) are disabled. Virtualization generally "just works" by way of the stock Virtualization.framework and Hypervisor.framework, which virtualization apps like QEMU can then use, but bespoke virtualization like that QEMU also ships with or that built into VirtualBox and VMWare works fine too. No toggles or terminal commands necessary. Linux does get virtualized a lot, but people frequently virtualize Windows and macOS as well.

What exactly did you need to do? All I've ever had to do to get QEMU working properly has been to make sure KVM is enabled in the BIOS (which you have to do on all OSs).

Just run a KVM based Windows VM (via GNOME Boxes, virt-manager, etc. On my Fedora install I had to install the @virtualization meta-package and enable dameons among other things, and the only reason I knew to do that is because I looked it up. Without that Boxes, etc just throws an unhelpful error that doesn’t suggest that more packages or config changes are needed.

I had to enable virtualization features in BIOS too, but that’s entirely separate and not the fault of any Linux distro.

Ah, I guess I might be a little unusual in that I use the QEMU CLI directly. I tried some QEMU GUIs in the past but they were annoying to get working so I just learned the CLI.