Kind of weird that the author does not make clear what a "normal person" is, despite this being a central concept to their article.

Personally I don't think it is normal to be unable to double click on i3wm in some graphical apt wrapper and then pick it from a scroll list at login. People use shortcuts in Windows all the time. Having more than one workspace might have been foreign to most a decade or two ago, but these days external monitors are common and workspaces are basically that.

I've seen people who I would not consider abnormal go from weird misconceptions about i3wm to efficiently sending around windows between workspaces and screens in a day. If you want you can also click your way through it, and configuration is generated for you after you decide whether you want Alt or Super as the core command key. Defaults are rather sensible, so you don't have to fiddle with them until you've got some experience.

Historically user interfaces on web pages and in Windows and Mac OS:s has changed quite a bit and people who I think most would consider normal managed to adapt.

> but these days external monitors are common

The assumption that everyone is using a laptop is interesting there.