I think the issue with that is that linux is the kernel. Everything around it is how you interact with it. So how to change settings would be the responsibility of the shell used. And there are several shells and even window managers on top of those. I forget if there's a graphical shell, but it's irrelevant.

And that's not getting into the issue of whether or not something is a kernel issue or not. And it could be the responsibility of the distro to provide the tools to change the settings.

Basically, it's a lot of people with no obligation to each other trying to work in concert.

The situation on Windows is different. Windows is both the kernel and the shell and the window manager and the provider for a lot of the core tools.

Apple sidestepped the issue with OSX. They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.

> They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.

They used NeXT’s XNU kernel which was a merger between CMU’s Mach and Berkeley’s 4.3BSD. They later refreshed it with code from OSF’s MK derivative of Mach (which also incorporated some code from the University of Utah) and code from FreeBSD, and have added a huge amount of new code of their own. They continue to pull new code from FreeBSD every now and again, but it isn’t so much a plain fork of FreeBSD as a merger between parts of FreeBSD and a lot of other stuff with a completely different heritage