@emberquill that is fair! I feel like I must have good luck with Windows, or maybe bad luck with Linux, or probably both. because I’ve had many very bad experiences trying to get Linux to work and to keep it working. but I’ve been using Windows 11 for about 3 months and my only problems so far have been:

• I needed to run O&O ShutUp 10 at the beginning to disable any spyware/adware (it sucks that this is necessary but at least it’s easy to do once you know the name of the tool)
• the built-in night light is borked so I can’t use it, so I installed f.lux instead

I’ve heard about updates resetting settings but thankfully I haven’t experienced that in any version of WIndows as far as I can remember. in older versions of Windows like 7 and 8 the forced restarting could be annoying at best, but on Windows 10 and 11 I haven’t had any problems with this thankfully (though it’s still anti-consumer of them to force updates at all). I feel like my ideal operating system would be something that is as easy/simple for me to use as Windows, but that’s FOSS like Linux so it doesn’t have a bunch of adware and spyware in it. I hate having to use commercial software that’s packed full of adware and spyware to be honest, but at least there’s a tool that lets me disable it all I guess - and once it’s disabled it’s definitely the best OS for my needs

@kasdeya Whoops, I deleted my post because it felt way too confrontational and defensive about Linux to me but yeah, you took it in the spirit it was intended. Should've just left it up.

To be entirely fair about Windows, I think the out-of-the-box experience is generally better than Linux. It's when you start diving into customization that things start causing issues. I think my issue with not being able to install updates was caused by the tweaks I made in group policy to stop forced reboots from happening, and I think the settings resets were caused by Windows and Linux fighting over who got to own the bootloader (a frequent issue when dual booting that is more the fault of Windows than Linux, but wouldn't happen with either OS alone).

I often forget that, as someone who loves to tinker, Linux just ended up working better for me, but if you want something more reliable for general use, Windows still wins. Unless macOS is in the running.

@kasdeya

I feel like my ideal operating system would be something that is as easy/simple for me to use as Windows, but that’s FOSS like Linux so it doesn’t have a bunch of adware and spyware in it.

I don't know if suggestions are warranted or if you're still interested at all in giving Linux yet another try, but it might be worth looking into one of Fedora's Atomic distros, or Bazzite which has a similar premise but is more gaming-focused.

Assuming you haven't tried one already.

I don't know if it's as easy as Windows due to my very skewed perception of Windows, but it's at least simpler than other Linux distros because the base OS is immutable and apps are sandboxed by default. Makes it very hard to actually break anything in the first place.

@kasdeya @emberquill imo your ideal OS might just be Linux Mint. have you tried that? i wouldn't mind helping you with it.

@emberquill oh, thank you! to be honest I am very intimidated by immutable distros after having some very frustrating experiences with Docker and Snaps (although, I’m able to use the latest version of Neovim on my Ubuntu WSL because of an appimage! so that’s pretty nice)

and also because I guess I feel like the immutability will be an extra layer of complexity that I’ll need to understand

but I also really like the concept of an immutable distro because, like you said, if I break something while trying to fix something else I can (I assume) hit undo in some way and revert that change which sounds perfect for me, because often when I’m working with Linux I am just Very Done with dealing with whatever is broken and I’m doing the command-line equivalent of pressing random buttons lol

@kasdeya I think compared to snaps and docker containers, flatpaks seem a lot easier to deal with. Atomic distros all have graphical front-ends for flatpak that behave a lot like a typical app store, except it's FOSS. Click button to install or uninstall, easy batch updates, etc.

The big caveat with immutable atomic distros is that if you are using it for development or you just like tinkering, that additional layer of complexity can come back to bite you. There are tools to handle creating isolated dev environments, layering additional system packages on top of the base image, or other things like that. Since I'm used to the way things work on Arch and other ordinary Linux distros, and I spend a lot of time in the terminal by choice, it was hard to adapt when I tried an atomic distro.