I’ve only once had a broken firmware update in years and it was an easy fix.

I’m not sure how people can recommend other distributions when they all have issues of one sort or another and you just have to do the bare minimum sometimes to fix them.

Judging from how hasty you are to dismiss a distribution based on a singular event, I would say it will be hard to find other distributions that can be what you wish them to be.

Not gate keeping here, but even in Windows/Mac there are issues which require some research to fix, sometimes even harder than linux ones.

Try explaining this to my idiot employer. They recently deployed Teamviewer to all company computers.

Gtk on Gnome vs Qt on Kde. I tried bottles. it’s fine. I can live without it given we now have a decent Lutris and Heroic

Or any compact pc like gigabyte brix, nucs, lenovos , etc. you can get those for 70-200 on ebay and they are amazing for running any homelab projects, including stream services like jellyfin with hardware decoding.

Wish I could do that when my school computers had Dos and Turbo Pascal. Ah, the good old himem.sys times. Miles better than W11.

redhat 5.5

Wifi? imagine trying to get pci modems working and basically compiling your kernel each time you’d need an obscure driver. usb didn’t even exist and external ones were both expensive af and running on serial ports.

good times honestly. I learned so much about linux.

there’s Zen also. that also has normie defaults, however the drastically changed UI/Uxmight not be for everyone.

I have fully switched my arch to flatpak only( for user installs obviously). There are still some apps missing features like anything requiring secure credential storage (i.e tutanota) , but for the most part using flatpaks has been an amazing experience, if you can live with the increased required storage needs.