Having an OS that doesn’t feel trashy by default should be an incredibly low bar to clear, but alas.

Half these "disable junk" settings auto revert after every update .

And then you have people regularly showing up in threads saying they ran a "debloat" script and now its impossible to run teams and the fix is "rebuild the os". None of this is as simple or risk free as it could be.

Easily disabled, and then a week later, easily disabled and then a week later easily disabled and then a week later easily disabled.

Yeah but the “out of the box” experience tells you a lot about a product imo.

I use windows only when I play a game, and wouldn’t touch it otherwise

It took me longer to figure out how to disable the Ubuntu motd ads than the ones in Windows but I didn't get outraged about it, I just set it up the way I wanted and moved on.

I’m not sure what those ads are. As others pointed out, plenty of choice out there. I’ve been a happy Debian user for over a decade.

Or, you can use Linux Mint and get all of the compatibility of Ubuntu with none of Canonical's bullshit.

The point is not to let a trivial thing bother me and make my decisions for me.

Investigate ARM / Android gaming scene - it's not your dad's clunky stuff any more - most ARM native games are faster, lightweight, and optimized for touch/vr. ARM console emulation is also on point.

That’s not really close to playing BF6 and other AAA games though

Until it can't be.

LTSC is all that's keeping me from a complete switch.