I feel that. Windows gives me the creeps since 8.1. Recently I setup a new Win11 machine and it took all day to get everything configured including figuring out how to turn off all the telemetry and spyware. I’ll use it for work but I don’t even like it on my network.

Arch from scratch sounds like an adventure. But there are many good arch spins like Garuda that make it easy, no drama.

Well when I was testing out distros last year, I wanted updated KDE, Wayland, BTRFS, Snapper, full LUKS (including the boot partition) and I wanted it all somewhat complete and configured with a GUI installer. I had spent way too much time mucking around in the CLI with Fedora trying to get all of that and I was over it. Garuda just delivered. I didn’t know much about Arch at that time but man, it just works so well. All the issues I had with Debian and Mint and Ubuntu and Fedora, they just aren’t a problem with Arch. And Garuda has it all configured out of the box. I’m sure there’s some bloat in it - stuff that’s included that I don’t need. But I’m just happy everything I want is in there and I don’t need to figure it out

May be an unpopular opinion but I’m loving Garuda. I’m not a wizard and I needed something to just work with all the goodies. Garuda does it for me.