Comment by Theodores

In my experience, hardware support with drivers is far better with Ubuntu than with any of the 'consumer operating systems'. Display drivers, Nvidia in particular, have been a problem though, which I avoid by just going for integrated graphics (Intel). This worked well since I don't play games, however, then I got into Blender, which really needs a proper GPU (with drivers).

This summer I tried to interest a relative in using a Wacom tablet on their Apple computer. In linux-world you just plug the thing in and the job is done. Yet on the Apple computer I was having to hunt down drivers and install stuff, taking me out of my comfort zone. We didn't get the Wacom tablet to work (it is a decade old) and gave up.

All operating systems will inevitably force their ways of working on you to some extent and it is 'better the devil you know' for most people, myself included. My first OS that 'didn't get in the way' of what I wanted to do was SGI Irix. I think Ubuntu has that aspect of not getting in the way, however, I am confidently able to use the command line to type in installation instructions. Text instructions for installing stuff is brilliant since you can reproduce results consistently with not much more than 'cut and paste' needed. As soon as you move to a consumer OS then this becomes murkier, particularly if you have to use things like 'Homebrew'. An Apple user will quibble with me that this is difficult, but each to their own.

Along the way I have invariably kept the standard Windows installation, to never use it, ever. I thought I would need dual boot to hop into Photoshop, Word or some other Windows application, however, this has proven to not be the case.

The time has come for me to delete those Windows partitions and get my disk space back. In so doing I will also be excluding myself from any of those AI integrations that must be polluting Windows these days.