I have the same motivation as you, I just want shit that works.

But Windows is the absolute last place I find that. All I get are updates that break my setup, constant inane interruptions from Cortana or the desktop or wherever, advertisement tiles in the fucking start menu, forced updates that can't be done in the background, Windows Activation disappearing after hardware upgrades, etc.

I feel like I'm in the Stepford Wives with all these people coming out of the woodwork to proclaim how majestic the Windows experience is.

A few years back I switched from Mac to Ubuntu for the faster, cheaper, diverse hardware and I have to say, it's pretty much perfect in the "Just Works" department on the 3 laptops + 2 desktops I've installed it on. But I'm also one of those people that actually liked Unity so I don't have to mess with it much after installing.

Just to add my own anecdote here, I have been getting months of uptime on Windows, since Windows 7. I have a W7 Laptop and a W10 dev workstation that are currently at over 4 months of uptime. https://imgur.com/a/U8fGpCi

Edit: Oops looks like someone rebooted my W7 laptop.. :'(

Interesting, may be I have some setting that prevents Cortana from annoying me and prevents windows from placing ads on the start menu. Not that I use the start menu often, generally I just hit the search box and start typing the name of the app I want (if it is not pinned to the task bar already).

I'm using Windows 10 Pro (Insider Preview fast track) and not seeing the annoyances you are experiencing.

In my experience, the ads are only present at initial setup. Once you remove the shortcuts (and disable suggested apps), they don't show up again.

as usual, the pirated enterprise editions with telemetry disabled work really well.

I don't tweak anything after installing Debian/RHEL at work or at home. They're stable and flexible. IMO, the folks who spend hours customizing their desktops are usually the ones who don't know linux well and want to feel like they do.

A more positive perspective, they want to learn what they can do. I remember trying every distribution, DE, and window manager when I started with Linux. These days I stick with stock GNOME on Fedora.

When I was a teenager, my father brought an Ubuntu 6.06 CD home from his workplace. It didn’t interest him much, but he let me play with it on an old family computer. Once the setup finished I spent as much time as I could playing with the colour scheme, figuring out how to install Compiz for the cube animation, and making Kingdom Hearts wallpapers. Those activities were mostly playful, but they ended up helping me get exposure to tools like cd, ls, and apt-get.

Today I feel a lot more confident in using Linux (or any Unix, really), but that’s likely 100% due to having time to spend playing and being curious.

There’s a lot of discussion about an education in computing helping people get ahead economically, but part of me wonders how much proficiency comes from being a child on a Commodore 64 than learning express+mongodb in a few weeks (not that being the latter is a bad thing, either!).

Now, that's cynical, isn't it.

I do have several setups, each for a separated task. It depends on what you do. E.g. doing creative stuff, it can be annoying when you get constantly derailed by one darn ugly UI like Gnome3. Now, you don't need to dabble with eyecandy every full moon, but there is nothing wrong with setting it up once for a specific workflow, is there?

Same here. Even when I switched laptop it was a painless: copy homedir, apt-get the same packages I had in the old one, let it cook for a while, and I was up and running with not a hiccup.

The only secret is to use hardware you know beforehand is well supported.

> Customizing your window manager to death

That is not required to use a Linux desktop.

My pet peeve is the default clipboard behavior, personally I hate when I select text and it overrides the previous content in the clipboard.

That's not the default in all Linux desktops I've seen.

There are two clipboards in X11. One is the middle-click-paste, selection clipboard that gets clobbered when you highlight something. But C-x, C-c, and C-v (in CUA applications) operate on a different clipboard altogether that doesn't exhibit this behavior.

And that is awesome feature that I miss a lot in other operating systems.

It's a wart of X11, which is obsolete and deprecated. Wayland has a single clipboard which behaves in mostly the standard way.

clipboard and selection buffer are separate, though I think there is a situation that co-mingles them.

> Macs work really well out of the box but with some tweaks

Really? I don't know your definition of tweaks, but I've always found macOS requires a bunch of third party apps (often only paid alternatives) to be useful for a power user. Last I checked even its window management support was awful, and in a lot of situations it's impossible to get to where you want without touching the mouse.

KDE works much better out the gate, and is actually an advanced desktop environment in terms of possible customization if that is your bag.

> I used to love customizing the window manager to death but I'm older now and I just want something that is consistent and works out of the box.

it's called GNOME