> I used to tinker around with my OSs but now I want them out of the way to a large extent.

This might seem counter intuitive, but configuring your own desktop kinda achieves "out of the way" on Linux... it gives you something persistent and reliable, it's a worthwhile investment. Like the parent, I use i3wm, it might seem a bit too spartan at first, but that's part of the beauty... less to configure, less gui in the way, less opinions, config a single text file, defaults are sane! I have hardly changed anything beyond my initial dot file setup about 5 years ago, yet have taken them through many desktop installs without any messing around.

Also configuring your desktop is not the same as Linux in 2000, you don't need to sift through thousands of lines of x11 config. Just pick the bits of desktop you like and stick it in a shell script, copy some config files here and there that you deem worthwhile configuring (smaller DEs or WM make this a far more minimal tasks than the big all signing all dancing KDEs and Gnomes).

... it's a small investment in time to pay for sanity and persistent experience over many years, the macOS days I could not bear the random changes pushed on users which became more and more heavy handed towards later versions.

TL:DR I like my custom configured linux desktop... because of how it prevents me from having to continually configure my desktop.

Unfortunately no-one provides what I consider to be a sane default.

I'm fairly happy with what I have. I add the odd alias to my dotfiles and a few things I pick up but for the most part I've had my config for half a decade or so now.

By contrast I could never figure out how to like, get Windows to fuck off with the telemetry ads bullshit. It always felt like I would disable it and then behind my back some randoservice would enable it again or install an update that brings back OneDrive or some madness.

The best bit about my Linux setup is that it's all just files. Home folder, few flat text files with the odd bit of json, we're home.

For what it's worth, I've had a lot of success with the Tron script[1] for getting rid of Windows Bloat. It disables a ton of garbage via Registry Keys which windows is much less likely to overwrite. It can be a little aggressive on some stuff like blocking your microphone from working in any app (easily fixable) but I'd rather have it that way than having to uninstall Candy Crush once a week.

[1]https://github.com/bmrf/tron

Stating it that way makes it seem like you're opposed to learning something new. That's fine, but a lot of people including GP just looked once and never did anything else.

Frankly, yes, I'm opposed to learning new tools when the old tools I used for the same task did the task just as well.

Knowledge is power, so learning should increase your power. If learning is necessary to just keep being able to do the same things you were doing, you're not increasing your power, you're struggling to stay where you are.

I’m not. However, I can’t keep going back to square one. I need problems I’ve solved to remain solved, not have to jump into X configs in Vim because my monitor layout won’t stay between sessions (random example from many years ago). I have 5 hours of work to do today, I’d like to not spend 2 of them in man files “learning” about an abstraction I can’t afford to be digging into right now.