Ubuntu is fine. Drivers are annoying on all distros (nvidia updates for me mainly, I don’t update hardware often).

I have daily driven various distros and tested a lot since the 90s and I pay close attention to time spent on customizing and fixes, and ubuntu just isn’t worse than other distros. I make setup scripts and have custom dockerfiles for webtops.

I want to like nixos or whatever fork will prevail, but it’s more work than people want to admit. I personally don’t want to have to pay that much attention to my operating system. It’s why i ditched gentoo almost 20 years ago. I don’t want to lurk forums for fixes and tweaks. I also make sure hardware I buy doesn’t have glaring compatibility issues.

If Ubuntu rubs you the wrong way but you are fine with most of it, just use debian.

I get it.

There are quite a few areas on the linux desktop that show obvious signs of too many choices and loose integration making it an unpolished experience.

Outside of niches like online forums, people seem to think GUIs and marketing are what make something professional.

In reality outside of individual use you really want to avoid GUIs in configuration so that you can be consistent. You shouldnt have to dig down into menus and click through lots of screens to do comparisons or set something up. Thats really where Microsoft’s ecosystem is weakest right now. WinRM and powershell remoting lack polish in the same way wifi or bluetooth management in the linux desktop does

You cant fully setup winrm with gpo, for example listener addresses get bound the first time its enabled with gpo and then its just stuck at that. If the system has it’s ip changed you have to disable the gpo to make any changes and when you get it fixed it reverts when the policy is applied again

Microsoft only seems to care about how things will be managed in their cloud now and all products for managing things locally are showing some rot. Sccm -> mecm -> mem is terrible, theyve even ending all training for tools for on premises management. All they do is azure training and certs now.

You can absolutely go as nuts or more nuts with this on linux. You can do all kinds of hardening steps, and centrally deploy the policies with push or pull. Microsoft has even moved towards dsc (desired state configuration).

Emulate a block device and reference it to the cloud api, unless im missing something.