I tried to daily-driver Linux back in the early 2000s. It was reasonable for my needs, with a given "dual boot for games or dealing with some propriatery-drive

I tried to daily-driver Linux back in the early 2000s. It was reasonable for my needs, with a given "dual boot for games or dealing with some propriatery-driver peripherals". I try some modern distributions, and many of them come very close to working out of the box. Usually nVidia drivers are a modest hassle, but it's arguably still faster to "everything you need installed" than Windows. But I never really feel comfortable in there. 1. I've never really trusted package management. What we have now is a morass of "some stuff comes from the vendor, some from an external repository, some comes via snaps/flatpaks, some compiled from source. This screams "unmaintainable tangle" later. 2. Modern desktops/config tools give me a very similar vibe. I feel like there are a lot of tools I can run that are likely to clobber (or neuter) the configuration changes made in the modern KDE/GNOME/XFCE graphical tools, with no obvious way to get back. All in all, the experience is much less "I have my finger on the pulse of exactly what my machine is doing" than it used to be. I know I can unbundle a lot of this stuff and run FVWM, but then you need to find replacements for many of the little helper applets that lived in a "desktop environment" dock (an always-on mixer so volume control keys work, for example) 3. A lot of distributions have the "let's be Free-as-in-broken-for-common-use-cases." The vital missing firmware components or drivers, or common codecs. Yeah, I get it. People played fast and loose in 2002 by including x11amp in the distribution. Even if they can't ship the bits in the ISO, they could at least have the non-free repositories enabled by default or some very clear "install-the-bloody-nvidia-drivers.sh" scripts left on your desktop after install. 4. Turnkey Windows games support. I get that if I install Steam, it and Proton are supposed to handle most stuff, but there's still plenty of titles where there's, at the best... conflicting information out there. I also expect that a lot of guidance is distribution and configuration specific, and probably quite brittle. I guess I'm waiting for Slackware 15, because they were always closest to the ideal in terms of "no package-management or configuration surprises", but on the other hand, I suspect getting from "working desktop" to "playing Guild Wars 2 on monitor 1, while streaming Crunchyroll on monitor 2" would be a lot easier if I was comfortable with something like Ubuntu.