Aside from maybe three years in the late '00s when Ubuntu was basically just Debian with much better defaults and that turned out to be a very good thing, I've

Aside from maybe three years in the late '00s when Ubuntu was basically just Debian with much better defaults and that turned out to be a very good thing, I've always kinda disliked Linux unless I start from something very minimal and build it up, carefully curating everything. It doesn't feel bloated if you do that. It still breaks in weird and/or stupid ways but at least you know how everything fits together so you can fix it. But, it's also a ton of work, so I just run macOS these days. If you want a near-instant-boot appliance with Linux, try Librelec. I think it's made for Kodi but you can use it for other things. Lakka (Retroarch) uses it and gets me to a GUI, ready to interact with, rendering under DRM (so, no X or Wayland) in like 3 seconds flat on a Raspberry Pi. Or, FreeDOS isn't a crazy option for appliance-type machines, depending on what you want to run.