I'm realizing how detrimental this is to my emotional well-being, but I still genuinely can not imagine what would entice me back to the Microsoft stranglehold. The fact that you even need to run a debloater (that removes most of the user-facing crud), add a package manager, and empathically tell your OS to shut up... I just don't see the point.
It's adversarial.
Why do I want an enemy for an OS? and even if the OS was friendly, Microsoft certainly isn't, and so: why do I want an enemy's snitch for an OS?
I do this for almost anything. I was doing the same thing when I was actively using Ubuntu, Arch or MacOS as a daily driver. Only I can say what is the environment I work in and its by definition impossible for anybody else to get it right.
> Why do I want an enemy for an OS? and even if the OS was friendly, Microsoft certainly isn't, and so: why do I want an enemy's snitch for an OS?
Why are you skipping relevant bits to confirm your biases ? I was fighting all OSes all the time, I fight Windows only on initialization, and other OSes every freaking week. Why would I want that ?
You don't seem to have healthy thought process around big coorps - I don't work for them, and I don't care about ANY of them. When I switched from Windows to Linux it was because I couldn't see that direction where MS was going was good and OS sucked. I was happy with Linux and learned a lot, but I had frequently to do non-trivial job to get trivial things working (like USB). I returned to Windows few years later when they started their FOSS era, and I am now more than happy.
The truth is, I don't care for ANY OS. I don't care for their desktops, shiny init apps, stupid windows managers, control panels. Fuck all of that. Give me kernel, terminal and browser and let me be, I can take it from there. So basically any OS I use looks the same and uses the same x-platform tools.