Microsoft transitioning Windows into a spyware platform filled with advertisements and garbage has been in the making for years at this point. Its absolutely exploitative, greedy, and evil, which is why if you can you should consider switching to a different operating system, like Linux. At the very least you can transition to using Linux for tasks that work on Linux while keeping around Windows for tasks which require windows, either due to a lack of Linux support or poor performance/stability/etc. All of this assuming you aren't doing this already.
Linux is a usability mess, and has been for 20 years. I give a new shot once every other year.
Basic flow:
- Works out of the box for a basic desktop
- Once you start installing drivers and software outside the package manager (Which you'll need to do immediately) and doing C+P CLI workarounds, the system state starts decaying, and things break.
- The easiest way to fix things is usually a clean OS reinstall, in the sense of a car "total".
Usability of Linux desktop environments isn't perfect but at least the trend is steady improvement. The days of having to do weird stuff just to make some everyday USB device work when you plug it in are mostly gone. The software available for Linux in a few areas is now genuinely best in class. It's not always the same exact applications you might be used to but then that's true of moving between Windows and macOS as well.
My own experience of modern Linux is very different to yours. I don't think I've had to completely clean and reinstall any Linux system I use - desktop or server - for over a decade. Some of those systems have been through multiple full OS upgrades in that time but those were done in place and usually without losing anything (or gaining anything unwanted).
It's obviously not perfect. Some of the recent Wayland changes got released by some distros before some of the applications that do video calls were fully ready for them and that caused problems with remote working for example. But it's paradise compared to the danger of installing any modern version of Windows or any Apple OS and getting serious regressions or overtly user-hostile new "features" that you can't turn off.
I do think there's room for a modern desktop OS that doesn't have all the historical baggage of Linux. Not having a permissions model that sandboxes apps and the data they work with by default seems very outdated in 2022 for example. The traditional filesystem hierarchy is unnecessarily complicated and not well suited to modern systems. We rely on container technologies for professional work now because the package management and installation/update mechanics are so fragile (though no worse than Windows or macOS IMHO). I just wish the barriers to entry weren't so high now that it is tough for anyone to build a new desktop OS from the ground up any more.
My computer ran well with Linux with one display after instaing Linux. Then I tried to use a second, daisy chained, Displayport display. And the mess began. Confusing tips on forums, confusing and experimental drivers to install... And so on. Didn't manage to get it running.
The thing with Linux is it gets blamed for lack of vendor support. If something doesn't work with Linux it's Linux's fault, if something doesn't work with windows it's the vendors fault. That's never seemed fair to me. Those confusing and experimental drivers you mention are unlikely to be provided by the vendor and are likely a volunteer's best efforts to reverse engineer the driver
As a counter point my old wireless canon printer works flawlessly out of its old box with Linux but getting it to work on windows 10 is full of confusing tips on forums, confusing and experimental drivers to install. Nightmare.
In this case (it's was couple of years ago) it was a beta release by the manufacturer.
Thing is, to me as an end user it doesn't matter who's at fault, if it doesn't work it doesn't work and I'm only so motivated to investigate something (functionality wise) basic not working while on Windows all the basics run fine but the advanced stuff creates problems. With Linux on desktop I never arrived at the advanced stuff giving up at (some of) the basic stuff not working out of the box.
But I fully understand, from a technical standpoint drivers and daisy chained display probably aren't basic and Windows has hidden als the complexity from me for the last 20 years.
Both AMD and Intel have open source drivers upstreamed into the Linux kernel (and are the vendor recommended ones, outside of certain enterprise use cases).
Rings true for me, I'm about at the reinstall stage with my HTPC. It will no longer send audio via HDMI due to some deep obscure pipewire config that broke itself without me touching anything. It also no longer connects to my Bluetooth keyboard on 2/3 of the keyboard's channels (actually it connects and disconnects very rapidly, several times a second, but is unusable regardless).
A lot of your "problems" are because you've spent years buying "Windows" devices indiscriminately. If you had been buying things that were known to be compatible with Linux, you'd have no problems getting them to work.
You didn't state which distro or package manager you were dealing with but there is a LOT more third-party support for DEB packages than the others, so that may also be why you had problems.
i used to do all sorts of stuff with Windows XP/2000 (like sysprepping reg-tweaked/debloated/pre-loaded Windows ISOs for myself). but now i have fully moved away from Windows to EndeavourOS/KDE and haven't looked back; many others have jumped ship to PoP_OS. yes, you do have to slightly limit/research your hardware options to get a great experience, but i've always been an AMD GPU guy (due to their better thermals / power efficiency), and all of my laptops are Thinkpads w/Intel wifi, so take this with those grains of salt.
i do miss Foobar2000 and HeidiSQL (DeaDBeeF and DBeaver aren't quite as polished), and Affinity products are hard to get running without glitches in Wine/Proton, but otherwise it's been fantastic. though i've had to fiddle quite a bit with Chromium and MPV settings to enable GPU hardware acceleration for video decoding.
first straw was slow filesystem access due to Windows Defender, last straw was unstoppable Windows updates full of ad garbage and apps i previously removed with various debloating scripts. i ran Windows 10 with these addons to get back a more Windows XP experience:
