i already gave up :D


I ended up restoring the image I took of my Windows 8.1 install and upgraded it to Windows 10 (thankfully there's still a licence associated with an HWID so i didn't have to dig). I don't think Linux desktop maining is something I'll end up revisiting because it really, really just is NOT for me as someone who cannot be bothered to fight their computer anymore, and like part of switching was a promise of "don't worry its better now!!!" and while it certainly is, it is just still not for me.
There's a bunch of little things that I want to do that are a single checkbox on both Windows and macOS that require shell scripts and whatever else to get to work on a Linux desktop environment, something as simple as passing through input audio from one device to the output on another is a bother that goes further than that single checkbox and while it might still be something that can be thrown in a script file: I shouldn't have to do that.
Then there's the massive footgun that having an Nvidia card is in general, I already had to compromise on the distro I used (originally I wanted to use Endeavour OS, but the process of installing the GPU driver indeed had the OS live up to its name and I ended up settling for Kubuntu) still being suboptimal because the graphics driver that they actually focus on doesn't support my card anymore and I'm not investing more money into this stupid rectangle.
The catalyst was probably the generally awful experience accessing network storage is for no reason whatsoever. The industry seems have settled on SMB as the "standard" for network storage and on both Windows and macOS it works well enough but on Linux it continues to be a pain for no reason. Every file manager seems to implement support for it and various other non-default file storage systems in their own way and no software ever is compatible with it, even the companion save dialogs to the file managers. FUSE already exists, I don't get why they don't at least use that so you can at least access things even if its through a roundabout method??? The greatest kicker was that at some point Dolphin's SMB support just Stopped working for me, I could reboot and reconnect all I want, I kept getting the same "Something Happened!" tier error message about a process, and I quote, Dying. Like I get that that's pretty ancient well established wording on the enthusiast and developer side of things, but showing that to a user in an error message that's already unclear and confusing is just baffling.
I'll be honest that there's also a big unwillingness to relearn on my part, I'm sure if you really went for it all the problems I'm having could have proper solutions but I really can't be bothered anymore. The most excited I've been about computers in the past 8 years was the announcement of Apple Silicon because it actually brought something new to the desktop/laptop computer side of things that didn't require an extra 0 at the end of your power bill and PSU wattage and I wasn't even an iPhone user yet at that point, and even Apple's recent bending over to investor cock with half baked machine learning functionality is making that less of a surefire jump to make.
I'll probably remember even more tiny details but I think I've made my point for myself, epic if it works for you, it really doesn't for me I do not have the patience required to get it going properly and it ruined my weekend. Windows 10 may blow chunks but at least I know how to make it blow those chunks fairly reliably.
this post is way too detailed for Desktop Thread reply lmoa