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I've spent years using both Ubuntu and windows on different occasions. Ubuntu is never as simple as it's touted to be. It has many of the same jankiness problems of windows while having odd driver & config problems that screw you over when you aren't looking.
I liked windows 7 because it was stable and there was 1 way to do most things. Windows 8 introduced the Tile UX, app store and touch apps which turned windows into 3 operating systems in a trench coat.
I dislike Ubuntu & Linux as an end user because there are a million ways to do things. That's just a million ways to break things. App store, snap, apt, flat pack....fuck off. The laptop is a tool. It should do what I need it to, reliably.
I have since moved to mac, and it correctly understands the assignment. I still miss window's workspace management, screen splitting and the explorer experience. Finder is trash. Screen management and workspaces in mac are unintuitive. But, that I can work with.
Well, I've used plenty of windows and unfortunately still have to use it for my job and I've been using Ubuntu for ~15 years now and I guess we just have very different preferences. It's not that I've never had issues with Linux that would have been solved by using Windows, but all those issues stem from people making software for Windows rather than Linux, not some inherent issue of Linux itself. I also feel like Ubuntu/Linux and just the whole suite of common opensource software around it has improved significantly in recent years. Although to be fair we were talking about Windows 7, not the current situation. Admittedly maybe my current positive experiences with Linux and negative experiences with Microsoft have biased me a little bit when looking at the past. I've always had a strong preference for basic, clean, minimalistic software, which does what I tell it to and nothing more has always made me prefer Linux over Windows. But in recent years the feature bloat and the clunky annoying UI of Microsoft - not just in the OS but in every single piece of software they make - has really been out of control. I feel zero temptation to ever switch back to Windows currently.
As for mac, I've never used it. It's probably fine, but the fact it runs on overpriced devices and tries to get you locked-in on a bunch of Apple hardware and software is enough for me to have never seriously considered using it.
I love Linux, but hard disagree here. FlatPak (or snaps or apparmor or whatever) have fixed the worst of these issues, but Linux made it needlessly hard for non-technical users to install software that wasn't part of your distro's repositories for years. There's even a video of Linus talking to a conference full of distro maintainers about how obnoxious an issue it is.
On Windows, for better or for worse, you can usually just download an executable and run it.
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After a decade of fighting config decay on one Linux distro after another I landed on nixos and have stuck here since, I think exactly because it avoids the problem you're describing.
If you don't fight the paradigm it's pushing (your system definition is explicit, you shouldn't try to make changes outside of the explicit system definition, package your projects for nix) there is only one way to perform each task and mistakes are all recoverable - no chasing down a nest of udev rules from the last time you tried to flash an arduino.
The downside is you have to learn their system definition language, though most relatively-modern LLMs can handle it well enough.
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