Comment by 76SlashDolphin

You're greatly over-exaggerating how much effort it takes for a power user to set up Windows. I had to do it the other day on a Dell MiniPC (sadly couldn't use Linux since I needed HDR) and it's just the following.

1. Set up USB stick in Rufus with all the setup skips enabled 2. Select install options, skip key, next next next 3. Wait for it to install 4. Say no to MS account, put in username, password, and security questions 5. Wait for a reboot and setup 6. Connect to internet, run Windows update, reboot when done 7. Uninstall the few bloatware apps in the start menu, most of them are UWP so the uninstall button does it immediately, takes no more than 5 minutes 8. Disable web search from group policy 9. Install Windows Terminal, Powertoys, and another web browser.

I could easily automate steps 7, 8, and 9 through powershell and winget if I wanted to. The total install time was less than 10 minutes plus the time it took for Windows Updates to install and I have a pretty clean environment.

In comparison, with Fedora running on Gnome I'd have to spend a solid amount of time messing with dconf settings to get fractional scaling to show up and for my touchpad to scroll at the correct speed + installing extensions to get a UX as good as Powertoys has by default, and on KDE I would need to spend the same amount of time messing with settings and installing KWin scripts to get functional tiling (although that might have got better since I last tried it).

Oh and on MacOS I would be up and running in almost no time, because there's no way to fix the absolute dumpsterfire of a UX it has so I don't even bother.

So all options kinda suck, Windows just sucks in its own ways.